Damnit, we're the contemporary Flower Warriors. I knew it.

If you've got a little bit of time on your hands and you feel like punishing yourself, take a look at Zhivan Alach's Strategic Studies Institute monograph "The New Aztecs: Ritual and Restraint in Contemporary Western Military Operations." It's a muddled mess of stereotype, unproven assertion, tertiary-source quotations, conservative social theory, tortured syntax, and staggeringly bad analysis, and it's the leading contender in the always-crowded field for Worst Thing I've Read This Year From a Serious Publisher.

To give you a taste of just exactly how awful this thing is, I present Prosecution Exhibit 1: the paper is just over 38 full pages of text, and it cites Ralph Peters 14 separate times and Victor Davis Hanson eight. There are no references to primary-source historical documents, and Alach's limning of the history of warfare -- sort of important context for a study of "primitive" restraint in warfighting versus the allegedly modern trend towards total war -- is cribbed almost entirely from Hanson and John Keegan.

Now for Prosecution Exhibit 2, which pretty much just speaks for itself:

It pays to consider the Aztecs. At the time of the Flower Wars, the Aztecs were hegemonic in Central America. They could fight in a ritualized way because they had no true rival. When a rival did appear -- a rival named Cortes, who fought in an amoral, instrumental, rational, unrestrained, and nonritualized manner -- the Aztecs were defeated. Cortes fought to kill. He fought to win. 

Is there a Cortes awaiting the West today? Will we, the contemporary Flower Warriors, face a foe who, to be defeated, requires our willingness to kill, be killed, and fight to the bitter end? Is the current style of Western warfare but a mere historical blip, a momentary anomaly that will disappear when the world changes again? History cannot answer that question, but we had better be prepared to answer it ourselves.

To answer it with lead and steel and metal and brawn, because brown people haven't mastered those things yet! If only those flower-fucking Aztecs had taken the gloves off and fought unrestricted, total warfare, they surely could've defeated Cortes' vastly superior tactics and materiel! It was those pathetic, primitive, and obviously homosexual Aztec ROEs that doomed them to defeat!

These freakin' people, man.

Now seriously for a second: how does the U.S. Army War College publish something like this?

War via Wikileaks

It's become a cliche to describe the media as an ever-present factor in modern military operations that can confer strategic importance on tactical actions, but Wikileaks is driving the phenomenon to new heights. As both the BBC and the New York Times have reported, the organization has posted video from an incident in 2007 when American Apaches fired on two groups of individuals on a street in Baghdad, killing twelve. The video is from the Apaches themselves, and thus provides more insight into the situation than is typical because it includes the communications between the two helos, and between the Apaches and US troops on the ground. Watch for yourselves, and please note that if I knew the first thing about video editing, I'd get rid of Wikileaks' inflammatory comments. But I don't, so try to ignore them.

The group that was targeted in the first instance included two people that appear to be armed, but it also includes two Reuters reporters carrying cameras that the pilots mistakenly identify as weapons. In fact, when one of the reporters crouches down and pokes his camera around a corner, the pilots report seeing an RPG. Partially mistaken or not, the Apaches opened fire on a group that did in fact include armed men. As tragic as the reporters' deaths are, this seems to me part of the risk assumed by journalists who embed (however informally or momentarily) with combatants on either side. Notably, this seems to be Reuters' position as well, who characterized it as a tragedy, rather than murder as Wikileaks alleges.

A couple of issues do seem to bear consideration. First, these pilots seem awfully eager to engage, and one has to wonder if that eagerness led them to mis-identify the cameras as RPGs. I could be wrong (and I'd welcome correction), but I'd imagine that the pilots may have felt a greater urgency to engage if they believed they were in the threat envelope of RPGs. Eagerness by pilots to engage has led to tragic mistakes elsewhere, and therefore might constitute a problem unto itself.

Nonetheless, there were two guys with weapons there, so it seems reasonable to have engaged. However, I am genuinely at a loss to understand the rationale for firing on the people who arrive in a van following the attack to help the wounded. None were armed. They weren't spotters for other combatants. Their only actions were picking up one of the wounded reporters and moving him towards the van. Am I missing something here? What would the justification have been to engage? I'm not leaping to judgment, but on the face of it this seems outside the line.

Whatever the reality was, whatever events led up to this incident (note that 38 minutes of video were released, of which Wikileaks posted 17), this is an info ops failure. The pilots come across as awfully cavalier, particularly when told there were small children in the van they demolished with 30mm fire. We may be missing a lot of context here, but revelling in the carnage when they weren't under threat seems likely to make that context irrelevant for a lot of people.

So, what do you all think? Were they justified in opening fire on the van? More broadly, is this incident symptomatic of the new pervasiveness of media scrutiny? If so, what are the implications for how we manage our communications?

UPDATE: So as usual I'm behind the curve on this one. Schmedlap started a thread at SWJ that's drawn some informed comments, and Starbuck is all over it. And the report of the Army's investigation ca be found here. Go read those smart people and then come back here and discuss further. H/T to Schmedlap, and thanks to the other insomniacs who've already weighed in.

UPDATE II: Schmedlap has a great post you should all read, especially the section entitled 'Positive Identificaiton (PID) and Basic Human Decency' .

UPDATE III: Foreign Policy has just put out an article about this issue. Remarkably, it manages to radically misquote Anthony Martinez' analysis of the incident in the second paragraph. My contempt for FP deepens.

Not good

The Post reported this morning that ISAF soldiers in a convoy shot and killed an imam in Kabul today. While the nationality of the soldiers was not mentioned, the locals said they were Americans. The car was apparently shot eight times at least and the convoy continued on its mission without stopping. ISAF spokesmen gave the normal "we regret the loss of life" statements - a statement that will likely stand until an investigation is complete.

This is terrible for a number of reasons, and I'll skip the discussion on the obvious (how shooting imams really pisses off the locals). After all of the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, I do not understand how convoys still end up shooting people around them and just keep moving. That is so 2004. I'm not questioning the decision to fire on the imam's vehicle as I was not on the ground and have no idea what prompted it. Convoys have a tendency to be extremely paranoid of car bombs (rightfully so) and have escalation of force procedures to protect themselves from that threat. While that paranoia can lead to completely unnecessary civilian deaths, they are generally useful and understood by the populace. It seems that this may have been unnecessarily heavy-handed, but again, I wasn't there so I don't know. The automatic investigation into this event will determine that. What bugs me is that they did not stop. Drive-by's should be a thing of the distant past - the convoy had an obligation to stop and cordon off the area to assess the threat, treat any casualties, and interact with witnesses to explain what the hell happened. Otherwise, the conspiracy-minded folk in the area will just go ahead and assume it was an assassination. The other result of this is that any "thorough investigation" won't have local witnesses and will be made entirely of statements of the members of the convoy. I'm going to assume it will be a lot of "I felt an imminent threat so I opened fire" kind of statements - because that's what usually happens (I may be proven wrong here, but I've never seen anything to the contrary) and is actually quite less than thorough.

The second problem I see here is the ISAF statement. Well no kidding this is tragic and everyone regrets it. ISAF should have publicly taken that convoy to task (they didn't have to identify them at this point) for not stopping and doing those three things listed above. We were told to expect more candor from ISAF when drone strikes kill civilians, I guess I expected that to include when convoys do stupid things, too. How silly of me. I understand mea culpas don't always make things right, but the bland statement that was made borders on obfuscation of the facts.

With the command's insistence on protecting civilians as its highest priority, both the actions of the patrol and the comments from ISAF violate the Chairman's "say-do" gap, in my opinion at least. It seems ISAF still has a long way to go in understanding the lessons learned in the past eight years.

"Less Peril for Civilians, but More for Troops." No Kidding, It's Called War.

Ann Scott Taylor has a front-page article in today's Post on the effects of the recent changes in the rules in engagement in Afghanistan with regard to the use of air and artillery fires. There are a couple of anecdotes in this article that concern me if they are true that tell of fires being held for no specific reason in heavy battles in which US servicemen are being killed. It seems that that concern is what this piece is trying to prompt.

In the second story about the Marine advisory team that was ambushed, a relative of one of the casualties stated that he or she had been told that women and children had been feeding ammo to the insurgents engaging the Marines. And yet they had been denied artillery support because of the new rules. (The first story should be well known to our readers now - LCpl Bernard and comments from his father, a retired USMC 1st Sgt and Vietnam veteran).

First of all, if the women and children were feeding ammo to the enemy (whoever they were), then they lose their noncombatant status. Plain and simple - it is not a situation of collateral damage. Obviously it's up to the commander on the ground to decide whether or not to engage in that instance - but it's just that: the commander's decision.

Second, and at the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard, the family members of casualties are not a good source of what happened on the battlefield. On top of being inexpert on the environment and not actually being on the ground, their grief and helplessness in the situation skews their perspective on what happened. They look for reasons why this tragedy had occurred to their loved one that has destroyed the lives that they knew. I am not saying that the story is wrong or inaccurate, I'm just saying that it is one perspective. The allegations of which should (and probably were) looked into. But their saying so doesn't make it so. I won't go into details, but I've dealt with lots of problems of this nature when I was deployed - it's the nature of modern warfare. This also ties back to a previous post I wrote on expertise.

That said, the other thing that bothers me about this article is the use of Vietnam vets as expert opinion to members of the Senate who are looking into the ROE. SEN Susan Collins cited 1st Sgt. Bernard and his letter discussing strategic interests in theater and other issues (to include the fact that Afghans "hate us anyway") that lead to his son's death. And SEN Mark Begich cited an Army colonel who served in Vietnam which lead the good Senator to say "You know, we're engaged or we're not. We're not halfway in." While I appreciate their service and insight, let's get something straight. The way in which the U.S. conducts wars has changed drastically in the last 30 years. ROE recommendations from Vietnam vets, based on their Vietnam experience, is about as welcome, I'm sure, as WWII vets' recommendations to them in Vietnam. You cannot allow liberal fires policies that kill lots of civilians to be used. Period. On top of bad policy, it's bad morality. To us, our soldiers and Marines are very valuable and should be used only when our strategic interests warrant putting their lives at risk. But they are willing combatants whereas civilians are not. The lives of Afghan civilians are not cheaper than those of any other human life. And killing lots of civilians unnecessarily is counterproductive to our mission in Afghanistan, whether we're doing CT or COIN or even if it's in the interest of force protection. Unnecessarily is the operative word and where we've failed before in Afghanistan.

Now that that's all out of the way, it does sound as if a review of the ROE should be done. The enemy has adapted well to it and uses it to their advantage. That's fine, they're going to do that no matter what the ROE is. But it sounds as if commanders are hesitant to pull a trigger because of the message the ROE sends, even if they should have. That's not good. I've said before, CAS and artillery should be used in this fight. It just needs to be used smartly.