I find it very strange that people talk about soldiers as if they had some special moral responsibility for what happens during a war.
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.
When you volunteer as a soldier to be deployed to a war zone and kill people (or directly support other soldiers killing), you have a special moral responsibility for what happens during a war.
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.
> When you volunteer ... you have a special moral responsibility for what happens during a war.
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.
You can't really push that sort of responsibility up. You own it.
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.
> You can't really push that sort of responsibility up. You own it.
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.
Bitcoin has nothing to do with waging war or the end of 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.
> Bitcoin has nothing to do with waging war or the end of the state.
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:
How about not reelecting a president to a second term when he started the war in the first term?
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.
Too true. This quote from the article reinforces that "Despite the rhetoric I internalized from the newspapers back home about why we were in Afghanistan, I ended up fighting for different reasons once I got on the ground — a mix of loyalty to my Marines, habit and the urge to survive."
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.
"a mix of loyalty to my Marines, habit and the urge to survive"
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.
"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]
That's a bastardisation of loyalty though. Yes, people volunteer, because they are expected to.
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".
> That's a bastardisation of loyalty though. Yes, people volunteer, because they are expected to.
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.
"It is pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about."
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.
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?
> No, I don't understand you since you have no arguments.
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".
I'm not a newbie, this isn't my first account. 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. I'm also quite sure that the Marines can speak for themselves.
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".
"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.
> 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.
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?
Imagine if we took the commandment "Thou shall not kill" to heart. Imagine if instead of killing those men on the roadside, it was the job to the soldiers to incapacitate them but take them alive. Is it possible? Of course it is possible. Perhaps harder, but possible.
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.
Well, when it comes to firearms, incapacitation doesn't work quite like the movies show. You can't just hit someone in the arm/leg every time (aiming is harder than that), and even if you do it will fairly likely kill them anyway. If you really want to priorize incapacitating enemy soldiers, you're going to have to use different weapons than firearms, weapons that are probably shorter range and slower. That isn't a practical option when the enemy soldiers have guns themselves.
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.
We could use some serious development in non-lethal weapons, but I'm afraid it might not solve anything - non-lethal weaponry is by definition more complicated by lethal, and thus any technology designed to stun could be repurposed to kill with more effectiveness than the bloodless variant. We'd probably need to reach the level when there would be no practical difference of effectiveness between the two types.
One of the fascinating things to come out of the widespread distribution of non-lethal weapons to police has been two effects:
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.
There's a difference between an army and a police force. Police are there to enforce the law and neutralize criminals.
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.
So, on your last point, you're sort of missing an important part of absolute war:
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.
Well yeah, but there's a powerful argument that militaries have been increasingly acting as over-amped global police forces. Part of this is a growing queasiness with war, like the OP, who don't understand what it is. It's why we use precision munitions and snipers instead of just firebombing cities. It's why we go door to door to "detain" people instead of just shelling the house.
The next logical step, and the one the military is very actively pursuing, is nonlethals.
That would be uber cool. Unfortunately, we don't have any that rival the effectiveness of lethal ones, thus if one were to use stun weaponry, one would lose to an enemy that decided not to.
To add on to that the complexity of developing such weapons grows considerably when you take into account the uniqueness of each target - various resistances, adrenaline, different body composition, hit area and so on. If you fail to incapacitate the target they might retaliate lethally.
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.
Indeed. And on the other side of the equation, if you overdo your non-lethal weapons, they can easily become lethal. Tasers have already claimed many lives. That ball of fast-setting cementy thing you shoot at your target may solidify in a way that chokes your enemy to death. And this is all discounting the possibility of a disabled enemy falling to his death by accident.
Effective non-lethal weapon is a very narrow target to aim for.
It's true that as society progresses it off loads the killing work onto fewer people - executioners, soldiers, drones, etc. These killings are presumably justified by the will of the larger society otherwise these men wouldn't be paid to do this. So a smaller part of the population does an increasing porportion of the killing, but does the overall number of people killed decrease?
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.
Which occurred over roughly two months. Literally millions of soldiers died over the same time span in the world wars, nevermind civilians. That's just in the last century, and it's not even in the same ballpark.
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.
The difference between 1915 and 2015 is that we've improved the industrial scale machinery of killing to a point that it is too powerful. No two top 10 states can really fight each other, because nuclear exchange will ensue and the consequences of that are too unpredictable and high risk to engage in.
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.
> We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century.
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.
Some research shows that we live in an unusually non-violent time period.
"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:
If that's true, I'd mark the start date for such a period at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
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.
Defining a non-violent period as "a period in which there are no conflicts with more than 1 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.
Looking at those numbers, I hadn't realised that from the Chinese civil war [1928] to the Korean War [1953], which is nearly a historical continuum, adds up to nearly 100 million deaths.
Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars.
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.
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.
If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.
The Bible very unambiguously does not prohibit killing, it prohibits unjustified or unlawful killing. If we took it to heart, we'd continue doing exactly what we're doing, which is killing people when we feel justified in doing so.
It is always an interesting experience when you recognize a little of your old self in somebody else, projection is really tempting. My head was in the same place almost ten years ago, after Fallujah - the end justifies the means. That is pretty much what the final two paragraphs say - yeah it is shitty, but the end justifies the means. This is a big step beyond "They hate us for our freedoms!", but still falls short of acknowledging the fact that a universally preferable end state isn't likely to be reached through violence or threats of violence. I wouldn't be surprised if the Captain Kudo eventually arrives at that conclusion.
> 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.
> 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.
While I agree that the President is not really able to shake things up any more than his political allies will allow, the quoted statement does beg the question: Who is handing out the orders?
Who is it that we blame for putting soldiers in a position to kill innocents for reasons of such dubious morality?
There was a BBC doc about Sandhurst a few years ago where they showed how they train recruits to kill people.
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.
War is the institutionalization of selective sociopathy.
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"
>I focused on lessons I had learned reading Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s book “On Killing,”
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/
I have no idea what the evidence really says on this topic, but I suspect the claim is more likely to hold true in the past era of huge conscripted armies, than in the modern error of small highly-trained armies (and small guerilla armies, which don't have large numbers of conscripts).
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.
It's very hard to do if the other side won't agree to sing campfire songs with us too. Especially if they'd rather violently impose Sharia through a worldwide caliphate, to use one contemporary example. Gotta pay the Dhimmi before we can forgive and flourish.
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.
The desire to set up a worldwide caliphate by violence is an idea that goes clear back to the Koran. Its implementors come and go. ISIS is the latest. There will be others.
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.
Since we're playing the "you don't know that" game, you don't know that it wouldn't have gone the other way. Maybe the Arab Spring might have taken hold in Iraq. Maybe the UN might have found a better diplomatic solution if the US hadn't pre-empted them by invading.
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.
I wanted to write something about the country, that in many ways forgot the true meaning of word freedom... but then I realized you're probably just trolling, aren't you :)
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.
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.
The US has previously contemplated false flag missions against it's own people (see operation Northwoods[1] which was rejected by JFK.) However, there's no evidence that they were behind the 9/11 attacks. Spouting conspiracy theories without serious backup is going to get you down-voted here on HN where we pride ourselves on being less gullible than average.
Now look at the evidence against. You can't cherry pick the few things that agree with your world-view, you need to take an unbiased, scientific approach where you consider all possibilities with the evidence (and likelihoods) both for and against. When weighed against the rest of the evidence, it just doesn't hold up. Remember, a good scientist doesn't look for evidence confirming his theory, which is often available even for incorrect theories. They look at all the evidence and see if it leads to the same conclusion.
Go read Ghost Wars http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-Septem... and come back with a better understanding of the shit storm that is in that region. All of the conflict over there dates back to before the 70's. Well before the Bush administration.
I don't know how many crazy Hacker News readers are there but I know that there are at least 2330 architects and engineers who think like me. http://www.ae911truth.org/
Given the population size, 2330 individuals isn't a very large percentage.
A quick search indicates that there are ~107,000 architects in the US[1][2], and there are ~272,000 civil engineers[3] in the US. So, 2330 signatories is < 1%.
I worked as a mechanical engineer at a company that had 3x as many engineers as that number in one building. We all did a lot of calculations involving explosions, designing systems to survive explosions, etc. I bet if you polled every single one of them, it would be a unanimous agreement that airplanes caused the damage on 9/11.
Also note, architects are not the right people to be quoting for this. When we hired architects, they did lots of design work, but never ended up on the calculation side of the process. Explosive loads are completely different from static loads, and architects don't learn that stuff. So I imagine you have a lot of architects that don't know what they are talking about in that 2330.
If you are arguing that it was a false flag operation that flew the planes, good luck with that, but it has nothing to do with science or engineering.
No, you didn't learn to kill. You were selected because of your trust in authority and lack of responsibility. Soldiers shouldn't ask for permission to shoot, especially not "snipers". The whole thing is just a charade to enable diffusion of responsibility.
This is ridiculous. Soldiers aren't 'selected' for their trust in authority and lack of responsibility. And they are supposed to ask for permission to shoot. Especially snipers.
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 don't know where you got your information, but it wasn't from any experience with military."
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.
He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking? That their chances of survival are higher if they kill the enemy combatants before they can kill them? Is this really what it boils down to? This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant. Amazing how these "soldiers" are multiple magnitudes less civilized than any insect I can think of right now.
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?
This is war. A place of snap decisions, unfortunately. Sure, I personally would like US soldiers, or for that matter my own country's soldiers, to wage war like United Federation of Planets - diplomacy, diplomacy, and if that fails, set phasers to stun. But we don't have phasers. Nowdays, if you run at your enemy with a taser, you'll get shot to death before you're halfway there.
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
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.
If only that was so easy. What really happens is that some of the people who don't want to go get jailed or executed, and the rest quickly change their minds. And if you somehow managed to breed a whole nation of people refusing to kill others, then your country would quickly get invaded by another one. "Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan."[0]
You'd have to enact a global and immediate mentality change to beat the coordination problem inherent in this situation.
Yes the State is an extortionist and if you are aware enough your moral system would lead you to explore alternatives really hard. For example preferring to personally try to be a Conscientious Objector[1] before buying the discourse of a guy with a tie that got elected in office to send you or your children to the front while having equity in the company that will get the contracts to rebuild the mess based on lies.
Dying defending your freedom is something very very different to justifying others people killing based on assumptions of threat after a preemptive war of aggression [2]
The only thing that can try to keep such an illusion consistent is Exceptionalism [3] which would magically give you self-serving moral superpowers.
Extrapolate that a little bit and you will see how Exceptionalism escalates to some form Elitist Dystopia [4]
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.
The point is, when you're a soldier on the ground, your choices are very constrained. You want the right decisions to be made? Go after people who sent those soldiers in the first place.
Replying to the edit of your edit - yes, seriously. HN is a place of discussion, not monologue. We all learn from one another. Just because you were wrong (IMO) about things (especially about cats), doesn't mean that I didn't seriously consider your arguments. I evaluated them, learned from them and decided to reply - even if to express disagreement. You should do the same. Deleting good comments (as in, civil, on-topic) is not the way to go - it hinders other readers' ability to understand the discussion and reach their own conclusions. You're of course free to not reply to comments - but please, for other people's sake, don't retroactively delete your comments.
> This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant.
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.
> By fun you mean exercise I assume. Cats aren't that smart I am pretty sure they don't have a concept of fun.
Being not smart might mean they have no concept of exercise, but the pleasure responses that can be fairly labelled "fun" are pretty fundamental.
(Now, the reason those propensity for those particular pleasure response or selected for in cats may well be the activity that they encourage provides exercise that useful in developing reflexes for survival skills, but that doesn't mean they do it "for exercise" in any motivational sense.)
You seem to be operating on some strange principles and are being inconsistent with your assertions. When humans kill it's abhorrent but when cats do it it's okay because it's 'exercise'? Ants fight pitched wars over territory with other ants. These battles are immensely brutal.
The ecosystem of your backyard puts our battlegrounds to shame. You don't see the warfare, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Plants mainly fight using chemical poisons they leach into the soil and through fungal networks. What you think of as synergy is actually really awful if you were to translate what they're doing to human terms.
> Cats for instance have very sophisticated behavior in regards to killing their own kind.
It's evolved behavior on the part of felines. Other animals are perfectly fine killing each other. In fact, males of many species will specifically seek out infants of their species that they haven't fathered and kill them so as to reduce rivals.
> The ecosystem of your backyard puts our battlegrounds to shame. You don't see the warfare, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
It reminds me of a thing I learned when I explored the possibility of joining the OpenWorm project[0]. It seems that, as fungi wage war with bacteria, one side learned to secrete enzymes that make C. elegans worms more aggressive at eating the other, thus using them as weapons.
No, cats kill for fun, or at least they do so for reasons beyond securing their next meal. If you've had a cat, especially an 'outside cat,' you will know this to be true.
Watch your cat carefully the next time it catches an insect. The cat will eat it, eventually. But not after playing with it for a good few minutes. Cats are cruel. They bring their prey to the brink of death, then release it only to catch it few moments later and repeat the process.
A cat's jaw is delicate. The prey a cat normally choses has beaks or teeth or claws that can damage that jaw, causing infection. That could easily kill a cat. One possible reason that a cat "plays" with the prey is to minimise the risk of an injury near the jaw by wearing out the prey to the point that a killing bite can be given.
> I think plants are much better. Most of them are living in amazing synergy.
And the rest of them are evil. Just like animals. Nature is a complicated thing. Some advanced animals have complex cooperation and ethics-like behaviours, but as for the rest, it's just kill or be killed, which powers the feedback loops of the ecosystem.
> How do you know? Cats for instance have very sophisticated behavior in regards to killing their own kind.
Yes, what a goofy bit of propaganda. Anyone with a shred of ethics asks something like, "What if this were a Chinese newspaper, from a guy who invaded the US and went around killing people for the horrible crime of defending their home?"
(And unlike Afghanistan, the US is the world's hyperviolent bully.)
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.
You don't fall into the false dichotomy of even entering into playing that game. Your question presents a false dichotomy that (dangerously) is pushing things into trying to institutionalise a justification of killing a fellow human being. Worst, is trying to do that a priori. Is exactly what dictatorships, genocides and Eugenicists would use.
In Nature, and even in urban life, the chances of experiencing the Trolley problem are close to nil.
Nope, you don't understand the trolley problem. It's a very precise tool designed to explore the workings of human conscience. It's a toy problem, not meant to be used with real-world situations. What it shows is that humans indeed have the intuition that, ceteris paribus, the value of lives adds up - saving two lives is more right than saving just one.
> It's a bullshit problem created to justify stupid decisions.
No. It's a toy problem designed to check for particular moral reactions in controlled conditions, for exploring the way human conscience works. It's not meant to be used as something you reduce real-world problems to.
> I don't think in moral absolutes, hell I don't even consider myself an especially moral person. I justify my actions based on their merits and everything I've read, seen and heard about offensive warfare just seems like a really stupid idea.
This is good, and that is very much in agreement with the trolley problem. Evaluating actions based on their merits, looking at principles and consequences alike.
With rest of your comment, I agree. Iraq and Afganistan wars are stupid, and are an example of a collective failure to do the right thing.
The point of the Trolley 'problem' (dilemma) as I think of it is to distinguish the moral difference between actively killing someone and letting someone get killed.
From a utilitarian standpoint, all you look at are the possible actions and the possible results.
From a moral standpoint, actively killing someone is much worse than letting someone get killed.
--------
> I would shoot only if shot upon, not because its moral, but because I'd feel like a coward idiot to do otherwise.
You're saying social expectations would cause you to shoot someone else?
Ignoring social expectations, your total opposition to kill is the reason I asked your response to the dilemma. It's not you who're being shot at, but your friends, family, and people and things you love. Would you be willing to let everything and everyone you love perish?
> From a utilitarian standpoint, all you look at are the possible actions and the possible results. From a moral standpoint, actively killing someone is much worse than letting someone get killed.
I disagree. What the trolley problem shows is that it's better to save many lives than just one, thus most people decide to pull the lever. As for why in real world you don't go and kill people for the greater good, is that our brains run on a corrupted hardware. "The end justifies the means" is a valid line of reasoning, but not for humans - because we predictably end up doing more bad than good when we follow it.
> Would you be willing to let everything and everyone you love perish?
If you put it that way, then killing one person to avoid this outcome is just like pulling the lever in the trolley problem.
>> I would shoot only if shot upon, not because its moral, but because I'd feel like a coward idiot to do otherwise.
This is a complex topic. I bet GP would shoot back when shot upon just because survival instinct kicks in. But barring that, social pressure is indeed a strong factor. I recall stories of Jehovah's Witnesses (die-hard pacifists) who got conscripted during First World War, back before the movement developed the idea that going to prison for your beliefs is a Right Thing; those soldiers would keep intentionally missing when shooting, in order to follow the "do not kill" commandement while avoiding getting imprisoned/executed for refusing to fight.
>He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking?
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".
Welcome to the hot harsh reality of war. Let us know when you realize that sometimes people lie. Your questions about other nicer approaches have been answered literally on the bodies of tens of millions of dead. Humans are extraordinarily deadly apex animals, and they'll go through unbelievable amounts of trouble to avoid getting hurt or killed themselves.
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.
And yet, maybe those men were actually farmers, producing an irrigation ditch to produce the food they need to feed their families.
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?
> And yet, maybe those men were actually farmers, producing an irrigation ditch to produce the food they need to feed their families
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.
Wars aren't rain showers, they are started and proliferated by decisions and actions.
> 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.
I want to ask Timothy Kudo if there was anything else he knew about the men digging by the side of the road that indicated to him that they were planting a bomb. Because if not, he's just a murderer. By the description in that article, he did not have nearly enough information to decide that those men should 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.
The concept of "innocent until proven guilty" is generally not used in warfare. This isn't an American thing; it's long been part of the customary / traditional rules governing lawful conflict.
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.
> The concept of "innocent until proven guilty" is generally not used in warfare. This isn't an American thing; it's long been part of the customary / traditional rules governing lawful conflict.
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.
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.