Sunday 17 June 2018


I watch this TV show called Blue Bloods. It is about a family of New York Police Department officers. The show is fictional and makes all the right noises about country, service etc. The chief protagonist is the police commisioner who used to be a US Marine Corps officer who later became a police officer and rose to the present position.
In this episode, (S07 E11 if anyone is interested) there is a test for entry into the NYPD. Many ex soldiers write the exam. There are questions in the psych eval asking if they had used arms against any human and if so, did they feel remorse.
Normally answer should be "NO" and "NA", but for ex soldiers truthful answer would be "YES" and "NO" and this would disqualify them. So they lie in the test.

This is the problem in our country. We use the army for dealing with civil unrest. The training in the army is to kill and feel that killing is the right thing to do, feel proud of eliminating the enemy. They are trained well for this purpose.
But now they are not facing the enemy. They are facing their people.
Can they forget their really good training and not kill?
If they can, the next time they face the enemy, will they falter and jeopardise the unit?

Civil unrest is not the same as war. Personnel dealing with this must be trained differently from personnel dealing with enemy combatants. But we use soldiers for dealing with civil unrest and expect them to react differently from what years of training has ingrained in them. How can you expect that?
The govt must raise and train an internal security force really well for the different kinds of challenges.


1 comment:

L said...

The greyhounds raised in AP solely for anti Naxal operations seems to have been a success.

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