To be honest, I find this kind of article deeply hypocritical. People die in wars, brutally, horribly, and special forces are normally comprised of psychopaths. The fact remains that they cause less civilian casualties than any other kind of politics by other means. If you are going to fight wars, it would be far better to train more people to be the kind of psychopaths that like to disfigure corpses and carry around strings of ears, than to do 'impersonal' drone strikes, or worse still, sanctions - which sound very soft, but ultimately kill far more, and with a far more brutal selectivity, than war itself.
I found the article very interesting (and depressing) but agree with the direction of your sentiment. The article even starts with the Seals being upset about an airstike being called on the wedding party convoy as they thought it was going to cause a larger loss of life than a targeted operation (it did).
I'm sure some psychopaths manage to get into the special forces but I think the majority of these people are just trying to cope with the job they're doing. I read this as a lot of myth making on the part of the Seals to justify what could very easily be seen as straight up murder. By disassociating with reality and instead living a borrowed Native American persona, they're in a way protecting their mental health from the horrible acts they're committing and witnessing.
In the end though I think you're right. Hearing about the details of this stuff on a human level is horrifying but it's more humane to do targeted actions like this then wipe out whole city blocks with bombs or cut off food supplies.
> special forces are normally comprised of psychopaths
I think it's more that in order to kill a person, a non-psychopathic person has to dehumanise them. Once you've dehumanised someone you can do anything to them because they're not people to you.
