Originally Posted by
OvertHawk
I've often pondered on the culpability of those who put, often very young, soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland and expected them to behave like police officers in a situation that felt to them like a war (which was what they had been trained to fight).
When a nervous squaddie pulls the trigger it's them that will bear the responsibility not the general or the politician that put them there.
But if the accountable manager of an airline put an inappropriately trained pilot in a role they were not suitable for and that led to a fatality they will (rightly) face consequences.
(I concede that this particular case seems to be a pretty clear example of gross negligence on the part of the soldier but many others are not so clear cut).
This seems to be the very crux of the problem in NI, at least in the early days. None of the young men sent there in the 70s and 80s were trained to be police officers, they had mostly been trained for war. I wonder how many of them at that time had been trained and fully understood how to interact with civilians and properly assess threats in that environment?
My best guess is that few would have had the training or maturity to deal with often complex situations, where most of the people around them were just innocent bystanders. It is easy to get a view from the media that NI is a place overrun with terrorists, but the reality is that the extremists on both sides are just tiny proportion of the population, most likely less than 1%.