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Notes -
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
A few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that troops who need an exemption from shaving their facial hair for longer than a year should get kicked out of the service.
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
I’m curious if you know much about the Nisour square incident. If you do and you think those guys are guilty, I’d love to hear more.
I’m no expert on the military or counter insurgency. But I did watch a 3 hour interview with those guys on the Shawn Ryan show. It’s very obvious to me that they are innocent. Worse than that, it’s a case where a bunch of veterans were set up up by Uncle Sam in order to kill Blackwater and hurt Eric Prince.
I’ve only heard one side of the story, but they did not look mistaken about the facts nor did they come off as liars.
It seems a shame they’re still being used as examples here for trigger happy war criminals. Especially when we have so many legit cases to point to.
You've been had.
It’s certainly possible that in been had.
But nothing here seem particularly damning. Your bullets just seem like the prosecutions cliff notes.
Are you denying one or more of those assertions, or are you accepting them but saying they’re actually fine?
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There's no evidence that they were fired at, although one vehicle did take damage from ricochet fragments of an M203 grenade fired by the convoy. They panicked and fired indiscriminately.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/24/opinions/blackwater-defendants-pardon-trump-opinion-oconnor
https://archive.ph/gFrF8
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