Originally Posted by
Kinger
....and you wonder why the war on terror isn't going so well. Such a compassionate attitude will really endear you to the average onlooker.
In case you hadn't noticed, this forum is for Military Aviation sorts, past and present. That is my audience. The appeal to "the dead people don't care how it all blew up" is a load of bollocks as well as misdirection. I am directly addressing the problem of the application of force, which is what MILITARY people do. The folks in that Hospital are dead, and can't care anymore about anything. None of us can go rewind reality and make that untrue. Sad, but true.
@stupidbutsaveable.
I retired ten years ago, plus a week.
One of the most pressing concerns we had in coordinating close air support and strikes of various kinds was to not kill anyone we didn't intend to. Besides the RoE being very strict, the ongoing concerns included
(a) hearts and minds. I kid you not. We were keenly aware of how hard it is to work with people when you just bombed their neighborhood.
(b) helping whomever was trying to sort out things on the ground, with means both combative and non combative (the latter exceeded the former by a few orders of magnitude). This included our forces, coalition forces, and various factions in those countries. Volunteers from NGO's were also supported where possible, but NGO's create serious problems in a lot of ways, for all of their altruism and desire to help people in a crap situation. One is the lie of "because I am here to help, I should be invulnerable." That applies to some journalists as well, though most of the war correspondents were very candid about how aware they were of the risks in their jobs.
(c) our various ground commanders whom we supported were hell on very discrete use of air power. They didn't want anyone blowing up people they weren't fighting: they were trying to maintain a modicum of control in a fluid situation. It was hard enough to do what they were trying to do without one more damned thing providing grief to the people the commander was trying to work with while at the same time killing other people.