Quote from ZZZzzzzzzz:
I am glad we do have people who are followers and are looking for the structure and nature of the military...I just don't think most of them are qualified or effectively detached from the battlefield mentality to review policy or the decisions being made by Bush.
Soldiers are simply not trained and/or indoctrinated to question orders from superiors...they are not trained to question authority.
IMO, in addition to this, many military types remain in denial about Bush and other presidents because of this mind conditioning. You really aren't going to question that a big part of the military training is mind conditioning, are you?
Evidently the whole essence of the military continues to elude you.
Of course, "Soldiers are simply not trained and/or indoctrinated to question orders from superiors...". I mean, you would think this would be self-evident.
Let's imagine the situation that evidently you prefer. We have a bunch of independent minded, questioning members of the military. An order is given to "take that hill". And immediately, half of the company starts to question this order as insane, because the enemy is heavily fortified, and a high number of soldiers will be lost.
In other words, you can't run the military with independent minded, questioning, troops. Soldiers have to be trained to accept an order and perform the order in accordance with their training. Without question.
The military relies on those giving the orders to issue orders that make sense, all the way up the chain of command. And of course, the higher one gets, the more "independent-minded" one may become.
But at the "grunt" end, the military must require soldiers who perform their job when given an order. That's what they're trained to do. Without this, the military would lose it's effectiveness.
At the soldier level, or in fact, the level of a 1st Lieutenant, it would be completely inappropriate to question Bush. Imagine, an order given to "take that hill".....and a number of soldiers say no, we're not going to take the hill because Bush is conducting an illegal war. LOL.
One wonders what qualifies this soldier to make a legal decision of this type, without legal training. One wonders how you conduct a war when you give latitude to its participants to make decisions they are not qualified to make, for any reason they may decide to make them.
Our system works with checks and balances. Executive authority is checked and balanced by judicial and congressional authority. Those are the places where the legality of war question should be addressed. Not by soldiers on a battlefield.
OldTrader
