One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any fucking sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command...
I'm speechless. This passage alone deserves its own facepalm.
3 comments:
Yes, I noticed that too. Perhaps instead of Afghanistan we should just patrol, say, Iceland.
Yeah, my jaw dropped after reading that. This is one reason why I continue to emphasize the need for balance of kinetic/non-kinetic activity. We're a bureaucracy. If the head boss tells the command that he wants less civilian casualties, then this is how it sometimes gets interpreted- a very twisted path of least resistance.
But this is what happens when a four star issues a tactical directive telling Lance Corporals in the field under fire what to do and when rather than focusing on strategy. Micromanagement. I'll say it again. Micromanagement. The military learned in from corporate America, and then went anal with it.
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