this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
1983 points (98.8% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
9777 readers
347 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this is what happens when your training gives your members permanent irreversible brain damage (haha i love concussions)
The us military is a fascinating thing.
I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from but concussions are probably one of the plethora of shitty things that you actually aren't exposed to during training. Concussions and TBI are common because of close contact with explosives in combat zones mostly, not in training.
Of course I'm not defending the military and their practices, I was in the Marine Corps myself, this bit is just not true though.
This whole comment section is full of people who never served talking like they know what it’s like.
it's not a literal concussion. It turns out the percussive blasts that shit like mortars are artillery produce are akin to concussive injuries to the brain. (with enough and repeated exposure, much like concussions) Which isn't really surprising when you think about it.
I will say the irony of someone who was in the military discounting this is pretty funny though.
I wouldn't call it ironic. You claimed that US military training causes permanent irreversible brain damage and referenced concussions as the cause. This is just has no hard evidence to back it up. And your comment here states something that was not your original claim and has not actually been studied and peer reviewed on anything except for a few studies on mice, where those studies indicate that it's hard to equivocate these outcomes to humans for a number of reasons. I'm not claiming that exposure to sub-concussive blasts isn't dangerous or injuring peoples brains, it probably is but I don't know for sure whether it does or not since it's not actually proven. Just stating, once again, that training is not responsible for actual concussions except in rare circumstances like accidental injury, almost all of these injuries occur in actual combat. Further, a majority of US service members are never even exposed to sub-concussive blasts, so there is only a small subset which your claim would even apply to in the first place.
I'm not trying to tear down your comments or defend the US military's practices, I just don't think making these types of claims without legitimate proof is useful or appropriate. If I've missed something that proves everything I've said wrong I'm perfectly happy to be corrected.
i referenced concussions because they are similar, and it was also a joke, hence the fact it was put into parenthesis. That wasn't meant to be taken straight up.
To my knowledge, there have been studies done in the military on the effects of continual and repeated sub-concussive blasts (if that's the correct term) that show some form of damage. It's also been said that after the results of these studies coming out with potentially bad impacts, that they were pretty quickly shut down. Not to mention i've seen a number of people who have been in the military as well as people who know those who have been in the military provide anecdotal evidence of it.
It's certainly not solid evidence, but for something like a federal military, that's pretty concerning.
And how do you propose they be trained? VR?
In concussion armor. The stuff we haven't been issuing to our troopers since the War On Terror, and they've been coming back by the hundreds of thousands with TBIs, for which the DVA doesn't do squat.
There's no such thing. You get a helmet and body armor.
I'm pretty sure there is. Families since the aughts have been buying or making cardboard inserts for standard issue to help ensure Johnny comes marching home, once it had been determined the armor issued wasn't doing it when dealing with IEDs.
But whether good armor doesn't exist doesn't matter. What matters is standard issue is resulting in troops coming home permanently missing faculties for which the DVA isn't adequately managing. So we counter-recruiters are telling them there are worse things that can happen than you coming back in a box, like you coming back in parts and your family confined to poverty and wiping your ass for the rest of your natural life.
Cardboard does absolutely nothing. And there was a small period of time in 2003 or 4 where there wasn't enough uparmored trucks. But that's it.
As far as the government not giving help to the TBI guys, yeah that tracks.
There were armor upgrades explicitly downvoted by congress. Then we were losing humvees to IEDs like flies to glow traps. Mechanics were attaching scrap until rhino kits came out. Not a good look.
The war on false pretenses also soured the whole ordeal. I hear our grade-schoolers coming back from American History are being taught Iraqi Freedom was revenge for the 9/11 attacks. (It wasn't.)
Oh no. Those things were horrible. The 1/2 inch steel plate was better. And yeah I remember driving around in those things. The steel plate is why I still have legs. Eventually though the anti coalition forces just started using something called an Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP). At which point we might as well have driven dune buggies for all the good armor would do. And by eventually, I mean late 2004.
Then there were the mission restrictions for heavily armored Humvees and early MRAPs. Basically they had to stay on asphalt and couldn't handle much in the way of curb hopping or going under bridges. We actually spent most of our second deployment in an old 1025 Humvee (the 1990's armor that wasn't seen as good enough) and had a much higher mission rate because we could go places other units could not.
I understand that from the outside the answer always looks like more armor, but it really isn't. And we made a lot of vehicles that could come through a normal blast just fine, but with a dead crew from over pressure. It wasn't until the M-ATV that we solved that problem. And that thing got made available as fast as possible. It now lives on in the JLTV.
Tl;Dr - Factory uparmored vehicles were a boondoggle sold to reassure civilians. They were less mission capable and did not prevent casualties.
Edit to add - That 9/11 Iraq myth pisses me off so much. I don't know why we went, but it wasn't for 9/11.
Thank you! A lot of this is new information to me!
No problem. It's a pretty niche experience bit so I try to spread it where I can.
with regards to their physical health, that would be a good start probably...
A soldier that has brain damage and cannot make a good decision is not a good soldier, nor is that something we should be doing to them to begin with.
I thought you were talking about the school football players.
they also get that problem but last i checked they aren't trained by the military so.