For the reason I said ;). So long as it's on-duty it should take precedence. Otherwise you're asking people to risk their lives to protect yours without giving them any sort of recognition for it.

Equally I think acts against serving military personnel should be subject to higher punishment. It's different for people like politicians. We can protect them by simply making "assassination" a seperate offence punishable more strictly.

In an ideal world it'd be great to say all lives are equal but they're not. I'll give you an example. If two children were in a burning building and you could save just one, and you knew one of them was going to go on to cure cancer and the other was going to be a homeless bum, which would you save?