Command environment problems? I’m sure these were just a couple of bad apples.

/s

From your last link:

But the Taliban doesn’t need, from a strategic perspective, to win popular allegiance. (That’s my major disagreement with Max Boot’s response to Andrew Exum, for what it’s worth.) It needs to stymie Gen. McChrystal’s forces from providing security to the Afghan population. If it does that, then it’s in a strong position, and right now, it’s doing that. McChrystal’s task isn’t just to reduce his own proportion of civilian casualties. He could do that, obviously, by not fighting at all. It’s to significantly arrest the violence that threatens civilians, full-stop.

Sounds like this “Kill Team” ought to be charged with providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

From the Post piece:

But a review of military court documents and interviews with people familiar with the investigation suggest the killings were committed essentially for sport by soldiers who had a fondness for hashish and alcohol.

I know sports. Soccer is a sport. Baseball is a sport. This stuff is a war crime.

Spencer, I’d love to see more on the command environment that allowed for such a sport to be pursued.

Where did it break down? War.

We send heavily armed kids into ambiguous situations where people try to kill them.

Not sure what else you might be expecting.

Two choices: Cover it up or prosecute it. In fact, neither have worked well…

mikey

“They confronted the informant and beat him severely – punching, kicking and choking the soldier, then dragging him across the ground”.

Are there really a lot of out of the way secluded areas on these FOBs where this sort of thing let alone hashish smoking can go on and no one in authority notices?

Beyond the problems the informant has gotten (not the least of which is the DoD naming him in the media), this episode points out serious failures of leadership and commandership in the platoon, company and battalion.

Let’s not be reluctant to agree this is one of the more difficult problems any officer will ever run into. It’s surely one of a lieutenant’s (platoon leader’s) worst nightmares, if not the single worst one. The company commander is, to some degree, insulated from the repercussions because he has a platoon leader below him to blame it on. But, the climate he sets in his company (and, similarly, the climate in the battalion set by the battalion commander) is where this gets started.

Look at it this way. You’re the platoon leader. Something like this going on in your platoon. If you don’t know about it, you don’t know what’s going on in your unit of 35 (or so) men and you have no control over your men. If something like this was incipient and you knew about it (i.e., you knew what was going on in your platoon), this wouldn’t have happened. You would have stepped in and stopped it. (Assuming, of course, that you have still retained your humanity and did not want something like this to happen. Not a 100% given.) The first question that lieutenant would run into (if, as appears here, he didn’t stop it) would have been to the effect of “why the hell didn’t you stop it sooner?”

That the informant did not feel confident enough to go to his lieutenant or company commander (or even the chaplain – always a good choice) but instead went to his family speaks volumes about the climate in that unit. I have to think the lieutenant and chain of command were more interested in completing the tour with as few problems as possible and that meant sweeping it under the rug and hoping it just went away.

If, on the other hand, he did find out about it and it still went on, then it’s clear the lieutenant had no control over his men. That, or he ratified the conduct, either explicitly or implicitly. There seems to be little question that sooner or later he’d have found out about it. He’d be dealing every day, all day with the sergeant leading the mass murder operations; there are only have 3 or 4 staff sergeants in a platoon. The rub is, each of them leads about a third of that lieutenant’s combat power. He turns them in, and he still has to continue combat operations with, at best, 2/3 of his combat power and the distraction of the investigation.

Then there’s the whole issue of continuing combat operations – everyone has a machinegun and lots of live ammunition and shoots, too – where one guy is a snitch who turned in a mass murder and dope plot, the mass murderers are right there and not happy about being exposed. And you’re supposed to make them all work together and not kill each other. Or you.

Oh, and they’re smoking hash, too. And probably swiping opium poppies to chew on. This makes the problem all the more interesting because you’re dealing with stoned guys (or jonesing guys), with both less self-control and machineguns.

The easiest, surest way to solve it would be to just whack the guilty party with your pistol – summary justice – and then report yourself and assert he threatened you when you confronted him with evidence of his war crimes. Don’t think it hasn’t happened in other situations. It’s a big risk, though, because you run the risk of being convicted of murder, even though the guy truly deseved his fate. The question the lieutenant faces then is “Are you willing to go to prison for the rest of your life to satisfy your sense of justice?”

The second-easiest way – if you have to continue combat operations with this character – is to keep putting him out on point until the enemy kills or wounds him or he breaks and you can do something else to him. You won’t go to prison for murder if the enemy does the killing.

Or you could just hope it goes away.

As to the commenter upthread, asking how it was that these troops could be smoking hash and not get caught over it, there are a couple explanations. First, troops get to be really, really good at hiding their mischief. It’s not much different from how people get to be smoking dope in a jail – how they get it, get it in, and use it in secure areas is the stuff of caper films. It’s them against you. Second, it may be that the chain of command tacitly accepted or allowed the troops to engage in smoking hash or drinking because they felt the environment and mission were so tough they deserved a break. Dumb, but plausible.

And, third, it’s entirely possible that discipline in that unit broke down to the point that there were no-go areas for officers. A few years after it happened, I was in a unit where in the 70s there had been no-go areas for officers and senior sergeants in the barracks. Troops would be openly getting high on the upper floors of the barracks. One time, a duty officer went through there on his rounds and tried to straighten out the drug den he walked into. The soldiers there took him, threw him into a wall locker, locked it, and tossed both him and the wall locker out the window. It was a fifth floor window. It landed on a spiked wrought iron fence lining the sidewalk below, killing the duty officer. After that, the unit issued its duty officers .45 pistols and live ammunition so they could walk rounds through their own barracks and live to tell about it. And that was in peacetime, where the weapons were locked in the arms room. The guys in this unit in A-stan were armed; you think anyone’s going to mess with their no-go area?