Life is cheap, $2500 cheap!

NOTE: this was originally published back on 06/06/2006. Due to a problem with the earlier post I was unable to make necessary changes. Here it is in the new form. Since the analysis is true today I decided not to delete the article.

Washington Post has an article up talking about Haditha. The author writes that

Here is my contribution: It should explain everything and yet it explains nothing.

Well he's right about that. there seems to be an attempt by some parts of the media and administration flacks to somehow get around this by claiming stress. Now of course combat is one of the most stressful activities humans can experience but all the training that the armed forces are proud of is supposed to alleviate that stress as much as possible.

As a student of counterinsurgency I'm fascinated by the fact that the Marine Corps was famous in Vietnam for being extremely successful in counterinsurgency as opposed to the Army who tended to be rather sloppy. Makes you wonder what happened in the last 30 years.

There are those who say that the Good men and women are 99.9% of the forces, well there are roughly 130,000 US troops in Iraq that means there are 130 ticking time bombs. Makes you wonder if the Israelis would have any suggestions on weeding out the unstable characters.

The above article says that 15 of the families have been paid $38,000 which is where I get the average figure of around $2500 from. Life is cheap.

Marine Corps
Iraq
War on Terror
Haditha
counterinsurgency