America's 'Tools' of Engagement

The American Thinker ^ | 2/24/2014 | Glenn Fairman

[Sioux-san]

No set of rules can exist without pinching our freedom of action, and in effect, administering some semblance of restriction or pain. And when we bring our rules and values down from their lofty seats of abstraction, we find sometimes that they can lead to our undoing. For the noble and uplifted soul of the American soldier, our military rules of engagement (ROE) are frequently accompanied by great costs; and sometimes, by leaning in the direction of inaction or mercy, we can paradoxically exact an even greater portion of suffering for our treasured Band of Brothers. In essence, it is this heartbreaking moral dilemma, spotlighted within the narrative of the 2014 film Lone Survivor, that tests America's Afghan engagement policy to its threadbare limits. For in the hellish theatre of war, there is nothing except brotherhood and honor that is ever totally cut and dried.

In the clandestine world of rough men whose duty it is to kill the enemy and to degrade their will to continue fighting, how often the vicissitudes of fortune and folly swing to and fro as a fearsome pendulum. In the crucible of war, one may plan minutely for all contingencies; but so often the most insignificant and unforeseen renders our best-laid efforts for naught. Such was the case in 2005 when four members of Navy Seal Team 10 conducted Operation Red Wings, a mission designed to identify Taliban loyalist and Commander Ahmed Shah who had been hiding in the Pech District of Afghanistan's Kunar Province. While attending their mission, Team 10 soon finds that their cover has been compromised by a group of goat herders comprised of several men and a boy of about fourteen (the true story, not the film which featured 2 boys)...

[Sioux-san]

No mention of how the Russians were chased out by these "goat herders" as well, but a good assessment of the destruction committed by Soetoro, et.al., on our Military forces in that hell hole.

[Art in Idaho]

"If soldiers cannot act with courage and good conscience in a brutal theater of blood because those who stand in the rearguard have delivered them up on some altar of political expedience, then maybe it is time to passionately rethink who that enemy really is and act prudently in a manner by which free and noble men censure such treachery: with the cleansing fires of "civil reformation."