Please, military strategists, get your advice from DeepT.
Are we winning yet?
LK: thanks for weighing in. You did a better job of articulating what was bothering me than I did: that this is a subversion of the military’s conventional rules of engagement for at best questionable rationales and negligible results - and at worst something outright illegal. I’m also concerned about the ethical slippery slope it places our troops on (a la Abu Ghraib): once you have the People On High saying a questionable tactic like this is totally kosher, it erodes a conventional soldier’s understanding of what they should or shouldn’t do in the field. So then you have a few soldiers go a little too far and they’re made to take the fall, while the ones who put them on that downward spiral get off scot-free.
There’s also the question of who authorized this tactic. The Post said it came from the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group. I can’t imagine, say, a captain or major in the field in Iraq woke up one morning and said, “Screw the regs - let’s borrow a page from Wile E. Coyote and go bag some Road Runners!”
It’s impossible for me to say what units are responsive to that sort of conditioning. I think a degradation of our standards is inevitable over time, but I also think slippery slopes do not accurately describe the primary means military tactics are dispersed throughout the US military.
There’s also the question of who authorized this tactic. The Post said it came from the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group. I can’t imagine, say, a captain or major in the field in Iraq woke up one morning and said, “Screw the regs - let’s borrow a page from Wile E. Coyote and go bag some Road Runners!”
There is that question. There is also the question of what the AWG provided as a recommendation and what that was turned into in the field. Sometimes the chain of command structure for such an idea looks an awful lot like a game of telephone, with the final recipient going “They want us to WHAT? Ah, fuck it. Ok here’s the way we can implement this madness and satisfy their demands with minimal risk to ourselves”.
One month later…
So, how’s that program going?
OH, the program. GREAT. We’ve greased a bunch of them. Army Snipers HOOAH!
Actually, we’re going to need to ask you a few questions about that…
I smell a new episode storyline~~!