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What is your point of view?"

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From My Point of View

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Definition

Rules of Engagement: Directives issued by competent military authority that delineate the circumstances and limitations under which United States forces will initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered.

The restrictions these rules placed on commanders and individual fighting men have become a frustrating and costly example of micromanagement taken to the highest level.

If you read or watched "Lone Survivor" the same ROE issue no doubt laid the foundation for the deaths of our brave seals and the struggle to survive by Marcus Luttrell.

The following are the words of Marcus Luttrell and take from his book "Lone Survivor"

"I CAN SAY FROM FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE THAT THOSE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT COST THE LIVES OF THREE OF THE FINEST U.S. NAVY SEALS WHO HAVE EVER SERVED."..."FROM MY VIEW WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY HAVE BEEN ALIVE TODAY."

From the book: "Each of the six of us in that aircraft en route to Afghanistan had constantly in the back of our minds the ever-intrusive rules of engagement. These are drawn up for us to follow by some politician sitting in some distant committee room in Washington, D.C. And that's a very long way from the battlefield, where a sniper's bullet can blast your head, where the slightest mistake can cost your life, where you need to kill your enemy before he kills you. And those ROE are very specific: we may not open fire until we are fired upon or have positively identified our enemy and have proof of his intentions, now, that's all very gallant. But how about a group of U.S,. Soldiers who have been on patrol for several days: have been fired upon; have dodged rocket-propelled grenades and homemade bombs; have sustained casualties/and who are very nearly exhausted and maybe slightly scared? How about when a bunch of guys wearing colored towels around their heads and brandishing AK-47's come charging over the horizon straight towards you? Do you wait for them to start killing your team, or do you mow the bastards down before they get a chance to do so? That situation might look simple in Washington, where the human rights of terrorists are often given high priority. And I am certain liberal politicians would defend their position to the death. Because everyone knows liberals have never been wrong about anything. You can ask them. However, from the standpoint of the U.S. combat soldier, Ranger, SEAL, Green Beret, or whatever, those ROE represent a CONUNDRUM. They are a danger to us/ they undermine our confidence on the battlefield in the fight against world terror. Worse yet, they make us concerned, disheartened, and sometimes hesitant. "... READ THE BOOK OR SEE THE MOVIE.

Fox Business

https://www.facebook.com/FoxBusiness/videos/vb.12795435237/10153301...

National security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports there is growing discontent among U.S. pilots carrying out the air war against ISIS over excessive rules of engagement, blaming a bureaucracy that doesn't allow for quick decision making.
‘frustrating’ fight against ISIS
Discontent among US pilots carrying out air war against ISIS
U.S. military pilots carrying out the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are voicing growing discontent over what they say are heavy-handed rules of engagement hindering them from striking targets.
They blame a bureaucracy that does not allow for quick decision-making. One Navy F-18 pilot who has flown missions against ISIS voiced his frustration to Fox News, saying: "There were times I had groups of ISIS fighters in my sights, but couldn't get clearance to engage.”
He added, “They probably killed innocent people and spread evil because of my inability to kill them. It was frustrating."
Sources close to the air war against ISIS told Fox News that strike missions take, on average, just under an hour, from a pilot requesting permission to strike an ISIS target to a weapon leaving the wing.
A spokesman for the U.S. Air Force’s Central Command pushed back: “We refute the idea that close air support strikes take 'an hour on average'. Depending on the how complex the target environment is, a strike could take place in less than 10 minutes or it could take much longer.
"As our leaders have said, this is a long-term fight, and we will not alienate civilians, the Iraqi government or our coalition partners by striking targets indiscriminately."
A former U.S. Air Force general who led air campaigns over Iraq and Afghanistan also said today's pilots are being "micromanaged," and the process for ordering strikes is slow -- squandering valuable minutes and making it possible for the enemy to escape.
“You're talking about hours in some cases, which by that time the particular tactical target left the area and or the aircraft has run out of fuel. These are excessive procedures that are handing our adversary an advantage,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a former director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Afghanistan in 2001.
Deptula also contrasted the current air campaign against ISIS with past air campaigns. Deptula said the Kosovo campaign averaged 135 strikes per day. In 2003, the famous “shock and awe” campaign over Iraq saw 800 strikes per day.
The U.S.-led airstrikes over Iraq during the first Gulf War averaged 953 strike sorties per day, according to the Air Force -- which said "only about 5 percent of the ... weapons released in those strikes were precision guided," meaning targets likely "required multiple strikes to meet the desired level of destruction."
According to the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS, U.S. military aircraft carry out 80 percent of the strikes against ISIS and average 14 per day.
Deptula blames the White House for the bottleneck.
“The ultimate guidance rests in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said. “We have been applying air power like a rain shower or a drizzle -- for it to be effective, it needs to be applied like a thunderstorm.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., recently complained that 75 percent of pilots are returning without dropping any ordnance, due to delays in decision-making up the chain of command.
A senior defense official at the Pentagon pushed back on the comparisons between the air war against ISIS and past air campaigns.
“The Gulf War and Kosovo are not reasonable comparisons. In those instances, we were fighting conventional forces. Today, we are supporting a fight against terrorists who blend into the civilian population,” he said. “Our threshold for civilian casualties and collateral damage is low. We don’t want to own this fight. We have reliable partners on the ground.”
McCain, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, also called for “forward air controllers,” as well as Special Forces and “more of those kind of raids that were so successful into Syria.”
Another former U.S. Air Force general agreed. “We need to get somebody to find the targets and [U.S.] airpower will blow them up ... period,” said retired Gen. Charles F. Wald, former deputy commander of United States European Command
In a letter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter Wednesday, Rep. Duncan Hunter asked the secretary to consider arming the Sunnis tribes in Anbar directly in order to defeat ISIS. Like McCain, Hunter also wants to “immediately embed special operators and ground-air controllers to support ground operations against IS[IS].”
But a defense official pushed back on Hunter’s plan to bypass Baghdad and arm the Sunni tribes directly, telling Fox News, “[the plan] doesn’t take into account the presence of Iran inside Iraq right now… there could be unintended consequences and restore a sectarian war.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/28/us-military-pilots-compl...

Conservative Tribune:
In an interview on Fox News, former pilots and retired generals spoke out about the White House’s limited engagement rules on the Islamic State group and how they’re crippling the U.S. military response to the terrorist group.
American military pilots are speaking out about President Barack Obama’s insane limitations on their fight against the Islamic State group, saying that even when they have “ISIS fighters in (their) sights,” they still aren’t allowed to attack.
In an interview on Fox News, former pilots and retired generals spoke out about the White House’s limited engagement rules on the Islamic State group and how they’re crippling the U.S. military response to the terrorist group.
Fox News Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin added that American forces were averaging 14 strikes a day against the Islamic State group.
“Compare that to the first Gulf War,” she said. “The United States averaged 1,125 strikes per day. In Kosovo 135 strikes a day.”
In addition, Sen. John McCain cited the damning statistic that 75 percent of missions returned to base without firing a weapon (H/T BizPac Review).
It has become painfully obvious that the White House is more interested in scoring political points than scoring victories in the war against the Islamic State group.
Our men and women in uniform are risking their lives in the battle against these terrorists, and they deserve real leadership and the opportunity to engage the enemy, not just words.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2012

Karen Vaughn was just a military mom from Florida until the day, just over a year ago, when she learned her son, Navy SEAL Team 6 member Aaron Vaughn, had been killed when his Chinook helicopter crashed over Afghanistan.
Then, she became an investigator.
The Aug. 6, 2011 crash, later determined to be caused by Taliban rocket-propelled grenade fire, claimed the lives of all 38 American and Afghan troops aboard, including 21 other members of the SEALs. In loss of life, it was the greatest tragedy in the history of U.S. special operations.
“In initial days after the crash, all we did was grieve for several months, and then we started asking questions,” Vaughn told Human Events.
As more detailed reports emerged about the incident, she wanted to know specifically why any of the U.S. aircraft circling the area had not laid down pre-assault fire as the Chinook was fired on that might have eliminated the insurgent who fired the RPG.
Vaughn said the events leading to the helicopter shoot down were only one example of a problem her son found systemic: rules of engagement that hindered American and coalition forces from adequately defending themselves, particularly in a war in which it frequently isn’t clear who the enemy is until he opens fire.
“You don’t know who’s who,” she said. “You don’t know who the enemy is. Aaron didn’t know who the enemy was.”
It’s not the first time a call has gone up for a comprehensive reform to military rules of engagement, which were updated with the Afghanistan counterinsurgency push around 2009 to become increasingly restrictive.
Earlier this year, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) called for the creation of an evaluation board to consider violations of rules of engagement in light of the American troops who get sent home to the U.S. facing murder charges for attempting to protect themselves or their units downrange.
“Green-on-blue” attacks
The recent trend of “green-on-blue” attacks in which Afghan soldiers or security forces have fired on and killed the American and coalition troops they serve with, prompting a scale-back of joint operations announced last week, has made the issue prominent again.
Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) joined Franks at a press conference earlier this month asking for a reevaluation of these combat rules that left troops vulnerable.
Gohmert told Human Events that the move to suspend joint ops was too little, too late from an administration pushing hard to meet its own 2014 Afghanistan exit deadline.
“It’s taken the death of 51 of our best and brightest before this administration would even suspend the process that is getting people killed,” he said.
Jane Horton, who lost her husband, Army National Guardsman Spc. Christopher Horton, to enemy small arms fire in Afghanistan last September, said he had told her stories of ways he had been forced to innovate to protect himself from the Afghan forces he was supposed to fight alongside: for example, wearing a name tape that said Christopher instead of Horton, so that no one from the inside could point him out as a target for insurgents.
Horton said she too had heard from her husband about ways that existing rules of engagement kept allied troops constantly on the defensive, and the “winning hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy meant service members sometimes had to risk their own safety to avoid causing offense. She had heard stories of insurgents firing from mosques for just that reason, she said. Vaughn cited similar stories.
“America’s way too afraid of making any kind of wrong move, that they won’t let them defend themselves and they won’t let them actually fight,” Horton said. “They’re way more concerned about the Afghans than they are about our own men.”
During a trip to Afghanistan earlier this year, Gohmert said it was clear to him that troop morale was very low, at least for some. “They’re told they cannot fight, they cannot shoot unless there’s no civilians, no friendlies in the area,” he said. “While the commander in chief is trying to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans, he’s getting Americans killed.”
Gohmert said he would like to move in the House to defund the war in Afghanistan until the rules of engagement—particularly those that hobble the troops’ ability to fire until they are fired upon—can be changed. But for now, he said, he is trying to mobilize citizens to tell their leaders to pay attention to this issue.
“The only way it appears that we’ll get the rules of engagement fixed and we’ll get this sad counterinsurgency plan changed is to get the American people to burn up the phones to the White House, burn up the phones to Congress,” he said.

The full article:  http://humanevents.com/2012/09/25/rules-of-engagement-reevaluation-...

From your point of view, what are your thoughts and what will it take to change the ROE's in an effort to protect our brave men and women?  What will it take to change these ROE's so that we can win in the battlefield?

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