Cazalet33,

Once again, your ignorance is showing. The International Committee of the Red Cross studied the visibility of Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols way back in 1970 and conducted tests in the '90s. The appropriate materials were are identified to ensure their visibility to electro-optical sensors.

Not displaying the symbol on the grounds of EO detection is not a valid argument.

I think this particular "Troll" Cazalet33 has an office based in St Petersburg.

Caz, your comment about paint and IR betrays your ignorance.

IR is based on temperature differential and different paint pigments have different thermal properties.

Not much if the two paints come from the same source and if the background metal has cooled down after solar radiation during daylight. It's the metal which emits the IR, not the paint.

Wrong wavelength. But the ICRC research must clearly be wrong according to you.

CAZ, I could post links to IR paint but I doubt you would believe r bother to prejudice your prejudices.

I've seen enough very large painted signs and labels of the sides of ships on IR optoelectronic displays to recognise the limitations at night of reading painted signs on IR displays.

A more serious problem with the idea of painting warning on the roofs of every non-acceptable target in Asia and Africa which might become a target for you-know-who is that there are just so many inappropriate targets. Not just hospitals but a hundred or more categories of inappropriate targets.

Don't forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. If we demand that every potential target for inappropriate air attack paint such recognition symbols, then it is sure that sooner or later the US military will claim that they had a right to attack one because the symbol was not clear enough. You know what they're like.

I think that MSF did all that could reasonably be required of them to inform the potential aggressor that the provincial hospital in Kunduz was where is was.

It was the attack which was unreasonable, not the target.

"I think that MSF did all that could reasonably be required of them to inform the potential aggressor that the provincial hospital in Kunduz was where is was."

Interesting use of the singular tense there...

Hey Caz,
Why not paint the roofs of just appropriate targets? Or am I missing something?

@cazallet33

Your posts read as though they are cut and pasted straight from the propaganda book you get issued with. :)

I have my suspicions that our troll is ex-maritime.

Two clues, IR/EO, and 1c buoys.

Your troll, Sir, only kept coming back because people kept reacting to him and so that he could fulfil his quota of message plants. Left alone they tend to grind their axe a bit and then move on.

Standards are slipping.

Can't believe you lot responded to this idiot. The ignore button is there for a reason.

"I think that MSF did all that could reasonably be required of them to inform the potential aggressor that the provincial hospital in Kunduz was where is was."

Interesting use of the singular tense there."

wellll - there is only one force out there with an airforce no???

But I also sure the local insurgents are careful about who they strike and where, checking their Geneva Convention booklet as they go................

Afghanistan defense minister says Taliban was in MSF Doctors Without Borders hospital blown up by US - CBS News

It is interesting to listen to the Afghanistan defense minister. He argues that Taliban were using the hospital as "Safe Haven" for fighting forces ... and that the request for airstrike on the basis that it was being so used again was integral to the call for airborne fires.

This points to a tricky problem of a coalition operation and who is using what RoE. It's a bit of a minefield, as this instance shows.

Also tricky is the tidbit of info (not sure of its quality) that a Pakistani operative was involved in this whole mess and was in aid of the Taliban in Kunduz. Nothing quite as simple as it seems, but one thing I learned is that RoE has (in some cases) restrictions placed on the operators for political reasons ... which means that the political sorts are willing to accept more friendly casualties for the political aim of ... not looking bad. (Or worse, since bad is a given anymore ...)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-analy...ctors-deny-it/

Kinda important and meaningful discussion to had here. I have a vested interest because I have a close family member who has taken career path in a similar organisation and who has the cojones to go into sh1tholes to help the vulnerable in the most extreme circumstances.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, the military outfits involved need to learn and if they can do better, they must do better. Nothwithstanding that, I'm ex military so I get "fog of war" OK

And stop debating with just one poster. It's pointless. If you think he/she is a troll let it go FFS.

Then I suspect, fellow old timer, that you know how hard they (the military still at it) work at getting it right.

Remember: all the things you and I learned in our years in uniform, before we were put out to pasture, did not just flow into the young minds in a Vulcan mind meld. As turnover happens, some lessons are retained better than others. It's kind of like why aircraft still crash now and again.

As ex-military (contrary to lonewolf's assumptions) from the time the SPAMs were "friendly firing" on British soldiers, it really does seem as though you believe personal rhetoric should be implemented rather than amending procedures from previous errors.
The operator(s) of the weapon(s) probably hasn't learnt that the "I was only following orders" defence kind of got dismissed in a very well known set of court hearings many moons ago.


I also have a close friend in war zone aid work, and I'm sure his family would appreciate knowing he is hopefully safe from this kind of event.

You are wrong, my friend, the effort to get it right never ceases -- your flaw in logic is that there is somewhere a perfect and fool proof procedure. Haven't seen one yet, but I've seen some pretty good ones that when followed prevent a lot of bad things from happening.

Are you sure you actually served? If you believe that any human endeavor is going to be conducted under zero defects, then you will be disappointed every time you wake up.

First rule of combat; "the plan only lasts till first contact with the enemy."

Agree completely.

Or first contact with the hospital, in this case.

Highly doubtful that MSF could reasonably be described as "the enemy".

And you, my Friend, are right. No matter how many times you revise the procedures, whatever type they may be, they never become perfect. Hell, they were still amending the F4 checklists when she went out of service and they had decades to get those right. As each battle plan is devised to meet the threat of the day, they don't have the same luxury of time to be as right as they can be.

As for battle plans surviving to first contact, I never knew one that lasted that long without some degree of failure.

the US pretty much immediately paid compensation to the families of deceased civilians. Along with President Obama calling MSF to apologize, I think that says a lot. Long before the ongoing investigation will reach an official conclusion. A conclusion we (in our lifetime) will most likely never know in, because no one would be insane enough to disclose details about RoE.

A few more details emerged, the US Special Forces and the JTAC on the ground who called in the strike were apparently new to the area. So was the AC-130 crew. I'm a conspiracy theorist (that's what Pprune is for), and I still suspect Afghan forces had some grief against that hospital (like, they were giving medical treatment to taliban combatants), and someone in the US chain of command, in a HQ far away failed to notice this was a hospital. I'd also assume because Afghan forces had called for the strike, it would need to be approved slightly higher up the chain of command than if US forces were under attack (even if RoE are different for AC-130 with their highly capable sensors and direct fire capability). I do wish - at the very least - that the career of that individual has ended. I'm sorry, looking at the satellite imagery, and publicly available maps, this doesn't look excusable to me. Fog of war, battle plans that fail, sure, but you need to draw a line somewhere, and I think it was crossed here. Accountability and responsibility shouldn't be empty words.

Indeed it does. It would be a fair and just response to a terrible event. There is no argument about who did what here. Event: U.S. Aircraft did terrible damage to a hospital. Response: make what little amends one could in those circumstances.

You think it says a lot. It says no more than what I have written in the previous paragraph. It says nothing about the hows and whys. You are fully entitled to speculate about all sorts sorts of things - and, to be honest, that's quite understandable. But we may need to hear a lot more facts before we can judge this. Those are things that will say a lot.

And again for MSF?

Yemen conflict: MSF hospital destroyed by air strikes - BBC News

Notice the deliberate lie and spin already in the media, provided by an MSF spokesman.
It isn't a war crime if it's a mistake. That is the fact of the matter.

If it was intentional and the whomever struck with that foreknowledge, there is a case to be made in support of his claim. The Saudi's are at this point saying "need an investigation" ... but the story does have a curious one-two punch to it:
Based on that one two punch, I will be more charitable in assessing this gent's belief that it was deliberate. What nobody knows, or reported, is if that position has been used as a fighting position recently or in and around the time of the attack. MSF will protest that it hasn't, but as they aren't the ones with guns, someone else may have done so regardless of what the medics desired.
Technically true in general, except when someone establishes a fighting position at a hospital. At that point, it's no longer safe ... but whether or not that is part of the matter here is unknown.

To sum up: it doesn't mean you were deliberately targeted simply because a bomb hit. What it does mean is that your preventative measure, offered in good faith, still wasn't enough thanks to whatever the C2 and decision making among people with weapons did on a given day.

Why ... remains to be seen.

Conclusion: might have been deliberate, based on the one two punch. Might have been an accident. In this case, I will put my ten bucks with the MSF report thanks to the follow up attack.

What is unknown: did whomever targeted that building know it was a hospital? Don't know yet, and given that it's the Saudis, whose reputation for transparency isn't stellar, that may remain unknown.

The Saudi bombing of a hospital is just part of a pattern of behaviour which presumes that the mass murderers involved are immune from prosecution by a war crimes tribunal.

The fact that the recent Saudi barbarity wasn't quite on the American scale of such atrocities doesn't excuse them at all. It's still a war crime to bomb or shell a known hospital.

Until some of these murderers are brought to Justice, the war crimes will continue with impunity.

Willfully and deliberately? Yes, in a war. By the way, if it is known to you and me as a hospital it is utterly irrelevant. As for the fellow with the artillery tube or the plane, then he doesn't know it's a hospital, you have to work your way up the chain of command to find out who did, and how that information got into (or failed to get into) a call for fire. That's where the transparency becomes a concern for finding out how this went down. Your knee jerk assumption isn't any better than the fast mouth from MSF.

Think about this, Caz: if a hospital gets bombed in sometime that is not a war, it's something like arson.

That it was willful is not established, though in this case (as I noted above) the follow up attack points in that direction. That's where my betting money is.

One can also argue that a sufficient state of belligerency has been established to classify what is going on in Yemen as war.

I hadn't heard anything about an inquiry into this yet...edit: I just did a quick search, there was a statement, "avoidable human error", compounded by "process failures" and "equipment malfunctioning". Unsurprisingly, lots of holes in the cheese.http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/25/po...ders-hospital/ Yet I was just thinking, maybe it doesn't matter what the public gets to know. The U.S. has likely compensated families of the deceased, and the most important is that they get closure. Hopefully, some lessons were learned, which is equally important. Some career hopes may have been dented, that is the least important (sadly, I have a feeling that will be true for "those who didn't follow RoE", RoE which may have been carefully worded to avert blame from those who created them..).

My reason for suddenly posting in this old thread was that I stumbled across this article, a journalist doing his job, researching a story about a man who died on an operating table, his bicycle, and his mourning daughter. Somewhat disturbing, when it gets personal. The Man on the Operating Table | Foreign Policy

This may be a faint hope, but I do hope decision-makers think twice about what they're doing in Syria. I'm still struggling to see the rationale for NATO involvement in Afghanistan, and struggling see what it actually achieved, and if the costs were justified (tax money as well as human cost). Then again, maybe I'm too impatient, expecting to see instant results.

It has become a bad tradition

I guess an attack on a NATO member isn't enough for you. Fourteen years, and change, since then, your question about what has been achieved is well asked in more places than at your keyboard, or mine.

For those of you that have expressed your outrage when NATO/Western forces accidentally hit a hospital in Afg, where is your condemnation for Russia and the Syrian Governments bombing a whole town?

Care to comment Cazalet33?

Delighted to comment.

The bastards should be hauled before a War Crimes Tribunal without delay or mercy.

Russian, American, or whatever: makes no difference.

As for yourself, Courtney, did you express outrage or condemnation when a marked and known hospital was repeatedly bombed with precision munitions and fleeing nurses, doctors and patients were hosed down with machine guns? I did.

You know I didn't. Didn't you read any of my posts at the time?

And it's the fact that you were so outraged then, when it was allied forces, and so silent now it's Russia/Syria (until prompted) that puzzled me.

Not to worry.

Courtney, I commend a well informed documentary for your education and perhaps edification on the underlying topic:


Not to worry.

You presume to educate me? Thanks for the offer, but I'll struggle along.

For those who decline an education in the matter, I proffer Part Two:

Thread necromancy: this time used as opportunity for a wind up.