According to General Carter Ham, commander of AFRICOM in a press briefing, as reported by Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy:
"Sometimes these are situations that brief better at the headquarters than in the cockpit of an aircraft."
No shite. These aren't Rules of Engagement. They're a Recipe for Lawfare.
BTW - it's hard enough to make those battlefield distinctions from a slow-mover, let alone from a fast-mover. Bill would be hard-put to make these rules work. And depending on other aspects of the ROE, such as how low can the aircraft go, it's a recipe to get the aircraft into manpads (short range air defense missiles) range, if not gun range.
And, I suspect (but don't know) that the rules won't let the pilots go that low - which means it will be harder to make the needful assessments. One can only wonder if, as Bill posits, we don't already have a significant number of SOF boots on the ground trying to help sort that out. I dunno.
But in other news of note - a newspaper in Lebanon, the Daily Star, notes the windbaggery of the Arab League (you should read the whole thing, not just this excerpt) -
Mark Steyn ties the packet up in a neat little wrapper.
"We do not provide close air support for the opposition forces. We protect civilians," Gen. Carter Ham, the top military official in charge of the operation, told reporters in a conference call on Monday. The problem is, there is no official communication with the rebel forces on the ground and there is no good way to distinguish the rebel fighters engaged against the government forces from civilians fighting to protect themselves, he said.
"Many in the opposition truly are civilians...trying to protect their civilian business, lives, and families," said Ham. "There are also those in the opposition that have armored vehicles and heavy weapons. Those parts of the opposition are no longer covered under that ‘protect civilians' clause" of the U.N. Security Council resolution that authorized military intervention.
"It's a very problematic situation," Ham admitted. "Sometimes these are situations that brief better at the headquarters than in the cockpit of an aircraft."
So how are pilots in the air supposed to tell the difference? If the opposition groups seem to be organized and fighting, the airplanes imposing the no-fly zone are instructed not to help them.
"Where they see a clear situation where civilians are threatened, they have... intervened," said Ham. "When it's unclear that it's civilians that are being attacked, the air crews are instructed to be very cautious."
"We have no authority and no mission to support the opposition forces in what they might do," he added.
What's more, the coalition forces won't attack Qaddafi's forces if they are battling rebel groups, only if they are attacking "civilians," Ham explained. If the Qaddafi forces seem to be preparing to attack civilians, they can be attacked; but if they seem to be backing away, they won't be targeted.
"What we look for, to the degree that we can, is to discern intent," said Ham. "There's no simple answer."
"Sometimes these are situations that brief better at the headquarters than in the cockpit of an aircraft."
No shite. These aren't Rules of Engagement. They're a Recipe for Lawfare.
BTW - it's hard enough to make those battlefield distinctions from a slow-mover, let alone from a fast-mover. Bill would be hard-put to make these rules work. And depending on other aspects of the ROE, such as how low can the aircraft go, it's a recipe to get the aircraft into manpads (short range air defense missiles) range, if not gun range.
And, I suspect (but don't know) that the rules won't let the pilots go that low - which means it will be harder to make the needful assessments. One can only wonder if, as Bill posits, we don't already have a significant number of SOF boots on the ground trying to help sort that out. I dunno.
But in other news of note - a newspaper in Lebanon, the Daily Star, notes the windbaggery of the Arab League (you should read the whole thing, not just this excerpt) -
The Arab embarrassment in the matter, however, does not end with mere inaction. The Western warplanes had barely landed after their first sorties when Arab League chief Amr Moussa began criticizing the strikes. Moussa, of course, was not alone. Arab disunity hardly counts as news; the hypocrisy of the backtracking was the truly nauseating part.
The Arab world bleats incessantly about U.S. and Western colonialism and imperialism; but when Arab leaders needed help in an emergency, they went begging to the West. Once the help came, many reverted to accepting the unproven view of a bloodthirsty mass murderer – Gadhafi – that civilians were killed.
Arab bosses have obviously not yet learned that if action is necessary and justified, then they should act. If they ask others to act on their behalf, then those actors become their partners, and the consequences of action are their responsibility, too.
Mark Steyn ties the packet up in a neat little wrapper.
There's only one way to make those rules work -- land the aircraft, walk over to the fighting, ask the defenders if they're insurgents or ordinary civilians, then walk back to the aircraft and either engage the gummint forces or fly away.
You nailed it. Those aren't ROE for the trigger-pullers, they're an exercise in CYA for the politicians in uniform at the top.
So the latest theory goes, anyway.
Of course, yours is just as likely...
Re: The Arab League. Of course it was a setup. Win/win for them, lose/lose for the infidels. They are busy dealing with their own internal problems while nurturing wet dream fantasies of using UN resolution 1173 as justification for launching a 'humanitarian war' against Israel.
The precedent has been set and about the only military action I can see these nations undertaking (besides slaughtering their own) would be against Israel.
Not that past results have deterred them in anyway, because afterall, "God" is on their side. And... so evidently, is the UN.
This ruleset is like a Microsoft help file. The red tape military is here. I guess it has been here for quite a long time.
I'm sure people in Arab nations know the Arab League is much better at whinging than doing. After all they don't bother asking them for help.
Also see Democrats: In chiding the use of America's Armed Forces as a world wide Police Force, then antithetically handing them a ROE that makes them precisely that.
*snerk*
According to the folks overseeing the show, *nobody* is in overall command.
Leave it to Obie to see a vacuum and pretend to occupy it...