moral calculations: a sample question

If you saw the movie Blackhawk Down, or if you read about the recent battle at Shah-i-Kot, you know that the US military will apparently spend the lives of an unlimited number of soldiers to retrieve 1 dead body.


Why does this make "sense" or not?


Why might the people who propagate this tradition be selected for survival?


eLROY

Whether it makes sense or not depends on where you are: in the battle, on a moutain top, or watching the news on tv from the couch.


If you are in the battle and you know if you are killed you will be left for mutilation by the enemy, or left for the birds and scavangers, how willing would you be to take chances that may get you killed?


On the other hand if you know your body will be brought back home for burial, you have the knowledge that you will be buried back home where you belong. Your buddies won't leave you behind if at all possible. A lot more piece of mind in the second situation.


From a high mountain top, it is a waste of life to risk more lives for what is essentially rotting meat.


From the couch, I think ambivilance reigns supreme.

During a battle, troops will try to recover the bodies of their comrades if it is possible. If it is deemed excessively risky, they will leave them. In Black Hawk Down, the two Delta snipers volunteer to go down to the second downed chopper. The commander didn't order them to and advised them against it, but wouldn't stop them from trying to protect the bodies and any possible survivors. To say that the military would spend an unlimited number of soldiers to recover one body is false. After the battle, an operation with the sole purpose to recover bodies, where the lives of many would be risked, would not normally occur. However, the rule that no one gets left behind is a powerful aspect of the brotherhood of soldiers. If I can bring the body of my brother back, I will and he would do the same for me.

Where did these policies originate?


How long has this general set of rules been around?


eLROY

My girlfriends and I were discussing this at lunch right after it happened. Every American's heart breaks when a serviceman/woman is killed in battle. The drone plane captured on it's video computers this soldier's fall from the copter. It was also ascertained that the fall did not kill him because he was able to activate his rescue beacon after the fall. The military personnel in charge watched as the drone recorded three enemy soldiers capture him and drag him off. It is unclear from any reports I could find whether it could be proven that he was dead beyond that. If there is any question about going in to rescue a possible surviving soldier in battle, the only conscionable thing to do is to go in and get him/her. What was disturbing to me is the grey area here..did the military powers that be know this soldier was dead and still went after the body? The reason this bothers me so is that it smacks of a political decision. We all remember how horrendous it was to watch those 18 soldiers bodies desecrated and carried around in the streets of Somalia in a macabre show of utter brutality.

I question whether six more soldier's lives and countless others wounded were cost going in to retrieve that hero's body. If the military powers knew he was already dead and still made the decision to go in and get the body back, I have this nagging doubt in the back of my mind whether it was done to save political face should this become another Somalia. Every life is precious. I can't justify in my mind the deaths of those six soldiers that perished in the attempt to bring back a corpse.

God bless our soldiers and I pray they are brought back safely...each and every one.

From the enemy's point of view, I see it more like tugging on one of those magician's handkerchiefs that just goes on and on and on. The more you take, the more keep coming and coming, and there is no point at which our soldiers are so few, and so outnumbered, that it makes sense for them to take our soldiers but not for us to try to get them back.


Normally, the incentive for military behavior is based on a numbers game. The more of them there are, and the fewer of us there are, the more sense it makes for them to go on the offensive. But you literally can't retrive a captive until you have captured or killed almost every one of the enemy.


As such, the more a US solider is outnumbered - and therefore the greater their cost in their own lives to hold him and the smaller their benefit for capturing him - the more the incentive created by the advantage is precisely canceled out.


As such, it eliminates the option of incremental calculations on part of the enemy. They cannot choose to do business on a scale that favors them.


So sure, the policy may secure more enlistment on one end, but it seems to work like more of a doomsday machine on the other end.


It serves to discourage the evolution of snatch-and-hide guerillas among our enemies, because it prevents us from performing the types of incremental cost calculations that allowed Hitler to take half of Europe before anybody did anything.


It's all about creating, and countering, cost/benefit asymmetries. I don't remember what Sun Tzu said, but when large, act it, and force them to take the other side of something large, even where you are small.


Force them to operate on a scale where the costs and volatilties become unbearable for them, rather down at their level where we have diseconomies of scale. Otherwise, at equilibrium, we won't even react until our forces becoem equal in size.


Just my thoughts, mind you. But my real point is, thoughts don't count, military traditions go way back in history, and who knows by why what esoteric mechanism the people who started them survived to pass them on.


eLROY