Okay CM, I promise not to comment on the present Syria/Iraq situation. In the coming months, I will await positive and meaningful results in defeating ISIL through airpower, because you are clearly of the conviction that our pilots have all the tools they need to do the job (including appropriate ROE).
If you think there is no link between
PR and ROE then I believe that you are sadlly mistaken. Our policy is set by the politicians as to what they want to achieve and what they think will be reaction from the general public. I am not saying they are all cynical manipulators, but I think it is also true that very many of them can't seem to grasp the realities of warfare, conflict and thee proportionate use of force. Ergo, you get idiots like Jeremy Corbin saying he doesn't agree with the Police's "Shoot to kill policy" - a classic example of good, workable ROE - but the basic principle of which Mr Corbin clearly doesn't begin to understand.
So we have arrived at recent conflicts such as the Balkans, post-GW2 Iraq and Afghanistan with initial policies and strategies that are woefully inadequate but which are played up as effective, substantial and fully capable of resolving the situation. Referring back to the UN mission in Bosnia, what else but '
PR' or gross delusion can be the reason for declaring Srebrenica a 'safe area' when it was anything but? Similarly CAS was promised to deter hostile acts, but were the pilots able to be scrambled, arrive at the target and decide when and where to bomb? Only after passing up a chain of command leading to the senior UN representatives, by which time the action was often already over. Yet the public perception was maintained that our fighters were on-call and would be used effectively - not hamstrung into virtual uselessness.
We saw the same thing in Iraq with the 'Snatch' debacle. Only after severe casualties and increasingly bad
PR were any changes made. There was quite a campaign about this in the UK (relatives turning up on TV etc) and it got results. Not sure that would have happened without the press taking up the cause.
As a parting shot, several of my friends from recent conflicts have commented that they would preferentially ask for US CAS since the Americans were percieved as having much less restrictive ROE and be much more likely to engage the target!
Flug