Why Don’t Americans Hold the Military Accountable for its Many Failures?

[Zarvan]

A Special Forces soldier firing a machine gun on a qualification course in South Korea in January 2018.CreditCreditAaron Agee/U.S. Army



By C. J. Chivers

• April 5, 2019
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Each year since the late 1990s, public surveys have found that Americans have a high confidence in the country’s armed forces, often higher than for any other American institution. This public confidence largely endured even as American plans in Afghanistan and Iraq repeatedly failed, and as thousands of men and women in uniform died and tens of thousands more were wounded in wars that did not achieve what the military and its leaders set out to do.

For many people who served in these recent wars, living within the services’ stifling bureaucracies or laboring in operations or circumstances that eroded their confidence in the Pentagon and the brass, these results can feel both familiar and odd. How do the services seemingly get a pass? Is public support reflexive, a species of approval as automatic as some of the thank-you-for-your-service gestures that are a feature of life as a service member or veteran?

The disconnect between public support and military performance extends beyond the failures in the wars. It’s a feature as well in how the military handles issues away from the battlefields, including, as presented this week in At War, in cases of sexual harassment and public health.

dangers of lead exposure in military service and the multiyear odyssey of Stephen Hopkins, a Special Forces veteran who suffered “crippling nausea, constant dizziness, a skyrocketing heart rate” and later “migraine symptoms, abnormal thirst and muddled thinking.” His symptoms began in 2005. Hopkins received a proper diagnosis — chronic lead exposure — in 2012, and only after he collapsed and his parents drove him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The military, Kime’s reporting found, has resisted wider monitoring of its members for exposure, and has not followed earlier warnings.

That soldiers are exposed to lead while on the job isn’t news for the Army. A 1996 study by the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine noted that soldiers on bases were at risk for exposure to ‘unhealthy levels of lead’ from firing ranges, battery repair, lead paint and building demolition. The center recommended fully implementing ‘existing Army policies, programs and procedures for lead-exposure reduction’ and including lead ‘as a priority pollutant in … pollution prevention programs.’ Yet Hopkins and others say they never received explicit warnings of potential lead exposure or guidance on proper range hygiene.

On April 4, At War published an essay by Cristine Pedersen, a former Marine Corps cryptologist who followed her father into the service. Pedersen was raised in a Marine ethos, a climate of almost religious devotion to the corps. She completed her demanding training and volunteered for deployment, only to have her good-faith service betrayed. Pedersen was subjected to misogyny and repeated sexual harassment, and to small-unit leaders who often did not act upon her complaints. For much of her service, she withheld the sordid details from her father, worried that he too might play down her suffering or be inclined not to believe her. “My father and many Marines I served with,” Pedersen wrote, “failed to grasp both the extent of the abuses and their costs. In the summer of 2015 I let my enlistment expire, and I started college three weeks later. I felt exhausted by my career and angry that my father still felt so loyal to an institution that had repeatedly dehumanized me.”

How to square this kind of deep loyalty to the armed forces and high public support with a long record of failures? Pedersen proposed an answer that aligns with the mission of At War. “You can simultaneously love an institution and recognize how it is failing. The truest form of commitment is perhaps to bring these failures to light.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/magazine/military-public-support-confidence.html

 

[gambit]

This is a hilarious article. What make this buffoon author believes the US do not hold its military accountable for its 'failures'? The US military was the first sub-culture to racially integrate.

https://www.trumanlibrary.org/anniversaries/desegblurb.htm

In fact, Truman himself was doubtful about integration but he went ahead with a commission to study civil rights and eventually forced the military to integrate.

So now we have a journalist short on deadline and had to come up with something -- anything -- and he resort to the most convenient target -- the US military.

I guess PDF trolls can now whip out their needle dicks and start wanking.

 

[war&peace]

I guess PDF trolls can now whip out their needle dicks and start wanking.

I don't see many on this thread other than your kind self .

 

[Lincoln]

I guess PDF trolls can now whip out their needle dicks and start wanking.

We are usually at each others throat every 3 answers after, how will we get a circle jerk started?

 

[LeGenD]

The author is blaming the wrong institution, and his assessment is also off.

There is a price to pay in a full-scale war, victory does not come easy. Secondly, the scale and scope of the so-called War On Terror was expanded to numerous countries in pursuit of additional set-of-agenda(s) on the pipeline, and the attention of American armed forces was split in this way. Still, American armed forces delivered on different fronts which is really impressive.

Iraq = regime change + political reforms (victory)
Libya = regime change (victory)
Operation Inherent Resolve = routing ISIS across Iraq and Syria (victory)

US is struggling in Afghanistan because White House was fixated on reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East and neglected this front consequently. Secondly, US propped up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan which alienated many Afghans due to its inefficiency and lack of justice [1].

[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/afghan-anti-corruption-program-is-corrupt-us-officials-say-1.555894

Afghan Taliban simply capitalized on the failures of the corrupt Afghan regime, and resurged consequently.

In fact, reforming Afghanistan is excessively ambitious objective because it is a backward tribal society on the whole. What worked in Iraq, will not necessarily work in Afghanistan.

Blaming American armed forces for failure in Afghanistan is akin to missing the point - the author should blame successive American governments instead.

Give the order to American armed forces to cleanse Afghanistan, and throw corrupt Afghan warlords and their followers into concentration camps for gasing, and see the results. But American politicians up to the task? Every war is different and should be fought differently accordingly, or don't bother.

Elected officials....

@gambit
@F-22Raptor
@jhungary
@KAL-EL

 

[nahtanbob]

The author is blaming the wrong institution, and his assessment is also off.

There is a price to pay in a full-scale war, victory does not come easy. Secondly, the scale and scope of the so-called War On Terror was expanded to numerous countries in pursuit of additional set-of-agenda(s) on the pipeline, and the attention of American armed forces was split in this way. Still, American armed forces delivered on different fronts which is really impressive.

Iraq = regime change + political reforms (victory)
Libya = regime change (victory)
Operation Inherent Resolve = routing ISIS across Iraq and Syria (victory)

US is struggling in Afghanistan because White House was fixated on reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East and neglected this front consequently. Secondly, US propped up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan which alienated many Afghans due to its inefficiency and lack of justice [1].

[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/afghan-anti-corruption-program-is-corrupt-us-officials-say-1.555894

Afghan Taliban simply capitalized on the failures of the corrupt Afghan regime, and resurged consequently.

In fact, reforming Afghanistan is excessively ambitious objective because it is a backward tribal society on the whole. What worked in Iraq, will not necessarily work in Afghanistan.

Blaming American armed forces for failure in Afghanistan is akin to missing the point - the author should blame successive American governments instead.

Give the order to American armed forces to cleanse Afghanistan, and throw corrupt Afghan warlords and their followers into concentration camps for gasing, and see the results. But American politicians up to the task? Every war is different and should be fought differently accordingly, or don't bother.

Elected officials....

@gambit
@F-22Raptor
@jhungary
@KAL-EL

Afghanistan is a backward society

Afghanistan is not a priority for American governments

The politics of access to Afghanistan is hurting American policy