re: One US air strike kills 200 civilians in Mosel

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The anti war left returns after an 8 year hiatus.

Good to see you people back. Wondered where y'all had been

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I'm having a fish fry in their honor

Welcome home guys!

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We kill civilians all the time.

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This must be fake news.

The geniuses who post regularly to this board insist that we take the utmost in precautions and rarely do damage to anyone outside the boogeyman....er....."enemy."

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The combined action platoon program in Vietnam was pretty much the only thing we did in that war that worked but the generals abandoned it because they didn't get to move battalions worth of troops around their chessboards and claim credit.

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The CAP program did work, but it wasn't producing the results that Westmoreland was directed to get before the 1968 election.

As GT23 indicates, having squad level units in the Villes made it slow to reconstitute the squads back into the companies and battalions-- the big units the Army generals wanted.



"The Combined Action Program was a United States Marine Corps operational initiative implemented in the Vietnam War and proved to be one of the most effective counterinsurgency tools developed during that conflict. Operating from 1965 to 1971, this program was characterized by the placement of a thirteen-member Marine rifle squad, augmented by a U.S. Navy Corpsman and strengthened by a Vietnamese militia platoon of older youth and elderly men, in or adjacent to a rural Vietnamese hamlet. In most cases, the Popular Forces militia members (Nghia Quan) were residents of the hamlet who were either too young or too old to be drafted into the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) or the Regional Forces (Dia Phuong Quan). The entire unit of American Marines and Popular Forces militia members together was designated as a Combined Action Platoon (CAP).

The program was said to have originated as a solution to one Marine infantry battalion's problem of an expanding Tactical Area of Responsibility (TAOR). The concept of combining a squad of Marines with local (PFs) and assigning them a village to protect proved to be a force multiplier.[1]"

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The good thing about the CAP program is that it made the NVA/VC mass to attack the protected villages. When they massed it made them easier for our intel assets to pick up and then to destroy with air and arty, and of course fire and maneuver. It was based on the Small Wars Manual of 1940.

The VC didn't like the CAP program at all. One of the best Vet Nam movies is "Go Tell The Spartans" with Burt Lancaster. It is about an Army unit on a similar mission and it is really good.

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War Crime

Please bro. Nothing prohibits us from killing civilians.

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What the frick. Of course there is.

"The Geneva Conventions comprise four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment in war. The singular term Geneva Convention usually denotes the agreements of 1949, negotiated in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–45), which updated the terms of the two 1929 treaties, and added two new conventions. The Geneva Conventions extensively defined the basic rights of wartime prisoners (civilians and military personnel); established protections for the wounded and sick; and established protections for the civilians in and around a war-zone. The treaties of 1949 were ratified, in whole or with reservations, by 196 countries.[1] Moreover, the Geneva Convention also defines the rights and protections afforded to non-combatants, yet, because the Geneva Conventions are about people in war, the articles do not address warfare proper—the use of weapons of war—which is the subject of the Hague Conventions (First Hague Conference, 1899; Second Hague Conference 1907), and the bio-chemical warfare Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, 1925)."

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One of the creepiest and most dishonorable thing the Bushies did among a lot of creepy and dishonorable things was to designate some of the people they picked up as "unlawful combatants". The Geneva Conventions cover every class of combatant and non-combatant.

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And we wonder why "they" hate us and we're in perpetual wars.

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To be fair, they hated us before we started killing them wholesale.

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Killing civilians while attacking a military target is not a war crime.

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That is a lot different from saying there was no law that covers it. And it would depend on circumstance in any case.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

By Horst Fischer

Collateral or incidental damage occurs when attacks targeted at military objectives cause civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects. It often occurs if military objectives such as military equipment or soldiers are situated in cities or villages or close to civilians. Attacks that are expected to cause collateral damage are not prohibited per se, but the laws of armed conflict restrict indiscriminate attacks. Article 57 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions states that, in an international conflict, “constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians, and civilian objects.” In addition, under Article 51, carpet bombing is prohibited, as are attacks that employ methods and means of combat whose effects cannot be controlled. Finally, attacks are prohibited if the collateral damage expected from any attack is not proportional to the military advantage anticipated. Military commanders in deciding about attacks have to be aware of these rules and either refrain from launching an attack, suspend an attack if the principle of proportionality is likely to be violated, or replan an attack so that it complies with the laws of armed conflict.

In internal conflict, civilians have little legal protection from collateral or incidental damage. Additional Protocol II requires that, so long as they do not take part in hostilities, the civilian population and individual civilians “shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations” and “shall not be the object of attack.” Protocol II also prohibits acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is “to spread terror among the civilian population.”

Parties to recent major armed conflicts, such as the Gulf War and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, have used the term collateral damage as part of an effort to demonstrate that their attacks were lawful. The claim is either that no collateral damage was caused or that the damage was minimal or proportional. Neutral observers might reach different conclusions than the parties to these conflicts. The death of many civilians in Iraq during the Gulf War due to the the lack of electricity in hospitals, which was the result of the destruction of almost all Iraqi power plants by allied air attacks, has been asserted by Iraq as disproportionate collateral damage. On the other hand, NATO officials in spring and summer 1995 quite rightly claimed that NATO attacks on Bosnian Serb military targets in Bosnia-Herzegovina did not kill civilians in a disproportionate manner and that therefore collateral damage was proportional.

Thus, besides having legal implications, the term is often used to win political support for a specific method of warfare or to counter allegations of violations of humanitarian law. The observer is reminded that whatever the claims of governments or armed forces, attacks directly targeted at the civilian population are in violation of the basic principle of distinction and cannot be referred to as having caused collateral damage."

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You seem like a very angry person

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No but obama did put some limits on the drone program that if I remember right Trump had removed.

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Lolol