What if I told you that you had to go through six months to a year of training to be a part of the military. And then, when you finally got deployed you couldn't fire at the enemy until you had been fired upon? I'm sure that would make many people quite angry and maybe even a bit confused.
Now imagine you are on the battlefield. Everything is peaceful for a change and all of a sudden, someone appears that seems a lot like the enemy you were just fighting. You open fire at the person and kill him, but it turns out, he was just an innocent civilian that happened to wander into a war zone. Now you could end up spending time in jail and charged with murder.
So are the rules of engagement effective? Or do they do more harm than good?
In my opinion, the rules of engagement implemented today are too strict. Now, I'm not saying that our troops should be able to kill whoever they want, but they should be able to use their training to their full ability to defend themselves and defeat the enemy. That being said, this is war that we're talking about. People die. And yes, sometimes even civilians are caught in the crossfire. Also, some men from the United States Navy would most certainly still be with us today if the ROEs weren't so strict.
In 2005, a mission was conducted named Operation Red Wings. This mission's purpose was to insert a 4-man team of US Navy SEALs to scout a village and possibly identify a Taliban leader named Ahmad Shah.
The team was scouting the village when they were stumbled upon by three Afghan goat herders. The men bound the herders, but couldn't figure out what to do with them; should they let them go and be found by Taliban shortly after, or terminate the compromise and risk being jailed for murder?
The men ended up letting them go because of the ROEs. The 4-man team was found by the Taliban and three of them died on the mountain and a Chinook helicopter full of Navy SEALs and Army Nightstalkers was shot down by a Taliban RPG. The only survivor of the operation, Marcus Luttrell, tells this story and voices his opinion on the rules of engagement in his novel and now movie "Lone Survivor."
If the ROEs hadn't been in place the SEALs could have taken care of the compromise and gone on with the mission. Instead, they were cornered and riddled with bullets to avoid a murder charge. To me, it sounds like something must change about these rules in order to truly keep our men safe on the battlefield.
