An introduction: Thanks to the book (and subsequent movie) Black Hawk Down, the phrase “Leave no man behind” and America’s corresponding policy are very much in the public eye.
An explanatory paragraph: American military policy is to protect, at all costs, the bodies of fallen soldiers. This means, using BHD as an example, that hundreds of soldiers are dispatched deep into hostile and very dangerous territory to secure the bodies of fallen comrades, risking death in the process.
A debate: Should America abandon this policy, on the basis that it is both morally and militarily illogical? On a moral standpoint, a safe burial of a single marine is not worth the lives of dozens of others. Militarily, recovering the body of a soldier while jeapordizing concrete strategic goals is non-sensical.
On the other hand, perhaps advertising the fact that we will kill dozens of your live soldiers just to ensure respectful treatment of one of our dead ones can only increase our reputation as global badasses.
As well, one cannot deny the effect this policy has on morale: every effort will be made to rescue those who are wounded (which, after all, you won’t really know unless you go look), even fatally. A soldier is probably more likely to put himself in harm’s way if he (or she) knows that at best, he will be rescued if things go badly, and, at worst, will die amongst his fellow soldiers rather than the enemy.
BTW, is this really a military-wide policy, or only a policy held by certain reputation-conscious segments of the military like the Rangers and other special ops forces?
This is one of those commitments you make because the overall result is positive, even though there may be some specific situations where it seems to not make sense.
Knowing that no matter what happens, no matter where you are or what condition you are in, your country will never, ever leave you behind… That is an extremely powerful motivator. And it helps build the cohesiveness of a team, and it makes your soldiers more effective.
War is full of compromises like that. This is a very good policy.
I should preface this by saying I’ve never been in combat…
My first reaction to BHD was probably as yours was, All this carnage to recover a body? I was appalled.
But there are a lot of sound reasons to reorient your priorities in order to protect even a single soldier. I don’t say “dead soldier” because most of the Americans involved in the BHD episode did not know about “dead” or “alive” in specific cases, they knew people were “down”.
Primarily for morale. I would think it’s critical for soldiers to believe they won’t be abandned on the field, even though we all know they sometimes are.
It’s usually low-risk. There are relatively few circumstances where American soldiers cannot blast their way to a fallen comrade. Again, I emphasize these kind of actions are NOT usually implemented to recover corpses, but to recover live soldiers (or to search for missing ones). You train to your strengths, and firepower and mibility are American specialities.
And it DOESN’T get carried to the point of endangering American strategic goals, one of which I might add is spread the message, “don’t fuck with our soldiers”. We didn’t invade North Korea over the Pueblo sailors, we didn’t attack China over the Orion aircrew. We didn’t launch an attack against Syria when American Navy aircrew were shot down and dragged dead through the streets. Cooler heads prevailed. In Mogadishu there was not time for that.
These comparisons are disingenous. The OP was asking about combat policy, the policy our troops follow when actively engaged in battle. As far as I can I remember, we didn’t have active combat operations going against North Korea, China, or Syria at the time of the incidents you cite. However, if those incidents had led to war, I think we can be sure that the military would have followed quite a different policy.
As an eight-year member of the Marines I can say this with some authority. It is a powerful notion to know that you will not be left behind. This isn’t a Special Forces thing, or an Army thing, but throughout the American forces. You will frequently see the same theme in movies depicting action in the more distant past.
Keeping this policy is the correct thing to do. This type of situation is the exception and not the rule. I am afraid that changing this “policy”, for the few times the numbers don’t add up, would have grave repercussions amongst the ranks. The only way to have it clear is to imagine yourself in that spot, understand what it means to make the promise to put your own life at risk for the recovery of the guy standing next to you, safe or otherwise. And also know every one of the men going in with you has made the same promise to you. In the big picture, does it make a more or less effective fighting force to have that mutual promise? I would have to say more effective. I am sure I would have a very hard time backing that statement with numbers, but I know what “Leave no man behind” meant to myself.
It seems to me that people who are actually in the military are better qualified to determine what makes military sense. The fact of the matter is that the bodies that we didn’t get to were powerful propaganda; I remember seeing a Newsweek cover of a soldier being dragged through the streets.
As scotth & Tedster alluded to, this is a rather old tradition – and not uniquely American, either. The Iliad describes the practice of recovering the dead. Hector’s body gets dragged around outside the city by Achilles, which isn’t too good for Troy’s morale. When Achilles is killed, Ajax fights to bring back his body.
That’s not entirely the same concept as in the modern U.S. military, but that is a hint that the roots of the tradition go back a long way.
I suppose that I was just going on my gut reaction to a situation in Afganistan in which 15 or so soldiers died attempting to rescue a gunner who fell out of the back of a helicopter.
