How has our military training failed us?

Question

Three soldiers are basically going to be charged with taking the law into their on hands. (see the link below)

This is not the first incident in this conflict or from conflicts in the past (and surely in the future) where a soldier has broken the law, the UCMJ.

We hold the military to a higher standard, but increasingly it appears that they can't live up to it.

Is it the American "cowboy" attitude? Is it popular media? (When was the last time in a movie the bad guy just gets caught and taken to court. No, in our movies we kill the bad guys.) Has the military become lax on instilling values? Is the screening process flawed?

What is going wrong?

The problem is that each one of these isolated incidents sets back our image, making it harder to win the hearts of the world and only adds to the hatred our enemies have for us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/middleeast/27abuse.html?em

Answer 1

This is old news and you are just now getting to it? If this is true justice will strike quickly, military training has nothing to do with it.

Answer 2

Quite frankly when you've had to pick bits of one of your buddies up off the scenery surrounding an IED explosion and put them into a body bag, and it's hard because half of him just ain't there anymore AND you've got hold of some of the guys who most probably did it, then can you honestly, I mean REALLY honestly, tell me you wouldn't have popped these guys too? This is WAR people.

NONE of us know how we're going to react in a situation like that and the old red mist if a powerful thing. Training goes out of the window no matter how disciplined these guys are. Most of them are frightened guys in their twenties. h**l they don't want to die and every less enemy combatant reduces the odds they will.

At worst a dishonourable discharge, at best a medal!

Answer 3

As a former organizer of death squads at the orders of USA  on behalf of her supreme interests, I support those soldiers.I worked at the orders of colonel Oliver ( Ollie for the friends) North, in El Salvador.We had the know-how of kidnapping, waterboarding , torture, a lot of practice in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, always with the oversight of USA.

I invented a new torture it is called " Dry Submarine" you use it whenever you lack water to waterboard somebody, you just need a nylon bag.This is how I killed this Jewish girl, she was a teacher ( an Unionist , aggh!)

http://www.desaparecidos.org/arg/victima...

Answer 4

  Please....we the people have soiled our image, by following blindly into war.  We the people can change our image by actually voting or going into public service.  How dare you cut the soldiers down as a whole.  There will always be enemies as long as humans continue to run countries as animals!!!!

Answer 5

The military hasn't failed us.  They've done everything asked of them, and they've done it with the highest degree of professionalism EVER shown in any military.  The civility and compassion these guys show on a day to day basis is astounding given what they go through.

THREE men failed us and themselves, it was not the military.

Answer 6

I don't know how old you are, but the last time there was this sort of wide-spread problem, was in another rather similar war.  Vietnam.

The reason for the analogy is simple.  They two conflicts are quite similar in terms of the stresses it puts on the troops, and in terms of the large scale and fairly routinely hostile contact between the troops and civilians.  

Soldiers are not, after all, cops.  Soldiers are trained, first and foremost to protect themselves and their fellow soldiers, and secondly to find, fix and kill the enemy.  In a situation with a large-scale insurgency which routinely costs the lives and maims the bodies and minds of soliders, a inevitable psychological transformation takes place.  When soldiers cannot distinguish friend from foe, or neutral from foe, then they must, in keeping with their first order of training, come to regard all civilians as at least potential enemies, and usually as de facto enemies.  Frustration at the loss of friends and the inability to pay the enemy back is, often, transfered to the available targets.  

For all we know, the civilians esecuted by these troops may have had something to do with attacks on American forces.  Not that any such involvement excuses what the soldiers did in taking justice into their own hands!  Not at all, but on the other hand, I don't think you can blame traing, per se.  Soldiers are war fighters.  Life takers and heart breakers, as they say.  Putting well trained infantry forces into the middle of a populated area, subjecting them to random, remote attacks and expecting them to win hearts and minds is a poor strategy and a poor use of the forces.  Alternatively, you could train a whole new class of troops to be occupation forces, and train them more like police officers are trained, but then they would likely be far less effective in an open, conventional, high-intensity war.  

Vietnam should have taught us the lessons about occupation forces in insurgent situations.  Unfortunately, someobdy dropped the ball, or refused to plan adequately for the long term occupation of Iraq.  Hmmm...wonder who that was?  

Answer 7

The problem isn't military training.  Its that these people are being punished for using their training.

Answer 8

My husband is in the US Army and let me tell you a little something. He knows there is a chance he will have to kill someone but he prays to GOD that it doesn't come down to that. I know a lot of people in the Military that feel the same as he does. So don't go judging the whole military system on what a few people have done. This is old news and the views of people about the military have been the same even before this, oh lets say since like Vietnam.

My husband loves his country and would give his life for it or take a life to save it. I was just saying a lot of people don't want to kill and would not go to the extremes that those men did. Its the training that is messing them up. Its them personally, what they have seen and been through  and who knows what else. I just don't want everyone judging the whole military because of a few bad apples. And I am not saying they were bad, because we honestly don't know exactly what happened and we most likely  never will.

Answer 9

That has nothing to do with military training!! Who really knows what went down...there could have been a struggle and maybe our soldiers took care of it but we won't know b/c of the media and how it portrays our soldiers! No matter what we do it will always be hard to win over our enemies b/c they are our enemies!! And those who arent but don't trust don't know any better and are simple minded.