How We Learned to Kill
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sure, they should be thinking about the implications and ethics of their actions, as we all should, and yet they also signed up to serve the nation, and to do what their nation thought necessary and just. Do people think that democratic nations should not have armies, and it is an ethical imperative for Americans, English and others to refuse to serve? If not, then it is all of our responsibilities, as voters and citizens, to ensure that only just wars are fought, and using ethical means. If not, then we are all responsible, not just the soldiers.
Instead of asking "how could you kill someone" we should be asking "how can you live in a political system that causes people to be ordered to kill people, in which you have the ability to change this fact".
I'm not a pacifist myself, I just don't see how in a democracy, the buck stops with the soldiers.
It's that rhetoric, created by almost everyone BUT soldiers, that sends them to war. And, especially in nationalistic countries where soldiering is viewed as some kind of heroism, no doubt leads to poor decisions once they arrive and face the reality of the situation.
I think that is mostly a cliché too though. People stay in bad situations because uncertainty is even harder to deal with. The military generally go out of their way to make any other alternative "uncomfortable".
If you're ready to sign away your freedom for glory, you should also be ready to do so for justice.
It is not, not in the infantry at least, where brain wa... er - psychological conditioning is the strongest. For example: just days after my battalion got back from a fairly taxing deployment, the company commander informed us at morning formation that an artillery battalion was preparing to deploy to the area of operations we just got back from. It was part of some pilot program, where they give non-infantry Marines a couple of months of infantry training and then deploy them as if they were infantry... it was a horrible idea that would lead to a lot of dead Marines - and everybody at that formation knew it. The company commander asked for volunteers, a cadre that would lead in training for a month and then deploy with them into combat as fireteam, squad and platoon leaders. About a quarter of the company volunteered, myself included, which was more than the CO was willing to part with - so he limited the pool to Corporals.
None of us wanted to go back, we knew that the odds were much worse throwing in with these guys, but we knew that they needed us. If that isn't loyalty, then I don't know what is. The Marine Corps put a lot of effort into building that sort of emotional connection, and it works.
In civilian life, the concept of "I" is so ingrained there is little understanding of idea of "We" in this context. For the 99%, listen to war journalist Sebastian Junger explain this concept along with Brendan O’Bryne (Sgt. 173rd,2BC,503 IR,Rtd.), talk about this brotherhood of men @woodman describes. ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwOAVSprv64
Post deployment, the consequences of moving from the safe world of "We" where you'll be looked after, to the alternative where you are left on your own is stark. [0]
[0] Loren Berlin, 'War Gives Way To Financial Strife For Returning Veterans' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/05/veterans-war-financ...
What about speaking up about a situation that is going to get people killed? What about the people who didn't volunteer, where they fine with the whole thing as long as they weren't affected? Is the commander visiting his guys after years and year when they are dealing with PTSD?
The military selectively decides what part of these virtues that are valued. That's why I'm saying it's a cliché and I think it's a major contributor to "fucking people up".
It is pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. You know that you can dislike people in general, but still recognize positive qualities right? Here is another example: Sergeant Major Bradley Kasal. This guy used his own body as a bullet stop to protect his Marines, nobody expects that.
> What about speaking up about a situation that is going to get people killed?
There was a lot of that, we got it shut down at the eleventh hour.
> What about the people who didn't volunteer, where they fine with the whole thing as long as they weren't affected?
I didn't poll everybody, but I'm pretty confident in saying that nobody was fine with the situation. At lot of those guys were pretty torn between loyalty to their families, the guys that they'd just been in combat with and their fellow Marines in the artillery battalion. There were many private conversation had were they tried to talk volunteers out of it, and more than one anonymous letter to a General.
> Is the commander visiting his guys after years and year when they are dealing with PTSD?
Do you think that is practical? In their careers they will have commanded thousands of men. There is a strong bond though, for example: another personal story :) When I got out of the Corps I drove all the way across the country, for a job in DC. After a few days of searching, I found a basement apartment for rent - the landlord lived upstairs with his wife and toddler daughter. Purely by chance, the landlord was a Colonel in the USMC, and he instantly treated me like an old family friend - standing invitation to dinner, long conversation on the porch, etc. The wife was not a big fan of this, and I'm pretty sure my new buddy was constantly catching hell for it. Until one day, several months later, when I came home from work and found the front door wide open and heard panicked footsteps inside. Now this was in pretty much the worst part of DC, and I could have easily just made my way to my private entrance and ignored the possibility that the landlord was getting burgled. Instead, I began clearing the house room by room - armed with a paring knife from the kitchen. I gave the cleaning lady quite a shock, she had forgotten the alarm code and was rushing around trying to find it. I was sure that I'd get the boot for that, but instead I got a dinner invitation from the wife. The cleaning lady informed her of what happened, and it suddenly clicked for her - I was family.
> The military selectively decides what part of these virtues that are valued.
Again, spoken like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about. Outside of the philosophy department in college, I've never seen an organization focus as much on morality as the USMC. Of course, the perspective is that of the state. So any flaws you find in the logic of military morality will be rooted in the state, not the military.
That's no way to have a discussion. You clearly didn't either read or understand my previous comment. You should probably stick to speaking to your loyal colleges who has everything figured out.
Says the person who just said that millions of people's understanding of loyalty, myself included, is a "bastardisation" of the word.
> You clearly didn't either read or understand my previous comment.
I think we understand each other now.
Please explain to me how the US military isn't breaking their loyalty to their soldiers when more people die of suicide than was killed in action, when soldiers requesting psychological assistance (which is hard to do by itself) after carrying the bloody children left behind by a gunship just to hear that they should "suck it up" or when the soldiers with blisters from chemical weapons aren't believed their damages are real in a war that was supposedly about finding those kinds o weapons.
As long as the miliary's loyalty doesn't also encompass those scenarios, how is it not a bastardisation of the word?
Seems pretty clear to me:
1. You say that Captain Kudo's loyalty to his Marines is "mostly a cliché"
2. I disagree and provide personal examples (which isn't really necessary, because examples of loyalty among soldiers are pretty well known)
3. You say that I don't know what loyalty really is
> As long as the miliary's loyalty doesn't also encompass those scenarios, how is it not a bastardisation of the word?
Your definition of loyalty seems to require the meeting of impossible goals. The military would not be able to meet its obligations and also fully protect all soldiers. PTSD is an unavoidable reality that comes with the job, and the military has really made massive improvements in handling it in the last decade. There are plenty of examples that demonstrate failures, but that is true of every system that has ever existed.
Maybe you should provide an example of loyalty that meets your lofty definition of unfaltering perfection.
> Or maybe I should understand you by your lack of arguments?
Or the more obvious answer: We aren't going to come to agreement on anything because we can't agree on a definition for "loyalty".
Settle @goodnight, the rules here are pretty simple: play nice, be civil & objective. As a newbie you might not understand this on HN.
It's also not a good idea to try and piss-off Marines.
I'm being fairly civil, I don't appreciate people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about. Especially when they in their previous statements have recognized their own bias in the form of "psychological conditioning".
He is probably cautioning you against antagonizing Marines, because we'll resort to telling jokes about the Army, and quoting Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody wants that.
> Especially when they in their previous statements have recognized their own bias...
Hmm, who to trust between two individuals - one who recognizes his own biases, or the other without such introspection?
Something like that, just make sure you don't mention your Mum, sister or phobias - SemperFi @woodman
What uid range?
"In the spirit of civility you might want to spell out why it's not a good idea to "try and piss-off a Marine" instead of resorting to implying things."
Because as soon as they mention their profession, they stand out. Because they stand out it makes them a target. A lightening-rod to anyone who is looking to rant and let off steam about their POV, Ad-nauseam. @woodman has clearly answered your points. Marine & service men & women just want to be treated like everyone else, no more, no less. Polite, tactful, restrained, but won't back down. This is called bearing.
Don't piss-off a Marine. A lesson from Sgt. Shamar Thomas USMC ~ https://youtube.com/watch?v=WmEHcOc0Sys
I ask about your uid range because your continued tit-tat, isn't indicative of a long time user. You can do better.
and to do what their nation thought necessary and just.
The US did not think that invading Iraq was 'just'. Iraq was a defeatable foe, and the war in Afghanistan wasn't producing results. There was nothing 'just' about the invasion of Iraq by the US - if the US did invade places because the dictator is nasty, they'd be a lot more militarily involved in Africa.
I don't understand why Americans don't hold people who volunteer to go fight overseas to a stricter moral questioning. It's a total cop-out to say "well, I was doing it for my country, and my country wanted to go do it". The comments you make about refusing to serve are not appropriate; there was no conscription.
it is all of our responsibilities, as voters and citizens
In a four-year election cycle, how does a voter have an effect on a war late in year 3 started because of an unrelated-but-significant event in year 1?
Basically the buck stops with the soldiers for the same reason that soldiers should decline to follow an immoral order. Otherwise you absolve them morally of anything their nation requires of them: hello Auschwitz guards. It's also an oversimplification, a false binary choice, to say that the buck can't stop in multiple places. It stops with the soldiers. It also stops with the politicians. It's not like there's only one entity responsible for something like this.
A responsibility for your actions, or everything that happens during the war? What if your voluntary enlistment was due to false information, or steady conditioning by the state since childhood? Does intent play no role? Do you extend that line of thinking to the justice system where manslaughter and murder are treated differently?
> The US did not think that invading Iraq was 'just'.
Opinion polls were pretty high at the time. The righteousness of the invasion, from a legal perspective, was pretty firm - UN buy-in, Saddam later admitting that he was intentionally trying to make his possession of WMDs uncertain, continuous violation of no fly zones, etc. From a strict moral perspective that observes principles of nonaggression, no - it was not just.
> I don't understand why Americans don't hold people who volunteer to go fight overseas to a stricter moral questioning.
Because the majority of people, not just Americans, don't deeply consider the morality of things like that. Consider the logical conclusion of this line of thinking. Your position is essentially that the state does not have the authority to define righteousness kills. If one were to accept that position, then the state would not have a monopoly on violence - which is pretty much the yardstick for state sovereignty. This is a position that is morally and logically consistent, but obviously not widely held.
> ... how does a voter have an effect ...
How about not reelecting a president to a second term when he started the war in the first term?
> ... soldiers should decline to follow an immoral order.
There is an obligation to refuse illegal orders, this gets back to my point about the majority of people not deeply considering the morality of actions, and deferring to the state.
I'm a conscientious objector because of that, not because I'm a pacifist (far from it). Reduced to the simplest of arguments: if everybody thought that way the only people that would end up pushing for a fight would be the politicians but they never ever want to get their hands dirty, problem solved. Don't be someone else's tool.
As for the 'righteousness of the invasion': I'm not sure if we lived in the same world at the time but from a legal perspective it was - and is - a total sham and UN buy-in hinged on the UN not being lied to which is something that we know for a fact happened.
Colin Powell's stature never recovered after that ill fated speech.
> Because the majority of people, not just Americans, don't deeply consider the morality of things like that.
That's not entirely true either. Flag worshipping, supporting the troops and other nationalistic elements are not equally present in all countries, America has these in spades. Very few countries in the world are so gung-ho about going to war as the US is.
> How about not reelecting a president to a second term when he started the war in the first term?
That's one of the problems right there, America likes to see itself at war against overseas foes, nothing brings out support for the sitting president as a war does. See the Bush quote: "I'm a war president". That made all the difference in getting him re-elected in the first place, critical thinking does not enter into it.
> There is an obligation to refuse illegal orders, this gets back to my point about the majority of people not deeply considering the morality of actions, and deferring to the state.
I've decided that the buck stops with me.
If someone ever invades the country where I live I'll be more than happy to do my bit but in the meantime I won't allow myself to be used as a tool for political ends whose murky origins (business, empire building, posturing, political careerism) are purposefully obscured.
That is pretty unrealistic. I agree with you about ignoring intent, but I also recognize the fact that at present this sort of philosophy would not work in a world dominated by states.
> ... the only people that would end up pushing for a fight would be the politicians ...
Or defense contractors. In a world where the majority of people believe in ghosts, it is not likely that things will work out in the way you think they would. I'm pretty confident that the US would start exercising its legal authority in drafting military aged males. I can already hear you saying "But they'd refuse!", but that would require you to ignore history.
> I'm not sure if we lived in the same world at the time but from a legal perspective...
I'm guessing not, because you seem to have forgotten all the games played with UN weapons inspectors and violation of no fly zones.
> That's not entirely true either. Flag worshipping...
Actually, the same logic that dismantles the moral authority of the state's power to wage war, dismantles the moral authority of every other state power. So obviously this sort of moral analysis is not occurring regularly, because the world is full of states. I have no doubt that there are a lot of countries full of people who are less predisposed to military expeditions than Americans, but my point is that it isn't due to deep moral reflection.
> That made all the difference in getting him re-elected in the first place, critical thinking does not enter into it.
And yet you are expecting widespread moral reflection from the very same people.
> I've decided that the buck stops with me.
That is great and all, but not every effective in terms of systemic change. If you really want war to go away, then you need to get rid of the state. That is the reason I got involved with development in the bitcoin ecosystem several years ago, popularization would likely deal a killing stroke to the state.
As for me being unrealistic: it's my life, I'll be happy to live it without ever having to say that I allowed myself to be used whatever the consequences, and yes, I would refuse.
Defense contractors can't wage war without people willing to operate the weapons, the circle of concern/circle of influence nicely overlaps if you simply say 'I refuse'.
That's where you exert maximum pressure. Developing bitcoin to stop wars is about as relevant as invading Iraq was as a response to 9/11.
As for the no-fly zones and the UN weapon inspectors:
(1) the no-fly zone was a unilateral arrangement, how do you think the US would respond if some entity declared a no-fly zone over the US?
(2) the UN weapons inspectors were in agreement that Saddam did not possess a credible threat of WMDs.
It's all just dumb wars over resources no more, no less.
Cash is just as important in war as bodies to throw into the meat grinder. If the state loses its control over the money supply, it isn't going to be able to finance war... or exert much influence otherwise.
> As for me being unrealistic: it's my life, I'll be happy...
Cool, I thought you were interested in solving a problem outside of yourself - carry on.
> Defense contractors can't wage war without people willing to operate the weapons...
There will always be people to operate the weapons, offer more money or tell them that their god demands it.
> As for the no-fly zones and the UN weapon inspectors:
Yeah, I'm not going to argue about facts - first result in google: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-inspe...
> It's all just dumb wars over resources no more, no less.
Agreed, but the original point was about legal justification, not actual agenda.
The reality is that had the opinion polls indicated that he would be resoundingly removed from office, he would never have gone in. He needed permission from a group of people who value re-election above almost all else. As he himself did. Even in the middle of a 4 year term the people have the power - the problem is that they approved.
To imply that the war was against the conscience of the majority of (voting) Americans is a falsehood. They were consulted, and their response sealed the national decision. As such the soldiers were respecting their oaths and their country.
Here's the funny thing about killing. Somehow we continually find excuses for doing it. And the easiest excuse of all is that the other guy did it first. And so it goes round and round and never stops, forever escalating. And it won't stop, until we stop making excuses.
(This is probably more true for people alive today than it is for all humans that have ever lived)
When was the last time there was a battle with thousands of causalities anywhere on earth? War hasn't gone away, but it has definitely declined. Surely it would be better if it were gone completely, but things are moving in the right direction.
Well, no. We're living in a period with less frequent very-high-casualty battles than WWI, WWII, and the Chinese Civil War, to be sure, but that's true of all the parts of the 20th century before, between, and after those wars, as well.
"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence"
There are a bunch of nice graphs showing this here:
http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/tit...
List of conflicts with over 1 million deaths:
1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion: 20 million deaths.
1914-1918 World War 1: 37 million deaths.
1917-1922 Russian Civil war: 9 million deaths.
1928-1936 Chinese Civil War: 2 million deaths
1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War: ~25 million deaths.
1939-1945 World War 2: 60 million deaths.
1945-1949 Chinese Civil War: 6 million deaths.
1950-1953 Korean War: 4 million deaths.
1966-1971 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30 million deaths.
1955-1975 Vietnam War: 3 million deaths.
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: 1 million deaths.
1998-2003 Second Congo War 1-5 million deaths.
The previous violent period lasted from 1914 to 1971. The current non-violent period has lasted 54 years since 1971. The previous non-violent period close to this long lasted from 1864 to 1914, which is 50 years.
Sure, as the world population grew, the size of conflicts haven't been growing to match, but in absolute terms I think there is good chance there will be at least several million+ deaths conflicts upcoming in the current century.
Though I suspect an arithmetic error.
2400 killed, 600 wounded.
But I think you are underestimating the violence that still exists. Others have mentioned the thousands killed in single battles in the Iraq war, but only slightly less recent is the Second Congo War[1], with over 350,000 direct deaths, and 5.4 million dead from disease and starvation directly caused by the war.
That war officially finished in 2003, but there are still spill-over conflicts (battles started this week to disarm one of the still-active militia).
In terms of proportion of the world population this is (of course) much lower than WW1 or WW2. But it's still a huge number of deaths, and we are mostly unaware of how large it is.
So we engage in proxy conflicts in the periphery and kill the hapless inhabitants there. There's no "battles", but lots of death... Mostly of people that are inconsequential to whomever is writing the history.
A few weeks ago, inflicted by Boko Haram, according to Amnesty International:
http://watch.ooduapathfinder.com/watch/?p=10555
Not to mention the thousands of children raped, tortured, sold as sex slaves, crucified, and buried alive in the past few weeks by Islamic State:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/04/isis-crucified-chil...
Someone didn't get the memo about the scheduled peaceful period.
Indirectly, we all kill, all the time.
It's an inevitability of life.
How?
For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove...
And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals slaughtered or killed in the name of humans (for food or as a consequence of human activity) it's tremendous.
It's about 35 million cattle.
116 millon pigs.
9 billion chickens.
271 million turkeys.
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/U...
And that's for food production.
If you look at wild birds, the numbers are pretty crazy.
100 - 120 million by hunters.
175 million by power transmission lines.
365 million to 1 billion by windows and buildings.
Again: hundreds of millions to a billion creatures killed by what is effectively static structures.
200 million to 3.7 billion by domestic cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...
I'm not condemning this, actually. As I said, it's a fact of life.
But yes, we kill. All the time.
Life inevitably kills and destroys. Eventually itself.
I'm all for peace but telling your own soldiers not to kill could be a very good way to get many of your own soldiers killed.
1 - police are more likely to use non-lethal weapons, even in cases where no weapon at all would work fine, because the long-term consequences of using a non-lethal are minimal
2 - in cases where people do die due to being attacked by a non-lethal weapon, there's generally quite a bit of moral outrage that the weapon was used at all, even if it was well warranted
I suspect if soldiers were issued stun weapons tomorrow, we'd see both of these come true and people would still cry foul when some percentage of targets inevitably died as the result of the use of the non-lethal weapon, and rules of engagement would be vastly changed to virtually eliminate the idea of escalation of force, just go in shooting and sort it out later.
Generally speaking, the police don't want to kill anyone. They want to capture the suspect and move on. Back in the day, non-lethal force meant beating the guy with a big stick, but liability became an issue. So now we pull guns on dumb kids, and a jumpy cop results in a dead dum kid instead of a broken arm.
Armies are different. Since the US Civil War, total annihilation of the enemy's ability to make war has been the rule of the day. You err on the side of killing, becuase a stunned enemy lives to fight another day.
Against a fair enemy, the "ability to make war" becomes the problem of destroying capital of the enemy (factories, railroads, etc.). Against an enemy that doesn't have any sort of indigenous weapons production or roads to speak of, the "ability to make war" consists of the problem of destroying the manpower of the enemy.
So, we notice that while we bombed Germany and Japan, less than three decades later they were banging along--and we notice that when we spend a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, we end up just playing whack-a-mole with hapless militia.
The next logical step, and the one the military is very actively pursuing, is nonlethals.
Which is actually possible with lethal weapons too - people don't always die from a shot or two and not always instantly. So to ensure the threat is defused the weapons must be very effective and the best way to ensure that is by making them as lethal as possible.
Effective non-lethal weapon is a very narrow target to aim for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill#Justified_k...
Here's one gem I noticed, right at the end:
> I don’t blame Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama for these wars. Our elected leaders, after all, are just following orders, no different from the Marine who asks if he can kill a man digging by the side of the road.
Exactly. Some people seem to think that the President is the one with the most power, and that he can wield it arbitrarily. It's not true. You don't get to be a President of a country if you're not up to your eyeballs with connections and mutual favour-based relationships. Nobody is going to let you become President if you're the type of person that could seriously endanger the entrenched status quo based on your whims. Such people are filtered out earlier in the process. I suspect that, in a way, the office of President is one of the least real power in actual politics.
Being a part of a corporation has taught me an awful lot about what cooperation looks like in that kind of setting. At my job, we hired a new VP of e-commerce last year, I didn't really understand what that meant for me for months. At first I kind of saw him as a threat, after awhile I realized that having a tech-savvy executive at that level means that the CEO is wanting to grow our department's role in the company and that I should stick around because it could be a huge opportunity for me in a few years.
The main thing about settings where there is a great deal of power flying around is that everything you do matters. You can't not make a decision, not making a decision is making a decision by not taking action. Everybody with power understands this and so learns how to read into these actions / inactions. Even if there's no real conflict, there's just not enough time to have copious amounts of discussion concerning intentions. You just figure it out and adjust your own goals and actions accordingly.
When you have change at the top, the entire executive structure under the new leader adapts to suit the guy at the top's sensibilities. You don't really see the multitudes of little changes or how they add up unless you know what to look for and have been watching it over multiple leaders. These things filter out to the public mostly unnoticed, but can be quite dramatic in their effect.
The biggest change with Obama is that he's an introvert and doesn't feel the need to pander to Congress. It's made a lot of waves and contributed majorly to the gridlock he's had to deal with in trying to push his agenda. Clinton was way more personable and much more pragmatic.
Who is it that we blame for putting soldiers in a position to kill innocents for reasons of such dubious morality?
Basically it involves the delightfully low-tech method of having recruits charge towards a bag of grass cuttings and stabbing it in the gut with their bayonet while chanting "KILL!"
One of the recruits was so freaked out by the whole thing that he quit soon afterwards.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LITY6RT1nmo
> Be farming your land in peace
> Some Saudis blow up shit
> US attacks Afghanistan
> Try to keep out of trouble
> See clear skies one night and want to irrigate land
> Carry tools in a package, start digging
> Get shot by highly trained killer cuz you are potentially a terrorist
> WTF.gif
This is quite illustrative:
"For a while after I ordered the Marine to take that first shot, everything we did seemed acceptable. It revealed that killing could be banal. Each day would bring a new threat that needed to be eliminated"
Dave Grossman reportedly cites someone named S. L. A. Marshall who made the claim that only a small percentage of infantry ever fired their weapons, to support the idea that most people have some natural reluctance to kill in battle. I just want to point out that there is zero evidence for this claim: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/shoot-to-kill/
People have looked for the evidence for his claim but can't find it. I've had people repeat the claim to me and cite Grossman or Marshall, but when I asked them to give a specific source for it they couldn't.
Pretty much. Sometimes people want diametrically opposed things, and cannot compromise. Force and violence have always been a part of life, and we can never do away with them entirely. All we can do is refrain from them as long as is practical, constrain them and use them as sparingly as possible.
And yet, I still have hope for us reaching the Star Trek level of humanity.
Yes, there are a lot of reasonable people on the other side of the line. But the leadership of those reasonable people can, depending on who you're talking about, be very, very unreasonable.
As opposed to "rather violently impose capitalism" using killing machines in the sky?
I think both 'sides' are as equally guilty of hatred as each other. I don't see the US Military-Industrial complex going out of its way to create peace, either - and no "but they are doing the bad thing" is not an appropriate justification.
It takes as much effort to make peace as it does to make war. The difference is: the decision to do so.
What a weird example. ISIS wouldn't exist today if it weren't for the US destroying Iraq as a regional power.
You would have (maybe) still died by somebody else's shot. You don't know that.
One of the criticisms against the US invading was that the US had no plan for what to do after the military victory, and that Hussein was a stabilising power in the region; remove him and chaos would ensue if things weren't handled carefully.
And there were and are people who want to impose Sharia violently
And instead they got people who wanted to impose Freedom(tm) violently... quite violently. I wonder if it matters to the average Kurd if their loved ones get beheaded, gassed, or "collateral damage"'d.
Anyway, it's just one example. Could have said the same thing about the Jonestowners -- lots of people wanted to leave but the leadership was fanatical and could not be reasoned with. Like Boko Haram. Or Al Shabaab. Don't have to reach very far in history to find such a thing.
I don't know where you got your information, but it wasn't from any experience with military.
Hey, lets look at some US Marine Corps ROE documentation:
"We must review all aspects of the fight, from weaponeering to the understanding of proportionate force. Training needs to be discussion and scenario based, thus forcing Marines to articulate their perceptions of and responses to the situations. “Wrong” answers should not be reprimanded but need to be explored further. This will take time, but we cannot allow wallflowers to escape participation. We must further empower subordinate unit leaders to continue the training at their levels."
Virtually everything the US military teaches is contrary to what you've stated.
I spent 15 months of conscription in one of those "small team, heavy backpack, green beret"-type units.
A sniper operates as part of a self-sustaining team to take down high value targets, often trough infiltration. It's self explanatory why a real sniper wouldn't ask for permission nor why no one would ever, despite what the movies tell you, tell them to "take the shot". Like in any high risk activity you are the one who is going to have to deal with the consequences of your actions and should therefor operate, as much as possible, at your own discretion.
These guys aren't snipers, they are sharpshooters on guard duty. They might as well be outsourced to some guy with a playstation controller in the future.
"Virtually everything the US military teaches is contrary to what you've stated."
I doubt that. On the other hand the US military isn't exactly known for being competent.
What kind of demented questions is "can we shoot them?" anyways. Don't shoot unless shot upon. No you can never just shoot somebody.
And that he has the balls to try to justify his mass murders after the fact is way beyond me.
Edit: Deleting my sub comments because the discussion has gone completely off topic. Guys write your own top level comment and describe your view in one coherent piece. This piecemeal snowball-fight leads nowhere and nobody can be asked to get into a pitiful mud fight with 100 different people at the same time. I realize its my own mistake I should never have replied to any of them, especially the sub-thread about cats. Seriously guys?
If you were in the situation above, what choice would you make? I'm legitimately curious, as I do not know many people that seem to think in moral absolutes.
(And unlike Afghanistan, the US is the world's hyperviolent bully.)
Animals are ruthless killers. Cats kill for fun. Plants aren't much better. In India, a captive elephant is allowed to kill two of its handlers before they will put it down. They suspect the elephants know this and pick their targets carefully. Only man has the ability to be moral, to decide whether the killing they do is legitimate or not. Doesn't stop us from killing, but at least we can feel bad about it.
We tried this terrible idea once. It results in our guys dying because surprise, they detonate the ied when you walk up to it.
> shoot the legs not the heads
Have you ever watched programmers on tv doing things like 3 people typing on the same keyboard? That's the equivalent of this statement.
> Don't shoot unless shot upon
They fight by planting ieds. In your world, we'd be dying by the dozens. Interdicting the guys planting IEDs is the most effective way to prevent IED attacks.
I'm not defending the atrocities many a soldier committed on purpose. There are many unforgivable things that happen during war. But in the current shape of warfare, you can't blame soldiers for using lethal force against a perceived lethal threat. Let's develop phasers with stun settings that are as effective as guns, and then we can go back to this conversation.
EDIT: Come on. Off-topic or not, you're breaking the conversation flow by deleting your responses. Those comments are useful for context even if some of us disagree with them.
Did you realise how that phrase is incredibly dangerously close to this other one:
"You can't blame a Government for preventively imprison or kill someone because some of its bureaucrat has perceived threat" ?
You bliss the first one and you have nothing left to contain the other one from happening
Unless you are a believer of the capability to self-refrain of an ever expanding Government.
It's not. Because soldiers are thrown into battle and forced to make snap decisions that determine whether they'll live or die the very next second, while the Government has both more time for deliberation and much, much wider range of possible actions to take.
> You bliss the first one and you have nothing left to contain the other one from happening
This does not follow. My point was - if they're shooting at you and you're not allowed to run, what can you do except shoot back? The problem is with those who put you in a position where you're getting shot at.
> Unless you are a believer of the capability to self-refrain of an ever expanding Government.
Of course I don't. I just feel that focusing on front-line soldiers is the wrong place to start solving this problem.
The guys planting the bomb are doing that because they know they won't win in a gun-on-gun fight and the guys shooting the guys planting the bomb are doing that because they know guns don't win against bombs, especially ones you can't see and don't know are about to rip your truck, your buddies and you to shreds. They're all doing what they're doing because foreigners started pushing foreign agendas on them.
Only people who seek to prematurely remove themselves from the gene pool go up and ask "hey fellas, whatcha doin'?". Only people who engage in a firefight, and still want to get shot after hitting their target shoot for the legs. Dead enemies don't shoot back, and nothing is more dangerous than a wounded apex animal. It's faster to kill your enemy if you hit them in the vital organs, the head contains members of the set of vital organs.
Congratulations, your "let's lead with conversation and then if we're dissatisfied with the response, leg shots approach" just killed an entire platoon. Maybe those nice men digging holes to plant bombs in just want to be given gifts of flowers and an understanding hug?
Soldiers aren't meant to be civilized, soldiers are meant to create the environment where civilization can exist. They're the fire that burns away at the wild things and leaves behind clear space to build on.
You can't say "don't shoot unless shot upon" when you're fighting an enemy that attacks you with bombs. Don't shoot unless you've been bombed? Sorry, you're dead. You can't shoot back. Logic dictates that to survive you must shoot before you get bombed.
"Hey blokes, is that a bomb you're planting?" Then what? Of course people surreptitiously trying to plant an explosive device they built in secret after weeks of premeditated intent and are desparately trying to conceal the existence of are going to answer absolutely truthfully and cordially.
"Yes foreign invader, this is a bomb that we made that we hope maims and kills you and your compatriots that we are planting." In your imagination is this to be followed by a friendly and robust exchange of geopolitical viewpoints while sipping tea and snaking on biscuits?
Does everybody afterwards exchange phone numbers and friend each other on Facebook and promise to keep in touch only to exchange greeting cards on major holidays?
"Sorry about the bombs chaps, we'll promise not to do it again." Is that the scenario you think will unfold? That rough men, who decided to fight, and spent weeks gathering material to MacGyver a bomb together that's powerful enough to decimate an armored vehicle and everybody inside, will, in the middle of seeing their plan through, suddenly be open to meaningful conversation with the people they're trying to murder?
And that scared kids, thrust into the middle of a battlefield, after watching their friends get turned into piles of gore and ripped apart, are going to suddenly lose their fucking minds and will to live and walk up to where there's a better than chance a bomb that could turned them into giblets is being planted and engage in a question/answer dialog?
You're absolutely right that war is not acceptable for any human being. But you're absolutely wrong in how wars should be fought and have a fully delusional notion about what happens during them.
Wars should be terrible, there should be no winners, they should be such extraordinary fuck ups that us apex animals go through unbelievable amounts of effort to make sure that we never end up in one. And then when we're in one we should do anything we can to survive and see the other side of it.
But once in a while, too often, we end up in one. And they're pretty fucking awful affairs. They should be about the worst things humans can do to one another. A notion that the alternative to killing your enemies is a friendly conversation in the middle of the battlefield is the product of a line of magical thinking so dense and ignorant I'm not sure I know how to perceive it other than with the strongest patronizing feelings I can muster.
Until you're in a war, or at least something more intense than a mild disagreement over your dry cleaning bill, you should probably keep your opinions about how they should go to yourself and maybe, just maybe, try to figure out what it is about war that's so fucked up that, when it happens, and when people are suddenly in the middle of one, it suddenly makes it reasonably acceptable for people to kill each other.
War is terrible, but your ideas about war are just about as terrible.
War terrible or not, whether your side believes it is righteous or not, is an us vs. them endeavor: there is no absolute right, both parties assume they are the righteous. A moral human does not get himself in a situation where he has to make such a decision. I've never killed anyone and I suspect you haven't either.
Normal, well-adjusted adult humans may be apex animals, but they certainly aren't inherently violent. There's a subset of that population who has a cluster B personality disorder that exploits a larger subset of the population who has limited opportunity to feed their family in order to create such violence.
Any analysis of war must take in to account the us vs. them situation. Imagine reversing the scenario, imagining an Afghani soldier wandering around the United States with a weapon, deciding who to shoot and for what behavior. Would your reaction be the same? Would you still think it was the correct decision?
This is why nobody wins in war.
I doubt that farmers in Afghanistan are idiots.
They will know that because farmers almost never work in the middle of the night digging right next to the road, and that bomber planters almost always work in the middle of the night digging right next to the road, that it is very very very dangerous to dig by the side of the road in the middle of the night.
Farmers who, for some bizarre reason, have decided that they want to dig an irrigation ditch right next to the road in the middle of the night are going to make sure that the Marines in the area know the farmers will be out at that location at that time.
The war has been a major part of the farmers' lives for many years. They know how it works.
> Soldiers aren't meant to be civilized, soldiers are meant to create the environment where civilization can exist. They're the fire that burns away at the wild things and leaves behind clear space to build on.
Waitwhat.
Well, what they were thinking was "if I walk over there and they're enemy combatants, they'll probably try to kill me", and "despite popular misconceptions, a shot to the leg is easily fatal", and "I don't want to die".
America was founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty". Timothy Kudo was acting as judge and jury for these men and found them guilty with almost no evidence. There are numerous reasons why someone might be digging next to the road at night.
It's only by chance that he happened to be right. He uses the phrase "good shoot, bad result", but if that is the standard he's using for "good shoot", I wonder how many of his kills were "bad shoot, good result".
And it's ridiculous to isolate the responsibility for this kind of action to the soldiers. This is on everyone who accept this as okay--the voters who vote for warmongering politicians, the politicians who start wars and create decision policies that say a shot like this is okay, the officers who give the orders, and the troops on the ground that follow them.
To provide an easy to understand example why; you would not have to have a legal proceeding to determine that someone wearing a grey uniform with an iron cross on it was in fact a German soldier during WWI. Visual recognition, even from a distance (of the kind that would cause serious cross-examination in a domestic court), is sufficient to make the call that he is an enemy combatant.
Soldiers are absolutely empowered to act as judge, juror, and executioner, and are given significant latitude in determining who is and is not a lawful combatant.
It is worth noting that this Marine officer was acting under not just US rules of engagement, but also NATO ROEs. Those ROEs would have been vetted by the lawyers of all the NATO members, who already abide by some of the most historically rigorous applications of the laws of war.
As for whether Kudo knew anything else about the men digging on the side of the road. The answer is probably not. But, he also knew a lot about the cultural context in which they were operating, and leveraged that to make an informed judgment call about how to proceed. Regardless of whether you personally think that was moral or not, the fact is that it was legally permissible under internationally agreed upon laws of warfare.
You don't get to just stop doing the right thing because a war started. Customs/traditions aren't an excuse for murder.
> To provide an easy to understand example why; you would not have to have a legal proceeding to determine that someone wearing a grey uniform with an iron cross on it was in fact a German soldier during WWI. Visual recognition, even from a distance (of the kind that would cause serious cross-examination in a domestic court), is sufficient to make the call that he is an enemy combatant.
Surely you can see how this is much clearer than people digging next to a road.
> It is worth noting that this Marine officer was acting under not just US rules of engagement, but also NATO ROEs. Those ROEs would have been vetted by the lawyers of all the NATO members, who already abide by some of the most historically rigorous applications of the laws of war.
And Nazis were "just taking orders". What's your point? Just because the authorities say it's okay to murder someone doesn't mean it's okay to murder someone.
> Regardless of whether you personally think that was moral or not, the fact is that it was legally permissible under internationally agreed upon laws of warfare.
And it shouldn't be.
Your defense of Kudo's actions is basically: "Law made by Western powers says that what Western powers do is okay, so it's okay!" Fuck that noise. This is just murder.
If you're killing someone, you'd better have a damn good reason, and you'd better be damn sure you're right. Kudo wasn't, but he killed those men anyway.