Chris Kyle killed

[AR_Six]

I find some of the anti-soldier sentiment in this thread very surprising. In my estimation the general view was that the soldiers sent to fight an unnecessary war are victims, and that the people responsible for waging war were the morally blameworthy ones. If you take the view as one poster did that enlisting in the armed forces is tantamount to "volunteering to kill people", you have a very different view of our military men and women than I do.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

I don't get how the States can just not sign up for this thing, and then invade whoever they want and all of a sudden to them it's legal, because it's legal under US law. I am sure when Germany told everybody they wouldn't invade Poland, and then did and caused a ####-show, they felt it wasn't illegal either. Or am I not understanding this properly?.

It's pretty simple: might makes right. Who's going to enforce international law on the USA? Nobody. That's why their government signs only the treaties that don't infringe on their sovereignty, and pretty well ignores the rulings of the governing bodies of the treaties it does sign when those rulings do not coincide with their interests.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by driveway

This is a euphemism for "volunteered to kill people."

Usually those guys are filtered out fairly early in the recruit training process, the army and navy and airforce don't want psycho's they want soldiers that will execute their duty and have the ability to function in a stressful environment, people who's one attribute is that they really want to know what it feels like to kill a person are usually worthless and nearly untrainable.

You my friend have watched too many movies like full metal jacket and platoon and are somehow equating it to real life.

Most people volunteer to serve out of a sense of patriotism, or duty, or a yearning for a adventurous life, or they have nowhere else to go and their future prospects are bleak.

I don't think that throughout my short time in the forces where I met and trained with people on both sides of the border, and with special forces up here, Airbourne, that I met someone that was just itching to kill people, you know put that bayonet into somebodies guts and slowly twist it while staring them in the eyes.

You could also state, that in this day and age, soldiers volunteer to die, chances are within the term of your enlistment if your in a combat arms position that your going somewhere that bullets are flying for real. In my day it was a much smaller chance unless you stupidly volunteered to be a peace keeper which most of us did.

Believe me when I tell you, most soldiers and especially at the NCO levels don't want to go to war, these are the guys that are praying that diplomacy works or nothing is going to come out of the blue, they don't really want to fight, however they will fight and they will absolutely kill to get the fighting done.

I'm not saying that there aren't loose cannons out there that slipped in and would thrill kill if they got the chance, there are people who's heads are a little too loose on the swivel in the Armed Services.

Are Special Forces different? Absolutely, like I've said repeatedly they have an ego that would match Maverick from Top Gun without the homo erotic volleyball games, but they aren't trained to hold territory, or do peace keeping. They are trained to scout, eliminate targets and blow things up, but a special forces member can't be a psycho, they have to be highly intelligent and adaptable and fiercely determined, not just killer. Does a Sniper enjoy killing people? I don't believe that case, but Snipers track their kill, sometime for days, and they have to dehumanize what they're shooting, so the stories are about amazing shots, or long hunts, but I don't see too many stories about snipers talking in terms of the actual kill as much as the actual process.

Serving in the Military is one of very few jobs where you have to make sure that your will is up to date before you go on a road trip, its one of the very few jobs where when you say goodbye at the airport it really could be goodbye. Its one of the very few jobs where pain isn't a stress headache from a deadline or the boss yelling at you, but the pain of stepping on a mine, or having a bullet rip out your guts or tear your head off, a person who just wants to kill, and is volunteering to kill, likely isn't going to be too interested in that aspect of the job.

[driveway]

^You misunderstand me. I wasn't implying that the motivation of volunteering to be a soldier is to kill people; I'm saying the reality of being a soldier is that you kill people.

When you sign up to "serve your country" you sign up to kill people, motivation doesn't enter into it.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by driveway

^You misunderstand me. I wasn't implying that the motivation of volunteering to be a soldier is to kill people; I'm saying the reality of being a soldier is that you kill people.

When you sign up to "serve your country" you sign up to kill people, motivation doesn't enter into it.

So you're basically breaking down the role of any military to that of 'killing people.'

Which is pretty strange, because after the earthquake in Haiti, over 70 countries sent military personal and resources to help. The US sent a crap load of stuff there.

You can find a lot of examples like that. Hell, even in Iraq you can find a lot of examples of military personal doing all kids of things besides 'killing people.'

[Phanuthier]

Originally Posted by Dion

How do you think the army gets it's enlistees to kill people? Humans have a powerful and natural resistance to killing another human being.

Either the guy was completely effed up before he joined or the military did it's job training him to kill. You tell me which one.

Originally Posted by Resolute 14

False dichotomy.

Also, the entirety of human history makes a mockery of your first argument. Mankind has been killing his fellow man for millenia. Often on mass scales in warfare.

Relevent reading (for Dion) to prove Resolute's case: Stanford Prison Experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University from August 14 to August 20 of 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.[1] It was funded by the US Office of Naval Research[2] and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners.

Twenty-four male students out of 75 were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by driveway

^You misunderstand me. I wasn't implying that the motivation of volunteering to be a soldier is to kill people; I'm saying the reality of being a soldier is that you kill people.

When you sign up to "serve your country" you sign up to kill people, motivation doesn't enter into it.

When you sign up to serve your country in a military capacity you sign up to serve your country, killing people is a probably effect of educating that duty, but its not the dominant precursor

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

When you sign up to serve your country in a military capacity you sign up to serve your country, killing people is a probably effect of educating that duty, but its not the dominant precursor

You sign up to die as much as you do to kill...

[vektor]

Whether he was a monster or not, doesn't really matter. If anyone wants to point fingers, point it at the people who sent him there. You wouldn't be mad at a bomb, you'd be mad at who dropped it. More often than not the soldiers sent in to kill indiscriminately (and many of them do) come from poor families with no education. They glamorize being a soldier like you get to be a rockstar/superhero.

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Phanuthier

Relevent reading (for Dion) to prove Resolute's case: Stanford Prison Experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

The Psychology of Killing and the Origins of War

Evidence of a powerful resistance to killing has popped up in unexpected places. Many people assume that soldiers in a firefight instinctively respond to enemy fire by shooting back, and that soldiers in a kill-or-be-killed situation will choose to kill. But informal interviews conducted with thousands of American combat soldiers during World War II by army historian S.L.A. Marshall revealed that as many as 75% of soldiers never fired their weapons during combat. In recent years the rigor of Marshall’s research methods has been called into question, but his basic conclusion that the majority of soldiers will not return fire during combat if left to their own devices has been corroborated by evidence and accounts from other wars, including the American Civil War, World War I, and the Falklands War.

So why didn’t these soldiers use their weapons? Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and professor of military science, looked at this evidence and concluded “that there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.” In some ways this isn’t all that surprising. Very few people would seek out an opportunity to kill others. At the same time, you may find it hard to believe that it is sometimes impossible for soldiers to kill others even when their own lives are at risk.

And yet despite this apparent aversion to killing, we still manage to kill each other with alarming frequency. How can this be? For anthropologist Paul Roscoe the answer is that we’re simply too smart for our own good. Humans excel at overcoming our biological limitations using technological innovation: if your arms aren’t long enough to reach an apple in the upper branches of a tree, use a stick to knock it down. Can’t take the square root of large numbers in your head? Write a computer program to do it for you. Similarly, we can find ways to get around our natural aversion to killing if we decide that it’s in our best interest.

Throughout history and around the world people have come up with ways to overcome an aversion to killing, such as dehumanizing the victim, placing distance between the killer and the victim, and using drugs or loud music to induce a trance-like state in a killer. In fact, following publication of Marshall’s findings in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. military embarked on a campaign to more effectively prepare soldiers for combat by employing realistic training exercises. New recruits began to practice shooting at pop-up, human-shaped targets rather than the traditional, stationary bull’s-eyes. More and more elaborate and realistic combat simulation exercises and ’war games’ were implemented. The point of this new training was to make killing an automatic response under combat conditions. And it worked. Interviews with American soldiers during the Vietnam War revealed that somewhere between 80 and 100 percent of soldiers shot at enemies during firefights.

http://smellslikescience.com/the-psy...rigins-of-war/

[FlamesAddiction]

^^^

One thing not mentioned about how humans have gotten around their aversion to killing is the application of summary executions for cowardice.

It wasn't that long ago that if a soldier shelled up and couldn't fight during combat, they'd be taken out and shot themelves. Maybe not every single one of them, but enough that it certainly motivated people.

[Dion]

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam head on into that hardwired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1998). You can observe this in killing throughout history, as I have outlined in much greater detail in my book, On Killing, (Grossman, 1996), in my three peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, (Grossman, 1999a, 1999b, and Murray, 1999) and in my entry in the Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999).

That's the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of “fixing” this “problem.” And fix it they did. By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a).

http://www.killology.org/print/print_teachkid.htm

[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by jammies

It's pretty simple: might makes right. Who's going to enforce international law on the USA? Nobody. That's why their government signs only the treaties that don't infringe on their sovereignty, and pretty well ignores the rulings of the governing bodies of the treaties it does sign when those rulings do not coincide with their interests.

Ok, as you are aware that is my point. Just because you're bigger than everybody doesn't mean it is legal.

Just because your soldier works for your government, which has openly decided to basically do whatever it wants in direct violation of international protocol, doesn't make it legal.

The poster was claiming what he did was illegal. I think it's a decent argument from the point of view of the international community.

I think a metaphor could be these people that are Freemen on the Land or whatever.. that basically just don't subscribe (in their minds) to the law of the country they live in. Can they just go do whatever they want and then call it legal?

And to add... who's the terrorist organization at that point...? When it isn't even a legal declaration of war? Again I might not be understanding this correctly, so my apologies if I'm wrong.

[Mr.Coffee]

Furthermore, now that I think about it, why would the US laws be relevant at all when the war is being conducted in Iraq, which has its' own laws, rules and regulations?

That also doesn't make much sense to me.

[CaptainCrunch]

National interests come ahead of the International courts, that's why the American's have not signed on, they won't give up their right to make decisions on their foreign policy to a nebulous court system.

the war was legal from the perspective of the Commander and Chief and the national command structure. Its irrelevant if the war was declared and fought in Canada Iraq Afghanistan or Santa's back yard.

Because the American Military which operates under U.S. law was fighting a legal operation and because America has not signed on with the International courts the International court has no jurisdiction. And the orders given to the Soldiers at an objective level are legal.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Ok, as you are aware that is my point. Just because you're bigger than everybody doesn't mean it is legal.

Can they just go do whatever they want and then call it legal?

And to add... who's the terrorist organization at that point...? When it isn't even a legal declaration of war? Again I might not be understanding this correctly, so my apologies if I'm wrong.

That, at its very core, is the only basis for law. Might is right, which is why we happily live on land that was stolen from someone else a few generations ago, to co opt another thread.