Savage: "Could have" or "Could've."

Techie: "Apalled."

kthxbai

impulse, I believe Tech is/was a marine?

Gatyr, it does. However I have seen a similar video of a mosk pole being fired at with the justification that there was a sniper on the top.

Do you expect us military servicemen and women to be sent to war and act like royalty? War is a scary and life changing thing, and this type of behavior has existed in every war this country has faught in. I'm not justifying it; i'm just saying that there is nothing new here.

I don't know if what he is saying is all entirely true. I highly doubt the Corps would let people do some of those things and then talk about it without being punished. Something smells fishy to me.

Mack wrote: LOL at prepubescent experts who stereotype all "military guys" based on the statements of a few on a site sponsored by an organization that has an agenda of its own and then expect everyone else to bow before their extensive and all-encompassing knowledge of world affairs. Get over yourselves.

1. LOL, and well stated
2. You are correct.  It is the Huffington Post after all.  Fox News looks fair and balanced in comparison...

Yeah, I'm gonna have to agree that there is too much going on here ("here", in this case, would include Iraq/Afghanistan) to jump to any quick conclusions about the truth of the matter.

This does have the potential to be quite the entertaining political flamewar, though.  Could somebody alert the Smittys?

benttwig33 wrote: No honor or morals whatsoever.

Well, you know - last time I checked, basic training in the USMC did not include detailed philosophical discussions about the morality of war, and the ethical dilemmas faced by combatants in a combat theater filled with non-combatants that look and act a whole lot like enemies.  Basic training is not a discourse on the sanctity of all human life.

Basic training does, however, feature a lot of training in how to kill people.  More specifically, to kill people who are not "yours", and who may be a threat to you and yours.

So why are we surprised when our Marines kill people?  What did we think was going to happen?

Tolgak wrote: ...many of our politicians and soldiers have been extremely immoral recently, which many of the forum uberpatriots have an extremely difficult time doing. Get the 'merica! mentality out of your heads.

But here's the thing, as EE alluded to.

Up to and including WWII, just about every war fought on this planet was fought on the carpet-bombing approach.  There was no distinction between "civilian" and "soldier" - there was just "us" and "them".

Firebombing Dresden was not an anomaly - that was just standard strategy over the past several millenia.  Old-skool warfare consists of total annihilation of the enemy.  Men, women, and children.  Execute or enslave the survivors.  Burn the castle and salt the Earth.

The Ottomans did not go to war for "regime change" or to "liberate" the people of Iberia.  They went to take stuff and to kill anybody that stood in their path, or to cruch any attempted rebellion against their rule.  When the Ottoman navy sank ships in the Mediterranean, they did not check for innocent passengers.

It is only in modern times (commencing, perhaps, with Hiroshima) that we have started to think that maybe we should not kill indiscriminately when at war.  This is a new idea, and we haven't fully gotten the hang of it yet.  More specifically, our militaries have not gotten the hang of it at all.  We train our armies to kill, not to consider killing.  We train them to destroy all in their path, not to play local politics.

While I am also disturbed by the video, I find it completely disingenuous (assuming the man is not lying) to single him out as some moral anomaly, when he is merely representative of the morality that we instill in our armed forces.  The soldiers and Marines are not being immoral - they are just being old-fashioned.

I agree, though, that this new morality, coupled with an old military, places a greater burden upon the politicians that choose to go to war.  They are deliberately setting the military upon a course of action where new-morality unacceptable civilian deaths are absolutely inevitable.  For them to blame "rogue Marines" is completely reprehensible.  Yes, we can blame the individual riflemen that pull the trigger, but there is blame enough to go around, and most of it belongs with the people that set these gears in motion.

Tolgak wrote: If, in the era of the civil rights movement (many people were still being brainwashed all their lives to be racist), there were farmers under extreme financial stress who were still using slaves; are those farmers immoral or "just being old-fashioned?"

I think the specifics of your hypo are off, but that isn't important - the answer is that in many ways they would just be old-fashioned.

We all do this - we cut the old people some slack when they talk about the "coloreds", or when grandpa thinks a woman shouldn't be President.  Even though we disagree, we acknowledge that their views are embedments from another era, and we acknowledge that it is unfair to judge them by the standards of today.

Morality is a function of zeitgeist, and moves slowly.  It takes time for society to catch up, and old people often don't.  Similarly, our military training programs reflect a military moral philosophy a few decades out of date compared to civilian society.

So compare the Marine to gramps.  Do we think he is wrong that a woman shouldn't be President?  Yep.  Do we think that his position is basically immoral?  Yep.  Do we kind of wish he would stop saying that?  Absolutely.  Do we still humor him as best we can?  Yes - because we acknowledge that it is too much to expect of him to instantly shed 80 years of morality and adopt a modern worldview.

Our entire military is, in a way, an anachronism, or at least reflective of an anachronistic morality of war.  How can we not expect this to show on the folks we send through the machine?  We have to cut the Marine some slack, just like we do grandpa.  If we want our Marines to be more hippie-like, we need to change our military so they stop churning out scorched-Earth killing machines.

Which, of course, comes back to us - truth is, we kind of like our scorched-Earth killing machines.  We aren't fully on board with this new morality either.  A large part of society would be perfectly fine - either subconsciously or otherwise - if we nuked the entire Middle East and called it a day.  Which, IMO, is why we haven't been in such a hurry to hippify our military.  We want our cake and eat it too.  And that puts our military in an impossible situation. 

usafpilot07 wrote: DeTrevni wrote: Savage: "Could have" or "Could've." Techie: "Apalled." kthxbai Actually, it would have been "should have" or "should've." Kthxbye.

You win this round...

Edit: LOL @ this thread. It's like a real life paintball sniper debate.

techietaichi wrote: pb125 wrote: Lol at the pissed off military guys in denial. Get over yourselves.   So come on big man, tell me what you've experienced in combat. You watch a friend die? You ever been REALLY shot at. Have you any idea? Doubt it, your comment says enough.

Can I comment then? Certainly you don't have to be overseas to experience and be awarded this sort of perception.