mikkel wrote:
Not as far as I can tell. I didn't say anything about the difficulties of waging war in a city. I didn't argue, not do I care whether or not this kind of action falls under the rules of engagement, or whether or not it is permitted in war. All I said was that if you can't fight a war in a city without this kind of action being sanctioned and perfectly acceptable, then I don't think you should be doing it. I realise that he disagrees with me, but he didn't address anything I said.
You ask for the impossible. Any kind of urban warfare you find unacceptable, but that is what constitutes warfare in the present day. Now if you want to say that we shouldn't have wars at all,
that would be hilarious.
mikkel wrote:
Flaming_Maniac wrote:
mikkel wrote:
Flaming_Maniac wrote:
War necessitates command decisions.
Yes. Show me where I said anything contrary to this.
mikkel wrote:
What I said was that if you can't do it without shooting first and asking questions later, then don't do it at all.
These instances of "shooting first ask questions later" are clearly command decisions. You can't ask the insurgents to kindly hold up all of their weapons that could be a threat to American personnel so that they may be engaged.
Disagreeing with a specific type of warfare that leads to a specific 'command decision' in a specific situation is not at all the same as arguing that war in general doesn't necessitate 'command decisions'. Or do you disagree?
Yes, it is the same thing. Command decisions are by definition the best judgment of the most senior person able to make and carry out a decision. You can't say you see the necessity of command decision in all but some cases, because command decision is defined by the possibly imperfect decision in
all cases. It would be a command decision to decide what is to be decided on the field and what is not to be - nonsense.
mikkel wrote:
Flaming_Maniac wrote:
mikkel wrote:
What counts as shooting first is seeing a civilian truck stopping in the middle of a busy city, men coming out of it to tend to an injured man on the side of the street, and then opening fire. Asking for permission to fire from someone who only knows what you're telling him does not constitute 'asking questions'.
Why not? The press should be informing the Army as to their whereabouts. The handlers of the Apache explicitly stated no friendlies were in the area before the Apache opened fire. Command was given accurate information as to the weapons the people were carrying, and as far as the U.S. armed forces knew there were no allies in the area. They could have had a video feed and the exact same decision would have been made. It's not like the pilots lied about anything.
I would agree with you entirely if we were talking about war waged on a battlefield where civilian encounters would be the exception, not the norm. I just can't really agree that merely establishing that no friendlies are in the area constitutes due diligence on establishing legitimate targets in a city where the civilian population outnumbers the number of combatants on both sides of the conflict by more than a thousand percent. Call me a hippie, call me an idealist, but it's just not something I see as being reasonable.
Hanging around people with weapons that mean to do harm to the big boys on the block is hazardous to your health. I find the assumption that people with weapons or people in the immediate vicinity of people with weapons during a war intend to use them a very easy one to make.