What’s a “warfighter?” Do they come from the “Gulf of America?” We used to call them servicemen or service members. Emphasizing they served the people. I guess that’s too effeminate for our roided up and ironically hyper-insecure Secretary of Defense.

The term war fighter is distinct from service member. War fighter means mission critical and typically in a theater, while a service member might be someone sitting behind a desk in a less critical role. Similar to having mission critical production systems and supporting production systems.

When you perform your business impact analysis, these will bubble up in different ways, requiring some differences to the playbooks.

Not really a new term: “warfighter” always has made me cringe but it’s been commonplace in defense contractor pitches to DoD for many years. Basically, if you hear it being used you’re likely in the presence of someone who does (or did) DoD work. Totally unsurprising to see it here given this is a DoD contracting argument that we’re all watching from the sidelines.

What term to you prefer for referring to sailors, pilots, soldiers, etc collectively?

Warfighter is not a new term and has been used in the military since at least the 1990s and was used by Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

Service members are anyone serving in the military.

Warfighter is used to describe combat roles.

If useful to distinguish between the two, warfighter is the correct term.

I hate this glorification of war.

Reddit discussion from 2016 (so before Trump).

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/4ta3hh/cmv_th...

There are many reasons to detest the current political landscape. Don't get distracted.

A new term was needed some decades ago. "man" titles have not been politically correct for a while, "member" sounds awkward and bureaucratic. In some other languages, "soldier" can be used for all military personnel, while English ended up with a more narrow meaning.