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Lately I've stumbled on a new (to me) dark corner of the internet: VetTV.
At first I thought it was just a youtube channel, since it was showing up in my shorts feed. And I assume that's what it started as. But eventually it became a full-fledged subscripion service with its own website, which you can subscribe to for just $6 a month (not an ad, I just thought it's interesting that it's a paid service but the cost is so low).
Anyway, they do have some very funny shorts and short videos. Mostly screwball, low-brow comedy, like you'd expect from young people who just got out of the military, especially the marines. Some of my favorites were: innappropriate gunny vs young marines, high school recruiting and holy waterboarding.
Bear in mind, those are just the clips they could get on youtube, the full episodes on their site are much more raunchy. It's obviously not a big budget production, but it is a little more polished than typical youtube channels. It's a low-budget yet professional studio where absolutely anything goes. So, well... they have some promotional clips where they compare themselves to a porn sites, and that's not wrong. It's interesting to see what ordinary people can come up with on a camera when there are absolutely no restrictions.
They have a few full-length (lightly censored) episodes on youtube for free. In particular I really recommend Recruiters. I liked it because... well, many reasons.
Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.
As a work of art, it's certainly powerful. It made me feel things. It sucks me in to the whole "whoo rah, kill 'em all" feeling of comeradie and bravery, and makes me curse those stupid officers who won't let the grunts just "do what needs to be done."
But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.
It reminds me a lot of two other famous war movies, which I'm sure it was inspired by. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse now. In both cases, there's a bad guy (the drill sergeant and Colonel Kilgore) who looks super cool and badass in the movie. People love those characters. But I think it's important to keep our perspective and remember that they're villains who caused immense harm and suffering. I wish people were more film-savvy and could see that, because I don't think those movies are at all ambiguous.
Also, after writing out all of this, I realize that almost all of their characters are marines. So in some sense, it's not really about military life in general, but just the marines. It's almost like, how civilians see the general military, is how other military branches see the marines. Or maybe it's just that people in the marines have a hard time transitioning back to civilian life after leaving the military, and need something like this to cope.
...Thoughts on any of this? Sorry I don't have an exact thesis statement here. Maybe it's a sign of how corrupt and out-of-touch Hollywood is that we need something like this to bring us "real" cinema. Maybe it's a sign of how we're all so brainwashed by porn that porn starts to influence everything else. Maybe it's a sign of how horrific military life is that it just can't be expressed in any mainstream media. Maybe now, with cellphones and social media, we can finally see "the truth" of what war and military life is really like. Maybe it's just funny to see women trying to act like men, when mainstream TV usually shows the opposite. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for something new I can't find on Youtube.
Oh, I was a fan of the series, at least back when they were putting full episodes on YT. I'm not enough of a fan to pay for their bespoke platform. I know quite a few vets, and they heartily endorse the show, most of the jokes have a generalized kernel of truth to them.
From what I've seen, the episodes on their platform are way darker and more serious. Also the people that leave comments there tend to seem very serious like "yell yeah! Truth! That's how it was!" So I'm a little concerned that maybe most of our military vets wish the war in Afghanistan was much more violent...
There's definitely strong selection bias in effect. The people who aren't hardcore fans are almost certainly not paying money for access.
Funnily enough, I personally think that the war in Afghanistan wasn't violent enough. If you can't solve your problems through violence, you're not applying enough violence. The American brass thought you could win against an insurgency by being nice, and that never gets you anywhere I'm afraid.
Our understanding of insurgency is pretty developed at this point, and applying more violence is not the answer.
The problem in Afghanistan was lack of clarity from the very top about America's goals, which is why the military couldn't build a coherent insurgency or counter-insurgency plan. Instead they just applied violence to whoever happened to be looking funny at the US at any given moment. More of that would have been disastrous.
Uh, Hadrian wants a word.
Somehow I doubt the "understanding of insurgency" that you imagine exists actually works in any real sense. More violence or no violence are the only two answers.
How much of modern "theory of war" (for want of a better term) ever gets empirically confirmed or rejected by military practice? I used to assume the sort of people who wrote for Foreign Policy/Foreign Affairs knew what they were talking about, but after browsing /r/geopolitics over the past two years and constantly seeing similar headlines from those sorts of sources that always end up proving laughably wrong I'm beginning to wonder how much insight these people really have.
It's all officers, who by definition are not soldiers and know fuck and shit about fighting all making up theories about how soldiers fight. They quite literally know nothing. They're vaguely aware that they're in charge of fighting, and a good officer might even know which sergeant he needs to tell to go fight, but they know as much about the process as a big city mayor knows about trash collection.
Very nearly 100% of all military analysis, history and theory has been catalogued and written by people who have never even seen a gunfight firsthand, much less kicked a door. Interesting so far as it goes, but to use any of it as a practical manual is ridiculous.
Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.
It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."
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I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers? Or are full-on wars these days so rare that by the time they're promoted to officers, most of them haven't actually done much fighting?
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