The Wikileaks collection

[Chris jM]

The Apache crews, as Seabee pointed out, got overexuberant. It happens. The US is not perfect, we make a lot of misteaks (see?) and we do dumb stuff. People do get overexuberant and Nations -- all of them -- foul up on occasion. Get over it, it's a war, it isn't nice and isn't going to be.

Nor should it be. As the guys fighting it on all sides know.

I can understand the perspective of the majority of posts on this issue.

The act itself aside (and I doubt whether this will ever come to light) but it would be illuminating to see whether the troops in whose AO this was benefitted by or came to be worse off from the strike. Local populations are not simplistic in outlook by any degree, and I'm sure that there is an understanding that if you start shielding insurgents within your population the inevitable will occur, with the population starting to become casualties - if indeed that is what happened.

Ignoring the 'political fall-out' of the video, which I doubt will impact on the current Iraqi situation in any meaningful way, knowing the historical short-term/ mid-term tactical fall-out of the action would be more interesting.

FM3-24 discourages air power to avoid incidents like this, where firepower in an urban environment will often lead to more harm than good. If this is the case, and a lack of appropriate decision making on behalf of the pilots set back the COIN mission for their infantry brethren on the ground, a great wrong was committed. If to the contrary they were doing their job in a difficult environment and, in an attempt to support the COIN elements patrolling, they caused civilian casualties... then ethically it's all very ugly, confusing and murky - which sounds awfully like every other battlefield in recent memory.

The worst that could happen from this is that the wrong lessons are learned. COIN will still see violence delivered, often in close proximity to a civilian population, and people will get hurt and killed. If it occurs through negligence or incompetence then those responsible should be held accountable - but if innocent casualties occur during the legitimate conduct of an operation, holding the trigger-puller at the very sharp end is both unfair and counter-productive.