We were defeated in Vietnam by the television news; in Iraq, it will be the lawyers.
Jon over at Laconic Blog has an interesting post on the rules of engagement, which govern our troops in Iraq. Known as “ROE” in milspeak, these rules determine when you can shoot and we you cannot. He finds the ROE confusing and restrictive.
He’s not the only one. One U.S. Marine Corps officer complained to me that it was hard to get his men to fire on a car that had burst through the barricades and was rushing toward them. It could be a car bomber or simply a drunk Iraqi. The Marines, he said, were afraid to fire for a few seconds. Finally, they did. A carload of insurgents were killed. Later, he asked his men why they had hesitated. After non-answers, one said that he didn’t want some JAG to come by a few weeks from now and say they shot the wrong guys. Immediately, the others agreed with this view.
What disturbed the officer was the bigger picture. Marines in their early 20s don’t think that they are going to die or at least discount the net present value of that risk. But their hesitation in battle–created by a lawyerly ROE–could kill them.
Other combat officers that I have talked to have said that the terrorists have learned the loopholes in the ROE. They will shoot at U.S. forces and then drop their guns. In one version of the ROE, you cannot a enemy who has put aside his weapon. Of course, the terrorists wait until the humvee has passed, pick up their guns, and spray its rear with automatic fire.
If the Democrat-led Congress is serious about oversight, it could start with hearings that drag in the lawyers that wrote the ROE. The opening question: Do you know that your rules are killing our men?
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4 Comments
1. David Nicholas:This Rules of Engagement argument has been aggravating me for several weeks now. Frankly I’ve refrained from posting because what I’m going to say won’t be very popular, and I’m like most other people, I don’t like to be yelled at. Problem is, the Marines and Army guys who complain about the restrictive Rules of Engagement don’t understand what they’re talking about.
First, let’s go to the actual incident Richard recounted. I can’t (and don’t) believe that the incident was outside the current ROE. The officer quoted said that the soldiers feared being questioned by “some JAG guy” which could happen after *any* shooting. There’s no clear explanation, here, of how the ROE caused this incident, or how if they were loosened this would change things (unless we’re simply going to suspend all JAG investigations into shootings in Iraq regardless of circumstances–something I doubt anyone serious would advocate).
The larger issue, though, is one that traces back to the Viet Nam War. In that conflict, which was mismanaged top to bottom, soldiers, especially senior generals, fostered the idea that our defeat was the fault of “the politicians” who imposed rules on the American military which were unreasonable, unprecedented, and which hampered our war effort to the point of crippling it. All of this was supposedly done to protect civilians who, as a result, wound up enslaved in a Communist country instead, a fate not particularly desirable.
The problem with the above argument is that it absolves the Army and Marines of any responsibility as to the outcome of the war. “The politicians” did impose rules, and some of them were unreasonable, but as various soldiers showed in different ways (eg David Hackworth, Harry Summers) the enemy *could* be fought, and defeated, even within the parameters put forward by the higher-ups. Frankly, the War in Viet Nam was so messed up there’s blame enough to go around to all the interested parties.
This brings us back around to Iraq. We seem to have spent the last 30+ years trying to forget everything we learned, however incoherently or incompletely, in Viet Nam. As a result, we’re not refighting the war (in terms of casualties for instance, or politically in that the Iraqis have an elected government, something we never managed in Viet Nam) but we’re finding new ways to inflict pain on ourselves. Though the terms victory and defeat are somewhat flexible in definition you can hardly say we’re winning. Defeat is harder to judge. Our army is large enough that we can’t lose, at the level of the insurgents occupying Washington and imposing peace terms on us the way we did to the Germans at the end of World War II.
That being said, what do we need to do in order to *win* in Iraq? Victory in a counterinsurgency looks different from victory in a conventional war. You don’t occupy the enemy capitol (they don’t have one), you don’t defeat the last remnants of their army (it doesn’t really exist), you don’t march people off to a POW camp, then release them (there’s nowhere to release them to). Instead, what happens is much more similar to what’s happened in New York City in the last 20 years or so: the murder rate has dropped, and things have gotten quieter. It seems silly, but *that’s* victory, and it’s what we need.
Bill Bradley has a post on Pajamas where he discusses David Petraeus’ appointment as the new Army chief in Iraq. Bradley also comments on Petraeus’ writing of the Army’s new counterinsurgency Field Manual, and summarizes it as “Community Policing”. Fact of the matter is, the line between warfare and law enforcement is blurring, and this is something we need to recognize. The war on Terror isn’t going to be won by a tank rumbling down the street; much more likely, it’ll be when the municipal services work, and people report thugs because they want peace and quiet.
Jan 27, 2007 - 5:49 pm 2. MarcH:Rich,
Thank you for this post. I hope that it is widely linked and discussed even though it’s “only” a short blog post.
It’s important because it introduces the meme that the same type of P.C. hyper-legalism which has damaged police work in U.S. cities is now spreading to the military.
Jan 27, 2007 - 7:28 pm 3. Chip:“Shoot back!”
– Tom Sizemore as Lt. Col. Danny McKnight in Blackhawk Down
Jan 28, 2007 - 3:20 am 4. max:As a contractor,one of our gravel trucks was in line waiting to clear a gate into Camp Victory. A white Toyota sedan races up,someone throws something under the truck,our guys jump out and run to the checkpoint gate, truck blows up as they point out the Toyota to the soldiers, WHO DON’T SHOOT AT IT !
Result? Same car came back that afternoon and did it again.
Feb 2, 2007 - 5:13 pm