Quote:
Originally Posted by HaplessOperator
You wouldn't believe some of the crazy-ass RoE we were dealing with at certain times and locations.
An example: In Al Anbar, 2005, for a significant part of the year in the vicinity of the city of Karmah, we were prohibited from pre-emptively engaging individuals carrying obvious heavy weapons with ammunition. PK machine gun, RPG, M69 or D-37 mortar, doesn't matter, can't shoot them, doesn't matter if they see you, start running, take up positions, can't shoot them, no firing until they engage you first.
Those might be poor farmers on their way to hand those weapons in for buybacks, you see.
Almost universally, they were simply transporting them to another location for hiding away, protected by the aegis of dumbass RoE.
I'd argue that no one benefits, really, but merely that it's next to impossible to militarily force a change of culture without undertaking utterly repugnant actions. It's also not really what a military is built to do, and certainly not with two hands tied behind your back and both balls taped to one leg.
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I'd argue that there are certain groups of people that profit more from long, failed wars than short, successful wars. Dumb ROEs get established because of "mission accomplished" turning a war into a "peacekeeping op" where no one told the other side and where it's a bad look if we blow up "farmers" who are handing in their weapons for buy backs.
Additionally, I won't ever say the Taliban were the good guys, but they certainly did put a crimp in things like Afghan opium production and Man Love Thursday, which both exploded back again after the US and the Northern Alliance temporarily kicked the Taliban out into Pakistan. In effect, the US military became the security force for illicit Afghan opium farming and heroin production for 20 years. Given the fairly rich legacy of certain US governmental organizations in the trafficking of narcotics, I would argue this wasn't exactly accidental.