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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

Whether a particular unit is itself necessary seems a question independent of whether its training is necessary.

At this point, the US military has determined that having paratroop units available is a useful capability in war. Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid, and I would hope goes for anything: strategies, tactics, personnel, armaments, vehicles, equipment, etc.

However, once decided that a particular tool is necessary, it seems to me unquestionable that they should be kept in a ready, prepared, capable state. I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable," but if we've decided that our military needs people to jump out of planes, I would hope it goes without question that those people need to practice jumping out of planes.

shorter: training and necessity of a unit seem to be orthogonal concepts

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I agree with this and will add that the cost of the risk of having to pay to support a disabled veteran for life needs to be considered part of the whole deal. If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.

>> Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid... I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable"

Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?

> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.

Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?

This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.

When you say unnecessary training it's not clear to me whether you're making a general statement or talking about details.

For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.

On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.

Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.

Re: jumping in particular, my point is more nuanced: that we train too many paratroopers and also there are too many dangerous jumps for which the readiness ROI isn't worth the additional injuries.

Those two are related and form a vicious cycle. The more people you injure, the the more you have train. The more jumps you require for minimal readiness, the more folks eventually refuse to re-up to even leave the Army as they watch their friends drop like flies to spinal injuries.

Jumps, and dangerous jumps in particular, are a huge point of contention in the Army because the Army likes to screw soldiers by claiming that spinal injuries from jumps aren't service-related.

Then there's a really long tail of physical fitness training that has more to do with macho signalling than actual readiness. Plenty of discussion down-thread.

There is nuance and trade-off, but there's a LOT of training in the military that does little or nothing for readiness and contributes massively to injury rates. I think the Army is so far to the "stupid" end of that spectrum that the nuanced conversation doesn't make much sense to me.

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