My relationship to military service:
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A small percentage are veterans (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia#Civilian_casualties
Re:5 years (Score:4, Informative)
I did ten years. It's the greatest job in the world... except for the people.
Re:does draft board count (Score:3, Informative)
You're in the army now... (Score:2, Informative)
You either are or were in the military, or you never have been.
Spoken like someone who has never been a dependent and doesn't know anything about what it's like.
When your parent/spouse is in the military, the military controls your life whether you want it to or not. You move where the service says. Depending on the post in question, you'll live on base, give birth/be born at a DOD hospital, go to a DOD school, shop at DOD Exchange/Commissary stores, worship at a DOD chapel, exercise at an MWR gym and spend your vacation, when you're lucky, at an AFRC. Everyone you know will be a servicemember or dependent; anyone who isn't will be gone from your life in three years when you relocate.
So no, this poll doesn't cover all the bases. There are hundreds of thousands of people on those bases right now whose relationship to the military is not adequately described in this poll, not by a long shot.
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Informative)
The pilot did not eject from his craft. ...
He flow in a no fly zone at a low altitude (it was anyway forbidden to fly that low) 20 dead, the craft landed with minimal damage on a nearby airport.
Both pilots got accused by an usa military court and found: not guilty.
Even in the heart of europe in NATO allied countries the USA behaves like a supreme emporer
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Informative)
Believe me, Americans are not happy with the way NATO is going either. From a US point of view, Europeans are leaving most of the expense and dirty work to the US and then complain about how the US does the job.
Gates put it pretty bluntly:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/10/world/main20070467.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody [cbsnews.com]
Re:Missing option (Score:4, Informative)
It was a Nothrop Prowler, not a Grumman Tomcat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_(1998) [wikipedia.org]
They were flying too low and based on maps that did not mention the new aerial tramway. They were court martialed in the U.S.A., acquitted, then trialed a second time and were sentenced to a short prison time.
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Informative)
Similarly in Iraq, numerous incidents of rape and murder went unpunished by US soldiers - I can't comprehend why you'd ever allow that. That makes the US soldiers akin to the Japenese soldiers that raped Nanking in my eyes, if you want to play the good guy you don't just go into a country and arbitrarily rape and murder people with little or no punishment.
I would appreciate even one link to a rape that happened that was not punished. I am not going to touch on the murder thing since that is always debatable in a war zone; although I assume you are talking about Haditha... links please.
To the parent, IIRC, it was a pair of EA6B electronic warfare jets that were flying "map of the land" which means extremely low. Their charts did not show the ski lift line but it was NOT a no fly zone. The tail of one of the planes managed to cut the cable supporting the ski lift. Neither plane was damaged.
The pilots of both planes were administratively disciplined (read their careers were over and were unemployable). Americans do not allow their soldiers and airmen to be tried in foreign countries because of politics never allowing a fair trial.
Re:Missing option (Score:4, Informative)
The US behaves according to the treaties, and they called for a US trial. There was sufficient reasonable doubt on the manslaughter charges, with the cables missing from maps, flight floor notifications not given or read, and aircraft malfunctions. Mistakes that led to this were went up to the commanders, yet people wanted only crew to be convicted. As is often true with military accidents, the actions of several people, and several intertwined conditions, coincided to create that accident.
Even then the two were railroaded out of the military, with loss of all benefits, because of pressure from the Italians. And in the end the US paid the agreed compensation to the families.
Re:Missing option (Score:5, Informative)
There's a semi-hidden cemetery in France filled with executed US WWII solders who raped and murdered the locals. The military has such disrespect for them that they are only marked with numbers, not names. We don't execute quite so much anymore, but we still do proper military criminal investigations into such allegations.
There are two sides to this. On one, we talk as you do about making sure justice is done for crimes committed, and the damage inherent in not fully investigating. On the other hand, there's the concern about railroading troops who were doing the best they could in a bad situation. A soldier fighting for his life in a firefight shouldn't have to ask to for a time-out so he can consult an attorney to avoid potential Monday-morning legal quarterbacking. This is all the harder with an enemy who doesn't wear a uniform and blends in with the locals.
And, yes, every friendly fire incident gets a full investigation. Criminal charges are unlikely since most of these are truly accidents with multiple contributing factors. However, we once railroaded a colonel out of the Army over a friendly fire incident, using the fact that he'd violated some local command policy by going up that day when they couldn't find an actual violation of law in the friendly fire incident itself. Because of feelings just like yours, there is a LOT of political pressure from the very top to convict for friendly fire incidents, and in those cases we have to be extra sure that justice, not mob justice, is done.