the original stevo wrote:
the lower ranks just follow orders given i understand the army is an organisation but its unfair that this would show the lads on the ground in a bad light innocents will get injured/ or even worse in conflict but the innocents are usually hit from afar by "smart" bombs or artillery which is ordered from above. The army can be reconised as the who institution or as "an army" meaning a small band of men
Yes this is my point about the Met police and the Jean Michael de Menezes incident that got brought up earlier in the thread, people use that to attack the police as an institution saying they just go gung ho shooting people. But they just carried out orders and a mission that was based on bad intelligence.
If the army is sent to carry out a mission to eliminate some Taleban insurgents from a street, and it turns out after they have carried out the mission that it was bad intelligence, then thats the same situation, it doesn't mean the squaddies are cowboys who have gone shooting up everything.