Thread: Downright disturbing US military behavior

Originally Posted by Syme

Are you saying that when attack aircraft spot enemy troops on the ground, they have a moral obligation to move within range of enemy counter-fire before engaging those targets, even if they could engage them from a safe distance?

I'm saying that it'd have been a super idea to actually examine the targets more (since they seemed completely oblivious to a helicopter quite far away) rather than immediately requesting to kill them because:

A. Not doing so could entail the murder of multiple civilians and no actual insurgents killed.
B. The helicopter was safe from being hit.
C. It's a city in Iraq and it's an insurgency. Unless you're in the mountain regions you shouldn't assume that everyone is a insurgent just because you think they may be carrying weapons.

You're presenting a strawman.

The group that was engaged in the video was about a dozen men with "five or six" AKs and at least one RPG. It's not absurd to identity a group thus armed as a group of combatants, especially since irregular combatant units often include several unarmed men with jobs such as carrying extra ammo and so forth. So let's stay focused on what actually happened instead of flying off with silly questions like "well would it have been okay to fire if there were 50 guys and only one had a weapon?!"

I'm pretty sure the US Military operates (theoretically, at least) on the assumption that the murder of innocent civilians is frowned upon. Even if one were to concede that it was a totally awesome idea to open fire on a bunch of people standing around nonchalantly on a hunch that they may be packin' heat, the successive attacks on civilians in a truck picking up the wounded is not at all defensible.

You'd think that members of the military who criticize/condemn the soldiers in the video would know a bit more than apologists for senseless killings, but yeah.

The SA posts I quoted weren't necessarily meant to be "intelligent." I just found them amusing. You're free to glance at the rest of the thread yourself.