President Bush continues to turn his back on those American who are brave and courageous and patriotic. Marines, Border Patrol in jail and terrorists and illegals free.
Here are some points on our rules of engagement.....
Posted by TomasUSMC to SandRat
On News/Activism 02/12/2007 2:12:54 AM EST · 15 of 16
From a Marine in Anbar: “A lot of us feel like we have our hands tied behind our back,” says Cpl. Peter Mattice, of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. “In Fallujah, [insurgents] know our [rules of engagement] - they know when to stop, just before we engage.”
From a unnamed Soldier: “I’m hesitant to do the job I was trained for. I don’t want to return fire because I might be on CNN the next day. The hardest thing for a soldier to do, despite all his training, is to return fire when he is fired upon.”
From an NCO in Kirkuk: You make the wrong move and kill civilians though, you not only have to live with the mistake, but you will be ridiculed unmercifully by the media/big army. You will be buried in proceedings and paperwork the remainder of your deployment, and you will not be the same. Your buddies will be affected as well. Cpl. X will see how bad it could be to make the wrong decision, and will hesitate just a hair too long when there is a real threat… and more men will die. The fear of failure leads to hesitation, and hesitation in war is a lesser form of suicide.
From an NCO in Anbar: So yes, from the grunts on the field perspective … the ROE is vague and limiting. And every time “violations” of the ROE came up it caused our soldiers and marines to question their actions and sometimes cause casualties. If you look up the case of the [unit redacted] Soldier from the [location redacted] region you will see an excellent example. The [unit redacted] Soldiers started pulling back after that, and even though he eventually had the charges dropped it caused problems throughout the entire Battalion.
And without going into specifics if you look at [date redacted] incident when we lost two Marine pilots and an Army Lt north of [location redacted] you will see another example of how fear of ROE kept us from hitting an enemy until after he had fired at us (and led to a downed helo and an IEDed hummer). And it was almost much worse. We dropped two 500 lb bombs a little later and stopped the insurgents from a planned attack that might have led to even more deaths. And we almost didn’t do that because of ROE.
The problem is that these men and women are expected to perform warfighting duties with a police officer’s ROE. Escalation of force, indeed. In war, there is no escalation of force. There is a complete destruction of those opposing the accomplishment of the assigned mission, in this case, an Iraq free of terrorists and murderers. It is not possible to fight a war without hurting people’s feelings. The first rule of war is that people die; sad but true. And as long as our troops are stuck with these ROE, violations of which are exploited by the enemy, they will contiune to die. We need to put some of these politicians in uniform and make them walk patrols. Wanna bet things would change then?
Comment by Mike — December 6, 2006 @ 2:34 am
Well what do you know. There really are chickenhawks and they’re all in the Pentagon. What a surprise.
Here’s a tip. If you cannot give your soldiers a true combat ROE then yes, by all means, pull them out. They don’t belong there and it is immoral to put them in harms way.
It may not be Vietnam II but it sure is starting to look like Beirut redux.
Comment by wlpeak — December 6, 2006 @ 8:20 am
As discussed in Newsweek’s expose on Marine Captain Rob Secher, Captain Secher wrote home that “any time an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force.”
In order to ensure that the additional combat troops being deployed to Iraq can achieve their objectives, we must change the current restrictive rules of engagement (ROEs) under which they are forced to operate. The current ROEs for Baghdad — including Sadr City, home of the Mahdi Army — have seven incremental steps that must be satisfied before our troops can take the gloves off and engage the enemy with appropriate violence of action.
You must feel a direct threat to you or your team.
You must clearly see a threat.
That threat must be identified.
The team leader must concur that there is an identified threat.
The team leader must feel that the situation is one of life or death.
There must be minimal or no collateral risk.
Only then can the team leader clear the engagement.
.............
This is how you lose a war.
AAARRRGGGHHHH!