Four-Star Badass: Difference between revisions
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***That is truth in television too. While a prolonged commerce raiding/counterraiding contest can be directed from shore, communications has never been good enough to allow that in a fleet action(it has not been tested sense then as there have been no full dress fleet actions sense world war 2). More importantly a fleet has a few dozen ships, while a twentieth century army sprawls all over the place.
***At the same time generals have when they could gotten close to the front lines often because they were subalterns in WWI and did not remember chateau generalship fondly. Coincidently, chateau generalship was as much because of the circumstance of WWI on the Western Front which was one big siege and placed a premium on command rather then leadership, as because of actual cowardice in officers who had after all signed on for a career they knew involved getting shot at.
** Haven has several. They did after all survive Manticore.
** Solarians with few exceptions are extremely bereft in the badassery department. That is because they have not fought a war for ages and are really mainly good at bureaucratic infighting. That would be the case if the Solarians were a more-or-less honestly run service and given how big a pork-barrel a military-industrial complex can be without the encouragement [[HAD to Be Sharp|of an outside enemy]](not to mention governments that value bootlicking more then efficiency), honesty is something you grade on a curve anyway. But the Solarian armed forces are not subject just to ordinary peacetime rot but like everything else in their government tend to be suborned by outright criminals. Moreover their technology and tactics are way behind the times, almost as much as the Chinese in the Opium war. However, so far Solarian admirals have not displayed cowardice at least. That just got their people killed in greater numbers. In other words the Solarian admirals are not badasses, they are targets.
* Patrick McLanahan from the books of [[Dale Brown]]. Various other characters get promoted to stars without much loss in badassery too. To be honest, though, while he is still a good bomber crew member and [[Powered Armor|Tin Man]] user if needs must, he now spends more time as [[Mission Control]] and fighting off politicians or other generals so that the lower ranks can do their job.
* ''[[Discworld]]'''s Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and one of the wealthiest if not the wealthiest man in the city (by marriage) by the end of ''[[Discworld/Men At Arms|Men At Arms]]'', His Grace, the Duke of Ankh by the end of ''[[Discworld/Jingo|Jingo]]'', and still giving the criminal element a [[Groin Attack|good kick in the nadgers]] when he isn't fighting off quasi-demonic forces, foiling dastardly political conspiracies, [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|or reading to his son, Sam Vimes Jr.]]
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