"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."
It's terrible, of course, but I don't think anybody in the military intends things like this to happen (aside from a few legitimate psychopaths who use the chaos for their own ends). It's 'just' a horrifying side effect of using war and military power as a blunt instrument for statecraft.
Fuck that, the U.S. has a huge dominant army with superior technology and well trained personnel. They bombard a village because it's easy and effective.
Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village. That's a war crime, and someone should pay for that. And that person should not be Bradley Manning..
Military operations are not law enforcement. They aren't required to prevent all deaths other than combatants. I don't know where you draw the line on collateral damage, but to say that you can't kill any "innocents" is not practical.
Yes, by all means, let us not burden our efficiency at slaughtering our fellow man with morality!
Certainly that's an easy choice for you to make; you're not the one bearing the brunt of that decision.
More importantly, the issue at hand is that we don't know whether that decision was as clean-cut as you suggest, precisely because of the lack of transparency of our .gov and .mil.
Now, there are very sound opsec reasons for not making that information public, but when we are the foreign aggressor I believe that it is not an unreasonable burden to place on ourselves; indeed, it may help encourage caution when considering military adventures abroad.
Second, it was not 5 soldier lives versus 1 civilian, more likely it was 5 soldier lives versus 140 civilian lives.
Third, yes I myself would probably also make the same decision, favouring the lives of my friends over a bunch of foreigners who are probably on the enemies side.
That doesn't make it less wrong, if I was in that position, and I made that decision, I would still have to be tried for committing a war crime, because that's what it is.
A side that operates like this doesn't get to call itself the "Good Guys" or call its opponents "Terrorists".
Nobody made this decision. American soldiers were already engaged in the fight with large Taliban force and suffering casualties when the strike was called in. They most probably had no idea where civilians are, since it wasn't exactly home terrain for them (they were called in from Farah when Afghans came under attack) and finding out where civilians are in the conditions of active urban warfare is next to impossible. They only target that makes sense to call air strike on is where the shooting at you originates. Turned out, it was also where the civilians were hiding (read: Taliban was probably firing either from the same or from the nearby places). Common tactics, Hamas is Gaza places rocket launchers near mosques, on the roofs of hospitals and in the school yards for exactly the same reason. If the army new that, they could probably do something else - retreat, regroup and try to resolve it in some other way, but I don't see where could they know it from.
Is that true? I mean, it could be, but I'm wondering if anyone determined this to be the case, or is this just speculation based on descriptions of the video of the attack.
Seriously, how can justify these kind of mistakes when you have military satellites, surveillance drones, intelligence and all the stuff that goes with it. I don't buy in it being just "collateral damage".
Satellites and even drones don't have that kind of resolution.
And what kind of intelligence do you think they have? Even the NSA, even with PRISM, requires a warrant on specific foreign persons to be signed by judge to milk data on them, unless they're dumb enough to communicate over a net NSA is able to monitor. (They're not that dumb).
Do you think it's like FourSquare where KSM says he's checking into a wedding? It's not, and it's also not like they can send the white/black/Hispanic guy in on the ground to check it out.
"I am a macho cowboy who shoots first and questions later." is not an acceptable excuse.
GeoEye is one example of a commercial company with the capability of producing high res close up "real time" satellite information. http://www.geoeye.com/Industries/defense%26intelligence#defe...
These are low resolution (50cm res) sample photos that the public can gain access to, consider how close they can actually get for military application. http://www.geoeye.com/gallery#!/album/defense-solutions/exmo...
Papers on GeoEye's latest capabilities: http://www.digitalglobe.com/sites/default/files/DG-8SPECTRAL... http://www.digitalglobe.com/sites/default/files/MyDigitalGlo...
The 50cm res is (afaik) a commercial limitation; "Because of federal regulations, the publicly-available images are slightly lower resolution -- approximately 50 cm)" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090526183858.ht...
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"And what kind of intelligence do you think they have?" With the massive amount of data gathering combined with information from satellites (that we know about) like these, who knows...
"We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means." -- Carl von Clausewitz
Now, the past decade of war has been against enemies which do not have the authority, power, or will to be dealt with politically. The obvious question, then, is how we can be fighting a war--we are going after the criminals that hit us, no?
Even a defense wherein we say "Aha! But the Taliban and Saddam regime were opposed to us, politically!" is flawed, for we had successfully conducted combat operations against their regular forces and won by any reasonable definition of the phrase. We now find ourselves in a long and bloody occupation---for that is what this is, and an occupation is not a war.
To be even more blunt about this, we cannot simply ascribe the bombing of an Afghan village as an unfortunate side-effect of total war.
We are not engaged in total war, we are not engaging an enemy which has hills and manufacturing capacity worth our bombs and weapons--this is no Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Hiding behind "War is hell" at the very least requires us to be engaged in an honest war, and this we are not.
And maybe that was the case in 2001-2002, but this has morphed into a sort of hazy nation-building / police-action kind of thing. But the tools and methods more suited to total war are still being employed, with the same brutal side-effects.
That said, I submit that we were never engaged with an opponent capable of conducting meaningful total war against our nation, and as such any loss of civilian life is unjustifiable.
I don't think that would happen without someone leaking.
It does, if enabling the public to realize the reality of war (and more importantly, the fallibility of their beloved military) results a society that is less bloodthirsty and eager to start wars.
Huh?
http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=45870
I may not be able to sit in and vote for a commander but every appointment has the backing of an elected official that can be replaced.
As a civilian everything the military does is of interest to me and should be made open - your argument of "you may not understand it" is irrelevant. I want to know everything from how much they spend on toothpaste to how many civilians have died.
Do we really care which? Mens rea isn't required for drunk drivers, why should we demand it for dropping bombs on villages?
By the way, it's a really crappy air force that can't do an air strike with sleeping-gas bombs.
I daresay that would be a lot less effective than you might expect. See the Moscow theater hostage situation[1][2] for what happens when trying to use it on a fixed target with ground level access. Imagine how much harder that would be from an air-drop, and the concentration gradient you'd end up with. Individual dispensers, cluster-bomb style might help a bit, but I still think you'd end up killing anyone close-by if you wanted it strong enough to permeate buildings.
Calling in a heavy smoke/CS drop and then retreating might be a sensible option, although I don't think there's nearly enough (public) information for anyone to judge definitively on the correct course of action in this instance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
If "effective" includes "not killing innocent civilians" then sleeping gas would work much better than what they are dropping now.
If smoke or CS would work better, well it's the military's responsibility, not mine, to the the R&D to pick the right tool to protect civilians as required by law.
It doesn't look like they give a fuck.
Precisely. If anything, it's a much more easily controlled environment for gas diffusion, and allowed almost immediate entry by the special forces to clear the area. Even then, there were significant hostage fatalities (although in a large part due to medical staff not being timely informed of the nature of the gas, or provided with the antidote)
Achieving that level of consistency of dose (enough to work, not enough to kill) in a rural village environment, via air-dropped containers, is, IMO, utterly impossible.
I'm arguing against your suggestion of 'sleeping gas bombs' only, not that the indiscriminate bombing is/was the correct choice.
In addition, R&D only determines what you will have available maybe some time in the future. If you're in combat right now, you don't have the luxury of waiting 3-5 years for promising test-bench stuff to make it to your rucksack/support units.
If all you have is high-explosives, eventually everything looks like rubble.
Are you kidding me? Vietnam ended forty years ago!
They've had decades to come up with something better.
They just don't give a fuck about civilians.
Hell, they don't even care that much about US grunts, if the "hillbilly armour" and servicewoman-rape scandals are anything to go by.
There are chemicals, of course, that can cause loss of consciousness, but any that causes loss long enough to be effective against the force of 400 people hiding in urban setting, would kill most of the civilians. It's not random that when the human is anesthetized it is done in controlled setting by an experienced doctor with very precise mixture of chemicals - it is very dangerous to do it and exceeding dosage could be lethal or cause permanent harm. Military weapon can not adhere to such dose requirements so it will be either ineffective or extremely dangerous.
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
This was the easiest setting - everybody in one enclosed building and civilians can be treated within minutes after the attack is done. Imagine doing this in a complex urban setting, with multiple buildings, with 10 times as much enemies, where both enemy and civilians can be anywhere. It's just impossible to do without killing everybody and leaving the place a chemical wasteland.
And, of course, on top of that, if US military does it once, Talibans get gas masks. But civilians would not, so the only effect would be killing civilians.
What was the weasel word google and facebook were, well, are relying on?
Oh yes "direct".
How would I say the truth?
The world is a beautiful and amazing place full of divinely creative and wonderful humans. We all need to work together toward a singular goal: evolving our civilization and exploring the truths of existence and the universe. We should see that we are a singular species on this planet that has evolved to a level of intelligence that allows us to explore the wider universe around us and gaining understanding and ultimately wisdom of this universe, existence and ourselves should be our cohesive, singular goal.
Tell that to the Taliban.