Let me just make a short comment on the theoretician (social scientist) vs. practitioner (military) note. All too often, IMO, we (Anthropologists / Social Scientists) classify some entire range of action as “Bad”, so “obviously” we should have nothing to do with it. This shows up clearly in the lackm of debate and common understanding of what “Harm” means in a context of ethics. “Harm”, at least in the discursive tradition I grew up in, is not the same as “hurt”, and “critical analysis” should not be a synonym for “you hurt my feelings! Wah, wah wah!”.
I truly believe that many social scientists have lost that intimate connection both with lived reality and with a transcendent ideal that characterized Boaz. We seem to have forgotten that Boaz held “science” (actually, the Baconian ideal of a via negativa form of science) as a transcendent ideal, and that one of our “missions” as scientists and Anthropologists was to come as close to ultimate “truth” as we could, always knowing that we would fail. As scientists, at least according to my reading of Boaz, we were required to produce our best understanding of “Truth” based on what we actually observed and saw. A critical component of that lay in our own, personal development and throwing away of preconceptions. Like the military, we were supposed to take what we observed, analyze it, and come to our best “solution”; and, if that meant attacking an institution, a power broker, or whatever, we had a moral imperative to do so.
All of this is a round-about way of getting at your last comment: most of the military folks I know want to make people’s lives “better”. That may be based on screwed up assumptions of what “better” means, but I have only met one person who didn’t want to do so out of the hundreds of military folks I know.
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