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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. 
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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/">https://www.cnn.com/2003/US/1...
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.
