"This was one of the most difficult dilemmas faced by my Soldiers in Iraq. You put a kid with a rifle or crew served weapon on a check point. It’s dark, and a vehicle comes barreling at him. He’s only got a fraction of a second to choose between three options, and two of them are bad:
1) Shoot, and it’s just a knucklehead driver (or worse, a family...it happens) you’ve just wounded or killed.
2) Don’t shoot, and it is a VBIED who kills you and every other trooper at the CP.
3) Shoot, and it’s VBIED driver you have just stopped.
Happens everyday. You are now him. What do you do?"
My unit engaged a number of civilians, and every engagement prompted a 15-6. There was a significant level of pressure from the Iraqi government to do these as well. What they do for the Chain of Command is document exactly what happened...for training purposes, but also to cover the soldier later if there was some question (like a civilian lawsuit) on what happened, and determine what (if any) compensation would be paid. This often seemed to be what the Iraqi's cared about most...
It is very uncomfortable for the unit, and all of ours fell within the ROE at the time, but you often wondered when the next kid was going to hesitate to engage because he was afraid of being prosecuted.
There are very, very few clear cut cases of "there's a bad guy, whack him" in a counterinsurgency. We just have to set our guys up to succeed the best we can. The UCMJ is the best way I can think of to take care of our own...it's not perfect, but it does protect the soldier. My problem is when individuals, or groups a world away who have never been in their shoes demand "investigations".
Regards,
Very well said. My concern about the trend of investigations is that they will become witch hunts conducted by people who have no idea what conditions combat soldiers face. Applying the uniformed lessons from Law School and Police Academy to the life and death decisions that soldiers have to make on a daily basis is a slippery slope indeed. Leaders, and the military more generally, have an obligation to protect their soldiers from these politically motivated star chambers.