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“The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.“
So Hegseth gutted the unit that would have wound up with the wokest people in the military. This is why I voted for.
I don’t want civilians killed. But firing that group I 100% support.
Uniformed targetters, planners and intelligence analysts, none of whom were assigned those specialties or that job because of their individual politics. Does that change your opinion at all?
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It's "woke" to not want to kill children?
Yes, if "we don't want to kill children" is the motte, but the bailey is something like "the US (or Israeli) military should not engage in otherwise legitimate attacks if children might be endangered."
And in practice, "we don't want children to get harmed" is a motte a very large percentage of the time.
I'm not some bleeding heart. I know that war means dead kids, that's just the nature of things. It's why war is bad and you try to avoid it, but it also means that sometimes some civilians will die in order to end a war quicker.
But surely you can see that the sentiment being expressed here is beyond that of just "it is silly to expect perfection from the US."
I'm not sure I understand your point. What sentiment do you say is being expressed here?
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It's woke to complain whenever the U.S. fails to be absolutely perfect and not complain at all when Russia/Islamic Regimes deliberately murder civilians with specific intention.
I do not see Dase equally criticizing Russian, Iranian, and Palestinian attacks on civilian populations.
In short, isolated demands for rigor on political grounds is a classic woke manifestation.
Because American propaganda and self image is (so far) "we are heroes fighting for truth and justice".
Tell Iranians or Russians "you are not good guys, you are brutish murdering bastards" and they will laugh.
Stings that will hurt would be "You are not world second super power, you are Africa tier rotting shithole living out of real super power dwindling inheritance" or "You are fake Muslims, worse than outright infidels, what is happening to you is divine judgement for your sins, your only future is hell fire".
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Two things: The demand for perfection and Isolated demands for rigor.
When it comes to demands of perfection, it depends on the level of fuckup. The level of fuckup also depends on capabilities. If I blow up a terrorist and some kids also die, there may be some discussion based on capabilities of if I could have targeted him when children weren't around, but otherwise it was an unfortunate necessity. If I aim for the target and miss and kill children, well then there was some level of fuckup. The amount of fuckup varies from "humans are far from perfect, what are you expecting" if my technology is at the level of catapults to "this needs to investigated" if my technology is such that I can precision target a specific mosquito from halfway across the world. In the latter example, even if the answer ends up being that better technology doesn't eliminate the potential for human error, investigating is still important for identifying ways to not make that mistake in the future.
I have no intention of speaking for Dase, but when it comes to Russia and Palestine, there is some of the above - Palestine does not have precision targeting or a monopoly of force necessary to pick and choose targets (even if I give them benefit of the doubt and don't think of them as terrorists). But more importantly, we have already concluded that they are pieces of shit and choose to act immorally. We want them to behave morally, but we have given up expecting it so there is no benefit to spending more time on it than necessary to document their atrocities for posterity. Their sins do not create permission for us to sin.
I actually kind of disagree with this. Here's a hypothetical:
Suppose the Palestinian Arabs put a military base under a hospital; they use that military base to conduct terror campaigns against Israel; and Israel bombs the hospital and takes out the military base but kills some civilians in the process.
Suppose that in such situations, instead of condemning Israel for bombing a hospital, the United Nations; most of the world's political leaders; and most of the world's NGO's publicly blame the entire situation on the Palestinian Arabs.
In that case, I think there's a pretty good chance that the Palestinian Arabs would stop using human shields.
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But we're not (yet) in charge of the Russians, Iranians, or Palestinians. Any complaints we make about them would be outward-facing, not inward-facing, a fundamental difference in character. While I agree that we shouldn't hold our enemies to a lighter moral standard, there is literally less reason to criticize them, because they are already a foreign adversary.
We know that one of the attack vectors used by our geopolitical rivals is to specifically emphasize these points to cause political strife, withdrawal from conflict, and to destabilize the US.
Regardless of underlying virtue associated with these conversations, we should be much more careful and diligent in doing what our enemies want us to do.
I seldom see that happening.
"And have you stopped lynching the black people?" the genocidal tyrant asked smugly, as he washed in his daily bloodbath squeezed from more victims than the entire history of the KKK.
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Does focusing one's campaigning on one's own government, instead of others, really count as an isolated demand for rigour?
Arguing that your side surrender because conflict result in unacceptable outcomes is not good game theory when being attacked by an aggressor.
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Isn't Dase Russian? Here he refers to the Russians as "us" and the Americans as "you".
You can take man out of world second super power, but you cannot take world second super power out of man.
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I don't know, but I am pretty confident that when it comes to Israel, the majority of the demands for perfection are coming from non-Israelis.
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Unfortunately I think there are units with even more woke people in them.
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I guess that's the fitting conclusion to the Culture War MAGA arc. Just like "nazi" became "everyone to the right of my AIDS-positive trans activist HR manager", "woke" now means "anyone with higher moral standards than Genghis Khan – like a small unit in a bloated imperial military that tries to reduce collateral damage by fucking checking whether a building marked 10 years ago as barracks is clearly something else now". I mean, a Tomahawk already costs like $2.5M, how much would this red tape add, given the third worldist level of American corruption? Certainly more than the cumulative utility or net worth of 170 brown children, and it's not like the parents could sue (seeing as they're IRGC, you've killed them earlier). Persians aren't quite brown, but that doesn't matter, American category of race has always been a social construct, after all.
Shoe, foot, who/whom, torturer and tortured, master and nigger, Jew and Amalek – that's all there is to American political discourse, when the disparity of power is sufficiently high. You lot were right about the leftists, and the leftists were… uh, all along correct about the right. I should've been more charitable.
This group probably does not double check targets to make sure they aren’t schools- if I had to guess, their job is to write forms that the people checking targets to make sure they aren’t schools fill out.
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My feelings to both sides here are along the lines of "What did you think war meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?". War is war, and there will be innocent casualties. Either the war is morally justifiable and those are regrettable consequences, or it's not --- frankly, leaning toward "not" personally here on the basis of what information has been shared with the public. Expecting an innocent-bloodless war, even just a precision bombing campaign, seems naive on both sides. Heck, Clinton managed to bomb a Chinese embassy.
I can see the reasons for establishing such a unit, and I think it sounds on paper like something easily justifiable. But if I had a nickel for every veteran account I've read along the lines of "We were under strict rules to not fire unless fired upon. We watched [enemy] truck in a heavy machine gun and ammo all morning, constantly calling our commanders for permission to dissuade them or to leave the area, and were ordered to stay put and hold fire. After they were all in place, they opened fire on us, and two servicemen were injured. We returned small arms fire and vectored in close air support, neutralizing the enemy." I'd have at least a few nickels. I wouldn't exclusively side with either the boots on the ground (plenty of examples of misbehavior in the past), or with the ivory-tower academics arguing ethics of war thousands of miles away with no skin in the game, but I see a reason to listen to both.
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I assume normal military people do these checks. The group labeled “check” this are going to be the pure lefties that get in the way of doing anything.
Don’t waste a tomahawk blowing up a school (or any non-useful thing) is what competent people do. You don’t need a specific group outside the command chain.
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This seems to be a standard job for military recon units, doesn't it? Before you fire on a target, confirm where it is and what it is. Shouldn't that be evident? What's the point in creating a separate unit responsible for reducing collateral damage? And then naming it 'Civilian Protection Center of Excellence' to boot?
This is just insane. "Recon" - a Company-level asset - is going to confirm the validity of strategic-level targets, and be capable of making decisions on target value versus potential drawbacks (legality, political blowback, unit morale, etc.)? Do the lot of you think this is Starcraft, and one general can, with just a scanner sweep, have perfect knowledge of what is in an area, what it's doing, its value to the enemy, and what, if any, issues may be caused by its destruction.
Targets is present in every 2 at the Division level and up, and they are the ones briefing decision-makers on potential targets, which includes not only verifying the validity of a given target, but also its value, what it might take to eliminate it, and what, if any, potential consequences might arise. They are not axiomatically the wokest part of the military, or even woke at all. Whether or not the particular unit Hegseth ostensibly "gutted" is bad or not, I cannot speak to, but the level of profound ignorance of military operations in this thread is truly something to behold.
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The rot starts from the head. The more orwelian a govt program or sub-unit is named the more I'm inclined to axe it whole. Same reason why the dept of defense should be officially renamed back to the dept of war.
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