[my5thaccount]

Articles like this remind me how rational and practical the military is. I know so many brilliant military minds, yet war itself seems outdated and plagued by so many emotionally irrational decisions. I can't reconcile those two thoughts.

How can people inside the military be so incredibly smart, yet still think it makes sense to ... you know, kill people's friends and families and not expect them to become terrorists.

What am I missing? It can't just be greed. Military industrial complex. The military minds aren't smarter than that? I struggle with it.

[jballanc]

I can't speak for the entire military[1], but I've known a few "brilliant military minds" and they rarely, if ever, talk in terms of killing. The military's goals are usually things like area denial, disrupting lines of communication, limiting access to materiel and supplies, degradation of morale, etc.

These aren't just euphemisms. If you're trying to win a war solely by killing the enemy, you're going to be in for a looooong and bloody war. In fact, there's long been a thinking in the military that "a dead soldier removes one soldier from the field, but a wounded soldier removes two".

What makes the military, and war, seem "outdated" or downright "despicable" comes down to, I think, two things:

1. War is often what happens when two sides have let long lingering issues fester to the point that dialogue is not possible. In other words, the only thing anyone wants less than to throw the first punch is to be unable to throw the second.

2. Yes, military industrial complex. Specifically, the MIC has muddled the "goals" and abstracted them away behind many layers of "weapons systems" and "advanced tactics". That is, if you're a general attempting to disrupt lines of communication, and you have to decide on committing the lives of your soldiers and potentially taking the lives of your enemy, you might consider a battle plan that minimizes loss of life. If you're that same general and Raytheon (or Lockheed or Honeywell or...) offers to sell you the CommsRuptor 7000 that will take out enemy communications at the press of a button (and a signature on a check for $300M), you might not adequately question the impact on lives. War used to be about loss of blood and treasure. Lately it seems to be more about treasure and blood...

[1] Especially not the "grunts" that see front-line action. I've heard, anecdotally, that enlisted soldiers are often trained in such a way that they enter war zones with raw blood-lust. Whatever your opinion on this practice, I took from your question that you were more interested in the thinking of the decision-makers, i.e. commissioned officers.

[Retra]

I wouldn't say "raw bloodlust" is accurate. I'd say the life of a serving infantryman is so boring, repetitive, and mundane that getting the chance to use your training in combat will look very pleasing to almost anyone. Especially on deployment.

[jessaustin]

Blaming the military for stupid shit that the military does is like blaming police for stupid shit that police do. It might make us feel better, but it ignores the root of the problem, and therefore perpetuates the stupid shit. That is, we, the society that puts the military into impossible situations ("topple governments in the Middle East, and then hang around a couple of years to make sure that ends in order, peace, and prosperity for all") and the police into impossible situations ("you seem to have violence under control, here are three or four more basic human drives we'd like you to thwart in capricious fashion") are the root of the problem. So long as we allow ourselves to be distracted from that, we can expect more stupid shit.

...and yes, of course the military-industrial complex is complicit in our ongoing distraction, but they only hire the pundits and media personalities. We're the ones who listen to them.

[ZanyProgrammer]

As a vet myself, you seem to have a view of the military that's straight out of a Tom Clancy novel (that everyone is extremely overly competent and highly educated and intelligent). "Articles like this remind me how rational and practical the military is. I know so many brilliant military minds"-no, the military is full of people, a lot of whom are as at least as fucked up on many levels as people outside the military.

[kobayashi]

The idea that killing a person's friends of family turns them into a terrorist, and that this is the ultimate source of terrorism and terrorists, is an oft-repeated but highly unsupported claim. It's ultimately a cudgel wielded by advocates of particular political ideologies, not serious students of terrorism and counterterrorism.

[azernik]

a) war a very unforgiving environment - bad policies become apparent very quickly under pressure

b) the things you are against ("kill people's friends and families and not expect them to become terrorists") are often policies not under military control. If the government doesn't want to spend the money or annoy its allies enough to solve the root causes, there's not much a soldier on the ground can do except mitigate the damage (and yes, that often includes actions that perpetuate a bad status quo)

[ccvannorman]

Momentum.

Also, it's easy to paint yourself as "the good guy with all the government sponsored guns and military contracts" who will "keep the other good people safe" because "you're better, smarter, more capable and more honorable than them." It's a very sexy and lucrative mindset, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it's pervasive.

[ArkyBeagle]

"the average man" is a very 19th Century Determinist concept. There may also be other 19th century Determinist concepts lurking around in military doctrine.

Those are frequently the troublesome ones that don't fit actual measurement.

At least in the US, there was no standing army until the 20th Century.

[SixSigma]

Do military people disagree with your analysis about killing ?

[my5thaccount]

I was really dismayed when Colin Powell argued for invading Iraq. Yes, there are military people who get it. But just look what's happening.

I guess they have to think, what is the alternative? We can't change our role in the Middle East. We can't just stop supporting Israel for example.

I suppose yes, they tried Camp David. I guess I just want everyone to cease fire.

Maybe the overpowered people resorting to terrorism, I do hate that word, have to think there is a positive outcome from the cease fire. If they cease firing and life doesn't improve, why did they cease firing? At least firing alleviates the frustration of it all. They think they are hurting those who are hurting themselves.

But life for the Palestinians never improves no matter. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse for them. The people with the power have to stop exerting it over others and selfishly taking more.

I had a buddy in Afghanistan and he said their way of life is 500 years old. I mean, I think okay, if they don't want to progress, that doesn't mean we should use the tools of our progress to take from them so we can progress more.

I think at some point we have to stop betraying people.

[voronoff]

High star generalship is more politics than military ability at this point.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-... for one discussion of this.

[fiatmoney]

The military is just the apotheosis of bureaucracy. Bureaucracies live off of data, often to a fault, when whatever they're after can't be reliably measured.