The Cost of Loyalty by Tim Bakken

Author:Tim Bakken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER 7

Violence, Torture, and War Crimes

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

—ISAAC ASIMOV, FOUNDATION

Although one job of the military is obviously to fight when necessary, its most important mission is to preserve the peace without fighting, thereby sparing its soldiers and protecting the populace. However, soldiers’ unnecessary or unlawful violence, whether at home or during war in foreign lands, transforms an army into an illegitimate and dangerous occupying institution, the very condition our nation’s founders feared. This is why there should be significant concern over the military ethos seeping into civilian society,1 where 33 percent of all federal employees in executive agencies are military veterans, although they comprise just 6 percent of the U.S. population—partly a result of hiring preferences for veterans.2

Outside the military, police officers are most likely to employ government-sanctioned violence, and in their ranks, military veterans comprise a disproportionate presence. Phil Klay, a novelist and former officer in the marines, wrote in 2016, “In Iraq, I knew so many Marines with plans of joining their local police force back home it was almost comical.” Klay’s intuition was correct. Professors Gregory B. Lewis and Rahul Pathak found that 19 percent of police officers are military veterans.3

In conducting possibly the first study of its kind, researchers at the University of Texas in 2018 found that Dallas police officers (a sample of 516) who were military veterans were much more likely to fire their guns while on duty than police officers who were not veterans. The cops who had been deployed—though most deployed soldiers work in support positions and do not see combat—were 2.9 times and the nondeployed cops 1.94 times more likely to have fired their guns. The researchers found that “close to one-third of officers involved in a shooting had a military background,” according to the Marshall Project, the criminal justice reform group that sponsored the study.4

The American military ethos teaches that threats and violence are early, sometimes first, responses to conflict. Reports indicate that current or former soldiers commit over 33 percent of the mass killings inside the United States. Klay pointed out that the killer of five police officers on July 7, 2016, in Dallas, Texas, “followed standard [military] tactics for a close ambush, which are ‘to establish fire superiority and assault through the objective.’ ”

Though the killer was a veteran of the Afghanistan war, Klay noted that military training and experience don’t necessarily lead to violence by veterans.5 To this, anthropology professor Hugh Gusterson responds, “But the facts speak for themselves. Veterans account for 13 percent of the adult population, but more than a third of the adult perpetrators of the 43 worst mass killings since 1984 had been in the United States military. It is clear that, in the etiology of mass killings, military service is an important risk factor.”6 Commenting on the killings in Dallas, Gusterson writes, “There are obvious reasons why so many mass killers might be military veterans. They may have been drawn to the military in the first place by an attraction to violence.

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