these guys are trained to not feel, if you let guilt or remorse into your thought process while taking on a mission then things can go terribly wrong. sure is it callous, yes. did he expect it to get plastered all over the net? no.

its terrible this happened, but its the cost of war. should we be there? should we be anywhere? no and no. but we are, this is how its gonna be.

On the one hand, I want to go over it several times over and pick it apart, but I'm trying to place myself in the pilot's/gunner's seat- seeing everything once, as it happens, uninformed by hindsight and with the video screen unenhanced.

Frankly, I think it's a series of compounded errors on both sides. The reporters ought to have thought about what they might look like from a distance. Cameras on slings can easily look like weapons. When one is shouldering a camera and leaning out from behind a wall filming in the direction of an attack helicopter in a war zone, that is a DUMB IDEA, because it looks exactly like someone with an RPG. While I am not privy to the specific ROEs the pilots were operating under, I can see how firing on the man with the object on his shoulder aimed at the helicopter is justifiable, and in the context of that perceived threat, other individuals with slung objects appear to be valid targets.

With that being said, after the initial attack, I cannot see the justification in continuing to fire on the wounded man, particularly once being picked up by individuals with no evident weapons in sight. It's not unreasonable to think that several minutes after a shooting has occurred, good Samaritans might come to pick up the wounded- particularly in a place like Baghdad. But again, I don't know what the Americans' specific ROEs, nor do I know what the threat climate had been like in that particular area in the days leading up to this incident. When the van came to pick up the wounded man I could not see weapons in evidence on the ground, in individuals' hands, or being picked up- logical, of course, since in hindsight it appears there were none on the scene; merely slung cameras. Again, not being privy to the ROEs I'm unsure whether a previous perceived threat was enough to continue the engagement against new individuals who had entered the scene to render aid, though no ROEs I'm personally familiar or experienced with have authorized the engagement of individuals removing wounded if weapons were not in evidence.

I did not see the kids in the van until they were specifically highlighted in the enhanced replays. I do not believe the pilots did either.

The video has clearly been edited for brevity. I would like to see it in its uncut entirety. I have my thoughts, as above, but I'm reserving final judgment.

You are simply not in a position to tell us with any degree of accuracy whether this reflects the legal realities the pilots operated under. Rules of engagement are a legal interpretation of applicable domestic and international law converted into a guide that allows formats to interpret situations and threats on the fly. For you to tell us 'this is why_______' is simply wrong, because not one of us is in a position to know. I would come closest out of current participants in the conversation, and even I don't have any degree of certainty in the matter. What I AM sure of is that shooting at unarmed individuals providing a medical response to an injured combatant who is rendered hors de combat by his wounds is typically frowned upon, but I'm giving the Americans the benefit of the (abundant) doubt.

The sheer concept of a 'war on terror' is a farcical idea to begin with, but you're right that the cultural challenges compound the difficulty.

I agree completely.

I suppose it remains to be determined if two or three unarmed dudes in a civilian van constitute 'a force' under any accepted definition. I personally would hold that they do not, but I'm not with the JAG corps. I would suggest, however, that that ROE stipulation is formulated for conventional warfare, and is not appropriate to counterinsurgency situations. If that particular ROE was relied on in this particular engagement then I think it ought to be revisited, if it has not been since then. One might also challenge what level of authority ought to be able to authorize engagement of unarmed targets engaged in medical evacuation, but I think that in this case this is the weaker of the two arguments I present.

It would have been based on the situation description by the Apache pilots.

I'm not suggesting the Apache crews operated outside their ROEs are military policy; this situation just has me questioning what has gone wrong that what we witnessed in this video can be officially sanctioned. In the context of a counterinsurgency I would have thought logic would dictate erring on the side of caution and not engaging the van.

I recently wrote a paper for my strategic thought and international security class where my basic thesis is that the conventional warfighting/peacekeeping paradigm we brought out of the Cold War has ill served us in our current conflicts. I didn't get into much depth regarding the profligacy of use of lethal force, but I did touch on it, and I think there's merit to my assertion that the current generation of middle level and senior leadership were all brought up under a military system specifically formulated for the highly effective destruction of an enemy, and that consequently the entire military culture is still perhaps a bit too eager to try to kill their way out of the challenges of counterinsurgency...

This is a crappy situation, but honestly I'm glad it's come out if it will help to further inform the debate on use of armed force in counterinsurgency operations.

EDIT TO ADD:

oldsoldier wrote: War by design is you kill and break things at a higher rate than your enemy, to the point where your enemy no longer has the desire to fight. Any other definition of war is idiotic.

Yup, and OS is right to point this flaw out.

Determining how free the troops can be on the trigger is one of the greatest challenges in modern conflicts. Western nations are extremely casualty adverse, and the troops on the ground obviously don't want to come home in a box, so the instinct is to apply the ROEs liberally when in any doubt. Strategically, though, accepting a slightly higher rate of friendly casualties may be necessary to mitigate the harm done to the very civilian population that ultimate success depends on. We have the same problems in Afghanistan.

Tough call.

Insurgencies are, by definition, in and of a civilian population. If you simply fight the insrugency, you fight the population itself, and you push more of them into the insurgents' arms. Experiences since 2001 have shown that this is ultimately self defeating. If you kill a five man insurgent cell, great, but if you also kill five civilians, those five combatants will be replaced and then some. 'collateral damage' as an operational concept simply cannot and must not be thought of the same way in a counterinsurgency as it is in a conventional war. A successful counterinsurgency must build more than it destroys, else the situation will simply continue to deteriorate. There is only a certain amount of building that can be done (of civil infrastructure and institutions), and only a certain amount of accidental destruction can be 'written off' by the positive efforts it seeks to enable. I would point to the end of the Irish Troubles as an example of a successful resolution of an insurgency.

Israel can maintain the status quo because they have a perpetual necessary presence in the conflict zone simply by virtue of the fact that it's on their own soil, or launched from immediate neighbours. Not comparable to Iraq or Afghanistan. The Israeli population will continue to support heavy handed operations in Gaza and the occupied territories simply because pulling out of the conflict in its entirety is not and never will be a viable option.

It is simply incorrect to claim that the brute force counterinsurgency 'worked' in Chechnya. as we've seen in this weeks news, that conflict is still ongoing. To this I would add the notable Russian failure in Afghanistan.

In an expeditionary operation that has taken on the characteristics of a counterinsurgency the lviing rooms and college campuses of Americans can be no more discounter than those of the civilian populations in the conflict zones. Variables cannot be isolated from each other in real conflicts. Political dissent may not be strategic convenient, and may make a good scapegoat for failings, but that does not decrease its relevance or the reality of its impact. Vietnam was also a combination of a conventional war and a counterinsurgency. The enemy was a true nation state in every sense of the word. This is not the case in Iraq or Afghanistan.

One of the better archetypes for ongoing counterinsurgencies is actually Algeria. The French attempted to use military force - fairly liberally - to crush an ideological insurgency that had strategically significant popular support from the population. They won in a tactical sense, but they lost strategically. They forced the insurgency under, for a while, but it came back with a vengeance and kicked them out.

Your thinking on this is the exact approach that was tried early in both of the ongoing conflicts, and it has been proven unsuccessful. Fighting is part and parcel of a counterinsurgency, by necessity, but it requires a whole of government approach with civil strategic objectives to ultimately be successful. 

 

Point taken.

Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if they used bullets sometimes.

Yes, really. With that note I have also only been shot by a team-mate once and it was a kid who clearly had no idea what was going on.

I've done the whole flank thing and still came out unharmed by friendly fire. I understand that when playing paintball your adrenalin does go up which can cause people to make stupid mistakes, but Im a pretty calm person on the field and I like to pick my shots instead of blindly firing away $100 worth of paint a day.

War is necessary. (my brother played on that team in MGO World Championships)

 

War is messy.

 

I saw multiple guns on the video 3:40. And the camera's did look like guns as well.

 

If I were at war, I would have acted the same as you don't expect to see guns mixed with cameras in a war zone.

 

 

 

you know, kill or be killed...

 

 

watching the video from the comfort of your home/office and then second guessing is pretty pathetic.

 

These guys put their lives on the line, and they saw a threat, good recourse is to eliminate the threat.

Whatever else this may be, it is not 'nothing'. Americans have the right to know how armed force is being used in their name in expeditionary military operations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

After the American ground elements arrive on scene they confirm finding an RPG round (17-18 minutes mark) and later on there is a request from higher to confirm whether the RPG round appears live or expended, to which they reply it was live. 

Piecing together the entire thing from what I could see and what I could figure out from the comms chatter, there was an American ground element (Hotel two-six) under fire in the immediate area, including both AK and RPG fire targeted at the Bradleys. The helicopters (Crazyhorse one-eight) responded to provide air cover along their axis of advance, and spotted a party of individuals, where they positively identified weapons, and further mistook the camera crew for more weapons.

They engaged the party of individuals, and then the van that came to pick up bodies.

Another ground element (Bushmaster) arrived on location with Bradleys, HMMVWs and trucks and formed a cordon around the area. They found the two injured kids, and also found a live RPG round that validates the determination of a positive threat.

I'm now chalking this one up to reporters hoping to get a good story by hanging out with insurgents who were preparing to ambush American forces, and got caught in the justified fire. At that point, a civilian van came up to try to render aid and to evacuate the injured, and they were engaged. I still cannot see that that was justified.

After this, Crazyhorse resumed patrolling, and spotted more individuals with AKs in the vicinity of the ground fighting. They followed them visually into a building, estimated 5-6 individuals in the building, and engaged it with three hellfires. On the initial hellfire shot it looks like a civilian passerby was definitely very close to the point of impact.

That's about all I've got. I'd need to know more about the events leading up to this to make any further meaningful estimation.

Uh... The actual names don't really represent anything. American units can basically pick their own callsign so long as they aren't already in use. The number is usually an element identifier. A 'six' at the end of it identifies the leader of an element, so 'Hotel two six' is the commander of 'Hotel two'. That might be either Two platoon of Hotel company, or the second company of a battalion with 'Hotel' as its radio identifier. The Americans do it a bit different from how we do; hopefully one of our American military members can help clear this up. It appeared that the 'Bushmaster' element that came in to the scene was roughly platoon strength, possibly with other assets. Hard to tell without an organizational chart.

 

Do we know they were good journalists? They were obviously with men intent on doing harm against Americans...

 

This points out the fact that most assume that the media is always on "your side" of a conflict. When there are ALWAYS two sides to a conflict and both sides have cheerleaders media members helping the "cause".

 

 

And we already know they hide behind children to make the US look bad. I wouldn't be surprised if they put the kids in the van ON PURPOSE to make the US look bad...

 

They hole up in temples and schools using children as shields because they know they will get the sympathy you guys are showing.

 

 

oh, the children...

 

What if they were planted to "protect" the van?

 

We just don't know, but it is surprising that no one even brought up that idea...

FreeEnterprise wrote: The most interesting aspect of this whole 5 page thread is the fact that everyone on her is assuming the "journalists" are good.   Do we know they were good journalists? They were obviously with men intent on doing harm against Americans...   This points out the fact that most assume that the media is always on "your side" of a conflict. When there are ALWAYS two sides to a conflict and both sides have cheerleaders media members helping the "cause".

The part of this under dispute is the second engagement, against the civilian van that arrived, found an injured man, and tried to rescue him. Note that the van arrived three and a half minutes after the initial engagement ceased. How far can you drive in a car in three and a half minutes? It's entirely plausible they had no idea what was going on.

Anyone who thinks engaging the van and the civilians in it - note that the occupants never had, moved or even touched weapons - is justified needs to review both the twelfth and eighteenth articles of the first Geneva convention.