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Notes -
Being hamstrung by dumb rules of engagement is a common complaint of GWOT veterans.
Jocko had a short solo episode in response to the Kirk shooting where he discussed this. He offered an example where his unit had received intel that a notorious bad guy was going to be at a certain time and place and wanted to take him out. They couldn’t do this on their own since the RoE demanded that someone display hostile intent. Basically if the guy didn’t pick up a weapon, then he wasn’t fair game. And he was leadership and not dumb, so he probably wouldn’t pick up a weapon.
They needed a declaration from higher ups, I think flag officers, that this man was to be considered hostile. With such a declaration they could engage him without him displaying any hostile intent. They ran it up the flagpole and were denied.
The Kirk link was that they accepted the decision, Americans abide rule of law, and that’s a good thing. It’s a bad thing that one guy on his own got to declare Kirk hostile and take him out.
Who should have authority to order executions? It makes sense to push that up to the higher ups. Maybe the burden of evidence could be lower if they simply wanted to arrest him, although tons of people got thrown into military prisons for no good reason in afghanistan.
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Imagine going half way around the world to someone else's home and complaining that you can't commit more war crimes against locals who never at any point asked you to be there.
The GWOT failed because they failed at building alliances with locals and getting support. Not a single Afghan wanted to defend Kabul. The Afghan national army had zero motivation and nobody in Afghanistan believed in the occupation regime. Killing more Afghans would not have strengthened their enthusiasm for a corrupt regime.
Rather than killing more villagers they would have needed troops that spent years in villages building relations with locals and working on creating alliances with local figures. More gung ho recent arrivals from Texas who are trigger happy and want to go out and slaughter locals would have turned into a Vietnam scale fiasco.
I don’t think this is responding to anything I had posted.
In the example Jocko had shared the notorious bad guy was hated by locals. He was the kind of guy who would torture and kill your whole family if he suspected you were collaborating with coalition forces.
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