I do want to state though that regardless of the prevalence of case law in this issue, we're still talking about the military and it's a completely different beast.

Just getting to the point where you can file for conscientious object status is a minefield and your success is very much predicated upon the makeup of your own command. When you sign up for service Tom, you pretty much sign away your Constitutional rights and put yourself under the control of the UCMJ which has no real civilian oversight to it. Your own commanding officer can sit on your paperwork and make your life a living hell until you get to the point where your case is even heard.

Good luck if start talking up filing for conscientious objector status and you're in a front line brigade in a foreign war and your immediate supervisor is some gung-ho fundamentalist Christian asshole. You can guarantee that from that point forward you'll be put on the point on patrols through dangerous territory. Time off, liberty? Good luck. They need someone to clean the toilets? Guess who their man is. All of that legal and prevalent.

I considered filing for that status while in the Navy because of my objections to the way the Cold War was being waged but one of my best friends successfully used it to get out before I had my chance. My case would have been just as good as his if not better but there would have been no way the Navy would have allowed two people from the same ship to get away with that during the same time interval. It would have precipitated a stampede of opportunists. My application, although I absolutely no longer believed in supporting our military mission, would have been denied not because of cause but because of politics.

Here's another case where the facts you present, although well-researched and accurate for the content they contain, are missing the human element of the equation. You'll never understand the military Tom. I didn't until I lived it. It's another world, a dehumanizing one filled with bizarre people you'd be very uncomfortable around. There'd be parts you'd be very happy with though, the black and white thinking, the good guy/bad guy fantasy, the high tech toys. But, in the end you'd miss the diversity our society offers, those very intellectual and liberal elites you so love to pick on. You'd grow weary quickly of being led by scores of people that acquired power not only through drive and competence but also just because they refused to leave and be real humans again, the ones too unsure about their own talents to try making it on the outside. You'd see what happens when authoritarianism runs amok. It's not pretty.

Art