Military engineer receives credit as fighter (8)
I believe the answer is:
scrapper
'fighter' is the definition.
(synonyms)
'military engineer receives credit' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'credit' could be 'cr' and 'cr' is present in the answer.
'engineer' could be 'sapper' (sapper is a kind of engineer) and 'sapper' is present in the remaining letters.
No letters remain.
This explanation may well be incorrect...
'as' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for scrapper that I've seen before include "An informal fighter, or one who discards waste" , "someone fighting" , "Boxer" , "I get shot of something" , "An informal fighter - sounds ragged" .)