“The < name > looks after it’s own” is an old and effective morale and loyalty builder. How loyal would you be to an organization you knew considered you expendable ?
How dedicated to the fight, and to supporting his fellow soldiers, do you think a man would be if he thought they might run away and leave him behind? How much do you think he could rely on them if *they * thought *he * might run away and leave them behind?
The doctrine is absolutely required for a fighting force to retain cohesion, much less effectiveness, even if on occasion it costs more lives than it saves. It even applies to bodies. You bring your dead home too. Will a man fight as confidently if he doubts his family would even have anything to bury?
If, say, one guy died to bring me back alive? I’m not sure I’d be beaming, but it would make some sense, especially fromj a psy-ops point of view, as I’m no longer a propoganda pawn for the other side. If, say, a whole squad’s worth of soldiers bought it to rescue me (assuming I wasn’t carrying valuable intel or whatevr), it wouldn’t make nearly as much sense, to me.
However, if they died to bring back my corpse? That’s all very macho, but stupid, IMO. Did anyone seriously think they were going to recover living people? I thought that’s what “Leave No Man Behind” was about, not leaving the bodies behind. At least, that’s the practice I was referencing. The losing of more soldiers (dead and injured) just to recover some corpses.
I get that it’s nice PR, and a morale booster, but seriously - expendable is just what footsoldiers have always been.
If there was more evidence that they were hostages, like I said, I could understand it. I get what people are saying about morale, I do, but what I’m saying is it doesn’t make any sense to me, it seems like a game of diminishing returns. Guess I just don’t see how the morale benefits outweigh the boost for the freedom fighters in having more warm targets, is all.
shrug I guess I’d just make a lousy soldier.
I listened to audio of the mother of one of the dead troopers this morning; it ran in our 7 a.m. newscast. She was so proud of her son because he had told her that he had to shoulder his share of the burden – other guys were doing their part, he had to so his. And she was so devastated by his death. The pain in her voice seeped out like a thick fluid.
Debate all you want about who is al-Quaida and who isn’t, about turning points and about whether the kidnappers missed a PR opportunity. For me, this incident is defined by the sound of Tom Tucker’s mom struggling to talk about her mutilated, dead son.
Must admit, it’s a doctrine I’ve only ever heard referenced in an American context, but that could just be selection bias based on available media sources. If you’re saying all militaries ahve it as standard doctrine, I believe you.
I’m no military scholar - the kind of military (medieval) I’m even slightly familiar with vacilated between “collect your dead” truces and “let the corpses rot on pikes” barbarism, so there’s no one mindset I can draw from, there. I trust the former military on this board to provide more insight.
Not since WWI, at least for the more sophisticated militaries. All other things being equal, soldiers treated as non-expendable will have higher morale, be more experienced ( since they’re still alive ), and there will be more of them ( again, because they are still alive ). Yes, it’s their job to risk their lives, but not to be expendable; massed charges into the machine guns don’t work very well.
Well, same here actually, but I don’t know where it’s any different. It goes along with the common theme that, ultimately, soldiers don’t fight for a cause or a country or anything so remote and insubstantial; ultimately they fight simply for each other.
Well, I can understand if you’re talking about an immediate “cover your buddy” kind of way, but it wasn’t their bunkmates that sent them out to die. Ultimately, they’re fighting for The Man, or whoever the authority is. Anything else is a comfortable fable they reinforce in each other.
Well, unless you were talking about the ancient Greeks, there. They really fought for each other. 
It’s “Leave no man behind”, not “Leave no man’s behind” 
OK, I get it - I wasn’t equating being expendable with wastfulness, but I can see what you mean. You seem to be saying the modern army will be willing to do tactically stupid things to avoid having a man die. I can understand that that’s the reality, given the expense of equipping and training the modern technosoldier.
Just seems a double standard, though - the 2 MIAs weren’t expendable, but the people searching for their (almost certainly) corpses seemingly were. Of course, again from that televised briefing, a lot of the 8000 searchers were Iraquis, so I suppose the sums are different then.
Hmm. When I was in boot camp (immediately after the Vietnam War) we were told that our lives were worth exactly $20,000 each, and the U.S. Government had so much money it could easily afford the loss of each and every one of us and still train our replacements. During squad training, some poor slob always had to walk the point, and on the days it was me, I felt pretty damn expendable. (It still amazes me is that our drill sergeants were able to make us feel physically endangered in the back woods of Fort Leonard Wood.) True, we were still learning to fight the Vietnam War even though it was over, but it became very clear very early on that, as infantry, we were the canaries in the mineshaft.
When I got to Germany, all of our training and deployment was purely defensive. And you only have to hear yourself described as a “tripwire” a couple of times before the word “expendable” comes to mind.
I don’t know what the tactical philosophy is these days, but the video we see on the evening news still shows a guy walking the point. Believe me, that guy is expendable.
They may say that, but it doesn’t make it true. First, in an all volunteer army, it doesn’t matter if they can afford to train replacements if none come forward, and short of a holy crusade or a war for national survival you won’t get many volunteers with a high casualty rate. The military is having trouble now, and Iraq is actually rather light on American casualties, historically.
Which brings up the second point, that no matter the rhetoric the government hasn’t treated our soldiers as expendable; not as well as it should, but not expendable. Politically we’re too casualty-allergic for anything else.
Third, I believe they spend more on training these days, so replacing soldiers is more expensive anyway.
IMHO your trainers were not only from a long time ago, but were probably just working you up into the proper psychological state. Someone who thinks he’s expendable is going to be just a bit more careful than someone who doesn’t. When you get right down to it, if they had regarded you as expendable, I don’t think they would have told you.
They also told a friend of mine that if he crashed the airplane he was training in it would come out of his pay.