Quote Originally Posted by Uboat509 View Post
I disagree completely. Giving a soldier a less than lethal weapon as his primary and then double ought buck in a combat zone is a bad idea. Having a less than lethal option available is not necessarily a bad a idea but making it the primary puts that soldier in a very bad position. When you need the lethal option and all you have is been bags and double ought at a check point, your chain of command has failed you. Certainly we need to do out best, within reason, to make sure that we are killing the right people, but we are getting way too wrapped up in the little details and trying too hard to make this whole thing safe. Out military is NOT a police force and never will be, nor should we expect it to be. I seriously doubt that the difference between an acceptable outcome and a not so successful outcome is going to come down to a few guys on motorcyles getting killed because they fail to respond properly to a checkpoint.
Insurgency may be warfare, but COIN is not. COIN is dealing with a civil emergency. Right now we are ordering our soldiers to apply courageous restraint, and to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. We have given them the orders, and have given them some suggestions cooked up at higher level hq as to how to implement those orders, but we have not given them new tools designed for what they were told to do.

Now, we too can debate the orders, but that will not change the orders or the fact that the soldiers need better tools to execute them.

All of those who insist on calling FID "COIN"; and those who insist on approaching COIN as warfare are, IMO, sadly off the mark. We are not a bunch of Colonial masters out to simply beat down the locals and keep our puppet governance in power, and keep the profits flowing; yet we continue to dig up the tactics of that era and discuss them as valid for the mission we face today. They aren't. And that is before you factor in the effects of the current advances in information technologies that render a whole other segment of oldschool COIN obsolete. Pop-Centric tactics are better, but they are tactics all the same and still require a strategy to shape their employment. Surging additional troops is good logistices, but also requires a strategy to drive the employment of those resources.

So, question is, if this operation was being conducted in Frankfurt (or London, or Kansas City?) instead of Kandahar would you want your soldiers to have effective non-lethal weapons? Is this somehow different because we are in someone elses country?