Left wing and others, if you're jumping on this thread without reading from the beginning I think you're going to totally get the wrong impression of the point I was trying to get across. Don't let Zapata muddy the waters. In trying to answer his questions (which he then calls "irrelevent") I think I've lost some focus of my main point.
I have no nostalgia for the military. I was a NCO and an officer. That was a long time ago. I disliked as much about the military as I liked. But, the point I was trying to make, is one of the good things about the military is that it required it's officers to have an education and professional developement and that is in large part what helps to define it as a profession. Seeing how as the military does some similar work to what we do I thought it was fair to compare and contrast. I don't want to argue about who is better or worse over all. But, I do think more education is better than less. Apparently the military and legacy airlines do as well.
This started as a discussion about what was professional and what a profession is. I guess what to one man is professional, to another man is "elitism".