Is someting seriously wrong with US military culture?

Great Debates
1

How do we explain this?

http://www.notinourname.net/war/torture-29apr04.htm

Granted, it’s not rape and pilliage, but still, it’s pretty damn despicable. The war is controversial enough without these knuckleheads behaving like animals. Is this travesty an aberration? Are such practices likely to be more widespread, or is this a renegade group of soldiers with a unique state of mind?

War is hell, sure, but I’m told these people are trained not to commit war crimes, especially against POWs, who are subdued and defenseless. The fact the enemy might do worse to our people doesn’t excuse such behavior. We have a higher standard, or so we’re told.

These stories made me sick. I’ve never blamed our troops for being in Iraq. I might decry our leaders for sending them there, but I’ve always wanted to be supportive of our troops, who are following orders, as is their duty as service men and women. I have, however, always expected them to represent our country well while there. Killing is a part of war, and I understand that. Since seeing videos of soldiers cheering snipers as they pick off enemy combattants like it was a sports event, helicopters shooting wounded, children photographed holding obscene placards, and now this monstrosity, what should I think? Yeah, I saw the pictures of the American contractors’ mangled and charred bodies, strung up for show. Yes, I see the enemies of our troops can act like barbarians. I’m sure that illicits rage in those on the ground in Iraq. But still, this latest scandal is inexcusable, and terribly worrying. Giving sensitivity training to combattants does seem like a bit of an oxymoron, but isn’t some code of conduct drummed into these people so as to prevent PR nightmares like this?

My confidence in our troops has been shaken. Should it have been?

2

Well, considering that there have been 2 groups of soldiers from 2 countries, both with photographs, in the past 2 days, it goes to reason that it is more widespread than people would like to believe.

I don’t think it is anything wrong with the military culture. It is common to all militaries, and likely most civilians. One could argue that evidence points towards miltiary recruits being younger emotionally than most people, but then one would be flamed to high hell for daring to speak ill of our brave soldiers.

However, any time where you have a situation where people are out to kill each other, it is not unknown for them to seek to do damage to each other whenever possible, including when captured. I don’t think this is unique to this war or this country - but it is one of those cases where people usually think, “but that can’t happen in America!”

3

There’s still a question over whether the UK photos are genuine or frauds.

4

True, I should ammend that they are alleged. However, there is a nice story to go along with them. We’ll see what the investigation turns up.

Either way, it is more likely that this happens more frequently than once, than it is that it was an isolated incident.

5

Actually, this is something I’d been wondering about.

Consider this: The majority of enlisted men in the armed services are probably somewhere between 18 and 25.

That age range is roughly the college-age range. Think about what stupid-ass shit that college kids pull. Think about frat parties, hazing, etc… All that idiotic testosterone charged nonsense that gets done.

And those are the “best and brightest”. The ones whose prospects are supposedly good enough that the military’s not an option. In all likelihood, the military recruits are not quite as bright on average as the college kids.

It’s not at all surprising that we hear about this kind of thing being caused by a bunch of young men without women around to keep them busy. (I don’t necessarily mean sex, just its pursuit).

I’m actually amazed that the military training works well enough to where it doesn’t happen all the time.

6

I’m pretty sure there are women among the soldiers who participated in the alleged torture, so I’m not sure if it’s a purely testosterone-related phenomenon. One could argue, I suppose, that if the soldiers were all women, nothing like this could happen. I’m not going to go there. Suffice to say, not all the torturers were male.

As for hazing, I’ve heard some pretty lurid tales of sororities as well as frats. Again, not a male-only phenomenon.

I think it’s fair to say (having been one) college kids by-and-large don’t engage in nearly as much abuse of others as they do themselves. In the fraternity-type setting, hazing is part of the culture. At many colleges and universities, where hazing rituals have demonstrably stepped over lines of decency or safety, the frats and sororities have either been compelled to change their ways or have even lost their charter entirely. From what I saw where I went to school, they largely complied, albeit grudgingly. But the few that didn’t comply eventually got frats and sororities booted out for good. After that, nobody got hazed, except for in the “underground frats”. So, the numbers of people getting carrots shoved up their asses and other such things went down considerably, and the change happened in just one year.

Frat culture, not college culture in general. There’s nothing about 18-25 year olds intrisically that makes them want to abuse people, so far as I can see. Even the knuckleheads.

7

I’m pretty sure there are women among the soldiers who participated in the alleged torture, so I’m not sure if it’s a purely testosterone-related phenomenon. One could argue, I suppose, that if the soldiers were all women, nothing like this could happen. I’m not going to go there. Suffice to say, not all the torturers were male.

As for hazing, I’ve heard some pretty lurid tales of sororities as well as frats. Again, not a male-only phenomenon.

I think it’s fair to say (having been one) college kids by-and-large don’t engage in nearly as much abuse of others as they do abuse of themselves. In the fraternity-type setting, though, hazing is part of the culture. At many colleges and universities, where hazing rituals have demonstrably stepped over lines of decency or safety, the frats and sororities have either been compelled to change their ways or have even lost their charter entirely. From what I experienced where I went to school, they largely complied, albeit grudgingly. But the few that didn’t comply eventually got frats and sororities booted out for good. After that, very few got hazed, except for in the “underground frats”. So, the numbers of people getting carrots shoved up their asses and other such things went down considerably, and the change happened in just one year.

Frat-y/Sor-y culture, not college culture in general, seemed to be to blame. I don’t think there’s anything about about 18-25 year olds intrisically that makes them want to abuse people, so far as I can see. Even the knuckleheads weren’t out to toture the plebes.

8

Goddamn it, SDMB people, I don’t mean to bitch, but the page froze, I hit stop, and did some more editing. How is it this keeps happening?

9

Always, everywhere, you will find people who will do this kind of things in they’re are told “here are the evil people” , are givenpower and means they can abuse of , and think they can get away with this.

You shouldn’t have any such confidence at the first place. Being of a given nationality isn’t in any way a guarantee that people will behave decently. Nor the subordinates, nor the people who give them orders. Especially in time of war. History, including recent history, makes this blatantly obvious.

10

I don’t think that was bump’s point. Not to speak for him, but his use of “testosterone” there was much more shorthand for “random irresponsible shit hyper young people do” than “male behavior.” Having been to college and having been in a fraternity, suffice it to say that the women are just as screwed up as the men.

The point is that these are young, immature people, a good number of which are in the military because they couldn’t go to college or just wanted to escape a bad family situation. They are given to doing stupid stuff without considering the consequences - and when people like that are given M-16s instead of pot and vodka, they are going to do some pretty stupid things indeed.

My hypothesis would be that people taken to going into the military tend to be less emotionally mature, developed, and stable than those who go directly to a 4 year university, and given that those who go to the students do stupid enough things, lord knows what the military ones do. The ones who would abuse people will do so to much higher levels.

As I said, I was/am in a fraternity, and I take exception to this statement. Fraternities themselves do NOT haze and do stupid shit - the people IN the fraternities do. Saying that the Greek (not the country) culture is behind it is stupid - the Greek system is a magnification of the regular student life. You think that stupid shit is limited to the Greek system? Yea, hah. Try going around to any non-Greek student living environment. Usually, worse shit happens there, because it isn’t organized. At least the Greeks generally own their own houses and have some measure of responsibility towards them. Co-ops are much worse.

Hell, our house is still alcohol-free, and we never hazed anyone. Some college students may be assholes, but don’t trash the entire system. Similarly, military people may be assholes, but you can’t trash the entire military culture.

11

According to a story about this in the Los Angeles Times, the unit involved was a reserve unit, 372[sup]nd[/sup] Military Police Company of Cumberland, MD. It can’t possibly be excused as a “heat of battle” type of thing.

Not would it be a result of rigorous training in battle combat tactics. I don’t think that MP training should ever include the super macho crap that you see in the movies, and I seriously doubt that real military training does either. One of the fears of military leaders is the loss of discipline and the disorganization that accompanies it.

If an army gets the reputation of running loose after a victory it can be disasterous. Nothing is easier than to present the enemy with a “victory” and then ambush them during their post-battle spree.

This isn’t quite the same thing but it is something that shouldn’t be and in fact can’t be tolerated in any army. Not only in the name of common humanity but as a self-protective measure. And there is at least one US soldier still in enemy hands isn’t there?

12

Chalk it up to the sadistic exuberance of unsupervised 18-25 year old hamsters.

13

Actually, youth may not have as much a role in this as we have been leading it to:

Cite: New Yorker

14

Anyone who has been following the investigations into prison conditions in California wouldn’t be surprised. The actions, in fact, are the way a lot of California guards seem to think things are “supposed to be done.”

15

This is exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve always been led to believe that US military culture is, above and beyond all else, one of discipline. Even off duty, I’ve always been under the impression soldiers were expected to display a modicum of decency because they represent a larger body that, you know, fights for freedom and justice and all that. Maybe the brass personally could care less about human rights, but they must know they are expected to train their soldiers to adhere to certain standards of conduct, in accordance to military and international law, etc. , and that good PR is of utmost importance when running a military campaign. They’re fighting to “liberate” a country, for crying out loud. If you’ve got soldiers behaving like this, not only does your outfit look depraved, it looks undisciplined. I have to wonder which would bother a high-level military officer more. I mean, stuff like this simply can’t be tolerated, right? Hence, you’d think they’d go way out of their way to prevent it from happening, if for no other reasons than strategic ones. Clearly not enough is being done.

16

That New Yorker article notes that the soldiers being accused of doing this are saying that they did it with the oversight of and at the behest of Military Intelligence people and CIA personell. They even allege incidents such as interrogators basically causing a man’s death from the stress of their interrogation (whatever that might have involved), putting his body on ice for a day, then faking the time of his death, making it look like he was under medical care, and covering up their involvement with him.

Of course, these terds have every reason to lie and point fingers elsewhere.

But unfortunately, there seems to be tons of stories about very similar incidents in other places, and plenty of situational plausibility to the stories themselves, given things like how hard it would have been for MI to not know what was going on if not be directing it specifically. None of this bodes well for the “just a few bad eggs” theories, nor the “Army was already on the job so why all the hoopla” excuse. Someone wanted people to confess to certain things (perhaps involvement in WMD programs?), and, whether those things were accurate or not (most experts agree that torture is really only useful only for getting people to say whatever you want them to, not getting them to tell the truth), people were apparently tasked with making sure there were fast and contrite confessions.

17

Well, that’s a matter of in-the-classroom vs. in-the-field. Not just in the US but in EVERY military it’s supposed to be a culture of discipline, of attention to detail, of there-is-nothing-unimportant… but out in the field it too often happens that the brass decides that they got too much on their hands and have to adopt a laizzes-faire position on some issues. It’s not so much “American Military Culture” as it is what happens when ANY military starts looking the other way. The Canadians went through something like that in the early 90s.

18

I like think the actual military is closer to Three Kings than Black Hawk Down. :wink: However, both have elements of truth to them. On one hand, they are highly trained and skilled professionals who, despite your point of view, perform their duties well. On the other hand, they are young adults, and maybe outside the rigors of direct combat, where training and instinct kick in, the lifestyle is a great deal more unprofessional - this is demonstrated by little things like the pregnancy rates of military women, statistically high numbers of reported rape cases, urinating on prisoners, etc.

Perhaps that is the biggest difference - on duty/in combat and off duty/out of combat. Soldiers have ALWAYS, in ANY country, at ANY time, been known precisely for their rough and tumble behavior, acts of public drunkeness, raping and pillaging, and other classic military tactics (including but not limited to sporadically breaking into acapella love songs in base bars, if Hollywood is any indication, and we all know it is).

So one could raise some questions from this group behavior. Is it:

the type of person who joins the military

the stressful military life

the young age of most servicepeople

or something else

that is responsible for this kind of rather crude behavior. As we have discussed above, college kids (well, people of that age group) behave in similarly dastardly manners, however the incidences of pregnancy and reported rape around military bases is still higher than around college campuses. Studies have suggested that military servicepeople show a lower average emotional age, however, this has not been proven. And the military lifestyle is certainly something that will make you want to kick up your heels while off duty, especially the stress of being in actual combat.

This all adds up to a severe problem - can the military be held to a looser social standard than the average American? How would the average American behave in an emotionally charged situation like this?

It is a classic correlation/causation - to put it one way, does the military cause rapists, or do rapists join the military?

Where can we draw the line at generalizing a situation like this? I wouldn’t want to say that “most military people are perverted, unbalanced mental children,” but some of them behave like it sometimes.

Further, what does the military have to do to work around this problem? Sensitivity training? Mandatory psychotherapy? Screening recruits?

19

Check out this article about events in Afghanistan, more than a year ago:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4620046-110878,00.html

Sound a little too familiar?

20

Take a group of mainly younger people, indoctrinate in how to kill, add a pinch of propaganda about how your country, god and mission is the right one, add a major dose of testosterone, mix together and bake for a few weeks. This recipe will get you the same results in any army in the world.