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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

How you would learn from mistakes made by somebody deep inside Army operations and help prevent them in the future? I can see where investigation is needed to aid the Army to do better, but publishing this has nothing to do with preventing such mistakes in the future, since the public has no control and no input on Army operations in any case.

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> "but publishing this has nothing to do with preventing such mistakes in the future"

It does, if enabling the public to realize the reality of war (and more importantly, the fallibility of their beloved military) results a society that is less bloodthirsty and eager to start wars.

This has nothing to do with investigating anything. First, the public would never actually realize the reality of war without actually experiencing it, what it can only realize is what the press would choose to tell them and in a way that the press chooses to report it, and there's a real lot of wiggle room in reporting and choosing how to present events. But more importantly, this would be the same with and without investigation - the tragedy already happened, and if you plan to exploit it in anti-war propaganda, you can exploit it regardless of why it happened, who is to blame and any other investigation results. In fact, investigating may only make it less useful for for anti-war purposes - what if after investigation it turns out Taliban deliberately placed their fighters in the midst of the civilians so that the response fire would hit most of them and thus achieve the best propaganda effect? It might only make the society more determined to get those bastards. The most tragic and most shocking part already happened - people died. If you want to say war is evil because people die - no further investigation necessary. Further investigation is needed only if you intend to wage war in the future but want to do it differently - but then it is useful mostly for people that actually wage war.

If publishing surgeon's performance leads to better surgeries, then I would say there is a chance same would happen in military operations.

Publishing surgeon performances wouldn't really lead to better surgeries by any particular surgeon - most of them are doing their best already. It would enable you to choose a better one (provided you can afford it and he/she can take you). Since you can not choose military commanders, how useful is that for you?

> Since you can not choose military commanders, how useful is that for you?

Huh?

http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=45870

I may not be able to sit in and vote for a commander but every appointment has the backing of an elected official that can be replaced.

As a civilian everything the military does is of interest to me and should be made open - your argument of "you may not understand it" is irrelevant. I want to know everything from how much they spend on toothpaste to how many civilians have died.

I know why civilians control the military. But I think you have wrong idea about it. Politicians control top generals, but they do not control details of every military operation, and neither do you - so knowing the details of the specific operational planning of the army would not be very useful to you, unless you want you politician to intervene in specific operation planning - which would not be very good, as neither you nor your politician have the relevant knowledge. There can be situations where common knowledge is enough - e.g. if certain commander plans to kill all civilians in the city, you don't have to be in the military to know it's wrong and such commander should be removed - but such cases are very rare. Usually mass-casualty tragedies result from a set of very complex circumstances and varied set of coincidences and mistakes, and I'm not sure your politician will be qualified to figure it out.

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