A gentleman, thank you...
I have grown tired over these many years, having our young men murdered, in foreign countries, under hostile conditions. All to often, unarmed, no one accepts responsibility. I am sorry but their deaths are unacceptable to me. I would not want to be the one that had the job of telling his Mother the circumstances of his death. That a killer just drove up and shot him, but all the regulations were being followed to the letter. Sad...
Lest anyway wrongly believe I am anti military or such, I go way back, my brother never came back, I got home with my hide intact. When someone dies under such circumstances as this, I feel I have a right to question and condemn the military. We paid our dues, in full.
This happens very rarely.
On the other hand, you are willing to accept the chance of a soldier or Marine jacking live ammunition into their weapon during the exercise and killing themselves or someone else.
Given how often that happens when the exercise personnel take every measure to ensure that no one has live ammunition on their person in the exercise area, one can be reasonably assured that accidental discharges of live ammunition will be extremely common if every soldier or Marine is carrying some.
It's a matter of managing risk. You seem to be willing to accept a much higher casualty count as long as those casualties are self-inflicted.
You do have the right to question and condemn, although I believe condemnation in this case isn't warranted. The regulations are in place to avoid needless death. ROE are in place to avoid the US military precipitating needless deaths through action, as well as to avoid provoking "international incidents".
I agree that this letherneck's death is a tragedy, as well as a crime. I just don't believe that the criminal acts of two Kuwaitis should be blamed on what I consider sensible training rules. I would hate to be the commander tasked with calling their families. It is truly the most terrible job ever, in or out of the military.
I think that assumption is unwarranted. As myself and other guys have posted, we have personal experience with training accidents and the risks of using live ammo in training. The policy is a result not of a mechanistic following of "procedures", but rather a result of years of experience in weighing the relative risks of issuing live ammo on such exercises.
It's like friendly fire incidents. During the Gulf War, we made a conscious decision to move very rapidly, fully recognizing that this would result in some increased confusion on the battlefield, and increase the risk of friendly fire casualties. But the tradeoff was that the enemy would be even more confused, and so less able to mount an effective resistance. We might suffer more friendly fire casualties, but those would be more than offset by the reduction in casualties from hostile fire. It's a calculated weighing of the relative risks that is equally applicable to the policy of not issuing live rounds on non-live fire field exercises.
The deaths may be "unacceptable" to you, but the fact is that some deaths are inevitable when you're dealing with war and the preparation for war. That doesn't mean that every death is "okay", or that there aren't times that fault should be apportioned and heads role. But that does mean there are times when you make good decisions that necessarily include the risk that someone may be injured or killed. But just because someone is injured or killed does not mean that the decision was wrong.