I would suggest you take a break as well. The fact that you need to resort to qualifications shows inability to answer my question.
Let me counter that by bringing in those who serve in other militaries if you feel just by the virtue of you having a Pak number gives you automatic superiority.
@gambit when can you object to an order?
If the order is patently illegal. Whether an order is illegal or not, is not as always murky as most people believe.
To start off, if a combatant surrendered, as in he displays no weapons and made himself completely vulnerable, you do not need a law degree to know that killing him counters every known rules and implicit understanding of war, hence, any order to kill him is patently illegal. If faced with such a situation, you have at least a moral duty to object. If pressed to kill, you now have a legal duty to refuse.
Now...If you received an order to go on a mission that you know have a very slight chance of survival, whether that order came from competent authority or not is besides the point for now, is that order patently illegal ? The order is legal.
Post 42...
There is a difference in being Changa Manga and being able to tell the superior that they are about to send 200 men into an open field to be massacred.. which people did .. yet these superiors still sent men to their death. That is not changa manga, it is a failed command system.
Like it or not, when you are a soldier, death is an accepted component of your life, whether it came from poor maintenance of the rifle, incomplete intelligence, or sheer incompetency.
If the idiot captain produced a plan that most assuredly will result in the deaths of his unit, his order is still legal. If you object, the military court may reduce your punishment once it is determined that the captain was incompetent, but the fact remains that you essentially mutinied. The court may even go so far as to side with you, the captain was low IQ to start, and he became mentally incapacitated due to combat stress and so on, and the court may exonerate you completely, but you still did mutinied and regardless of circumstance, a mutiny is taken very seriously.
Post 36...
Sure, you should per discipline take their orders and jump into a well. But that is where military discipline and common sense collide.
I understand you use an extreme example here and it is illustrative. We need extremes in order to gauge the middle ground, correct ?
Is the order to jump into a well as legal as the order to go on a practically suicide mission ? Absolutists would argue 'Yes'. But common sense will prevail. Jump into that well would assure your death, but then so would going on that near suicide mission. So is the question of your death the final arbiter on whether the order 'Jump into that well' legal or not ? No, your death is not the final arbiter. Military accomplishment -- is. Jumping into that well have no military value to start, whereas that near suicide mission, at least it has a patina of having a military value. What if you succeed and survived and did great damage to the enemy ? How does jumping into that well contributes to the war effort ? Soldiers are not stupid. At least we have gut instincts to fall back upon and your gut instincts would tell you exactly what I described above. So if you refused, the court would side with you that the order was illegal because it has no military value.
So now we come to real issue -- and that is the balance between the value of the soldier's life and the value of a military objective. Both must be of equal worth. If there is a persistent issue of incompetent order givers sending men to their deaths on missions that were determined to have no military values, that is an institutional problem that cannot be resolved by debating the legalities of orders. Like it or not, jumping into a well is clearly worthless in every way, but on a near suicide mission, at least the incompetent order giver can argue his case.
Believe me, a military that give some training to its members, even the lowest ranks, about the legalities of orders which is tacit approval for laying the foundation of mutiny, is a good thing. Because now it forces the institution to be careful in who it promotes. Even conscripts can be convinced into believing their lives are worth the military objectives. But if you are talking about volunteers, then it becomes harder and the best way to alleviate their fears -- that their lives are worthless -- is to have competent leaderships at all levels.
