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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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