Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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Why do it, then? I'm not trying to be inflammatory or ask loaded questions here, I'm genuinely curious (as someone who, as you note, has almost no connection to the Americans who fight in wars; I have friends who are vets, but have been out of the military for years), and I just don't understand.

I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?

Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?

I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)

I don't have a good answer for you. I expected the upper and middle officer corps to conduct themselves with honor and they aren't.

I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)

But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.

There have been so many crimes and zero accountability. I frankly wouldn't know where to start, but maybe a good example is "collateral murder", which Assange has been persecuted for revealing for the better part of the past two decades.

At least we're not pretending anymore.

And they have DOD lawyers (with backup from the DOJ) saying the whole thing, and specific targets, are legal. Along with that, much of the most Sr leadership (of both combat forces, and legal) have been fired and replaced with MAGA loyalists.

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

I guess it makes some amount of sense that information isn't always distributed in huge amounts of detail, outside of the specifics on what they need to do.

I hope that those detailed investigations are still happening.

> the soldiers continue to follow orders

We want them to. At the same time that we sit at our keyboards and philosophize about how soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders, we [collectively] do not really want them spending all that much time pondering it. The most obvious cases, sure, but in general we want them to do what they are told, and do it quickly. That is why there are lawyers in the field to make fast judgements.

The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.

> The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.

I would really love if we could manage that, and soon.

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