OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt
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I read a similar story about an SAS patrol in the first Gulf War being found by a young goat herder and compromised as a result of not wanting to kill him.
Of course, correct SOP in these circumstances is to disembowel the kid and garrote him with his own entrails, before feeding his liver to the youngest member of the patrol by way of an initiation rite.
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Yes, one might assume that ten years later they might have found an effective way of dealing with being found by goatherders. But apparently not.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Yes, one might assume that ten years later they might have found an effective way of dealing with being found by goatherders. But apparently not.
You mean a change in their ROE to mandate summary execution? That'd do it.
What has changed, in the intervening 10 years, that would've given them a better way out? A reduction in morality so that the qualms about killing someone who's innocently going about their daily business are dispatched with? A marvellous advance in technology so that they can't be discovered? Those are really the only two ways that wandering goatherds could cease to be a problem. -
Matthew Poole, in reply to
1. Don’t confuse US special forces, which the are ‘vote’ troops in question, with the SAS.
+1. It was US SEALs, not SAS, who put up execution as an option. The SAS appear to have retained their moral compass through the entire sorry affair.
I do wonder, though, whether the same goatherd stumbling across the same team in a declared war on a nation state would've survived.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
What has changed, in the intervening 10 years, that would've given them a better way out? A reduction in morality so that the qualms about killing someone who's innocently going about their daily business are dispatched with? A marvellous advance in technology so that they can't be discovered? Those are really the only two ways that wandering goatherds could cease to be a problem.
To be honest, I don't know. However, there is an implication in the story which suggests that they didn't have a plan B. An integral part of pre-mission planning is going through as many 'what ifs' as they can think of. 'What if we're compromised by non-combatant locals' should, I would have thought, been quite high up the list. It appears that it wasn't.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
However, there is an implication in the story which suggests that they didn’t have a plan B
But they did. They called for extraction.
If you're on a covert mission, if you're compromised that's the end of things. You can't just go and find another spot to recon the same location. There is no Plan B for covert reconnaissance being discovered, because in the same manner as Heisenberg, if you interact then you change what you are observing. Being discovered is an interaction. -
one might assume that ten years later they might have found an effective way of dealing with being found by goatherders
What they could do is flood the battlefield pre-combat with hordes of Ozzie Ozborne clones hell-bent on exploding any goats they found (1).
Then any stray goat herders would become pre-occupied with protecting their goats from immolation and not concern themselves with lurking troopers. Also, if they did stray too close, the troopers could RPG the goats and the goatherds would simply blame it on Heavy Metal Megaslaughter.
1. Ok, this is wierdly undocumented, but Ozborne apparently once exploded a goat onstage. I learnt this in primary school at the age of 8, so it must be true.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
I've thought about this a bit more, and I think it's not really about the plan, the plan B or the lack thereof.
You're correct that they called for an extraction (and there was a problem with that which meant they were stuck). OK, shit happens. They got compromised and had bad comms, and that's just bad luck, arguably not necessarily something that they could have been reasonably expected to plan for. But they're soldiers and had a job to do. Having to make a collective decision on whether to kill a civilian in cold blood was just an unfortunate side-effect of getting on with the job.
However, the debate is framed in a way such that the underlying assumption is that they had a duty/right to be there in the first place, doing their super-secret soldier stuff.
Perhaps a better question to ask is whether they should have been there at all, and thus put in position where that decision had to be made. And then perhaps we could go on to ask about the involvement of the NZ SAS, and why they are there. Game time for the troops? Supporting our US allies as they achieve....well, what exactly is it that they've achieved over the last 10 years?
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Ozborne apparently once exploded a goat onstage
Are you sure it wasn't that he bit the head off a bat? Which actually happened and is well documented.
And it's O-s-b-o-u-r-n-e :)
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
1. Ok, this is wierdly undocumented, but Ozborne apparently once exploded a goat onstage.
And PJ has previously blown up sheep with rocket launchers.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Those are really the only two ways that wandering goatherds could cease to be a problem.
I can think of half a dozen alternatives, that could at least buy them a whole lot of time for extraction. But yes, there will always be times when the horrible decision of killing civilians might have to be made, just to save one's own life. Which is yet another reason that covert military operations against guerrillas should always be kept to a minimum.
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Just thinking, in reply to
PJ should have got an Oscar these.
This one is even pertinent.
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been there, drone that…
Here’s a glimpse of what the Aussie soldiers do ‘over there’ in other people’s wars, from the Sydney Morning Herald
(also posted on the 'other peoples' wars' thread]
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