[FireBeyond]

> When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.

If only you hadn't found the perfect word in your description of the "problem": they are "personnel".

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

"personnel" is too broad though as it could include all of the civilian support staff, admin staff, contractors, etc. Sometime you do want a term to collectively include all of these people, but sometimes you want to just refer to the ones actively doing the military bits and not the support bits.

[shawn_w]

Troops?

[stult]

Troops is almost exclusively used to refer to Army personnel in the US.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Actually, yeah that works