Quote:
Originally Posted by jimbuna
I'm in no way defending the above but I should imagine every country has a number of individuals within their armed forces of a similar disposition.
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Well, I think we shouldn't forget that however you slice it - the problem is that the military's job is to kill people. That always has been and always will be their job, and by all means they have to be trained to do so quickly and effectively.
This doesn't mean that responsibility doesn't need to be exercised and enforced though. One of the problems here is that there is an illusion that with all this technology, everyone has total and accurate information - pilots, ground controllers, troops etc. With that assumption, the ROE totally works - except it doesn't, because the assumption is false. The pilots have already made up their mind about what they're seeing before the first shot is fired, and continue to convince themselves that what they're seeing matches their own imaginary story about what's going on down there as they shoot. And they're going to keep seeing that, because what they came here for is not to make peace and spread positive ideology, but to kill Iraqis.
In short, this is what happens when you put together people trained to kill and an illusion that the technology will help control their killing. There's nothing, in theory, wrong with an army that kills people - that's what it's for. A military that doesn't have killing people as its first objective isn't a real military, and noone needs a wussified military like that. It's that total-information illusion that needs to be tackled and worked with, hopefully with some openness and via the democratic process that its ultimate leaders are elected by. It's getting more ludicrous as to the length the military is willing to go into denial about this in order to do what it wants, not what it should. But I fear it's only getting worse.