Hear me out.
The Panjshir Valley is the last stronghold of resistance to the Taliban.
So, it’s off grid. Fertile land. No income tax.
We can transport American homesteaders out there to farm and build the perfect off grid lifestyle.
As a bonus, they can keep all the US military equipment they can get their hands on.
All they really need to do is occasionally fight off Taliban.
It would be like Westward Expansion in the 1800 but with AKs and Islamists instead of arrows and Indians.
Forget flying Americans out of Afghanistan, I want to fly them in.
What I hear over and over again is that if the RoE were changed to the advantage of the soldier, lots and lots of these issues would just go away.
I was watching a documentary on Afghanistan and they spotted a person on a motorcycle (prohibited) with what looked like an RPG slung over his back as well as an AK style rifle. Again, prohibited in that area.
The team that had eyes on this dude had to get confirmation and permission before they could engage.
The motorcycle comes to a stop, they dude goes inside. Dude with exactly the same clothing comes outside a few minutes later without the RPG and rifle, gets on the motorcycle and rides off.
The team was not allowed to engage because permission to engage didn’t come through until after he had gotten into the building and once he offloaded, he was no longer a “target”.
The same team follows a dude into one of these series of underground water tunnels/wells. They go down, they see a cache of weapons. They can’t do anything about the fact that the insurgents are using these tunnels to hide from the americans and if they make it into one, they are home free because RoE forbid any damage to these water ways/wells.
In your idea, the RoE are going to be different. It isn’t going to be waiting for higher ups to give permission. It is going to be engage when target is identified.
Some dude runs up, fires an RPG at your home then drops the tube and goes hands up? Round through the skull. You don’t become a non-combatant just because you drop your weapon.
We fought the first Gulf War with rules of engagement that were written to make sure our soldiers looked nice and polite on CNN (knowing that CNN would spin the footage for us). We barely accomplished that mission, mostly due to how limited our goals were and just how incompetent the Iraqi military leadership was.
We fought the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War with rules of engagement that were written to make sure our soldiers looked nice and woke on YouTube and Twitter (knowing that camera phones were ubiquitous and we couldn’t rely on gatekeeping corporate media to scrub the footage for us). We’ve lost both wars.
We fought every previous war we ever waged with rules of engagement that were written to make sure our soldiers won the fucking war. We won all those wars (yes, even Vietnam).
I remember reading a book about WWII and a Marine colonel giving the order “kill everything that doesn’t speak English.” It worked.
Amazing. Twenty years before, the Taliban controlled Kabul and all the other maor cities. The only holdouts were in the Northhern Alliance controlled the Panjshir Valley, and not much else. Then 9/11 happened. Now 20 years later, the Taliban control Kabul and all the other maor cities. The only holdouts are in the Panjshir Valley, and not much else.
Thank you George, Dick, Barack, the Pentagon, US Defense Industries, and especially Joe Biden. You accomplished so little on the ground while killing and maiming way too many US Soldiers, Allied Soldiers and Afghani citizens. May you all Burn In HELL!
A story from somebody that claimed to have been there and done that. At this point I put his truthfulness level at about a negative 100 but it is the sort of story that exemplifies this type of sick RoE.
According to ex-friend:
There is incoming fire on the berm. He heads over. Gets there, yep, there is a kid shooting at them. Yep. Child soldier.
RoE says they can shoot him. Kid is having a hard time reloading as he’s so young.
E-F: asks “Why don’t you just waste him?”
Officer: “RoE”
E-F: goes and hops in a Humvee heads out the gate, turns and *runs over the kid with the vehicle*. Returns.
O: WTF?
E-F: RoE’s doesn’t say anything about traffic accidents.