Discretion is everything. Any time we'd hit a compound, we would pore over the intelligence, assess whether this was a likely badguy, whether they were a key player or just a low level radical, etc.
Equally important, are the people around said badguy likely also bad or innocent bystanders? If they're probably bad we want to capture them all together. If they're probably innocent we want to wait until the dude wanders off to minimize the risk to civilian life and property, even if that means greater risk to us.
Once you actually get to the target location, it starts all over again, only with less time and information. Is that a shovel or an RPG? I can't quite tell from here. Looks like an RPG -- what if I'm wrong? There's a house behind him, what's the risk if I wait 30 seconds...?
It's a real profession that takes real expertise by people with real emotions.
You had me until race war but yes. This is true in my exp.
It all comes down to training and experience. Police training budgets are tight, officers roll in single squad cars (little safety), sometimes physical fitness standards aren't upheld (fat cops can't scrap with someone they have to use a device to subdue them), and mental health issues abound (the job can be quite stressful and boring at the same time).
I've watched a lot of body cam footage of (legitimate) police shootings. I wonder how many of these one on one situations would have turned violent if the perp knew there were two officers bearing down on him instead of one?
But yeah, maybe a marine on the ground has more discretion than I realize. The other cases, though, I think are valid.
Thank you for serving your country. Thank you for lending your voice to this discussion.
Even though you can't downvote such comments (when they are a direct reply to you), you can flag them (if you have enough karma, like 50 pts iirc). That's probably the best thing to do as the HN guidelines indicate we shouldn't reply to bad comments, it just deepens the problem.
I probably defend you more than anyone else on Hacker News because it sticks in my craw to see you targeted for the crime of being high on the leaderboard. But your position on the leaderboard in no way makes these comments pass muster for the HN guidelines.
It's an ugly personal attack.
Maybe take your political opinions to your well trafficked blog and vent there. But it isn't acceptable here. The guidelines do not say "Unless you are on the leaderboard, and then feel free to do whatever you want."
For the record, I have a lot of respect you. I don't care if you believe that or not. From what I gather, someone has your ear and is filling it with lies about me. I've given you a lot of latitude in part because of my high personal regard for you, but I'm not attacking you here and I'm not obligated to tippy toe around you or something and defer to your opinion or something because of whatever your personal issue with me is.
I will make a note that you aren't interested in me defending you and try to restrain myself in the future when I see people behaving inappropriately towards you. I'm not the moderator here. It's not my job to moderate the space. But I am a member and folks do make "meta" comments at times.
I'm done here. I don't intend to reply further. This is not productive.
You don't own this entire thread because you spoke in it. I'm quite open about my background. It should hardly come as a shock to you that I don't agree with the idea of personally vilifying military members because you personally disagree with the politics of their country.
Anyway, I'm done, regardless of whatever else you want to say here.
If I believed that you, in all seriousness, wondered if they ever thought deeply about such things, I wouldn't have said anything. The only thing "have you heard of 9/11" says to me is that the individual feels attacked by you. Given all the words you have written here, I think it is reasonable for them to interpret your question as an attack and not some good faith attempt to start some deeply philosophical discussion.
And it's an ugly thing to do, regardless of the justification you want to come up with after the fact while clearly signaling your belief that being a soldier makes you de facto evil. I don't agree with that position and I don't think it is appropriate for anyone to go around picking fights with soldiers on HN because they hold such beliefs.
You are required to follow legal orders. Illegal orders, not so much because "you will end up holding the bag" as "I was just following orders" isn't a valid defense.
As for net positive/negative that really up to the politicians since (in the US at least) the military is commanded by the civilian government. One hopes one is engaging in a net positive but, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Have a read:
I'm curious if you would say the same hostile things to a Dutch soldier who was only serving his or her own country as they were asked to do.
[1] https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2018/06/15/netherlands...
Count on it.
But being sucked into Iraq was the bigger error.
The major reason NL has been so safe is because the EEG and later the EU came into being, not because of any action by enlisted military. The NATO 'an attack on one is an attack on all' combined with the nukes of France and the UK are the bigger part of the balance there, with some help from the US, where there arguably is room to point out that this was mostly to serve US interests rather than the interests of Europe, any kind of fuck-up there would have likely turned the EU into a smoldering pile of ashes.
NL has very little to be proud of when it comes to the deployment of the military, both historically and in the present.
Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest.
ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.
Pilots drone or not have the best situational awareness and they often scrub missions and even abort after launch if the situation changes to what they would consider unacceptable.
Essentially any type of “fire at will” order is discretionary.
Pilots didn’t sign up to blow up schools and hospitals and they can and are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties they can and do question the intelligence and information which lead to authorizing the strike they’ll asses the strike package and they will assess the situation and the target to the best of their abilities before engaging.
Shit does happen, mistakes are made but they are by far not the norm.
Serious question, are you aware of any cases of US pilots ever being punished for collateral damage or hitting the wrong target?
The laws both national and international that govern military operations don’t put civilian lives a head of military operations in all cases.
I’m not American but from my experience we had to do a lot of work for risk reduction when planning missions, essentially we perform and throughly document the process in which we reduce the risk of collateral damage that came in form of selecting a strike package to minimize the damage, choosing a time that would ensure minimal non-combatants in the AO and also providing the parameters of engagement to the pilots based on the value of the target.
I can say that out of the approved strikes close to 50% of them were aborted last minute and even after munition launch due to the pilots giving us the no-clear in the last moment and then essentially missing the window of opportunity.
I'm not involved with the military in any way, shape or form. My guess would be that if such a thing happened, it would be buried (see Chelsea Manning, Abu Ghraib etc).
You did say though that pilots are directly liable for any collateral damage, so I was curious as to whether that had any real meaning - would a pilot actually face charges (military or criminal) if they, for example, negligently fired upon the wrong building, or failed to abort launching against a pre-approved target that it later turned out was obviously a school, hospital, wedding party, etc?
If a pilot tracks a school bus that loaded a bunch of kids and heading into town and calls it a military target and blows it up they will be charged.
Investigations also happen quite often, quite often they don’t result in anything because everyone did what they were supposed to do to reduce the risk and make the best judgment call based on the information they had.
You can’t charge people for making a mistake as shitty as you might think it is war gets people killed by definition and for the most part professional soldiers do what they can to make sure that the people who die are combatants.
However, I can attest that pilots routinely provide us infantrymen with information that we weigh very heavily in our decision to engage. Moreover, it is often the case that air-strikes fall under the "close air support" (CAS) category, which in turn means the aircraft shoots where and when the ground troops request it.
In other words: discretion is what separates the professional soldier from the disorganized militia.
That seems like a very strong claim.
Put another way, if we think of 1960's era ICBM technology as entry level autonomous warfare, it's the least effective example of this kind of technology. That alone should give a bit of pause.
That is how potent this technology is, and it should be regarded with no lighter wariness.
It is more precise, more durable, more accurate, and worst of all, requires fewer people per intervention, indicating that it can be operated with a hair trigger, leaving the capacity to react with force more prone to emotional decisions.
If it seems that ordinary guns make it easier for ordinary civilian citizens to lash out at tens of victims, this technology will expand that ability even further. But, put in the hands of unrestrained organizations and institutions, operating with the capacity and constraints of nation-state authority, no less than World War III is on the table.
It's precisely because people do have discretion that we have the concept of the strategic corporal [0].