A lot of online commenters make a big deal out of the military's rules of engagement and how they're "more strict" than police.
What they don' tell you (or don't know) is that in Iraq, US soldiers were often given engagement rules like "from this point on the map onward, shoot anything that moves."
In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.
Is this your personal experience? Where did you get this from? This isn't my experience having done OEF 02/OIF 03 as an 11b in the 82nd, and I was in the follow on forces for both wars so I saw a pretty loose ROE in both countries.
The guys that served after 08 would have no idea what you're even talking about because their ROE was extremely restrictive, essentially they had to be shot at first and use of indirect fire required multiple layers of permission.
https://www.msf.org/attack-kunduz-trauma-centre-internationa...
Any time the military kills a terrorist, a certain group of people will say "You monster! He had kids for God sakes! Look at these pictures of his family! He never got a fair trial!" When a genuine fuckup happens, these same people naturally jump on the opportunity and criticize endlessly. The American population is especially apt for this kind of behavior.
The last problem the American people have is that they're too anti-war. It's literally the opposite.
Not that that makes this ok, but it does put it in the category of "error", not deliberate targeting of civilians (if you believe that narrative, of course).
Not sure how well that aged now that the US essentially took all the money from the Afghan central bank.
Also, there have been leaked documents showing that the US would delibrately target ambulances and civilian infrastructure. I don't understand why anybody would take the US military's word as gospel without substantial evidence (and no, apologising and paying reparations after controversy is not compelling evidence that these actions were not delibrate).
> In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.
I can speak to this though, I was in Afghanistan in 2011-2012. It was my job to aid troops in getting drone and air support. Can you be specific about who operated the drones you're mentioning? In the DOD we required three levels of verification to occur; every request started with "troops in contact" which requires that not only are troops engaged, but they have to be able to demonstrate that they cannot move (eg: "we are dead in the water if we sit here.") In the midst of this they had to be able to concisely define the target, usually with a building grid, but also describing the target with orientation (trees, other objects, etc), and third someone like me had to verify all of those facts by feeds, radio, binoculars, or sight on seen to pass order to an Air Officer who would design a proposal, which usually got passed all the way up to regimental office. As far as I know, for CentCom under Mattis this was not unusual - if provably difficult.
With respect to ROE, the ROE in Iraq and Afghanistan were different. The one in Afghanistan required you be shot at in order to engage. This resulted in an abundance of injured or mamed troops, because the way the military does operations require them to blanket and leaflet towns they're going to invade. So yes, the Taliban usually knows you're coming weeks in advance, and the townspeople who aren't Taliban affiliated have left.
That's not to justify, "This area is a free for all", and doesn't sound much like the military I know.
Edit: I do highly support the idea of boots on the ground over drones. We never had any missed targets that I was aware of and BDAs (battle damage assessments) were always accurate to our desired outcome in my experience. That said, the reliance on drones in areas where we couldn't bring artillery created a real race for resources, which is where you get stories like Dakota Meyers.
Edit:
Last one, I promise.
> Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war.
This is junk. War is messy, it's the byproduct of deplomacy breaking down. It's on everyone who has experienced the theater of war to talk about how the rules were or were not applied. Sometimes you may not like the answer that results in an exception, but it's useful for warrior to understand the baseline reality that they will face and expect - I say this on either side, whether you're a US troop or a warrior in the Taliban. These laws come into conflict in complicated ways many times. One classical example:
When I first learned to shoot the M2 (which is a 50 caliber machine gun) I learned you cannot shoot them at people. You can, howver, use them to assault vehicle born targets, targets with necessary distance, targets behind cover, targets using armor, etc... When you have a vehicle loaded down with explosives racing through a winding ingress point, knowing in all likelihood of they succeed that another attack is imminent, do you debate the law of land and warfare or do you zero in on the engine block and let fate take it's course?
But then you get things like this which seem to be operating under different rules.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam....
"In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam [...] despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians"
When people speak in generalities it makes conversation vague but entertaining. It doesn't differentiate between policies that work and ones that don't. eg: most civilians don't understand the difference between this graph: DOD <> State Department <> SOCOM.
I'm not trying to shade the person that responded to me, but I think this is a learning opportunity. They clearly know very little about what they're talking about in general, but it sounds like they've heard detailed specific stories and applied it to the wider concept. This is entertaining, maybe to some (to me it's not, I don't like being cast as a war criminal by presumption), but utterly lacking in information to learn from (future policy) or worth remembering (history). Instead, it's only function is divisiveness and furor.
War won't stop any time soon and warrior culture needs to go in existing so long as war is constant so that we continue to fight wars with discipline and some amount of honor. If you remove information and history in favor of conjecture, we can do neither.
More specifically, there's a lot of stories I could tell about having to interact in near-proximity to SOCOM that may shed light on why strange things seem to happen with them so often. That said, if I'm spending all my time trying to understand if said criticism also involves me (in a totally different department, whose acting on totally different policies) then that information will never make it to the reader because my line is busy.
Also, I'll leave you with this: There's a lot we don't know about the Korean War and Vietnam (aside from video, which isn't that great). It's largely because veterans refused to share their stories, officially or unofficially. If I, in order to share anything, have to overcome that I am a monster in your mind first, I probably won't speak. When you accuse someone of war crimes it's not a joke, and let's be real - that is exactly what many people casually do when talking about war. The realities on the ground at war are informed by policy and real-world split second decision making which is reinforced by training. It's invaluable that we have an atmosphere where people are understanding and discerning between fact and fiction if we're ever to do things better.
I certainly don't, at least inasmuch as it is a surprise to learn there are policy differences between DOD and SOCOM, which I understand to be one of its constituent parts, and also as a military command not given latitude to set policy in ways that would conflict with any cabinet department. I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly there, though, because my own perspective is limited.
I was aware the State Department and DOD are different departments with their own agendas which to say the least don't always run side by side, but it's news to me that State operates any weapons systems, as you seem to be saying they do. Again assuming I've understood you correctly here, that is also quite surprising, and on both points I'd be obliged for any references you could point me to.
> there's a lot of stories I could tell about having to interact in near-proximity to SOCOM that may shed light on why strange things seem to happen with them so often
Not that I'd blame you for continuing to demur, but I'd be interested to hear any such stories you find yourself inclined to tell. As you accurately note, there's a learning opportunity here; however undesirable warfare may be, as you also note and as anyone who reads the headlines should know, it is not going anywhere any time soon. That being so, I'd like to know more accurately if I can how my country goes about it, the better to understand what's happening today and try to predict what might happen tomorrow.
Which bits of the linked news article were fiction?
If folks just walk around with overly broad criticisms such as "war bad" then folks won't listen.
Whatever they said is irrelevant. We were drone-striking weddings. For a decade.
In a country with no functioning police/military, carrying an AK was considered enough to make you a combatant.
Imagine if Canada invaded the US and decided that a couple of guys with hunting rifles in a pickup truck riding back from a hunting area were "enemy combatants."
The State Department using drones to bomb weddings and the policy that allows it is not congruent to the policy that allows a Marine in the ground to declare "troops in contact" and perform a 9-line. They're informed by very different things.
The key differentiator in my mind is one policy that works and one policy that clearly doesn't because I keep reading about it in the news. If you want a policy changed so bad, why is pointing out who the policy rests with - and an example of a similar policy that works - so problematic to you?
KennyBlanken, who I replied to, mixed the facts of several incidents into one and presented them as a singular coherent idea. I think I'm allowed to dissect an argument on a public forum, if I so see fit, at that point.
ROE doesn't apply to drones, it applies to troops on the ground. Drones are usually acting in a couple capacities (this is not dogma, just my experience)
1. Intel gathering
2. Troop support
3. intelligence resources
Intelligence resources, and all things State Department, would fly cleanly outside of DOD mandates or procedures. To my knowledge, they have their own set of criteria that was very different from what I had to abide by.
That's not true though, .50 has never had an issue being used on an antipersonnel role