As noted in the previous post, another casualty of the Iraq war is that fewer medals and fewer medals of distinction for bravery are being awarded because they call attention to the war’s bloody realities.

Sorry, but you are attributing intent and cause without evidence here. Awards are often downgraded for good reason and it has nothing to do with limiting “bloody realities.” The services use written guidance to determine award levels common to all the services, though interpretations do vary. Because awards directly benefit promotion, there are limits to how many individual commanders can give out. This is to prevent demeaning of awards by awarding too many of them. Even so, Bronze stars, for instance, are fast becoming the standard battlefield award, even for non-combat related duty – quite a change from past wars. The result is to lessen the prestige of the award, which causes commanders to put people in for higher awards to differentiate people from the bronze star.

I’ve deployed to Afghanistan twice and I think the chain of command is right to limit the number of awards at the bronze-star level and above.

Finally, the same argument you use as reasoning for the limited number of MOH winners can apply to other awards as well.