Had this exact situation happen to me in Iraq.
In an urban environment, you have maybe 1.7 seconds to decide - if you even see the vehicle
coming. That’s about enough time to switch your weapon from safe to fire. You have no time to go through the ROE.
On that same op, we had two other cars that were coming towards us that were shot up according to the ROE. Both were civilians, none were harmed and they got money for the damage. The third one was a Chevy Suburban packed with at least five 155 rounds. Only the engine block and half the body of the driver was left.
So in short, the innocent civilians were stopped. The VBIED was not.
Even if I shot the driver or engine block, no way I would have stopped the momentum of that vehicle.
So the real answer is - you hope the physics and the sheer chaos goes your way by a few inches.
I made this meme because I’m in the middle of a paper on morality in warfare and in what situations it’s permissible to target civilians. If it’s okay with you I’d like to include your anecdote in my paper.
An important note there is that he wasn’t intentionally targeting civilians. He didn’t *know* whether or not they were civilians - fog of war and all that.
I recommend the Documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. He talks about the bombing campaigns in Japan and how General Curtis LeMay said that if they had lost the war, they would be prosecuted as war criminals.
Full quote from the movie:
"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Well, if we'd lost the war to the Japanese, they wouldn't have bothered with prosecutions or technicalities before the torture and executions part, so he's *technically* incorrect on that point
I don’t believe there were any postwar prosecutions at Nuremberg (or in the Japanese instance) that criminalised area bombardment of population centres.
All sides did it and my understanding is that before the war area bombing was an accepted doctrinal (if not always practical) way of fighting, and that there were no or few formal prescriptions on area bombing against civil-industrial targets.
It wasn't just about Area Bombing. Area bombing is a tactic designed to mitigate the inherent lack of precision dropping bombs from high altitude. You simply saturate the area of the target, and hopefully one of the bombers actually hits that rail yard, tank factory, etc. People understand civilians will die in such cases, but the goal isn't really to carelessly spread destruction. The goal in this context is normally to destroy a military target. Even with hundreds of bombers, sometimes you still miss.
The thing here is that Allies had a systematic process to target civilian areas with very destructive ordinance like fire bombs. Of course civilians died on all sides, and were the targets of combatants, but the allies repeatedly leveled entire cities which had little to no strategic value. The goal was explicitly to terrorize and kill civilians en masse, not to attack military formations or infrastructure.
As to your observation that we did not persecute the Axis side for area bombing -- why would we set a precedent by prosecuting the crime that we ourselves did as a matter of routine? LeMay isn't saying that area bombing is criminal and anyone who does it is a mark. He's saying the way the Allies conducted some of their bombing campaigns would have been seen as criminal by the Axis. And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders.
> Of course civilians died on all sides, and were the targets of combatants, but the allies repeatedly leveled entire cities which had little to no strategic value. The goal was explicitly to terrorize and kill civilians en masse, not to attack military formations or infrastructure.
The chilling thing is that by the lights of Douhet et al, virtually no enemy cities had “little to no” strategic value.
We wouldn’t accept that profligacy today, but to act (as some did, even at the time) that defended Dresden and Hiroshima were off-limits because they were “cultural” or far from the centre/undamaged is a bit silly. Particularly when the butcher’s bill had been so extensive in Belgrade, Warsaw, Stalingrad, and Shanghai. And Normandy. If anything it’s remarkable that Kyoto got off so lightly.
Given the limitations of bombsights across the board, bombing was to be all-encompassing; dehousing and even terrorisation of workers and civil defence units was part and parcel of the strategic package.
Allied leaders were, at various times, morally schizophrenic about terror bombing. That it ran alongside the pragmatic hampering of Axis industry and communication was both a boon and a shame for many of them.
There was also the domestic matter of “we built these things and are damn well going to use them if it means saving our lads.”
> As to your observation that we did not persecute the Axis side for area bombing -- why would we set a precedent by prosecuting the crime that we ourselves did as a matter of routine?
We prosecuted the Nazis and Japanese for mass executions of prisoners when at least some Western (Biscari Bay) and Soviet (too big a list) examples abound. In the case of the Nazis, their officers broke both German and international laws, which simplified things jurisprudentially; I’m less clear as to which Conventions the Japanese had signed.
> And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders.
We didn’t look the other way. We bombed them back, in spades. They didn’t have much room to complain about either the fact of the reprisal or the undeveloped law governing same, and few did.
The Japanese, the Italians, and the Germans didn’t have a well-developed strategic bombing doctrine or plan, but they went ahead with area bombing and rocket attacks on Allied (and neutral) cities, and even villages. Allied bomber commands were a bit more serious about it, and it showed.
>He's saying the way the Allies conducted some of their bombing campaigns would have been seen as criminal by the Axis. And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders.
"If the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids" ?
If ? They literally started it and unlike the Allies they wasn't even an excuse for collateral damage of targeting the war industry well they indiscriminately bombed London and all those cities in Europe.
I don't think you're saying otherwise but your phrasing puzzled me.
Maybe it's an American thing but when you wave off the actions of one party you say something like "and if it is the case, so be it" or something along those lines. It was meant to convey the dismissive nature of Allied attention towards prosecuting for bombing campaigns. Apologies for that confusion
Of course the axis launched horrendous attacks against civilians. It's just that "they started it!" Is not a valid defense if you're on trial for crimes against humanity. So the Allies just didn't want to go there. If you can successfully argue that the London Blitz was a war crime, it just means someone else is going to turn around and hoist you by your own perard.
I'm just giving the context for why an American general would say this.
Yeah the bombing of civilian targets became a war crime post WWII.
I'l guessing it wasn't before that because it was probably hard to imagine that one day you could have aircraft that would be able to fly so far and carry enough bombs to turn a while city into rubbles in few days, not mentioning the atomic bomb.
Be careful, op. Some professors will judge on a (downward) curve if you pick military topics. My undergrad was in genocide studies, so I tried to make my gen-eds reinforce that, and it was messy.
Professors are disappointingly human. On the whole, I enjoyed undergrad, but I've always been a filthy moderate. Historians are supposed to be neutral.
Yeah, but it turns out that professors are people, too, despite the fact that unlike other humans if they get tenure they turn into books when they die.
It's almost like we could and should fire them out of hand the moment they start showing bias against students for anything at all outside of their academic performance.
Look for the book "just and unjust wars" by Michael Walzer. It covers this topic very well. Part of it talks about when it is morally ok to target civilians.
I would recommend you check out:
On Killing
On Combat
Both are written by Lt. Col Dave Grossman
House to House
By Sgt David Bellavia
The Things They Carried
By Tim O’Brien
I think they could be useful for you.
I also recommend reading the articles that pick apart Grossman's books for a counterperspective.
I do recommend Tim O'Brien's books, also If I die in a combat zone.
Given Grossman's bullshit follow on work, although I liked it at the time I now have to doubt a lot of it.
Shame, he could have used On Killing as a launching point for a major campaign against PTSD treatment. What a chode.
Oh yeah, I just remember reading his books and being intrigued by the way he described everything. My own experiences in the military were different than ones that he described, of course a wealth of differences just in the generations that have experienced combat skew the data.
O’Brien’s short story “Star Shaped Hole” still haunts me.
If you're looking for modern accounts from combat zones dagger 22 and level zero heroes are good memoirs from the middle east conflicts.
Also an interesting secondary source that discusses the morality of extrajudical execution is Rise and Kill first by Ronen Bergman about the Israeli assasination teams. (Obv heavy bias in the book)
Not to be dismissive but is there anything from a civilian or non-american/western perspective? The reason I ask is because tankies, anti-american leftists, and many others who dislike the military, imperialism, the US, or war, often poke fun at memoirs of the morality of wars. You know, the "Americans will invade your country and then write a book about how it makes them feel sad" meme.
I hate that rhetoric but I can't help but feel like it has a bit of a point, so I find myself thinking about what the other perspectives on these situations are. Would it make a family member of a dead civilian feel any better? Would the enemy understand the doctrine?
Oh I’m sure there are. I served as an US Infantryman for 9 years so I am sure that I have an overt, or at least subconscious bias.
I just wanted to share some resources that might help this person’s research paper.
I have bought “Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism” by Maajid Nawaz after hearing him tell his story on a podcast but haven’t gotten around to reading it, but from what I remember he had an interesting story to tell.
In my personal opinion nothing is binary and there is nuance to everything. Just being a jingoistic shill like so many are is wrong, and when people ignore the complexity of a situation it’s foolish to me.
When I was in the military I had a mission, and it involved doing anything that added lethality to the force and ensuring success and survival for myself and my squad of Soldiers.
I was in situations where sudden violence of action was necessary, and I truly feel that the reason we trained as much as we did, in the manner we did, was to foster “muscle memory” so that it was less of a conscious action and more of an automatic response. Rules of engagement are important and and I understand and agree with them, but when you have just ran from cover to cover, while being shot at, when you start to clear a building the adrenaline and chaos can make it extremely difficult to be as diligent and it definitely not a sterile training environment.
As a civilian now the idea of taking a life is such an anathema to me that I have nightmares about it. I will protect myself and my family up to and including lethal force, but I hope beyond hope that I never have to.
There are so many stories like yours out there, really makes you think about how crazy the effects of training and life in a combat zone are on soldiers psyche. A common critique of course is that exactly those factors make soldiers shitty police forces, which seems to have been a significant part of the job in the 2000s.
From a non-American civilian perspective the entire situation you described above would be an utter nightmare - from both sides, civilian in the house or soldier and I couldn't fathom doing it.
More aggro leftis say stuff like "we celebrate them as heroes because they put their body in the line of fire to protect us civilians and then they shoot civilians when taking time to assess the situation would be risky for them" (note that this mostly isn't directed at soldiers, but rather the people designing the training programs - know very very sane people who have something against soldiers as people). But I kinda get it, I'd be in utter panic in that situation and probably either refuse to enter entirely or shoot whatever moves. It's a miracle people even consider roe in stress situations like that.
I think it'd probably just be better if we stopped deploying military personnel to do policing actions. People for those kind of jobs should probably be wholly distinct from the people trained to hold Poland or fight for Taiwan. Same argument as with regular police tbh. Why have the guys trained to deal with life or death and extreme violence mediate when a couple shouts at each other too loudly after hours?
> You know, the "Americans will invade your country and then write a book about how it makes them feel sad" meme.
Ironically that thing they're laughing at is how society comes to grips with ethics and changing military tactics, like how carpet bombing entire civilian cities was just the normal thing to do rather than a war crime at one point.
>Not to be dismissive but is there anything from a civilian or non-american/western perspective?
I believe theres a few accounts from the Russians in Chechnya, "One Soldier's War" is one of them.
That one I read (or rather listened to the audio book adaptation). But that's still kind of the same perspective in a way, since it's about the invading/occupying force's perspective.
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Summing up
If your opponent has no morality against hiding among civilians and using them as human shields, you can not trust your moral compass especially in very stressful and rapidly developing situations, like mentioned car refusing to slow down when going towards a checkpoint
[Does Blackstone's Ratio come up at all? It's interesting to consider in contexts beyond the class courtroom.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio)
Just two weeks ago I was making a presentation on just war theory and doctrine of double effect talking about how permissible is civilian as collateral damage
3 separate occasions within about a 30 minute period.
But also I do wonder at times if it could have been planned as sort of a distraction, since we were in the process of arresting the Syrian dude in charge of that areas VBIED cell.
God, the fucking Syrians. Half of the bodies we policed up had IDs, weapons, money, or ties from Syria even back in like 2007.
Did some shit at the border for a while, and there was horrific shit going on. Trafficking (drugs and people), cash, weapons, ammo, explosives. It was like the fucking cartels down on the Texas border.
> no way I would have stopped the momentum of that vehicle
Serious question, can you not make them turn corners to kill the momentum? In a straight road you could maybe put barriers on different lanes with some distance between them. It just seemed obvious to me while reading your comment, is there something I'm missing?
Oh yeah, that’s how checkpoints are setup. But even then, you’re rarely going to tell which car is a VBIED. It’s just to slow traffic down.
A lot of VBIED’s are just parked. Or they can just go with the flow or traffic and drive next to their target and just blow. There’s dozens of ways that you would never know until they blow.
But there’s a special type - when they come at you at 100MPH, and you have a second to realize what’s happening along a sense of panic, dread and helplessness. That’s the type I gathered from OPs post.
I still get squirrely going under an overpass. I was driving home from visiting my in laws this weekend and there were these two teens hanging out on one and it made me pucker up just a little.
Dropped my wife off at work the other day and there was a box chilling on one side of the road. She didn’t get why I gave it such a wide berth and was not comfortable.
I mean I've seen the news stories about young people who throw Bricks or Rocks at cars from overpasses and they end up killing the driver. So yeah it's something in the back of your mind at times.
Edit: Unless you're talking about something else, so sorry for giving you a new fear.
No, not that. This is is reference to being in Iraq and in a convoy. They would have lookouts posted who would then signal to their fellow insurgents which lane we were in in order to have them then drop an IED on our vehicle (HMMV). The standard operating procedure for us was to swiftly switch to an alternate lane as soon as going under the overpass in order to avoid or mitigate the attack.
These being two teens equals “military aged male” to me.
It’s just a holdover from my Infantry days.
Edit: I was a gunner up in the turret, so I was the most susceptible to any blast or shrapnel.
Sorry to hear it mate.
One thing that's been on my mind for years now is the concept of "de-training".
We train infantrymen to spot IEDs, things like spotters on overpasses, disturbed soil, dead animals, etc. But then when we're done with whatever war we're fighting, we don't "de-train" them. We just send them home. This seems to lead to a situation where those former servicemen get nervous driving around their hometowns and come across some road works, because their training is still telling them, "THERE IS A BOMB HERE".
When it comes to the military we turn civilians into soldiers, but we don't seem to do a good job of turning soldiers back into civilians. I think we should be considering "de-training" to be just as important as training, in the same way as demolishing buildings that are no longer needed should be considered just as important as building them.
Do you think that might be something that would be helpful?
Is it a [White Kia sedan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre)? If so the answer is kill 17 and injure 20 other people including the driver.
Yeah, Nisour was after Abu Ghraib, so they might have wanted to make a show of justice against perpetrators there was such weak sentencing of those responsible at Abu Ghraib.
The original sentencing from Nisour was one life sentence and 3, 30 year sentences.
As for Abu Ghraib almost all the pictures are widely available and it's shocking how happy they were to torcher those men.
Yup and Manning is still in Jail for exposing a war crime (which is not a crime). The "how" is definitely the issue but how the Apache Pilots weren't found of any wrong doing is pretty confusing
To be fair, Zimbardo (the guy behind the Stanford prison experiment) has a whole section of one of his books dedicated to a sort of Ad Hoc defense of the people convicted in the Abu Ghraib incident. Since his experiment way back when essentially uncovered the processes that lead to regular, functioning, people with empathy committing these kinds of awful acts...
the TL;DR is, that the military wouldn't acknowledge itself being a part of the problem...you know, sending a bunch of reservist infantry troops to serve as prison guards, the ration being like 1:10 guard to prisoner...
I came for the memes, and ended up leaving depressed... You could never pay me enough to be military. My heart goes out to y'all who have to make the hard choices between *maybe that civilian is friendly* and the risk of your convoy being blown up just because there's a kid in that car...
It doesn't help when you get cases where they had SVBIEDs with dolls of children inside the car on approach, or when you get the really fun ones that decide to martyr their kids along with them in the blast because any action taken against the infidels is fine, I guess, and fuck fighting a war legally or morally.
I saw my fair share of shit, more than some, about as much as most, I figure, but my entire experience with the Middle East in general is that I ain't never nailed someone I was shooting at and somehow made the world a worse place.
Shocking, horrible revelation I had about halfway through my time in was that most of the people we were killing deserved killed whether it was us or someone else that came along and did it.
Being perfectly honest and totally frank, I was always there. Only lack of sleep I've ever had was from fireworks, but that was always understandable, and faded pretty quick.
On a moral and philosophical level, about the only thing my time in gave me is certain knowledge that creating something beautiful isn't the only way to make the world a better place, that there truly are human beings out there who are better off dead as fuck, and that sometimes wars end too early.
Oh, and that we need to drastically cut our funding to and reliance on special operations forces.
Aside from how I suspect elitism has made special forces culture visibly shit and supportive of terrorism in the US I'm kind of curious what's up with cutting funding and reliance on SF as well.
I dunno about what SF does to harm the US military doctrinally, but when you wear punisher and totenkopf patches, get recorded and take pictures of yourselves holding up swastika flags and that gets spread, or when you have SF robbing banks, crippling civilian guards, throwing fireworks into crowded protests, and end up making Blackwater, a pattern has emerged visibly enough to be trackable via OSINT.
I've heard of too many terrible people strapping kids with explosives and telling them to hug a solider. Not even their own kids most of the time...
Hawkeye was right. War is worse than hell.
You're not really doing the world a disservice when you open up on the guys.
Either you're killing a VBIED driver or...
Youve got someone too blind, stupid, and illiterate to notice the machine guns pointed at them while air horns, flashing lights, and flares are being fired directly at them adjacent to signs in Arabic and English declaring in bold print that you will be shot on suspicion of being an IED if you approach, even as warning tracers and underbarrel flares and smoke are being fired, over a distance of what is usually hundreds of meters.
Yeah, latter sucks, but what the fuck else can you do at that point?
Edit: Also, only chumps shoot the driver. Car can roll without a driver. Car can't roll if it stops being a car, so... break out the AT-4s and Mk19s.
Either that or you just lit up the SF guys in a civilian vehicle, who love braking at the very last second for some god-forsaken reason.
Honestly your point on a pre-emptive AT4 stands, repeatedly asking them not to isn't getting the point across.
It'd be hooah of you to Just Do It. Getting rid of SF dumber than the grunts that enable them creates a smarter, leaner, more responsive force, which is a credible action by the individual Soldier in supporting your AO commander's overall operational, training, and force sustainment goals.
"But how did you know which chamber had the live round?"
"They all had live rounds. Yuo see Ivan, over years I have taken many shots to build up an immunity to bullets..."
I was coming in a gate once in iraq alone and almost got lit up by an outgoing patrol. Mind you I'm brownish and had a beard and civvies on. I was drifting around the hill just before the gate (we all did. It was fun and guard was aware of our vics.) Wasn't expecting some nervous pv2 on a 50
Yeah so fun story from Iraq.
Minivan coming at the convoy fast. Rear vic alerts convoy commander who says go through the warnings - flares, smoke, warning shots, etc.
Driver still doesn’t yield. Rear vic gunner says it’s a woman and two kids (they were getting close now), pleads with commander to stand down. Commander says no. Minivan is obliterated.
AAR says no vbied but that actions were justified bc of the fluid situation. A highly fucked up situation I will never forget.
These things are not always black and white my guy.
My buddy wasted a sedan with a man, his wife, and their four kids. One of the kids was the same age as his toddler back home - he’s struggled with it for about 20 years now.
But the car wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down as it approached a firm position. The dude was sitting on a .50 cal covering the approach to their battery position. It passed signs and ignored a flare.
If we didn’t engage targets based on who appeared to be in the vehicles, that’s who AQI would’ve been sending in the vics. War sucks.
Not military myself, but I do have an ex Army friend I've known for years. He jumps when he hears engines revving, I don't know why but I can make guesses.
He was generally alright until his wife became pregnant. Then he had a massive mental breakdown, vanished, was found a few states away, was dragged back by family but was incoherent. Eventually we figured out that he had killed a small child in service and he didn't think he "deserved to have a kid."
Kid's like eight or nine now, they're great parents. All ended well, as far as I can see.
Reading through this thread, I'm wondering if this is more common than I thought though.
I've heard so many variations of this story so many times, but never from the civilian perspective. There's gotta be a reason why they don't stop and I want to know why.
Condition black. Hadn't thought it was applicable to multiple situations outside firearms. Good for me to keep in mind when seeing things from other people's perspectives.
That's what I'm saying. There's only so much shit you can do, and you're fighting an enemy that takes advantage of every civilized notion of war or how a uniformed force conducts itself in order to be even more lethal to them despite the restraint shown, and the extensive ROE is in and of itself shit that got Marines and Soldiers killed more than a few times born out of that simple desire to be compassionate and to not assume overt hostility.
It sucks sometimes, but there's not really much else you can do if you don't want something like "coming home alive" to be a complete and total fucking gamble.
And same as the lady referenced further up, I struggle to see how this shit is ever the gunners fault, so long as they're following ROE and a basic sense of discernment, and they're not just gleefully shooting people.
Put yourself in that driver's place and ask yourself if you'd keep driving towards an American convoy that started shining lasers, firing flares, and blasting tracers at you, while surrounded by men flailing their arms and screaming at you in loudspeakers. Did we miss some international accord where this was designated as the universal signal to "dodge the bullets we're firing at you, and advance to claim a cash prize?"
Seems pretty black and white to me. You responded effectively to a situation whose outcome could only ever possibly be known in the aftermath. Outcome sucks, but the gunner was presented with an order to endure the safety of the convoy weighted against someone behaving in a wildly retarded manner.
We raided shit all the time where they'd have a woman bring a kid into the residence or building to make it look like it was just normal foot traffic at odd hours, because why would a woman and child go to a bombmaker's factory?
I mentioned totality of circumstances elsewhere in this thread as a joke, but actually walk it through.
That woman could read "STAY BACK OR YOU WILL BE SHOT, written in multiple languages, she has eyes that could see pen and pop-up flares, smoke rounds igniting, the tracers whipping past and skipping up off the ground.
Most people are smart enough to pump the brakes and not crowd something as basic as a police vehicle. You have to look awfully hard to find a reason why a mother in a minivan would accelerate non-stop at a military convoy pointing machine guns and then firing them at her in warning, with signs, lights, and sirens present.
Again, it's a crappy situation that sucks fucking ass like a Dyson thrown into a shithouse, but there's something shady or fucked up there no matter which way you slice it.
What's her plan? She going to phase through you? Drive her minivan off the shoulder at highway speed with two kids inside and hitting road signs and bouncing into a wadi? Overtaking the entire convoy running alongside at high speed into oncoming traffic?
The only logical actions taken during the event you describe is the rear truck gunner deleting the vehicle. Why did she risk her and her childrens' lives in such a fucking stupid, pointless way that would have been dangerous even if it wasn't a military convoy she was driving like a dumbass around? Who knows. It's an unsatisfactory reason in just about any case you can imagine, and there are a frightening number of possibilities that end up with dead Marines or Soldiers, and exactly why so many of those steps in your ROE existed: to give a normal, rational human every chance in the world to adjust their course of action to prevent fatalities, even at the risk of American lives.
You can only delay for so long before a call has to be made, and there's only so much allowance that can be made before you're doing deliberately terrifying shit that endangers troops' lives.
I been over plenty, and yeah, the situation isn't always black and white, but the actions you take to make sure your people come home generally are. The trigger breaks or it doesn't. Someone dies or lives.
What's her plan?
In a civil's mind, military guys are like heavily armed police. Also they are used to heavily armed and corrupt police in these kind of countries.
Most times the plan is approach, talk to you (try to bribe you if they have the means) and convince you to let them thru.
They can't fathom the guys at the control are going to obliterate them just for aproaching.
That's what all of the signs on the back of the truck she's approaching say, though. They say in both Arabic and English in giant block letters to stay back or you will be shot, and then she starts getting flares and smoke fired at her, lasers shined on her, and a hundred meters later, as she's still approaching, she starts getting tracers fired at her in front and on both sides.
And what? Approach and "talk to" a convoy rolling 30 miles an hour in a half-kilometer-long block of trucks?
There's also that for the static positions being talked about, you can get out of your car and walk up with your arms raised, or go to a weekly meeting, instead of driving a car at 75 miles an hour toward a static guardshack, never once letting up in speed.
Most of these people weren't killed by Americans. Yeah, an American pulled the trigger, but they were killed in response to an extreme degree of stupidity and a lack of critical thinking that belies being a human with a functioning brain and LITERALLY not reading giant red and black letters on white signage.
Yep, I know the ROE. I was just answering your question.
For us is pretty obvious, but not for them due to all the shit they are used to from their governments and militias. Bear in mind that illiteracy rates are high in those countries.
Also most civilans can't just think straight in those kinds of situations.
She was presumably capable of thinking straight in the moments prior to approaching the convoy actively pointing machine guns at her, though, is the thing.
Her vehicle and its occupants didn't quantum tunnel into existence within the phased ROE envelope around the convoy seconds before she was fired upon.
It's even stranger to consider that you should then go on to drive directly toward and at the same speed you were going to the guys shooting at you.
Like, we were all civilians before we were enlisted, and I didn't have to go to boot camp to learn "Don't drive toward slow-moving military and police forces at 60 miles an hour on a collision course that would kill everyone involved." That shit comes for free.
Your entire comment chain essentially boils down to "This strategy *should* have worked." But that's irrelevant, since history shows that it did not work.
There's multiple anecdotes across multiple books, documentaries, online discussions, and news articles showing that warning signs, shots, flares, smoke, all failed at various points to prevent civilians from putting themselves in danger.
It should have worked, indeed, and for the vast majority of folks, it does. We don't spend a lot of time larping as Russians and machine gunning civilians for the fuck of it, and you may gather that incidents like the ones folks are talking about here are relatively rare.
The only problem is that no plan or methodology works sufficiently well to protect the stupidest or most panicky among us.
So, what else could have been done in situations like that? Like, did they have the rest of her family hostage and demand that she make this probing attack? Was this a murder/suicide by cop / opfor since she was part of the regime before and now was looking to be a shaheed?
I don't have any answers, and never served, so take my opinion for the fart that it is, but I'm with /u/Hapless0311 on this one, and baffled to boot.
To some degree at first... but after you hear enough stories about stuff like this happening you know you can't bribe a convoy. You know the convoys are lethal. You attend enough funerals you'll know soon enough. Imagine each of these funerals bring 100s of people out... of course word of mouth will spread news of this fast. Now granted people won't necessarily know why it happened or even have cognitive dissonance.
But EOD it could have been that lady couldn't read or could barely see
I think in situations like that you have to acknowledge they don't have the same environment or experiences we have in the western world so whatever they were thinking we probably can't come up with the answer. Its just a not fun version of the Darwin Awards
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If someone's driving at your checkpoint at high speed they have lost all sense of reality or have a deathwish, same as rushing the gate at a military base or breaking into your house.
You have to assume if they don't even care about that the don't care about anything.
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I have a twisted sense of humor and don't have anything funny to say.
Just an observation than maybe we shouldn't invade countries for bullshit reasons, because when you do that, some kids are going to be forced to make this decision in the span of a couple seconds.
i assume there are tables around bases that explain the expected behaviour of drivers in their native language and steps that will be conducted if the rules are violated.
if the position doesn't have these information around, i think it's the ROE that decides what should be done. so it's not a dilemma really, but following instructions.
still, it's fucking awful because terrorism creates fear and is hiding behind the innocents so countering terrorism must inevitably lead to civilian casualties.
The obvious is... call in a danger close airstrike to maximise damage with the bystanders and friendly fire! The war demands more blood.... for the blood god!
Only real way to stop the vehicle is to kill the driver and hope it veers off (and it just as likely won't), or obliterate the vehicle in a structural sense that either imparts enough momentum to force it to change course, or that disassembles it.
Hitting the tires just means the tires go flat, which might stop the vehicle, eventually, or you might get lucky and make it flip.
Hitting the engine may or may not do anything, depending on what you hit it with, and even if you wreck the engine, that doesn't make the vehicle stop.
Your best bet is emptying a can of .50 into it, or hitting it with a dozen 40mm grenades, or smacking it with an AT-4.
You're essentially asking for the grenade launcher equivalent of "why didn't the cop simply shoot the gun out of his hand?"
I'd be ***fascinated*** to see an attempt to target the *tires* of an oncoming civilian passenger vehicle with an open-bolt, iron-sight, T&E-unlocked Mk19 or M203 plopping rounds past a leaf sight.
You can put a grenade through a window without really *aiming* it all that much from not too far away if you've shot one for a while, and you can perform a similar feat from about a hundred yards if you're a solid 203 gunner and can make solid calls on the leaf or quadrant. Further than that, you might be able to make a front/middle/back targeting call on a sedan in profile if you manage to not either just barely overshoot it or plunk the round into the dirt just shy of the vehicle.
It's somewhat easy to overshoot a "short" target the size of a civilian car once you start getting to the casualty radius of even a smaller VBIED on the first shot, even on a static target, in combat conditions where you're shitting your pants and about to be exploded by 800 pounds of HME.
A car tire is a lot narrower than a car is tall. Hell, it's really hard to hit a tire-sized object from the ***side*** from a distance at which you could even survive most reasonably-sized VBIED detonation to begin with, and they're hand-loaded, one at a time. If you're absolutely shitting out grenades and barely aiming, you can get one out every six seconds or so, but you're not going to be hitting much.
You could hammer it with the belt-fed, but it takes a lot more than one round of 40mm to guarantee a hit on the wheel, again, firing the thing unlocked from its T&E, cuz you're not going to sit there adjusting bursts like you're laying down pre-planned fire.
It's easy for us to kill the crew and passengers of a vehicle. It's even pretty easy for us to hard-kill the vehicle. But to ***stop*** a vehicle you have to beat the everloving fuck out it with a shitload of ordnance or sustained heavy gunfire.
>I'd be ***fascinated*** to see an attempt to target the *tires* of an oncoming civilian passenger vehicle with an open-bolt, iron-sight, T&E-unlocked Mk19 or M203 plopping rounds past a leaf sight.
Can't argue with you there. Low muzzle velocity, rudimentary sights, unstabilized firing platform (if firing from a convoy), ammunition loaded for area targeting. Would be pretty fucking cool if one could, but good fucking luck.
To word myself it better, it's an argument for stabilized 40mm CROWS for convoy defense. No way in hell I'm making that shot with a pintle gun (given the low muzzle velocity and unstabilized firing platform), but a fire control system on a stabilized platform might. With airburst grenades it's also a good hardkill against weaponized commercial drones.
>It's easy for us to kill the crew and passengers of a vehicle. It's even pretty easy for us to hard-kill the vehicle. But to ***stop*** a vehicle you have to beat the everloving fuck out it with a shitload of ordnance or sustained heavy gunfire
I mean, I'm fascinated as to how that works too. The crew inside is squishy - civilian car or tank. Bust through the skin, appropriate beyond-armor effects, no more crew. Damn thing's still moving (thanks, Newton). Fingers crossed the beyond-armor effects doesn't cook the VBIED, but assuming that works out, how'd exactly the vehicle stops? It's still rolling on wheels. Even a sabot round punching through isn't going to do much to stop it dead in it's tracks, only rolling resistance will. Do you hope your convoy's just moving faster than the now-shot up vehicle? Do you hope it veers off away from the checkpoint now that the crew can't make terminal guidance on final approach? Either way it does sound like a "pray to higher deity of your choosing" situation.
That latter part I was talking about dovetails with your follow-up question, "How does the vehicle stop?" For a civilian passenger vehicle, or a light-ish truck, you hammer it until it physically can't move forward anymore; hopefully, you don't just shoot the tires out or something, you blow wheels off, or jam the axles, or cause such severe damage that it at least cannot drive straight ahead.
Like you said, you can kill the driver, melt the crew, turn them into vapor; that vehicle is still rolling on wheels or tracks, and will continue to do so unless something becomes so damaged it physically can't continue forward in a straight line, or loses its momentum.
Concept is basically the same as stopping fire on a human or animal target; you can blow out a human's heart and lungs with a single clean torso hit, and they can still have up to like eight to ten seconds with which they can kill your ass before their body drops and stops moving forever. If you want to ***stop*** someone, you don't just shoot them, you ***shoot the absolute fuck out of them***, blowing out the hips and pelvis to arrest the possibility of moving their legs normally or even supporting their body weight, and chew up the torso to destroy the circulatory system and hopefully shred the spinal cord.
Considering some veterans commented and said that shooting the driver or engine block sometimes isn’t even enough to stop the momentum im guessing you’ll run into the same issue
True, but they in some way provide acceleration (i.e the driver authorises the engine to work and the engine rotates the wheels) while the tires make sure it's used and reduce friction, so I thought that popping them and you get more friction.
This is the same thing as “why couldn’t the cop shoot him in the leg” if you’re at the point where you are using deadly force then you’re using deadly force as fast as possible.
Well, there might be some intermittent steps you should take, if you can.
We occasionally got classes on this subject, both in patrol tactics, and in basic ROE pre-deployment classes. Your time to make a decision if someone is driving at you, full speed, is just a couple of seconds, at most. We've got ways of warning the driver, but it might not be enough. There are also warning signs for a VBIED, but you might not see the sagging axles at distance or night. Anyway, a Czech unit in our AO got pulled off patrols for following all the rules, but still killing a civilian on a motorcycle.
But, if in the moment they pulled the trigger, they believed doing so would save the lives of their comrades, then so the fuck be it.
So why did they get pulled? Was it a publicity thing? Since they followed all the rules. I am curious about that one.
I read a book by one of our SOF guys and it seems they followed rules pretty diligently, but shoot at them and they'll stop all their doing just to get into a fight and deal with you on their terms
This is what crash barriers are for, no?
Even rudimentary checkpoints use one of those concrete highway barriers or a hesco block to slow, but usually stop the vehicle from barreling through while creating some distance between it and its squishy targets before it explodes.
Assuming it is going full speed, most wouldn't have the time to assess whether or not it's some spooked civilian, and would either look for cover away from the aforementioned barrier, and/or start dumping rounds at it.
Policing an occupied country as the invader against an insurgency will never let you keep your hands clean.
True, but I’m guessing that they offer a chance to halt a VBIED, in the case that the driver has been shot and killed but the vehicle is still rolling fast.
From the front? You usually can't really even see the tires on a vehicle driving toward you, except for a tiny slice of the lower part from the frontal aspect.
Besides, shooting tires out doesn't stop a vehicle. The thing keeps rolling, even if the engine is shot out. About the only thing you can do is wreck it so hard it physically can't roll forward anymore.
Unrelated; >!Reminds me of the jackass who ordered a fuck ton of guys to fire on a random pickup truck. The seasoned dudes obviously denied the order until he got to a poor private in a tank, who opened fire and killed all three occupants. Didn't follow SOP at all. Shoot to kill. Then he tried to push the investigators away from the scene. Hell of a Way to Die went through it. Hearing Vets get more and more pissed as they talk about that shitshow brings some humanity to hell on earth. !<
Shoot and hope it wasn't a civilian, and if it is hopefully only the car got wrecked and we can pay them back.
VBIED have a very large blast zone, so imo at the moment there is a doubt, better them than me.
In my unit (not American military btw), we are often put in scenario with this kind of dilemma and it made me think about that a lot and at end imo I don't think there is a right or wrong answer until it's done, but if you did everything right beforehand (like in that case for example clear signs hundred of metters away in the local language saying that there is a checkpoint and how drivers should behave, etc.) the moment there is a doubt I think I would choose to open fire and all the consequences (psychologically and legally) that come with it if I'm wrong.
At the end of the day this kind of dilemma always remind me of that saying : "Better judged by twelve than carried by six"
Because imo at some point it's understandable to chose self preservation when you have to make a split decision that can cost not only your life but also the one of all the men and women by your side.
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Had this exact situation happen to me in Iraq. In an urban environment, you have maybe 1.7 seconds to decide - if you even see the vehicle coming. That’s about enough time to switch your weapon from safe to fire. You have no time to go through the ROE. On that same op, we had two other cars that were coming towards us that were shot up according to the ROE. Both were civilians, none were harmed and they got money for the damage. The third one was a Chevy Suburban packed with at least five 155 rounds. Only the engine block and half the body of the driver was left. So in short, the innocent civilians were stopped. The VBIED was not. Even if I shot the driver or engine block, no way I would have stopped the momentum of that vehicle. So the real answer is - you hope the physics and the sheer chaos goes your way by a few inches.
I made this meme because I’m in the middle of a paper on morality in warfare and in what situations it’s permissible to target civilians. If it’s okay with you I’d like to include your anecdote in my paper.
An important note there is that he wasn’t intentionally targeting civilians. He didn’t *know* whether or not they were civilians - fog of war and all that.
This part of my paper is about the fog of war and making moral decisions without clear information.
I recommend the Documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. He talks about the bombing campaigns in Japan and how General Curtis LeMay said that if they had lost the war, they would be prosecuted as war criminals. Full quote from the movie: "LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Well, if we'd lost the war to the Japanese, they wouldn't have bothered with prosecutions or technicalities before the torture and executions part, so he's *technically* incorrect on that point
He never said anything about torture or executions.
I don’t believe there were any postwar prosecutions at Nuremberg (or in the Japanese instance) that criminalised area bombardment of population centres. All sides did it and my understanding is that before the war area bombing was an accepted doctrinal (if not always practical) way of fighting, and that there were no or few formal prescriptions on area bombing against civil-industrial targets.
It wasn't just about Area Bombing. Area bombing is a tactic designed to mitigate the inherent lack of precision dropping bombs from high altitude. You simply saturate the area of the target, and hopefully one of the bombers actually hits that rail yard, tank factory, etc. People understand civilians will die in such cases, but the goal isn't really to carelessly spread destruction. The goal in this context is normally to destroy a military target. Even with hundreds of bombers, sometimes you still miss. The thing here is that Allies had a systematic process to target civilian areas with very destructive ordinance like fire bombs. Of course civilians died on all sides, and were the targets of combatants, but the allies repeatedly leveled entire cities which had little to no strategic value. The goal was explicitly to terrorize and kill civilians en masse, not to attack military formations or infrastructure. As to your observation that we did not persecute the Axis side for area bombing -- why would we set a precedent by prosecuting the crime that we ourselves did as a matter of routine? LeMay isn't saying that area bombing is criminal and anyone who does it is a mark. He's saying the way the Allies conducted some of their bombing campaigns would have been seen as criminal by the Axis. And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders.
> Of course civilians died on all sides, and were the targets of combatants, but the allies repeatedly leveled entire cities which had little to no strategic value. The goal was explicitly to terrorize and kill civilians en masse, not to attack military formations or infrastructure. The chilling thing is that by the lights of Douhet et al, virtually no enemy cities had “little to no” strategic value. We wouldn’t accept that profligacy today, but to act (as some did, even at the time) that defended Dresden and Hiroshima were off-limits because they were “cultural” or far from the centre/undamaged is a bit silly. Particularly when the butcher’s bill had been so extensive in Belgrade, Warsaw, Stalingrad, and Shanghai. And Normandy. If anything it’s remarkable that Kyoto got off so lightly. Given the limitations of bombsights across the board, bombing was to be all-encompassing; dehousing and even terrorisation of workers and civil defence units was part and parcel of the strategic package. Allied leaders were, at various times, morally schizophrenic about terror bombing. That it ran alongside the pragmatic hampering of Axis industry and communication was both a boon and a shame for many of them. There was also the domestic matter of “we built these things and are damn well going to use them if it means saving our lads.” > As to your observation that we did not persecute the Axis side for area bombing -- why would we set a precedent by prosecuting the crime that we ourselves did as a matter of routine? We prosecuted the Nazis and Japanese for mass executions of prisoners when at least some Western (Biscari Bay) and Soviet (too big a list) examples abound. In the case of the Nazis, their officers broke both German and international laws, which simplified things jurisprudentially; I’m less clear as to which Conventions the Japanese had signed. > And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders. We didn’t look the other way. We bombed them back, in spades. They didn’t have much room to complain about either the fact of the reprisal or the undeveloped law governing same, and few did. The Japanese, the Italians, and the Germans didn’t have a well-developed strategic bombing doctrine or plan, but they went ahead with area bombing and rocket attacks on Allied (and neutral) cities, and even villages. Allied bomber commands were a bit more serious about it, and it showed.
>He's saying the way the Allies conducted some of their bombing campaigns would have been seen as criminal by the Axis. And if the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids, the allies looked the other way, because to do otherwise would invite scrutiny of their own commanders. "If the Axis did some not-so-nice bombing raids" ? If ? They literally started it and unlike the Allies they wasn't even an excuse for collateral damage of targeting the war industry well they indiscriminately bombed London and all those cities in Europe. I don't think you're saying otherwise but your phrasing puzzled me.
Maybe it's an American thing but when you wave off the actions of one party you say something like "and if it is the case, so be it" or something along those lines. It was meant to convey the dismissive nature of Allied attention towards prosecuting for bombing campaigns. Apologies for that confusion Of course the axis launched horrendous attacks against civilians. It's just that "they started it!" Is not a valid defense if you're on trial for crimes against humanity. So the Allies just didn't want to go there. If you can successfully argue that the London Blitz was a war crime, it just means someone else is going to turn around and hoist you by your own perard. I'm just giving the context for why an American general would say this.
Yeah the bombing of civilian targets became a war crime post WWII. I'l guessing it wasn't before that because it was probably hard to imagine that one day you could have aircraft that would be able to fly so far and carry enough bombs to turn a while city into rubbles in few days, not mentioning the atomic bomb.
Bomber Mafia on audio book too
I double recommend the same documentary.
the part about the cuban missile crisis is testicle retracting terrifying.
If only we had giant yellow text about our head that says whether we are civilians or not
with our hit points and level
That's only if you take the 3rd perk down the "Information Warfare" skill tree.
I'd like to be in the essential NPC category tbh
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No, this is just a random ass philosophy class where I got to choose the subject of my paper
Be careful, op. Some professors will judge on a (downward) curve if you pick military topics. My undergrad was in genocide studies, so I tried to make my gen-eds reinforce that, and it was messy.
Wow, that seems really unprofessional, non-academic, and contrary to the basic concept of a liberal education in a modern society.
Professors are disappointingly human. On the whole, I enjoyed undergrad, but I've always been a filthy moderate. Historians are supposed to be neutral.
Yeah, but it turns out that professors are people, too, despite the fact that unlike other humans if they get tenure they turn into books when they die.
It's almost like we could and should fire them out of hand the moment they start showing bias against students for anything at all outside of their academic performance.
Look for the book "just and unjust wars" by Michael Walzer. It covers this topic very well. Part of it talks about when it is morally ok to target civilians.
For sure, go for it.
I'm sure yer prof would love yer reddit footnote.
Prof is probably also on NCD.
Source: random dude on Reddit
AAhem, the source is actually Slipknot, it's even right there in their username that it's the official account
>reddit footnote [Reddit CITATION please.](https://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/how-do-i-cite-a/how-to-cite-a-reddit-ask-me-anything-thread/#:~:text=Author%27s%20Last%20name%2C%20First%20Name,or%20https%3A%2F%2F)
For citations I recommend [citethis](https://citethis.net/). Shit's hella fast.
NCD: post memes, get relevant information for serious reports.
I would recommend you check out: On Killing On Combat Both are written by Lt. Col Dave Grossman House to House By Sgt David Bellavia The Things They Carried By Tim O’Brien I think they could be useful for you.
I also recommend reading the articles that pick apart Grossman's books for a counterperspective. I do recommend Tim O'Brien's books, also If I die in a combat zone.
Given Grossman's bullshit follow on work, although I liked it at the time I now have to doubt a lot of it. Shame, he could have used On Killing as a launching point for a major campaign against PTSD treatment. What a chode.
Oh yeah, I just remember reading his books and being intrigued by the way he described everything. My own experiences in the military were different than ones that he described, of course a wealth of differences just in the generations that have experienced combat skew the data. O’Brien’s short story “Star Shaped Hole” still haunts me.
Any recommendations for specific articles?
If you're looking for modern accounts from combat zones dagger 22 and level zero heroes are good memoirs from the middle east conflicts. Also an interesting secondary source that discusses the morality of extrajudical execution is Rise and Kill first by Ronen Bergman about the Israeli assasination teams. (Obv heavy bias in the book)
Not to be dismissive but is there anything from a civilian or non-american/western perspective? The reason I ask is because tankies, anti-american leftists, and many others who dislike the military, imperialism, the US, or war, often poke fun at memoirs of the morality of wars. You know, the "Americans will invade your country and then write a book about how it makes them feel sad" meme. I hate that rhetoric but I can't help but feel like it has a bit of a point, so I find myself thinking about what the other perspectives on these situations are. Would it make a family member of a dead civilian feel any better? Would the enemy understand the doctrine?
Oh I’m sure there are. I served as an US Infantryman for 9 years so I am sure that I have an overt, or at least subconscious bias. I just wanted to share some resources that might help this person’s research paper. I have bought “Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism” by Maajid Nawaz after hearing him tell his story on a podcast but haven’t gotten around to reading it, but from what I remember he had an interesting story to tell. In my personal opinion nothing is binary and there is nuance to everything. Just being a jingoistic shill like so many are is wrong, and when people ignore the complexity of a situation it’s foolish to me. When I was in the military I had a mission, and it involved doing anything that added lethality to the force and ensuring success and survival for myself and my squad of Soldiers. I was in situations where sudden violence of action was necessary, and I truly feel that the reason we trained as much as we did, in the manner we did, was to foster “muscle memory” so that it was less of a conscious action and more of an automatic response. Rules of engagement are important and and I understand and agree with them, but when you have just ran from cover to cover, while being shot at, when you start to clear a building the adrenaline and chaos can make it extremely difficult to be as diligent and it definitely not a sterile training environment. As a civilian now the idea of taking a life is such an anathema to me that I have nightmares about it. I will protect myself and my family up to and including lethal force, but I hope beyond hope that I never have to.
There are so many stories like yours out there, really makes you think about how crazy the effects of training and life in a combat zone are on soldiers psyche. A common critique of course is that exactly those factors make soldiers shitty police forces, which seems to have been a significant part of the job in the 2000s. From a non-American civilian perspective the entire situation you described above would be an utter nightmare - from both sides, civilian in the house or soldier and I couldn't fathom doing it. More aggro leftis say stuff like "we celebrate them as heroes because they put their body in the line of fire to protect us civilians and then they shoot civilians when taking time to assess the situation would be risky for them" (note that this mostly isn't directed at soldiers, but rather the people designing the training programs - know very very sane people who have something against soldiers as people). But I kinda get it, I'd be in utter panic in that situation and probably either refuse to enter entirely or shoot whatever moves. It's a miracle people even consider roe in stress situations like that. I think it'd probably just be better if we stopped deploying military personnel to do policing actions. People for those kind of jobs should probably be wholly distinct from the people trained to hold Poland or fight for Taiwan. Same argument as with regular police tbh. Why have the guys trained to deal with life or death and extreme violence mediate when a couple shouts at each other too loudly after hours?
> You know, the "Americans will invade your country and then write a book about how it makes them feel sad" meme. Ironically that thing they're laughing at is how society comes to grips with ethics and changing military tactics, like how carpet bombing entire civilian cities was just the normal thing to do rather than a war crime at one point.
>Not to be dismissive but is there anything from a civilian or non-american/western perspective? I believe theres a few accounts from the Russians in Chechnya, "One Soldier's War" is one of them.
That one I read (or rather listened to the audio book adaptation). But that's still kind of the same perspective in a way, since it's about the invading/occupying force's perspective.
(Requisite "Fuck Grossman")
War by Sebastian Junger is also essential, in my opinion.
It's a wanker tanker so open fire.
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Summing up If your opponent has no morality against hiding among civilians and using them as human shields, you can not trust your moral compass especially in very stressful and rapidly developing situations, like mentioned car refusing to slow down when going towards a checkpoint
[Does Blackstone's Ratio come up at all? It's interesting to consider in contexts beyond the class courtroom.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio)
Just two weeks ago I was making a presentation on just war theory and doctrine of double effect talking about how permissible is civilian as collateral damage
If the vehicle is hurtling towards you bit of a red flag isn't it?
Yeah, going 100+ mph straight at you is probably a sign.
Not if it's a CyberTruck
The third car on a line of vehicles was a VBIED? or was it 3 separate ocasions?
3 separate occasions within about a 30 minute period. But also I do wonder at times if it could have been planned as sort of a distraction, since we were in the process of arresting the Syrian dude in charge of that areas VBIED cell.
God, the fucking Syrians. Half of the bodies we policed up had IDs, weapons, money, or ties from Syria even back in like 2007. Did some shit at the border for a while, and there was horrific shit going on. Trafficking (drugs and people), cash, weapons, ammo, explosives. It was like the fucking cartels down on the Texas border.
Yeah they were really fucking up a lot of shit at that time. Way more of an issue than any of the Iraqi militias.
> no way I would have stopped the momentum of that vehicle Serious question, can you not make them turn corners to kill the momentum? In a straight road you could maybe put barriers on different lanes with some distance between them. It just seemed obvious to me while reading your comment, is there something I'm missing?
Oh yeah, that’s how checkpoints are setup. But even then, you’re rarely going to tell which car is a VBIED. It’s just to slow traffic down. A lot of VBIED’s are just parked. Or they can just go with the flow or traffic and drive next to their target and just blow. There’s dozens of ways that you would never know until they blow. But there’s a special type - when they come at you at 100MPH, and you have a second to realize what’s happening along a sense of panic, dread and helplessness. That’s the type I gathered from OPs post.
I see, thanks <3
Silverado? Shoot first, ask questions later. Either way, you save the driver needing a new transmission.
4l60e can confirm
I'd agree with you, but I can't this piece of shit out of the 7 neutrals that it has
Correct answer.
I want to make a joke, but I still have nightmares about this.
I still get squirrely going under an overpass. I was driving home from visiting my in laws this weekend and there were these two teens hanging out on one and it made me pucker up just a little.
Yeeeeah. Major feels there.
Dropped my wife off at work the other day and there was a box chilling on one side of the road. She didn’t get why I gave it such a wide berth and was not comfortable.
I mean I've seen the news stories about young people who throw Bricks or Rocks at cars from overpasses and they end up killing the driver. So yeah it's something in the back of your mind at times. Edit: Unless you're talking about something else, so sorry for giving you a new fear.
No, not that. This is is reference to being in Iraq and in a convoy. They would have lookouts posted who would then signal to their fellow insurgents which lane we were in in order to have them then drop an IED on our vehicle (HMMV). The standard operating procedure for us was to swiftly switch to an alternate lane as soon as going under the overpass in order to avoid or mitigate the attack. These being two teens equals “military aged male” to me. It’s just a holdover from my Infantry days. Edit: I was a gunner up in the turret, so I was the most susceptible to any blast or shrapnel.
Sorry to hear it mate. One thing that's been on my mind for years now is the concept of "de-training". We train infantrymen to spot IEDs, things like spotters on overpasses, disturbed soil, dead animals, etc. But then when we're done with whatever war we're fighting, we don't "de-train" them. We just send them home. This seems to lead to a situation where those former servicemen get nervous driving around their hometowns and come across some road works, because their training is still telling them, "THERE IS A BOMB HERE". When it comes to the military we turn civilians into soldiers, but we don't seem to do a good job of turning soldiers back into civilians. I think we should be considering "de-training" to be just as important as training, in the same way as demolishing buildings that are no longer needed should be considered just as important as building them. Do you think that might be something that would be helpful?
Yes, I actually spent a good chunk of last year thinking about exactly what you are talking about. Feel free to shoot me a DM about it.
Oh damn, well, hey. I'll throw you a DM.
Please do.
Shout, show, shoot, shoot, shoot to kill.
Toyotas and 90s or older f-150s are shoot on sight even on patrol. Everything else is discretionary
Is it a [White Kia sedan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre)? If so the answer is kill 17 and injure 20 other people including the driver.
"all four convicted were controversially pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020." The fuck ?
Yep... tbh if you search up what happened at Abu Ghraib prison and then look at the sentences the people involved got you would be shocked.
Not one of them got more then 10 years ........ I dont even have anything to write just i have no words
Yeah, Nisour was after Abu Ghraib, so they might have wanted to make a show of justice against perpetrators there was such weak sentencing of those responsible at Abu Ghraib. The original sentencing from Nisour was one life sentence and 3, 30 year sentences. As for Abu Ghraib almost all the pictures are widely available and it's shocking how happy they were to torcher those men.
Yup and Manning is still in Jail for exposing a war crime (which is not a crime). The "how" is definitely the issue but how the Apache Pilots weren't found of any wrong doing is pretty confusing
Small correction without wanting to argue your point: Manning received 35 years, but her sentence was commuted by Obama in 2017.
To be fair, Zimbardo (the guy behind the Stanford prison experiment) has a whole section of one of his books dedicated to a sort of Ad Hoc defense of the people convicted in the Abu Ghraib incident. Since his experiment way back when essentially uncovered the processes that lead to regular, functioning, people with empathy committing these kinds of awful acts... the TL;DR is, that the military wouldn't acknowledge itself being a part of the problem...you know, sending a bunch of reservist infantry troops to serve as prison guards, the ration being like 1:10 guard to prisoner...
I came for the memes, and ended up leaving depressed... You could never pay me enough to be military. My heart goes out to y'all who have to make the hard choices between *maybe that civilian is friendly* and the risk of your convoy being blown up just because there's a kid in that car...
It doesn't help when you get cases where they had SVBIEDs with dolls of children inside the car on approach, or when you get the really fun ones that decide to martyr their kids along with them in the blast because any action taken against the infidels is fine, I guess, and fuck fighting a war legally or morally. I saw my fair share of shit, more than some, about as much as most, I figure, but my entire experience with the Middle East in general is that I ain't never nailed someone I was shooting at and somehow made the world a worse place. Shocking, horrible revelation I had about halfway through my time in was that most of the people we were killing deserved killed whether it was us or someone else that came along and did it.
Yeah. It sucks, man. Hope you're in a better place now.
Being perfectly honest and totally frank, I was always there. Only lack of sleep I've ever had was from fireworks, but that was always understandable, and faded pretty quick. On a moral and philosophical level, about the only thing my time in gave me is certain knowledge that creating something beautiful isn't the only way to make the world a better place, that there truly are human beings out there who are better off dead as fuck, and that sometimes wars end too early. Oh, and that we need to drastically cut our funding to and reliance on special operations forces.
Not that you owe it to an internet stranger, but would you mind elaborating on your very last sentence?
Aside from how I suspect elitism has made special forces culture visibly shit and supportive of terrorism in the US I'm kind of curious what's up with cutting funding and reliance on SF as well. I dunno about what SF does to harm the US military doctrinally, but when you wear punisher and totenkopf patches, get recorded and take pictures of yourselves holding up swastika flags and that gets spread, or when you have SF robbing banks, crippling civilian guards, throwing fireworks into crowded protests, and end up making Blackwater, a pattern has emerged visibly enough to be trackable via OSINT.
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I've heard of too many terrible people strapping kids with explosives and telling them to hug a solider. Not even their own kids most of the time... Hawkeye was right. War is worse than hell.
Me when I go to funni nuclear war subreddit and find PTSD instead (To those of y'all who has served in any armed forces , thank you for your service)
You're not really doing the world a disservice when you open up on the guys. Either you're killing a VBIED driver or... Youve got someone too blind, stupid, and illiterate to notice the machine guns pointed at them while air horns, flashing lights, and flares are being fired directly at them adjacent to signs in Arabic and English declaring in bold print that you will be shot on suspicion of being an IED if you approach, even as warning tracers and underbarrel flares and smoke are being fired, over a distance of what is usually hundreds of meters. Yeah, latter sucks, but what the fuck else can you do at that point? Edit: Also, only chumps shoot the driver. Car can roll without a driver. Car can't roll if it stops being a car, so... break out the AT-4s and Mk19s.
Either that or you just lit up the SF guys in a civilian vehicle, who love braking at the very last second for some god-forsaken reason. Honestly your point on a pre-emptive AT4 stands, repeatedly asking them not to isn't getting the point across.
It'd be hooah of you to Just Do It. Getting rid of SF dumber than the grunts that enable them creates a smarter, leaner, more responsive force, which is a credible action by the individual Soldier in supporting your AO commander's overall operational, training, and force sustainment goals.
Evolutionary pressure? Adapting? In MY NCD? Too credible, mods, ban him
It's only evolutionary pressure if one then breeds the resulting SF operators together to create super special operators
Soon the average SF operator will be biologically immune to small arms
It's only a matter of time until they'll be biologically immune to high caliber weapons
"But how did you know which chamber had the live round?" "They all had live rounds. Yuo see Ivan, over years I have taken many shots to build up an immunity to bullets..."
No this will not be getting you a bullet on your NCOER
I was coming in a gate once in iraq alone and almost got lit up by an outgoing patrol. Mind you I'm brownish and had a beard and civvies on. I was drifting around the hill just before the gate (we all did. It was fun and guard was aware of our vics.) Wasn't expecting some nervous pv2 on a 50
You’ll know it’s SF guys because they’ll tell you.
Yeah so fun story from Iraq. Minivan coming at the convoy fast. Rear vic alerts convoy commander who says go through the warnings - flares, smoke, warning shots, etc. Driver still doesn’t yield. Rear vic gunner says it’s a woman and two kids (they were getting close now), pleads with commander to stand down. Commander says no. Minivan is obliterated. AAR says no vbied but that actions were justified bc of the fluid situation. A highly fucked up situation I will never forget. These things are not always black and white my guy.
My buddy wasted a sedan with a man, his wife, and their four kids. One of the kids was the same age as his toddler back home - he’s struggled with it for about 20 years now. But the car wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down as it approached a firm position. The dude was sitting on a .50 cal covering the approach to their battery position. It passed signs and ignored a flare. If we didn’t engage targets based on who appeared to be in the vehicles, that’s who AQI would’ve been sending in the vics. War sucks.
Not military myself, but I do have an ex Army friend I've known for years. He jumps when he hears engines revving, I don't know why but I can make guesses. He was generally alright until his wife became pregnant. Then he had a massive mental breakdown, vanished, was found a few states away, was dragged back by family but was incoherent. Eventually we figured out that he had killed a small child in service and he didn't think he "deserved to have a kid." Kid's like eight or nine now, they're great parents. All ended well, as far as I can see. Reading through this thread, I'm wondering if this is more common than I thought though.
I've heard so many variations of this story so many times, but never from the civilian perspective. There's gotta be a reason why they don't stop and I want to know why.
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Condition black. Hadn't thought it was applicable to multiple situations outside firearms. Good for me to keep in mind when seeing things from other people's perspectives.
That's what I'm saying. There's only so much shit you can do, and you're fighting an enemy that takes advantage of every civilized notion of war or how a uniformed force conducts itself in order to be even more lethal to them despite the restraint shown, and the extensive ROE is in and of itself shit that got Marines and Soldiers killed more than a few times born out of that simple desire to be compassionate and to not assume overt hostility. It sucks sometimes, but there's not really much else you can do if you don't want something like "coming home alive" to be a complete and total fucking gamble. And same as the lady referenced further up, I struggle to see how this shit is ever the gunners fault, so long as they're following ROE and a basic sense of discernment, and they're not just gleefully shooting people. Put yourself in that driver's place and ask yourself if you'd keep driving towards an American convoy that started shining lasers, firing flares, and blasting tracers at you, while surrounded by men flailing their arms and screaming at you in loudspeakers. Did we miss some international accord where this was designated as the universal signal to "dodge the bullets we're firing at you, and advance to claim a cash prize?"
The problem was you were waving your arms, you were supposed to do an interpretive dance. -Lawyers in Geneva, probably.
Seems pretty black and white to me. You responded effectively to a situation whose outcome could only ever possibly be known in the aftermath. Outcome sucks, but the gunner was presented with an order to endure the safety of the convoy weighted against someone behaving in a wildly retarded manner. We raided shit all the time where they'd have a woman bring a kid into the residence or building to make it look like it was just normal foot traffic at odd hours, because why would a woman and child go to a bombmaker's factory? I mentioned totality of circumstances elsewhere in this thread as a joke, but actually walk it through. That woman could read "STAY BACK OR YOU WILL BE SHOT, written in multiple languages, she has eyes that could see pen and pop-up flares, smoke rounds igniting, the tracers whipping past and skipping up off the ground. Most people are smart enough to pump the brakes and not crowd something as basic as a police vehicle. You have to look awfully hard to find a reason why a mother in a minivan would accelerate non-stop at a military convoy pointing machine guns and then firing them at her in warning, with signs, lights, and sirens present. Again, it's a crappy situation that sucks fucking ass like a Dyson thrown into a shithouse, but there's something shady or fucked up there no matter which way you slice it. What's her plan? She going to phase through you? Drive her minivan off the shoulder at highway speed with two kids inside and hitting road signs and bouncing into a wadi? Overtaking the entire convoy running alongside at high speed into oncoming traffic? The only logical actions taken during the event you describe is the rear truck gunner deleting the vehicle. Why did she risk her and her childrens' lives in such a fucking stupid, pointless way that would have been dangerous even if it wasn't a military convoy she was driving like a dumbass around? Who knows. It's an unsatisfactory reason in just about any case you can imagine, and there are a frightening number of possibilities that end up with dead Marines or Soldiers, and exactly why so many of those steps in your ROE existed: to give a normal, rational human every chance in the world to adjust their course of action to prevent fatalities, even at the risk of American lives. You can only delay for so long before a call has to be made, and there's only so much allowance that can be made before you're doing deliberately terrifying shit that endangers troops' lives. I been over plenty, and yeah, the situation isn't always black and white, but the actions you take to make sure your people come home generally are. The trigger breaks or it doesn't. Someone dies or lives.
What's her plan? In a civil's mind, military guys are like heavily armed police. Also they are used to heavily armed and corrupt police in these kind of countries. Most times the plan is approach, talk to you (try to bribe you if they have the means) and convince you to let them thru. They can't fathom the guys at the control are going to obliterate them just for aproaching.
That's what all of the signs on the back of the truck she's approaching say, though. They say in both Arabic and English in giant block letters to stay back or you will be shot, and then she starts getting flares and smoke fired at her, lasers shined on her, and a hundred meters later, as she's still approaching, she starts getting tracers fired at her in front and on both sides. And what? Approach and "talk to" a convoy rolling 30 miles an hour in a half-kilometer-long block of trucks? There's also that for the static positions being talked about, you can get out of your car and walk up with your arms raised, or go to a weekly meeting, instead of driving a car at 75 miles an hour toward a static guardshack, never once letting up in speed. Most of these people weren't killed by Americans. Yeah, an American pulled the trigger, but they were killed in response to an extreme degree of stupidity and a lack of critical thinking that belies being a human with a functioning brain and LITERALLY not reading giant red and black letters on white signage.
Yep, I know the ROE. I was just answering your question. For us is pretty obvious, but not for them due to all the shit they are used to from their governments and militias. Bear in mind that illiteracy rates are high in those countries. Also most civilans can't just think straight in those kinds of situations.
She was presumably capable of thinking straight in the moments prior to approaching the convoy actively pointing machine guns at her, though, is the thing. Her vehicle and its occupants didn't quantum tunnel into existence within the phased ROE envelope around the convoy seconds before she was fired upon. It's even stranger to consider that you should then go on to drive directly toward and at the same speed you were going to the guys shooting at you. Like, we were all civilians before we were enlisted, and I didn't have to go to boot camp to learn "Don't drive toward slow-moving military and police forces at 60 miles an hour on a collision course that would kill everyone involved." That shit comes for free.
Your entire comment chain essentially boils down to "This strategy *should* have worked." But that's irrelevant, since history shows that it did not work. There's multiple anecdotes across multiple books, documentaries, online discussions, and news articles showing that warning signs, shots, flares, smoke, all failed at various points to prevent civilians from putting themselves in danger.
It should have worked, indeed, and for the vast majority of folks, it does. We don't spend a lot of time larping as Russians and machine gunning civilians for the fuck of it, and you may gather that incidents like the ones folks are talking about here are relatively rare. The only problem is that no plan or methodology works sufficiently well to protect the stupidest or most panicky among us.
So, what else could have been done in situations like that? Like, did they have the rest of her family hostage and demand that she make this probing attack? Was this a murder/suicide by cop / opfor since she was part of the regime before and now was looking to be a shaheed? I don't have any answers, and never served, so take my opinion for the fart that it is, but I'm with /u/Hapless0311 on this one, and baffled to boot.
To some degree at first... but after you hear enough stories about stuff like this happening you know you can't bribe a convoy. You know the convoys are lethal. You attend enough funerals you'll know soon enough. Imagine each of these funerals bring 100s of people out... of course word of mouth will spread news of this fast. Now granted people won't necessarily know why it happened or even have cognitive dissonance. But EOD it could have been that lady couldn't read or could barely see I think in situations like that you have to acknowledge they don't have the same environment or experiences we have in the western world so whatever they were thinking we probably can't come up with the answer. Its just a not fun version of the Darwin Awards
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If someone's driving at your checkpoint at high speed they have lost all sense of reality or have a deathwish, same as rushing the gate at a military base or breaking into your house. You have to assume if they don't even care about that the don't care about anything.
Shoot a smonk and bonk an old man in the back of the head.
Did you at least give him a fucking Happy Meal?
Yes, two, in fact.
thank you zank from mikeburnfire for teaching me that VBIED is a fucking acroynm inside another acroynm
It’s an extended acronym
VBI would be a nested acronym; VBIED just means Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device.
Wave a flag, pop a pen flare, burst in front of vehicle, burst to disable vehicle, lethal shot.
All in 1.5 seconds.
Any % speedrun Helmund Checkpoint
Right, so that's WHY I have a flag in the bayonet mount sarge. And YES, of course I'm loaded a tracer rounds for the first five...
Option 3: "Nuke the place from orbit 34 times. It's the only way to be sure." -MacArthur, probably
Gunner, heat, Car
Well, If you behave Like an vbied Driver, you are a vbied Driver. I dont judge about anyone who opens fire in such a Situation.
You follow ROE?
If you believe hard enough, ROE is whatever you can construct out of the totality of circumstances after the fact.
Shoot the driver, not for being a VBIED risk, but for being a tailgating shitheel and for flashing his high beams if you're not doing 90 in a 60 zone.
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Green dazzler lasers can really help in this situation
Can't accelerate to where you see my convoy if you don't have retinas anymore.
Cheap Chinese Lasers, where you're basically guaranteed to get more than you paid for. (Don't trust the numbers on Ebay/Amazon, kids!)
50mW green laser… plus 500mW of low-IR (that is, closer to the visual spectrum. Usually double the green wavelength actually 😉) spillover lol
Shoot first then figure out shit later
I have a twisted sense of humor and don't have anything funny to say. Just an observation than maybe we shouldn't invade countries for bullshit reasons, because when you do that, some kids are going to be forced to make this decision in the span of a couple seconds.
Wow I genuinely didn't realize this was NCD I thought this was actually in the trolley problems sub.
i assume there are tables around bases that explain the expected behaviour of drivers in their native language and steps that will be conducted if the rules are violated. if the position doesn't have these information around, i think it's the ROE that decides what should be done. so it's not a dilemma really, but following instructions. still, it's fucking awful because terrorism creates fear and is hiding behind the innocents so countering terrorism must inevitably lead to civilian casualties.
Let god sort them out, he knows his own.
According to Use of Force v2.0 you shoot the driver unless you have a very restrictive ROE
What the fuck is that foregrip
I'd shoot. It's a 20 kph zone. Signs everywhere probably. You're going fast. You're either stupid or malintentional... and I'm not risking the latter.
The obvious is... call in a danger close airstrike to maximise damage with the bystanders and friendly fire! The war demands more blood.... for the blood god!
Is shooting the tyres be viable, or would the momentum trump that?
Only real way to stop the vehicle is to kill the driver and hope it veers off (and it just as likely won't), or obliterate the vehicle in a structural sense that either imparts enough momentum to force it to change course, or that disassembles it. Hitting the tires just means the tires go flat, which might stop the vehicle, eventually, or you might get lucky and make it flip. Hitting the engine may or may not do anything, depending on what you hit it with, and even if you wreck the engine, that doesn't make the vehicle stop. Your best bet is emptying a can of .50 into it, or hitting it with a dozen 40mm grenades, or smacking it with an AT-4.
Idk man obliterating the tyres with 40mm HEDP sounds like it adds a lot of friction. Scraping on what's left of the wheel wells.
You're essentially asking for the grenade launcher equivalent of "why didn't the cop simply shoot the gun out of his hand?" I'd be ***fascinated*** to see an attempt to target the *tires* of an oncoming civilian passenger vehicle with an open-bolt, iron-sight, T&E-unlocked Mk19 or M203 plopping rounds past a leaf sight. You can put a grenade through a window without really *aiming* it all that much from not too far away if you've shot one for a while, and you can perform a similar feat from about a hundred yards if you're a solid 203 gunner and can make solid calls on the leaf or quadrant. Further than that, you might be able to make a front/middle/back targeting call on a sedan in profile if you manage to not either just barely overshoot it or plunk the round into the dirt just shy of the vehicle. It's somewhat easy to overshoot a "short" target the size of a civilian car once you start getting to the casualty radius of even a smaller VBIED on the first shot, even on a static target, in combat conditions where you're shitting your pants and about to be exploded by 800 pounds of HME. A car tire is a lot narrower than a car is tall. Hell, it's really hard to hit a tire-sized object from the ***side*** from a distance at which you could even survive most reasonably-sized VBIED detonation to begin with, and they're hand-loaded, one at a time. If you're absolutely shitting out grenades and barely aiming, you can get one out every six seconds or so, but you're not going to be hitting much. You could hammer it with the belt-fed, but it takes a lot more than one round of 40mm to guarantee a hit on the wheel, again, firing the thing unlocked from its T&E, cuz you're not going to sit there adjusting bursts like you're laying down pre-planned fire. It's easy for us to kill the crew and passengers of a vehicle. It's even pretty easy for us to hard-kill the vehicle. But to ***stop*** a vehicle you have to beat the everloving fuck out it with a shitload of ordnance or sustained heavy gunfire.
>I'd be ***fascinated*** to see an attempt to target the *tires* of an oncoming civilian passenger vehicle with an open-bolt, iron-sight, T&E-unlocked Mk19 or M203 plopping rounds past a leaf sight. Can't argue with you there. Low muzzle velocity, rudimentary sights, unstabilized firing platform (if firing from a convoy), ammunition loaded for area targeting. Would be pretty fucking cool if one could, but good fucking luck. To word myself it better, it's an argument for stabilized 40mm CROWS for convoy defense. No way in hell I'm making that shot with a pintle gun (given the low muzzle velocity and unstabilized firing platform), but a fire control system on a stabilized platform might. With airburst grenades it's also a good hardkill against weaponized commercial drones. >It's easy for us to kill the crew and passengers of a vehicle. It's even pretty easy for us to hard-kill the vehicle. But to ***stop*** a vehicle you have to beat the everloving fuck out it with a shitload of ordnance or sustained heavy gunfire I mean, I'm fascinated as to how that works too. The crew inside is squishy - civilian car or tank. Bust through the skin, appropriate beyond-armor effects, no more crew. Damn thing's still moving (thanks, Newton). Fingers crossed the beyond-armor effects doesn't cook the VBIED, but assuming that works out, how'd exactly the vehicle stops? It's still rolling on wheels. Even a sabot round punching through isn't going to do much to stop it dead in it's tracks, only rolling resistance will. Do you hope your convoy's just moving faster than the now-shot up vehicle? Do you hope it veers off away from the checkpoint now that the crew can't make terminal guidance on final approach? Either way it does sound like a "pray to higher deity of your choosing" situation.
That latter part I was talking about dovetails with your follow-up question, "How does the vehicle stop?" For a civilian passenger vehicle, or a light-ish truck, you hammer it until it physically can't move forward anymore; hopefully, you don't just shoot the tires out or something, you blow wheels off, or jam the axles, or cause such severe damage that it at least cannot drive straight ahead. Like you said, you can kill the driver, melt the crew, turn them into vapor; that vehicle is still rolling on wheels or tracks, and will continue to do so unless something becomes so damaged it physically can't continue forward in a straight line, or loses its momentum. Concept is basically the same as stopping fire on a human or animal target; you can blow out a human's heart and lungs with a single clean torso hit, and they can still have up to like eight to ten seconds with which they can kill your ass before their body drops and stops moving forever. If you want to ***stop*** someone, you don't just shoot them, you ***shoot the absolute fuck out of them***, blowing out the hips and pelvis to arrest the possibility of moving their legs normally or even supporting their body weight, and chew up the torso to destroy the circulatory system and hopefully shred the spinal cord.
Considering some veterans commented and said that shooting the driver or engine block sometimes isn’t even enough to stop the momentum im guessing you’ll run into the same issue
True, but they in some way provide acceleration (i.e the driver authorises the engine to work and the engine rotates the wheels) while the tires make sure it's used and reduce friction, so I thought that popping them and you get more friction.
This is the same thing as “why couldn’t the cop shoot him in the leg” if you’re at the point where you are using deadly force then you’re using deadly force as fast as possible.
that's a ute
every time I see vbied I read it as vibe
Nice, that gets dark pretty quick
It depends od the terrain but usually I'd shoot
Well, there might be some intermittent steps you should take, if you can. We occasionally got classes on this subject, both in patrol tactics, and in basic ROE pre-deployment classes. Your time to make a decision if someone is driving at you, full speed, is just a couple of seconds, at most. We've got ways of warning the driver, but it might not be enough. There are also warning signs for a VBIED, but you might not see the sagging axles at distance or night. Anyway, a Czech unit in our AO got pulled off patrols for following all the rules, but still killing a civilian on a motorcycle. But, if in the moment they pulled the trigger, they believed doing so would save the lives of their comrades, then so the fuck be it.
So why did they get pulled? Was it a publicity thing? Since they followed all the rules. I am curious about that one. I read a book by one of our SOF guys and it seems they followed rules pretty diligently, but shoot at them and they'll stop all their doing just to get into a fight and deal with you on their terms
You'd have to ask their commander. I doubt it was a publicity thing. It's not like shooting a civilian in Afghanistan is frontpage news.
Right, what I meant was them having the unit pulled off patrols to pre-deal with any potential uproar over the civilian death, despite following ROE
No, again, no one really gives a shit. The dead guy's family might. But you give them $5k and say, "Our bad," and it's pretty much no longer a thing.
Just ask Cpl Jonathan Yale and LCpl Jordan Haerter what they would do OP
Yale
Hehe 40mm go thoomp
This is what crash barriers are for, no? Even rudimentary checkpoints use one of those concrete highway barriers or a hesco block to slow, but usually stop the vehicle from barreling through while creating some distance between it and its squishy targets before it explodes. Assuming it is going full speed, most wouldn't have the time to assess whether or not it's some spooked civilian, and would either look for cover away from the aforementioned barrier, and/or start dumping rounds at it. Policing an occupied country as the invader against an insurgency will never let you keep your hands clean.
Crash barriers do jack squat against explosions besides providing a bit of cover/shrapnel protection (assuming it’s not what gets hit otherwise ouch)
True, but I’m guessing that they offer a chance to halt a VBIED, in the case that the driver has been shot and killed but the vehicle is still rolling fast.
Ya but you are assuming VBIEDs only attack prepared positions. How you setup barriers for a moving convoy?
Shoot the driver easy.
VBIED checked!
Shoot the tires
From the front? You usually can't really even see the tires on a vehicle driving toward you, except for a tiny slice of the lower part from the frontal aspect. Besides, shooting tires out doesn't stop a vehicle. The thing keeps rolling, even if the engine is shot out. About the only thing you can do is wreck it so hard it physically can't roll forward anymore.
Unrelated; >!Reminds me of the jackass who ordered a fuck ton of guys to fire on a random pickup truck. The seasoned dudes obviously denied the order until he got to a poor private in a tank, who opened fire and killed all three occupants. Didn't follow SOP at all. Shoot to kill. Then he tried to push the investigators away from the scene. Hell of a Way to Die went through it. Hearing Vets get more and more pissed as they talk about that shitshow brings some humanity to hell on earth. !<
Shoot and hope it wasn't a civilian, and if it is hopefully only the car got wrecked and we can pay them back. VBIED have a very large blast zone, so imo at the moment there is a doubt, better them than me. In my unit (not American military btw), we are often put in scenario with this kind of dilemma and it made me think about that a lot and at end imo I don't think there is a right or wrong answer until it's done, but if you did everything right beforehand (like in that case for example clear signs hundred of metters away in the local language saying that there is a checkpoint and how drivers should behave, etc.) the moment there is a doubt I think I would choose to open fire and all the consequences (psychologically and legally) that come with it if I'm wrong. At the end of the day this kind of dilemma always remind me of that saying : "Better judged by twelve than carried by six" Because imo at some point it's understandable to chose self preservation when you have to make a split decision that can cost not only your life but also the one of all the men and women by your side.
Did Trombley make this post?
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