8 ms·

> I don’t completely trust military organizations, because they tend to put duty before morality Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the

> I don’t completely trust military organizations, because they tend to put duty before morality Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the master misspoke. Second, I submit you can strongly trust military organizations to do their duty. They will stop at nothing to kill their enemies with extreme prejudice. And the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself. Now, that doesn't mean war is a civilized affair. It is awful, insane. And I frankly don't know a lot of senior military leaders who have ever been eager to go to war, except in cases where they believed the operation truly met the standards of jus ad bellum. What you often find in histories are senior officers getting replaced when their advice to not enter war is not in line with the positions of their civilian leadership.

Joe-Z 8y ago
Hey! It sounds like you know what you're talking about. Could you maybe point me to some sources on where one could read up on how military leaders decide to go to war, what set of morals they need to come up with to be able to send people to war or this "jus ad bellum"-concept (never heard of that before). I would really appreciate it!
- baxtr 8y ago
  Not quite what you looking for, but I found this source insightful regarding how the military think about leadership. Very progressive I’d say, see for example the Gardener’s approach http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Military leaders don't decide to go to war. That's for elected leaders. Waging war and studying how to wage war are the proper roles of the military. That said, any civilian leader with a clue should ask their military commanders what a war would entail, those critical "how much" questions. And if the numbers don't add up, probably take a pass, look for a diplomatic solution. This is where honest warriors like Shinseki lose their jobs and people like McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland end up in charge. As for reading up on the general principles upon which the Western world built its world order, how to know when a war would be just, the collected works of Plato, starting with The Republic, and the stoics would be a good start. I would advise Irvine's Guide to the Good Life as an introduction to the stoics. I would also add Errol Morris's The Fog of War, including McNamara's separate 10 lessons (1), and, as counterpoint, Ken Burns' Vietnam series. The two together are an unparalleled view of the entry into war, and its consequences. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#Ten_additional_lessons_from_R.S._McNamara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#Ten_additional_...
  - jrumbut 8y ago
    I would also add a very significant figure in Just War Theory (another useful term) is St. Thomas Aquinas (as I'm sure you know but maybe others don't). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Jus_ad_bellum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Jus_ad_bellu...
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    Thank you! I actually already read "A Guide to the Good Life" and was planning on re-reading it this winter.
solveit 8y ago
A more charitable reading is that military organizations are structured so that everyone but the very top leadership follow 'duty', i.e. orders, without thinking about the morality of their orders (I know that in principle they're supposed to refuse unlawful orders. In practice, we have fairly mixed results on that front. Not to mention the fact that a great deal of barbarism can be perfectly lawful in war.). But as anyone who's been in an organization of more than ten people can attest, what the leadership says it's doing, what the leadership thinks it's doing, and what the organization is actually doing are three very different things. In most organizations the mismatch usually just ends up in money leaking everywhere and stupid things being build. In militaries, all sorts of atrocities can happen, and this is amplified because the boots on the ground and the cogs in the machine are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. So I think that quote is a perfectly reasonable take on the matter.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  > are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. My experience has been that a great many officers think very hard about the ethics of their actions. War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses.
  - mda 8y ago
    Apparently they think about it yet execute the orders regardless. Just judging by the atrocities of all wars.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      Do you think you shouldn't steal things from other people? Of course. I mean I think we'd agree that everybody, more or less, feels this way, right? Yet each year there are more than 8 million thefts per year in the USA alone. It seems that the latter fact there contradicts the former, but it doesn't. You can't compare things to a baseline of 0. You need to compare them to what things would be like if our proposition was true. For instance if most people believed that it was okay to steal things from people then there would not be 8 million thefts per year, there'd be billions. 8 million thefts is actually very strong evidence that most people believe you should not steal from other people. And so too for atrocities in war. The non-zero number of atrocities in no way suggests that people just blindly follow orders, as a matter of fact. You need to compare these numbers to what would happen if people gave no consideration to morality whatsoever in their execution of orders. And what are those numbers? I'm not sure, but I expect vastly higher than the relatively few atrocities we can reference.
shawn 8y ago
And I frankly don't know a lot of senior military leaders who have ever been eager to go to war Look no further than the cuban missile crisis. If you dig into the history you'll find that the US military commanders were rather eager to start some messy business with our soviet counterparts. The worldwide US Forces DEFCON 3 status was returned to DEFCON 4 on November 20, 1962. General Curtis LeMay told the President that the resolution of the crisis was the "greatest defeat in our history"; his was a minority position.[50] He had pressed for an immediate invasion of Cuba as soon as the crisis began and still favored invading Cuba even after the Soviets had withdrawn their missiles.[132] Twenty-five years later, LeMay still believed that "We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba at that time." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
garyhunt 8y ago
> the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself. Do you have any data backing up this claim? To me, it sounds like wishful thinking. The detailed and well studied cases that I can think of, eg: Mylai Massacre, the murder and subsequent coverup of Patrick Tillman, the murder of Laveena Johnson, indicate that the people who lead military organzitions, and the systemic structures within these organizations typically have a very questionable (if any) sense of morality.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  > Do you have any data backing up this claim? The last 24 years of my life and the great many excellent enlisted and officer members of the armed services I have worked alongside. We study My lai, and Abu Ghraib, the Vincenes, and other failures of leadership. I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule. We also study failures of civil and business leadership, but those are so plentiful they occupy every newspaper every day.
  - garyhunt 8y ago
    > I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule. Could you give a few examples where our military leadership took an action that backs up your claim of exhibiting a strong sense of morality?
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      You're asking for something that doesn't make news. There's multiple classes of this. The untold hours NCOs and officers spend sweating details to reduce moral ambiguity in operations. If you want is to see men take bullets for innocents, there are plenty of them but, unfortunately, there aren't many people around to tell those stories. A few have made it out, and you can find some of them in the Medal of Honor citations (1) General Dean's delaying action at the outbreak of the Korean war (2). More subtly, General Shinseki testifying to Congress against administration dogma on the number of troops needed in Iraq, and sticking to that despite intense pressure. Admiral McRaven's life in general. (1) https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-congressional-recipients-official-citations/dp/0964459000/ https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-congressional-recipients-o... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Dean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Dean (3) https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.htm...
gman83 8y ago
in most cases I doubt the current American commander in chief has thought long and hard about his moral positions. That being said, the authoritarian regimes of the world will undoubtedly not hesitate to use AI in their military, so some form of deterrence will presumably be required.
- Lkjhmnbv 8y ago
  And yet he was the one calling to not strike Syria while the democrats and their propagandists and commisars called him a traitor for not wanting to bomb them. You have a distorted view of reality blinded by your irrational hatred of orangeman bad.
  - Skrillex 8y ago
    It seems to me that it is your view of reality that might be distorted if you can and have inferred that the parent has an irrational hatred of the current president of the United States from that particular sentence.
    - Lkjhmnbv 8y ago
      I'm perfectly willing to entertain that notion. Explain to me how the parent could come to that conclusion by other means? Consider that this president has consistently used teddy roosevelt tactics to deescelate tensions in areas the cultural elites have deemed impossible (e.g., north Korea, China, Russia, EU, Canada).
      - Skrillex 8y ago
        I do not want this to sound ironic, but the explanation that seems most intuitive to me is that the parent has been informed of some number of the president's actions (likely through the media and/or aquaintances) and came to the conclusion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. While the parent may indeed have an irrational hatred of the president (I do not immediately see any evidence for it, but you may not prove a negative), it is not a hard requirement in order to maintain the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. Does that seem plausible? On an unrelated note, I do not hate the president, but also believe that either he does not think long and hard about his moral positions, or simply does not actually share them with the public. In my case, I believe this because he appears to rapidly shift his opinions, attitudes, and words in a way that makes it difficult to infer what he believes, or even what he wants people to believe that he believes.
kaveh_h 8y ago
It’s not merely military organizations. The US president and congress use military force on any target in the world even when there’s no or very little benifit for security of US citizens, even under influence of lobbyists. Think of Vietnam or Iraq 2003, and others.
anotheryou 8y ago
people in the military at least have seen war first hand, but they are not the ones making the big decision of joining one, no?
simonh 8y ago
You might find a few example of military officers counseling against war in history, mainly in liberal democracies, but you'll probably find a lot more the other way round. Even then the council is usually more about when, where and how rather than whether to do it at all. Not all militaries are meaningfully accountable to political leadership, and not all political leadership cares about morality anyway (cough Russia cough). In free democracies yes, the military is at least to some extent held accountable to the government and the people, but we still end up with atrocities only a few of which are ever held to account, such as the Balkans war. Or in places like Chechnya or eastern Ukraine (so far) nobody is ever held to account. A few is a heck of a lot better than none, because it can act as a deterrent and an encouragement to the organisation to do better next time though, of course. Realistically, the decisions about what weapons the military should have, how they should be designed and what safeguards should be in place are all political decisions. Only how they are employed in war is really in the hands of the military, and in liberal democracies even that is sometimes a political decision (e.g. using a submarine to sink the Belgrano in the Falklands War.)
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
Merriam Webster puts duty arising from morality third after https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/duty https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/duty 1 filial duty and 2 obligatory tasks, I believe the usage here was obligatory tasks. I also think obligatory tasks is unfortunately the way that duty is commonly used in our degraded age.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the master misspoke. I can't speak for them, but I'd say obedience would be a better word here. > the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions Then that just proves that there are leaders in military organizations that even after thinking long and hard about something, come up with abysmal results, which they never quite seem to be capable to even own up to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g > except in cases where they believed the operation truly met the standards of jus ad bellum Oh, so I can trust they believe that, and when it's instead a war of aggression, I'm to be comforted that they believe it's not? And then exactly those people who already can't seem to use their brains responsibily are supposed to be allowed to build machines to make "decisions" and kill autonomously? All you said is what everybody said, historically. Everybody is either the good guy, or when they fuck up, they're not obedient to evil, they're simpling making "mistakes"... but at least they thought long and hard, it's not always smooth sailing for those who kill others. As if that perspective is the only one that matters, while ignoring the people who were murdered by militaries through no fault of their own, and any duty a person might have towards them.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  You're asking members of a military, that is, the custodians of ultimate state violence, to decide who the enemy is? Are you sure about that? To whom does the soldier have a greater duty, the government elected by the citizens of his country, or the citizens of some other country? Let's say I take a 4-star general, and strip him of all rank. Put him in a platoon and tell him to follow the orders of the lieutenant in charge. No matter his geopolitical insights and experience, he is now dependent on the information of the lieutenant. It's no longer theory, now it's specifics. He is told to knock down that door and shoot the first person he sees. How can he possibly make any decision other than to execute the orders he is given? This is the terrible responsiblity of the lieutenant: he is the last source of information and direction the soldier has. Would you want your soldiers to die for a lie? As the result of misdirection? Do you want them to know to kill an innocent?
nabla9 8y ago
The difference between military and civilian decision making is this: Civilians can be politically active, convince other and refuse to work, or quit on case by case basis without criminal penalties. In military you can only refuse to follow obviously illegal orders and even then it's a huge personal risk. Refusing to follow morally wrong but technically legal orders will lead to criminal punishment. For example. Targeting civilians is illegal. If every male above 16 years of age is considered combatant, then it's legal to kill unarmed children from the sky. Refusing on the principle will lead to military court. Military court is extremely unlikely to rule that refusing to follow orders was the right action.
- monetus 8y ago
  'Enemy combatants' is a horror built into the system. IME, most people have forgotten that is how collateral damage was hidden.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Joe-Z 8y ago

Hey! It sounds like you know what you're talking about. Could you maybe point me to some sources on where one could read up on how military leaders decide to go to war, what set of morals they need to come up with to be able to send people to war or this "jus ad bellum"-concept (never heard of that before). I would really appreciate it!

baxtr 8y ago
Not quite what you looking for, but I found this source insightful regarding how the military think about leadership. Very progressive I’d say, see for example the Gardener’s approach http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm
killjoywashere 8y ago
Military leaders don't decide to go to war. That's for elected leaders. Waging war and studying how to wage war are the proper roles of the military. That said, any civilian leader with a clue should ask their military commanders what a war would entail, those critical "how much" questions. And if the numbers don't add up, probably take a pass, look for a diplomatic solution. This is where honest warriors like Shinseki lose their jobs and people like McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland end up in charge. As for reading up on the general principles upon which the Western world built its world order, how to know when a war would be just, the collected works of Plato, starting with The Republic, and the stoics would be a good start. I would advise Irvine's Guide to the Good Life as an introduction to the stoics. I would also add Errol Morris's The Fog of War, including McNamara's separate 10 lessons (1), and, as counterpoint, Ken Burns' Vietnam series. The two together are an unparalleled view of the entry into war, and its consequences. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#Ten_additional_lessons_from_R.S._McNamara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#Ten_additional_...
- jrumbut 8y ago
  I would also add a very significant figure in Just War Theory (another useful term) is St. Thomas Aquinas (as I'm sure you know but maybe others don't). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Jus_ad_bellum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Jus_ad_bellu...
- Joe-Z 8y ago
  Thank you! I actually already read "A Guide to the Good Life" and was planning on re-reading it this winter.

solveit 8y ago

A more charitable reading is that military organizations are structured so that everyone but the very top leadership follow 'duty', i.e. orders, without thinking about the morality of their orders (I know that in principle they're supposed to refuse unlawful orders. In practice, we have fairly mixed results on that front. Not to mention the fact that a great deal of barbarism can be perfectly lawful in war.). But as anyone who's been in an organization of more than ten people can attest, what the leadership says it's doing, what the leadership thinks it's doing, and what the organization is actually doing are three very different things. In most organizations the mismatch usually just ends up in money leaking everywhere and stupid things being build. In militaries, all sorts of atrocities can happen, and this is amplified because the boots on the ground and the cogs in the machine are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. So I think that quote is a perfectly reasonable take on the matter.

killjoywashere 8y ago
> are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. My experience has been that a great many officers think very hard about the ethics of their actions. War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses.
- mda 8y ago
  Apparently they think about it yet execute the orders regardless. Just judging by the atrocities of all wars.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Do you think you shouldn't steal things from other people? Of course. I mean I think we'd agree that everybody, more or less, feels this way, right? Yet each year there are more than 8 million thefts per year in the USA alone. It seems that the latter fact there contradicts the former, but it doesn't. You can't compare things to a baseline of 0. You need to compare them to what things would be like if our proposition was true. For instance if most people believed that it was okay to steal things from people then there would not be 8 million thefts per year, there'd be billions. 8 million thefts is actually very strong evidence that most people believe you should not steal from other people. And so too for atrocities in war. The non-zero number of atrocities in no way suggests that people just blindly follow orders, as a matter of fact. You need to compare these numbers to what would happen if people gave no consideration to morality whatsoever in their execution of orders. And what are those numbers? I'm not sure, but I expect vastly higher than the relatively few atrocities we can reference.

shawn 8y ago

And I frankly don't know a lot of senior military leaders who have ever been eager to go to war Look no further than the cuban missile crisis. If you dig into the history you'll find that the US military commanders were rather eager to start some messy business with our soviet counterparts. The worldwide US Forces DEFCON 3 status was returned to DEFCON 4 on November 20, 1962. General Curtis LeMay told the President that the resolution of the crisis was the "greatest defeat in our history"; his was a minority position.[50] He had pressed for an immediate invasion of Cuba as soon as the crisis began and still favored invading Cuba even after the Soviets had withdrawn their missiles.[132] Twenty-five years later, LeMay still believed that "We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba at that time." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

garyhunt 8y ago

> the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself. Do you have any data backing up this claim? To me, it sounds like wishful thinking. The detailed and well studied cases that I can think of, eg: Mylai Massacre, the murder and subsequent coverup of Patrick Tillman, the murder of Laveena Johnson, indicate that the people who lead military organzitions, and the systemic structures within these organizations typically have a very questionable (if any) sense of morality.

killjoywashere 8y ago
> Do you have any data backing up this claim? The last 24 years of my life and the great many excellent enlisted and officer members of the armed services I have worked alongside. We study My lai, and Abu Ghraib, the Vincenes, and other failures of leadership. I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule. We also study failures of civil and business leadership, but those are so plentiful they occupy every newspaper every day.
- garyhunt 8y ago
  > I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule. Could you give a few examples where our military leadership took an action that backs up your claim of exhibiting a strong sense of morality?
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    You're asking for something that doesn't make news. There's multiple classes of this. The untold hours NCOs and officers spend sweating details to reduce moral ambiguity in operations. If you want is to see men take bullets for innocents, there are plenty of them but, unfortunately, there aren't many people around to tell those stories. A few have made it out, and you can find some of them in the Medal of Honor citations (1) General Dean's delaying action at the outbreak of the Korean war (2). More subtly, General Shinseki testifying to Congress against administration dogma on the number of troops needed in Iraq, and sticking to that despite intense pressure. Admiral McRaven's life in general. (1) https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-congressional-recipients-official-citations/dp/0964459000/ https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-congressional-recipients-o... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Dean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Dean (3) https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.htm...

gman83 8y ago

in most cases I doubt the current American commander in chief has thought long and hard about his moral positions. That being said, the authoritarian regimes of the world will undoubtedly not hesitate to use AI in their military, so some form of deterrence will presumably be required.

Lkjhmnbv 8y ago
And yet he was the one calling to not strike Syria while the democrats and their propagandists and commisars called him a traitor for not wanting to bomb them. You have a distorted view of reality blinded by your irrational hatred of orangeman bad.
- Skrillex 8y ago
  It seems to me that it is your view of reality that might be distorted if you can and have inferred that the parent has an irrational hatred of the current president of the United States from that particular sentence.
  - Lkjhmnbv 8y ago
    I'm perfectly willing to entertain that notion. Explain to me how the parent could come to that conclusion by other means? Consider that this president has consistently used teddy roosevelt tactics to deescelate tensions in areas the cultural elites have deemed impossible (e.g., north Korea, China, Russia, EU, Canada).
    - Skrillex 8y ago
      I do not want this to sound ironic, but the explanation that seems most intuitive to me is that the parent has been informed of some number of the president's actions (likely through the media and/or aquaintances) and came to the conclusion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. While the parent may indeed have an irrational hatred of the president (I do not immediately see any evidence for it, but you may not prove a negative), it is not a hard requirement in order to maintain the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. Does that seem plausible? On an unrelated note, I do not hate the president, but also believe that either he does not think long and hard about his moral positions, or simply does not actually share them with the public. In my case, I believe this because he appears to rapidly shift his opinions, attitudes, and words in a way that makes it difficult to infer what he believes, or even what he wants people to believe that he believes.

kaveh_h 8y ago

It’s not merely military organizations. The US president and congress use military force on any target in the world even when there’s no or very little benifit for security of US citizens, even under influence of lobbyists. Think of Vietnam or Iraq 2003, and others.

anotheryou 8y ago

people in the military at least have seen war first hand, but they are not the ones making the big decision of joining one, no?

simonh 8y ago

You might find a few example of military officers counseling against war in history, mainly in liberal democracies, but you'll probably find a lot more the other way round. Even then the council is usually more about when, where and how rather than whether to do it at all. Not all militaries are meaningfully accountable to political leadership, and not all political leadership cares about morality anyway (cough Russia cough). In free democracies yes, the military is at least to some extent held accountable to the government and the people, but we still end up with atrocities only a few of which are ever held to account, such as the Balkans war. Or in places like Chechnya or eastern Ukraine (so far) nobody is ever held to account. A few is a heck of a lot better than none, because it can act as a deterrent and an encouragement to the organisation to do better next time though, of course. Realistically, the decisions about what weapons the military should have, how they should be designed and what safeguards should be in place are all political decisions. Only how they are employed in war is really in the hands of the military, and in liberal democracies even that is sometimes a political decision (e.g. using a submarine to sink the Belgrano in the Falklands War.)

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

Merriam Webster puts duty arising from morality third after https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/duty https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/duty 1 filial duty and 2 obligatory tasks, I believe the usage here was obligatory tasks. I also think obligatory tasks is unfortunately the way that duty is commonly used in our degraded age.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the master misspoke. I can't speak for them, but I'd say obedience would be a better word here. > the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions Then that just proves that there are leaders in military organizations that even after thinking long and hard about something, come up with abysmal results, which they never quite seem to be capable to even own up to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g > except in cases where they believed the operation truly met the standards of jus ad bellum Oh, so I can trust they believe that, and when it's instead a war of aggression, I'm to be comforted that they believe it's not? And then exactly those people who already can't seem to use their brains responsibily are supposed to be allowed to build machines to make "decisions" and kill autonomously? All you said is what everybody said, historically. Everybody is either the good guy, or when they fuck up, they're not obedient to evil, they're simpling making "mistakes"... but at least they thought long and hard, it's not always smooth sailing for those who kill others. As if that perspective is the only one that matters, while ignoring the people who were murdered by militaries through no fault of their own, and any duty a person might have towards them.

killjoywashere 8y ago
You're asking members of a military, that is, the custodians of ultimate state violence, to decide who the enemy is? Are you sure about that? To whom does the soldier have a greater duty, the government elected by the citizens of his country, or the citizens of some other country? Let's say I take a 4-star general, and strip him of all rank. Put him in a platoon and tell him to follow the orders of the lieutenant in charge. No matter his geopolitical insights and experience, he is now dependent on the information of the lieutenant. It's no longer theory, now it's specifics. He is told to knock down that door and shoot the first person he sees. How can he possibly make any decision other than to execute the orders he is given? This is the terrible responsiblity of the lieutenant: he is the last source of information and direction the soldier has. Would you want your soldiers to die for a lie? As the result of misdirection? Do you want them to know to kill an innocent?

nabla9 8y ago

The difference between military and civilian decision making is this: Civilians can be politically active, convince other and refuse to work, or quit on case by case basis without criminal penalties. In military you can only refuse to follow obviously illegal orders and even then it's a huge personal risk. Refusing to follow morally wrong but technically legal orders will lead to criminal punishment. For example. Targeting civilians is illegal. If every male above 16 years of age is considered combatant, then it's legal to kill unarmed children from the sky. Refusing on the principle will lead to military court. Military court is extremely unlikely to rule that refusing to follow orders was the right action.

monetus 8y ago
'Enemy combatants' is a horror built into the system. IME, most people have forgotten that is how collateral damage was hidden.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]