Aaron MkII wrote:You may want to see Stark's comment as a criticism of military culture where command responsibility is preached but they'll stick the lowest guy they can with blame.
That would be fair. If he says it is I'll accept it, and it would put his remarks in a different light.
If we were doing things right, command responsibility would be defined in terms of job descriptions. No one person can keep track of the mental health of ten thousand people, certainly not while doing any other important job at the same time. So making that the
personal responsibility of a commanding general, who is criminally liable for failure, doesn't make any sense. Punishing generals for failing in that 'duty' won't get the duty done, it'll just give you an excuse to fire generals predictably over and over.
He has staff for that, he
has to. If he acts in good faith and his staff fucks up, firing him isn't going to help. If he acts in bad faith, of course, that's another matter.
Thanas wrote:Of course not Stark. That would be so Nuremberg. We have risen above those outdated principles and gone straight back to the 19th century.
The Nuremberg principle works the other way: officers are responsible for whatever they
do, even if they were ordered to do it, and so on.
I don't recall the Nuremberg Principles saying that we should routinely throw field marshals in jail for atrocities committed by isolated, mentally ill sergeants.
Thanas wrote:The Duchess of Zeon wrote:JLBM has some incredibly severe issues...
If what you say is true then heads should be rolling over this.
Stark wrote:Only heads at his level, though. Nobody who had responsibility for his conduct, support or command at a higher level is really responsible. Right? :V
Heads should be rolling for a messed-up base at a level responsible for the base. Probably at least one or two links up the chain of command from whoever commands the base.
When a private goes nuts, it's not hard to justify holding a lieutenant or captain possible. Having detailed knowledge of every one of their troops
is in their job description. Having detailed knowledge of military bases in your country is the job of some very senior staff officers, who are totally responsible if things are that bad at a particular base.
But if we go all the way to, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would he even know about it? Would he ever have received any information? If so we can talk about his responsibility. But if not, it seems very pointless to start firing people as scapegoats for a failure they never got the chance to avoid.
Stark wrote:You said officers should be held responsible 'at their level'. You said they should not be if the actions are by those remote to them, but still under their command.
To make it more clear:
If the actions are remote and there is no realistic way the officer could have prevented them, then it makes no more sense to hold someone responsible. Do you fire the police chief every time one cop takes a bribe? The chief can only stop the bribery if there is a path by which he can find out and react and prevent the abuse. That takes time, and it can also take scale.
If you find a pattern of abuse, and evidence that the officer colluded in it, then they should get hammered.
If the colonel commands a regiment, one company of which has been operating a torture facility for weeks or months, there is no plausible way the colonel wouldn't know. That's his fault, and the fault probably runs up the chain all the way to the theater level- because commanding generals probably know (if nothing else) that they're using information gained via torture.
If the colonel knows that one of his platoon leaders is an unstable nutcase and keeps sending him out on patrols till he massacres a village, that's his fault. He knew there was a problem, he had a specific, obvious thing he could do to stop it, he chose not to react and filed nothing. If the colonel is getting orders from above to do horrible things, he's responsible. If he's obviously tolerating atrocities over and over, he's responsible. If he's obviously tolerating atrocities
once, he's responsible.
If one of the thousands of men under his command turns out to be mentally unstable and starts killing people, is he responsible in the "go to jail" sense? I don't know. What did the colonel know, and when did he know it? What decisions did he make that made this event more likely? Could the event ever have been foreseen as a consequence of his actions?
