Defence #4: On challenges to your faith in humanity

This week has produced two of these.

On Tuesday Archbishop Cranmer reported on a Conservative Home survey that suggests 70% of those polled opposed increases in the international aid budget if it came at the price of our defence spending (though having read the survey I'm not sure Cranmer is jumping to the right conclusions). Meanwhile today we have the release of the new Iraq War Logs. Including an account of how a crew of an Apache helicopter gunship killed two insurgents attempting to surrender to them as 'you can't surrender to a gunship' (according to the legal advice they received on the spot).

Indeed what makes it worse is that contextually one can almost see the point of the advice given to them. Let us say for instance that the pilots of that gunship accepted the surrender of the insurgents. Now that would necessitate the gunship landing and the men staying with the insurgents until ground forces arrived to take them into custody. Now depending on the location and situation of the nearest land forces that could take some time, preventing said gunship from intervening in any other engagement until those forces arrive. All well and good, but if the gunship is desperately needed by Coalition forces engaged in a fair dogfight, then do the pilots leave them to die? It's not a good decision, but sometimes we as a society and species conspire to put ourselves in bad positions.