"Docile lambs alone cannot protect a village."

And with that statement most of my doubts concerning the soundness of how they're going about trying to deal with the situation they're in are laid to rest. Some details are still missing in the specifics, but up until now I wasn't convinced that that concept existed somewhere in their society. With that in mind, I actually agree with Kraco on the lack of impressiveness of the ethics committee. It's not that they don't do their jobs well, it's that they don't realize the stakes concerning the members of group 1. This is particularly unimpressive because they were aware that an experiment was being performed on group 1, and that it was ordered by the ethics committee chairman.

In light of that, their decision to dispose of Mamoru without consulting granny was a mistake. That along with their handling of Saki and Satoru implies that they did not consider the reasoning behind the ethics committee's decision to go along with the experiment. This is either because they did not know it, or they really could not (for whatever reason) use that knowledge as input in their decision making. That makes the education committee come across less as a driving force behind the village's protection, and more as a mere tool. Until the introduction of the Tomiko, I thought everyone behind the village's defense were more like the members of the education committee.