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There are a mil & vets claiming a moral high ground right now, but they shouldnât. You have to be a special blend of arrogant, biased & misinformed to believe mil performance in GWOT was better than what weâre seeing in US now. All use of force training needs improvement. 
Iâm proud of my military service, but Iâm also a professional & recognize that any organization given special trust must self-police & strive to be better. Law enforcement needs similar reforms, but mil is not objectively better.
Theyâre judging all police by the actions of a subset. Letâs apply that same logic to the military. Letâs start with Abu Ghraib, Black Hearts & the Afghan kill squad. A pattern of behavior by a subset is not representative of the whole. There are many good & bad cops & soldiers.
Thereâs already plenty of evidence of war crime incidents, but less of the excessive mil force tactics that increased violence & civ casualties. If Iraqis or Afghans in â06-â08 had cell phone cameras & Twitter there would be well-documented violations of home searches.
Buy an infantry vet a drink & ask about house searches after an IED strike, esp if an American died. Or ask about interrogations: https://www.cnn.com/2003/US/12/12/sprj.nirq.west.ruling/
Sure, we trained on de-escalation, RoE, EoF, LoAC, but people still violated. Vehicles shot wrongly at checkpoints? Yup. Pat Tillman was almost certainly killed by a young, scared fellow Ranger, not the enemy. Inexperience + fear + a weapon (or other violence) = mistakes.
Alternatively, letâs consider the unaccounted for impact of warning shots, pen flares, and other ânon-lethalâ EoF actions that injured or killed. Kid throws a rock at a patrol and the gunner shoots a laser in his face?
Not to mention that police patrol in smaller numbers & therefore train to escalate or control situations very differently than mil squads/platoons which come in a 9-30 person team with long guns & helmets.
During protests/riots, many police are asked & trusted to go far beyond their base training or daily job. Mil units train for months to prepare for war & enforce a stand-off distance.
The issue isnât about whoâs better/worse. What both military & police get wrong right now is that a âwarâ mentality dehumanizes the enemy & prioritizes self/team defense instead of risking your life to avoid unnecessary suffering. Mil & police volunteer to carry wpns & be there.
Not all mil or police behave badly, but enough do to show that both institutions need major improvements in oversight & accountability. Even if mil had a better record, the focus should be on why & how.
The militarization of police isnât just about hardware, but the deeper issues of dehumanization, us vs them mentality & greater concern of safeguarding the lives of the people who VOLUNTEERED to serve. This is a training & culture problem for both orgs.
Lastly, I need to be very clear that this entire thread comparing training & performance is secondary to the core issue of Americaâs institutional & systemic racism which is exacerbated in LE (& mil). Better training is worthless w/o accountability for extrajudicial killings.
