For comparison, there were 33,000 firearms related deaths in the U.S. In 2014.
From the Wikipedia page of ongoing conflicts, I count somewhere around 34,000 direct violent deaths from African conflicts in 2014, assuming one uses the lower figure for South Sudan (I can’t say if that’s a good assumption). The vast majority are from Boko Haram, with a handful of trouble spots claiming the rest.
Africa is home to one billion people. Most are not at war. A random African is about 3X LESS likely to know someone who was killed in combat last year than you are to know someone who was shot in 2014.
Having some sense of what most countries consider adequate when it comes time to certify someone a safe and well-trained driver, before issuing a driver’s license - which is to say, if you hire someone else to stand in a line for you and had the teller $20, you will be issued a driver’s license - I’d be pretty willing to believe that a lot of these guys can’t shoot straight.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are given a gun and a pack of bullets and told that if they want more bullets, they have to buy them themselves - like, for example, if they want to practice firing the weapon. But that’s expensive and they’d rather spend that money on booze and chicks. And I suspect that a lot of these guys have spent more time shaking down tourists and people they don’t like, than fighting in battle.
So while what everyone else said may well be true, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that in most cases the training really starts from step 1.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its Allies tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to build a new military from scratch.
Elsewhere, I thought a lot of it was in respect to sales of major weapons systems… the US sells a country F16’s and then trains the pilots to fly them and the technicians for maintainance, and then these guys are the ones who teach the rest of their people.
Every military trains all the time - even the US military has training happening right now.
It’s pretty rare for a 40+ years old person to run the trenches – they become instructors for the new/young ones, become officers, etc… or just go back to there civilian life.
It’s mostly young people entering the soldiers life with no previous training.
I wouldn’t say safer than the States-- they are measuring different things, and direct violent deaths are only a part of the death toll of war. My main point is that “Africa” is not an undifferentiated mass of nonstop warring. It’s 54 separate countries, some of which have experienced nonstop war and the majority of which have not.
Military training in Chad (which has a strong military honed by decades of conflict) is going to be different than military training in peaceful Gabon.
Yeah, I asked almost this same question a long time ago, in 2007. I wondered why we can take a kid from the states, run him through basic and a some AIT, and in 16 weeks or so turn out a passable soldier, but after five years of training the Iraqis we were still at it.
What I hadn’t considered is that you can turn out an E-1 that way, but his corporal takes a couple years longer, and his sergeant longer still, and all the way up through the officer corps. If you’re in a military culture that values family and sectarian connections more than actual military competence, it can take a lot of training before you develop the infrastructure that lets a soldier be a soldier.
The problem in Iraq was that they had an army, and the US disbanded it. The ex-army guys started fighting the Americans, or at best sat on the sidelines. So the US was trying to form an army from scratch while fighting an active war against a smorgasbord of forces. The few hundred “soldiers” trained in the US prior to the war were a joke and promptly disappeared as soon as they hit the ground.
“two tribes of half-naked savages”
The conduct of fully-clothed and “civilized” troops throughout history has been no less savage than that of “primitive” peoples. In fact war as conducted by nation-states and, now, non-state actors, is far more violent and destructive than anything that occurred among tribal peoples.
We might also observe that any general grade leader who is actually competent and popular will probably be distrusted by the regime, who suspect that he will be leading the next coup.
To be honest, these are the things I would call “military professionalism”, but I’ve never had any luck explaining military professionalism to a civilian. It seems much of it is beyond the realm of experience to anyone who hasn’t served and been exposed to it (both actual professionalism, and the occasional lack thereof).
I wouldn’t say that; there are elements of it that are somewhat foreign to civilians, mostly due to the different stakes involved. By that, I mean that a lot of military things are life or death, and you not doing your job or not putting the common goal first means that you or some other guys may die horrible deaths. Or that the nation is somehow threatened.
But in the civilian world the stakes are almost never that serious; most of the time the stakes are pretty far removed from the people doing them. I mean, if I fuck up or go home and leave something for the following day that I shouldn’t, in all likelihood, it just means extra work for someone- myself and/or other people. Nobody’s going to die or get injured as a result. The company probably won’t even lose an appreciable amount of money.
So people don’t take things as seriously. And it’s why ex-military types often seem a bit psychotic in their mission-orientation- the mission is rarely so important in the civilian world.
I suspect in civilian occupations where the stakes ARE similarly high, you do see a similar professionalism as the military.
No. we don’t train them to fight particular enemies, unless the traininees are already involved in a shooting war. We train the armies of corrupt dictators so they can stay in power. They may be bastards but they’re OUR bastards.
In a modern army, training is pretty much your full time job. Unless you are deployed in an honest-to-God combat zone, UN mission or a natural disaster, you are usually training. I was on some kind of training course or exercise almost the entire time I was in uniform.
Some allegedly need more training than most.
50% odds this film is 100% legit.
But I live around a lot of guys who have served in Iraq, & this is pretty consistent with what they say.
Astute watchers will notice that they practice room entry tactics by actually going through them, not just with Warcraft table top miniatures and a pencil. I suppose OP must think that they aren’t exactly the brightest bunnies in the burrow and need to be told which boot goes on which foot. Right OP?
