Pete Hesgeth and ROE

There should be one rule of engagement.

"When confronting the enemy, make the confrontation so horrible for the enemy so they will not ever want to war or confront you again."

ROE's are there for the MIC to profit from war.

Leaving Afghan in '12, you couldn't even fire off a warning flare anymore. Used to be: visual hand signal, warning flare, warning shot, shoot to disable/shoot to kill. This was all predicated on hostile act/hostile intent. They passed a directive shortly after we got in theater that basically eliminated hostel intent. You literally had to almost wait until a shot was fired at you before you could go through your ROE and engage. A lot of it had to do with a large majority of the population having AK-47's in their domiciles. It's good to see this shite getting pulled back to common sense.

Yeah, my impression is he’s talking about ridiculous minutiae such as this. Not scrapping the Geneva Convention.

ROEs vary by place and time and then by the public’s perception.

If you break the ROE and it gets out there is always some jagoff ready to make their career by putting you in Leavenworth forever.

Our ROEs have killed more soldiers than we care to admit. Some ops get different ROEs upon special orders, but we have made it too complicated. You shouldn't have to worry about going to jail or getting fired for killing a guy pointing a gun at your head. Figuratively or literally.

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rules of engagement and could they have been revised to make you more safe or effective

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ROE gets more of our soldiers killed.... Any time you turn the warfighting over to the lawyers, you are pretty well fricked...

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more ‘narrow’ than that of other countries?

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Absolutely and our enemy doesn't have any...

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Our ROEs have killed more soldiers than we care to admit. Some ops get different ROEs upon special orders, but we have made it too complicated. You shouldn't have to worry about going to jail or getting fired for killing a guy pointing a gun at your head. Figuratively or literally.

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the biggest problem is that for the majority of the time since Korea, we have only halfway gone to war. we fight wars with vague goals in places where some of the populace is good and some isnt. you HAVE to have strict ROEs in places like that, or you just create more insurgents. and part of the super strict ROEs we put on ourselves comes from a good place - our obsessive desire to be viewed as the good guys.

the solution to a lot of our problems isnt looser ROEs - the solution is not putting ourselves into impossible to win situations to begin with, or, if we must, we need to dedicate WAY higher troop numbers.

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I was in Afghanistan in 2010-11, and we could only fire if they demonstrated hostile act / hostile intent, which is of course extremely hard to determine until it is almost too late. but that is the nature of fighting against an insurgency, unfortunately. plus, of course, the Taliban all knew exactly what our ROEs were, which they used to their advantage.

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This and a few other replies was what I was curious about. I would rather hear firsthand accounts than edited documentaries and embellished movies. It seems counterintuitive and morally bankrupt to put a soldier in harm’s way and increase the chances of his death by limiting his options because of PR concerns and ‘bad’ optics.

He used a line that Rush Limbaugh used to say often: “The military’s job is to kill people and break things”. The perspective of history says that peace comes only after one side has decided that their enemy has too high a satiation factor for death and blood.

Shoot 1st question later

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He used a line that Rush Limbaugh used to say often: “The military’s job is to kill people and break things”.

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unfortunately, for the better part of the last 80 years, the military's job has been to kill SOME people and break SOME things, but also make sure you dont kill the wrong people or break the wrong things.