![\"\"](\"https:\/\/nbsubscribe.missouri.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Houston-phonesoldier.jpg\")
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[by Mark Safranski,<\/strong> a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n Many of you have seen the controversial NRO<\/strong> essay by David French<\/strong> on absurdly restrictive rules of engagement that enlisted men and their NCO’s and junior officers have been forced to wrestle with in Iraq, Afghanistan<\/strong> and miscellaneous conflict zones. This is a problem that began under the Bush II administration<\/strong> as the Army and Marine Corps wrestled with pop-centric COIN theory<\/strong>, but ROE became increasingly self-defeating under the Obama administration’s<\/strong> philosophy of micromanaging the world from the White House staff conference room.\u00a0If you have not read the article yet, here it is with a blurb:<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n ….This evening, however, our troopers believed that the car ahead wasn\u2019t full of civilians. The driver was too skilled, his tactics too knowing for a carload of shepherds. As the car disappeared into the night, the senior officer on the scene radioed for permission to fire. His request went to the TOC, the tactical operations center, which is the beating heart of command and control in the battlefield environment. There the \u201cbattle captain,\u201d or the senior officer in the chain of command, would decide \u2014 shoot or don\u2019t shoot.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n .<\/p>\n But first there was a call for the battle captain to make, all the way to brigade headquarters, where a JAG officer \u2014 an Army lawyer \u2014 was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. His job was to analyze the request, apply the governing rules of engagement, and make a recommendation to the chain of command. While the commander made the ultimate decision, he rarely contradicted JAG recommendations. After all, if soldiers opened fire after a lawyer had deemed the attack outside the rules, they would risk discipline \u2014 even prosecution \u2014 if the engagement went awry.<\/strong><\/p>\n .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If we are to take the premises of the domestic-politics driven ROE imposed on front-line troops\u00a0by the Obama administration and a pliant senior leadership because they believe that our soldiers and Marines cannot be trusted with even the smallest decisions, the solution is obvious: we could field platoons composed entirely of lawyers. At least until robot soldiery becomes fully autonomous.<\/p>\n [by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] Many of you have seen the controversial NRO essay by David French on absurdly restrictive rules of engagement that enlisted men and their NCO’s and junior officers have been forced to wrestle with in Iraq, Afghanistan and miscellaneous conflict zones. This is a problem that began under the Bush II […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[680,278,39,821,183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fail","category-legal","category-military","category-military-professionalism","category-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48167"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48171,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48167\/revisions\/48171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How Our Overly Restrictive Rules of Engagement Keep Us from Winning Wars <\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
\n\n\nActing on the best available information \u2014 including a description of the suspect vehicle, a description of its tactics, analysis of relevant intelligence, and any available video feeds \u2014 the JAG officer had to determine whether there was sufficient evidence of \u201chostile intent\u201d to authorize the use of deadly force. He had to make a life-or-death decision in mere minutes. In this case, the lawyer said no \u2014 insufficient evidence. No deadly force. Move to detain rather than shoot to kill. The commander deferred. No shot. Move to detain. <\/strong><\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nSo the chase continued, across roads and open desert. The suspect vehicle did its best to shake free, but at last it was cornered by converging American forces. There was no escape. Four men emerged from the car. American soldiers dismounted from their MRAPs, and with one man in the lead, weapons raised, they ordered the Iraqis to surrender. Those who were in the TOC that night initially thought someone had stepped on a land mine. Watching on video feed, they saw the screen go white, then black. For several agonizing minutes, no one knew what had happened. Then the call came. Suicide bomber. One of the suspects had self-detonated, and Americans were hurt. One badly \u2014 very badly. Despite desperate efforts to save his life, he died just before he arrived at a functioning aid station. Another casualty of the rules of engagement.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n.<\/div>\nSuch a system, where brigade headquarters must be consulted by low level patrols or checkpoints before any combat action can be taken is essentially organizational paralysis of the fighting force, an fundamental principle of the art of defeat.<\/a>\u00a0What to do?<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\n\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nOur newly established ObamaCorps\u00a0Lawyer-Infantry units would have troops\u00a0all certified as JAG<\/strong> officers in charge of supervising themselves in decisions to fire. No officers or NCOs will be required since they are effectively expected to defer to a lawyer over the radio anyway, they\u00a0no longer serve a\u00a0useful purpose in modern battle.<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nWe will save time, save money on radios and radio operator positions ( we will have lawyer-pilots to do CAS<\/strong> and lawyer-artillery men to decide on when to bombard the enemy). We can also save money on general officers by drafting retired Supreme Court<\/strong> justices to serve as a Board of Appeal in place of a theater or combatant commander. Should work better than what we do now at least.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\n[End rant]<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nJAG officers are not to blame for this situation, they are inserted where commanders and politicians demand they be inserted and they must follow orders in interpreting ROE as best they can. \u00a0You could remove the lawyers\u00a0entirely from this process and a SSG or LT having to call up a\u00a024 hour “hot line”\u00a0to brigade headquarters (!)\u00a0to talk to staff officer colonels of infantry\u00a0before letting privates fire their weapon in a normal combat situation\u00a0remains equally ludicrous and ineffective.<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nWhat the Obama administration has done by incremental steps, aided by a careerist and risk averse leadership, is put American troops under unworkable\u00a0“police model” warfighting constraints without openly admitting this is their policy goal.\u00a0 Moreover, the longer these constraints and procedures\u00a0remain in place, the more institutionalized they become as the new “American way of war” and legal\u00a0Catch-22<\/strong><\/a> for low level troops is the\u00a0normal way of doing business.<\/div>\n\u00a0.<\/div>\nWithout serious pushback, the risk to troops and tactical\u00a0harm becomes likely to endure long after the Obama staff\u00a0apparatchiks leave office.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"