From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Fri Apr 12 2002 - 13:34:26 MDT
On Fri, 2002-04-12 at 09:20, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
> Not the only one. If it was possible, I would put a TV-camera on the
> helmet of every soldier, broadcast it worldwide, and record on tape. Then,
> after the war, review them and hold the shooter liable for any
> misconducts.
>
> After all, a human being is not infinetely reliable, moreso
> with a rifle in his hands in split-haired situations like the ones that
> he will encounter in the battle field. We think "guilty" about people who
> kill other people in car accidents, usually due to some errors in their
> driving. I don't see why during a war these rules should be changed.
With all due respect, this is utterly naive. I have grave doubts that a
camera will give adequate context for any analysis of possible criminal
behavior in a combat environment, particularly if evaluated by
individuals who have never been in combat themselves. And I suspect the
well-meaning civilians who want these cameras in the first place would
not be happy with the analysis of combat vets who were qualified to make
the evaluation.
What most people are not aware of, though it has been well-documented,
is that serious combat causes sensory overload that modifies the
cognitive and perception characteristics of the individual. This
manifests in a number of ways, such as sensory exclusion and a loss of
high-level cognitive abilities. Sensory exclusion is where the brain
starts "muting" normal sensory signals and dumps all its resources on
processing the center of your field of vision. One of the first things
to go is your hearing; the better war movies capture this well by muting
the audio when the camera is capturing the perspective of a combatant.
You also can lose your peripheral vision, as well as general feeling in
your limbs (hence why soldiers frequently won't even notice a serious
flesh wound during the heat of battle). An interesting thing about
sensory exclusion is that you regain limited memory of some of your
other senses after the fact even though they were not available to your
cognitive processor in realtime.
The loss of high-level cognitive ability is the reason repetitive
training is so important. There are lots of documented cases of people
engaging in bizarre and ridiculous behaviors in battle that mirror the
habits they have learned in other places. A famous observed behavior is
people who will collect their expended brass in a firefight and put it
in their pockets, because cranky rangemasters at some firearm training
facilities make people do the exact same thing. Most military combat
training operates under the *assumption* that you will lose your ability
to make high-level decisions under adverse conditions.
So while you are sitting back in your comfy chair reviewing the video of
the soldier's actions in battle, you have to take into consideration
that the soldier may have no sensory perception beyond the center of his
field of vision and that his high-level decision making functions may be
completely offline at that moment, and that this is an involuntary
condition. These involuntary changes in brain function are in response
to extreme environmental conditions and it is difficult to hold a
soldier fully responsible for their actions when sent into these types
of situations unless they obviously and willfully step outside the
intent of the mission. Note that it is also hard to predict exactly how
an individual will react in extreme situations without putting them into
it in the first place. It is instructive to see what "crimes" on the
field of combat the military actually punishes and which they do not,
since the military justice system is far stricter than the civilian
justice system. The civilian justice system is not likely to have
adequate context for making a fair judgement against a soldier's actions
in combat, which is among the reasons a separate military justice system
exists in most countries. In most developed countries, the military
justice system works quite well.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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