Quote:
Originally Posted by DESS
Sounds more like a soldier's job is to do what is needed of him/her. If that's fighting, fine. If that's peacekeeping, fine. If that's sandbagging river banks, fine. If that's going nose to nose with a Mohawk "warrior" and not blinking, that's fine, too. Would have been nice to see a soldier break rank and bayonet one of those fracktards during the Oka standoff, but I guess it's good they followed their orders.
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A soldier is first and foremost trained to fight, his first duty is to the defense of his nation and to carry out the wishes of the command authority.
So yes, there is a certain amount of flexibility thats required by a soldier in order to be able to perform his role. If he needs to go peacekeeping then he goes and trains before his specific mission so that he can effectively peacekeep. There's no training for disastor relief, I didn't train for hours on the technique of stopping a flood, or putting out a forest fire, or in one horrible afternoon, try to find the body of a kid up in the Banff area.
We didn't take course in basic on riot control or civil unrest.
Your right, a good soldier does follow orders, but they also should question these orders, especially the stupid ones.
I always thought that the Oka crisis was stupidly handled. The Warriors shouldn't have seen one soldier there, they should have heard them, maybe had some of their buddies vanish only to show up in jail. They should have known that they were up against professionals who had the training advantage on them and the drop on them, but the Soldiers were told to act more like cops. You can talk about a good soldier being a mere extension of national policy, but thats only because the people that make national policy really don't know what a soldier is, or what he's capable of.
In terms of peacekeeping, I've always thought that the best idea that I heard in a long time was the creation of a specific peacekeeping unit. Train them to wave the flag, stand in between warring sides, act like a social worker, a humanitarian, a logistics expert for emergency supplies and a engineer in building schools. Train them on small arms, vehicle searches and diplomacy.
It would probably be cheaper and save more lives then trying to order a soldier to act like something that at the end of the day he's really not.