How come more US military experts don’t weigh in on more topics in Quora?

Posted 1Aug2017.

“Military experts” like these?

I couldn’t tell you – I just found that site for the sake of finding out what exactly a “military expert” is. Interesting concept, though.

Perhaps you mean “military folks”?

Yeah, we’re here… a lot more of us retired, prior service, or active duty folks than I thought. Judging by the feedback, we’re quite vocal… and somewhat sarcastic, at times.

As far as our participation on “more topics in Quora,” again, we seem to pipe up frequently on a broad range of topics. Speaking only for myself, I prefer to read and upvote where deemed worthy. I even thank on a frequent basis when an answer either took time and care in addressing the question or made sense to me on a personal level. My participation seems to be have recently been limited to the few joyous opportunities where I get to justify my obsessive interest in anything related to Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined one, not the one from my childhood).

Some of my own issues from “weighing in” on specific topics of military-related topics, like Adam pointed out) stem from my low-order paranoia about current tactics, techniques, and procedures… on these topics, I stay quiet (for the most part – there are some exceptions). Another reason follows David Anderson’s answer almost perfectly: knowledge of the subject matter, interest in a topic, and the desire to avoid the contentious and debatable topics. There are some things I know a lot about (3-4b), some that I have forgotten even more about (3-4b), and some things that, no matter how hard I may try to avoid it, will piss people off (again, 3-4b).

We pass a lot on questions because they may be irrelevant to reality, but a lot of the questions I skip are often due to the fact that the average civilian either won’t “get” it, or are not capable of understanding the fact that the sight of plums makes me cringe, how it feels to be task-saturated on a point-of-injury mission south of somewhere in Iraq, or even why we can find such joys in the extremes in experience and life.

However… if you ask us, we may make an attempt to weigh in with an answer, perspective, and (sometimes) eloquent profanity.