busyA Morally Bankrupt Military: When Soldiers and Their Families Become Expendable
The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as "nondeployable for medical reasons" have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.
The opening contains a point worth discussing first: changing a normal person into a soldier requires ripping out the original moral framework and replacing it with something else. This allows the soldier to kill other human beings without hesitation, to continue fighting even while substantially damaged, and otherwise do all sorts of things that normal people can't or won't do -- which is necessary if the soldier is to live and the war is to be won.
The problem is, that process has drawbacks. It tends to destabilize the personality, which may or may not ever manifest as serious personality problems. Going to war also destabilizes personalities. Most people can recover from one trip, enough to be reasonably functional. But every trip lowers the chance of functionality and raises the chance that the personality will fray or break altogether. Because much of a soldier's self-preservation has been dismantled, and this is reinforced by other soldiers, it requires very careful observation to tell when one of them is damaged enough to require treatment or retirement. Failing to do that usually means the soldier loses a grip on the implanted violence routines and attacks themselves or other people.
It is hardly fair to blame the soldiers when the army pushed them to that point, and not even entirely fair to blame the army for also being what it is. Society needs to recognize that the army needs enough personnel to meet the demands on it, or else demands need to be lowered to what the personnel can do; that the army needs resources aside from artillery, such as adequate health care and staff; and that the army requires some supervision from ordinary people who will have an easier time spotting soldiers in need of care rather than leaving it all to other soldiers who have all been reprogrammed with the same "keep moving till you drop" routine. Because if we don't take care of those steps, broken soldiers explode out of the military and wreak havoc in other communities.
So is the military really morally bankrupt? Of course it is. It's a military. It's not supposed to be moral; it's supposed to be a formidable killing machine, and morality just gets in the way of that. Morality is society's job.
And society is becoming morally bankrupt. It sucks people in, uses them up, wipes its arse with them, throws them in the gutter, and then complains that the trash is unsightly.
November 13 2009, 00:09:11 UTC 11 years ago
Failing to do that usually means the soldier loses a grip on the implanted violence routines and attacks themselves or other people. It is hardly fair to blame the soldiers when the army pushed them to that point...
Yes it is. Or at least it's as fair to blame a murderer who's a vet as it is to blame any other killer who's gone through hardships in their life.
Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of people go in and out of combat units every year in Israel alone, and many more in the US. The vast majority of them do not go out and attack or kill people afterwards.
Obviously people who are mentally unfit – for any reason, be it PTSD or run-of-the-mill civilian insanity – do and should receive consideration in the justice system. But excusing people from responsibility for their own actions just because they've been through the military is wrong - even if the army doesn't take care of its veterans as well as it should. The fact that responsibility may be shared doesn't exempt either side.
So is the military really morally bankrupt? Of course it is. It's a military. It's not supposed to be moral; it's supposed to be a formidable killing machine, and morality just gets in the way of that.
This is both untrue and a dangerous misconception. An army has obligations to its own soldiers and to its enemies. Excusing an army from these obligations invites atrocities, and injustices such as you've described.
The military's job is not to kill - it's to protect. Killing is a means to an end and should be a last resort, certainly not a goal in and of itself. A force whose goal is killing is not an army – it's a group of murderers. A code of ethics is a vital and necessary part of any army (I direct you to this blog post for further reading). Look at the army's ROE – even during an attack, the preference is to disable the enemy without killing them.
The military is not only supposed to be moral – it's obligated to be so under law. That's why laws of war exist. That's why any decent army has an internal system of checks and balances – just like any government – that includes a legal advisory body.
I can tell you that in the IDF during wartime, lawyers who are experts in the laws of war sit right in the thick of the operational HQ, know everything that goes on and act to stop illegal military action. Additionally, there are very clear laws here that define a soldier's rights, from the minimum hours of sleep a night to access to medical and psychological treatment. There is also an entire body dedicated to making sure that these rights are in fact fulfilled for every soldier.
If soldiers' rights are not being respected, this is a problem with the army in question – not with the concept of an army. Treating injustice as inevitable condones its existence and encourages its continuance.
Anonymous
November 13 2009, 03:21:00 UTC 11 years ago
Replacing normal decency and compassion with a structure that pretends to an over-riding 'morality' -- compounds the damage.
November 13 2009, 03:55:07 UTC 11 years ago
Soldiers are people and (this may be hard for you to believe) actually DO have morals, decency and compassion.
Furthermore, they are held responsible for the morality of their own actions while in uniform (there is such a concept as an immoral order) and are expected to be guided by their personal ethics and judgment. They are punished if they act immorally and are assumed to have enough decency to know when that happens.
Funnily enough, I'd expect the existence (as in any part of society) of judicial oversight to be a positive thing. Do correct me if I'm wrong.