That's too bad.

It hasn't gotten a lot of really public discussion right now, but the red cross hasn't meant much of anything since WWII Europe. It is time to rethink it, but it is not time to promote that rethinking by having a meltdown and being a douchebag.

As you say, it's too bad.

"... That was a good reason, I said, why the crosses should be painted out or made very much smaller. Please be human, I said. You are transporting a wounded man and you must protect him by every means. Then protect him. Hide him. Make sure the Communists can't see him.

...

I learnt about this strange rule, that red crosses must not be shot at, quite by chance. When I was still a Soviet officer, I was reading a book about Nazi war criminals and amongst the charges made was the assertion that the Nazis had sometimes fired on cars and trains bearing a red cross. I found this very interesting, because I could not understand why such an act was considered a crime. A war was being fought and one side was trying to destroy the other. In what way did trains and cars with red crosses differ from the enemy's other vehicles?

I guess he's arguing we should bring ourselves down to the level of the uncivilized a la Colonel Kurtz. It's not like we put red crosses on tanks and helicopter gunships.

Define meltdown.

He's using the (few) resources at his disposal to bring attention to what he believes is a critical issue, and one that I think any reasonable person can get behind (arm those fuckers!).

Furthermore, primadonna or not, his insight into the war far surpasses that available anywhere else I've found (mainstream or otherwise). For that I will continue to receive his emails.

I don't necessarily disagree but he keeps shooting himself in the foot. Eventually he's going to get kicked out of Afghanistan and his work will be about him, not his observations.

Not really strange. Folks outside the military are usually taken aback at the level of crushing bureaucracy that seems to be involved in every action, and even more so when such bureaucracy seems to impose itself into matters of life and death.

The 59 minute medevac time looks immediately like a pencil pusher's fudged data in order to get in under the desired 60 minutes.

If a regular US ambulance crew took 15+ minutes to wait for a mission briefing, and then a police escort before responding to a 911 call not only would they be immediately fired but they and their company would be sued into oblivion, and the plaintiffs would win. We have ambulances standing by at all kinds of public events, high school sports, etc, so no medevac on standby for a high risk military combat operation in progress looks like a planning/leadership failure to anyone with common sense.

War usually invokes powerful responses. When you hear a bunch of people talking bureaucratic nonsense in circles with the result being good people dying unnecessarily, sometimes those responses get aired out for the world to see.

Pretty sure this is his point. The only people who care about the red crosses are bureaucrats on our side perpetuating institutional inertia, the enemy we face sure doesn't respect them. If recent reports are correct it's likely culturally insensitive for the US to be displaying them in any event and they might theoretically even be a particular target for that reason.

...or in this case, actually made legitimate threats of murder that were recorded and provided as proof...

Good points.

But we have to do it because it's the law. (Geneva Conventions, of which we are signatories.)

So we either violate the laws of armed conflict, or arm the medevacs.

And since the US position is that we will comply with LOAC regardless of whether or not our enemies do, looks like the helos stay unarmed, until we withdraw from the Geneva Conventions.

Sometimes, I suspect Mike's spent a bit too much time in the woods. I like his writing, but it seems that something's slipping with him.

He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.
William Tecumseh Sherman


If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.
William Tecumseh Sherman


War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman

above is a few of my favorite Sherman quotes.

below are my thoughts.

Painting a ship , truck or helo with a red cross and then expecting an enemy that wants nothing more than your total destruction then to respect that red cross, is silly and insane.

if you start a war, or more importantly, a war is started on you, kill every mother fucker you come across and maybe when your children grow up they will not see war in their lifetime or their children's lifetime.

politicians do not take war serious enough, I think if they start the war, they should fight it, leave the innocent citizens out of it.

Is there any law that prohibits armed aircraft from evacuating wounded personnel if they're not wearing the red cross?

Because that seems like the simplest solution. Since our enemy is not respecting the LOAC and the red cross markings, don't use them and simply designate all aircraft, regardless of mission, as combatants, and arm those in harms way.

I get his email dispatches, and over the last couple months or so it looks like he has gone off the deep end.

I was hooked when he covered 1/25 in Mosul, and enjoyed some of his coverage of the Brits in RC South, but I hardly pay attention to him anymore.

Overall, he needs to get over himself. He's a reporter and is using his "fame" to negatively influence the military.

It's not a violation of the law/convention for medevacs to be armed and unmarked, otherwise, the AF CSAR birds couldn't fly medevac missions.

The only distinction is that if you want the protection of the Geneva Convention treaty for your medevacs, they have to be unarmed and marked. Since our enemies do not care a whit for said treaty, it's simply an exercise in futility - insanity really - for the US to claim to rely on those protections instead of putting effort into actual protection instead of the imaginary protection of the written word. You're not required to follow the proscriptions, just required to respect others who do.

It's obvious the medevacs are flying targets, why else are they not allowed to fly without Apaches for escorts.

I doubt anyone in the chain has even considered that the giant red cross markings are the same as the crusader's flag and might well invite specific targeting against those vehicles in the current operational environment.

Too many hot ladybois and that thai stick fucks with your mind.

Plenty.

I follow his facebook account mainly for cool pictures, but i was reading some of this stuff about this the other day and I was a little confused.

I didn't read the entire thing, and I only spent a minute on it, but I think he was saying that there is a different policy concerning the crosses between the different branches of the military? Like the Navy doesn't have crosses but the army does, it sounded fishy to me and I stopped reading.

OK, thanks for clearing that up.

* The Conventions apply to all cases of declared war between signatory nations. This is the original sense of applicability, which predates the 1949 version.
* The Conventions apply to all cases of armed conflict between two or more signatory nations, even in the absence of a declaration of war. This language was added in 1949 to accommodate situations that have all the characteristics of war without the existence of a formal declaration of war, such as a police action.[10]
* The Conventions apply to a signatory nation even if the opposing nation is not a signatory, but only if the opposing nation "accepts and applies the provisions" of the Conventions.[10]

You also have to realize, the Army medical branch is, how shall I put this, delusional at the higher echelons. Don't get me wrong, they are pretty good at patching shot people up, and most of their personel are dedicated and motivated...but they also have a distinct idea of how the world should work, and they try as hard as they can to make it so. Medical officers get treated a lot different than, say, an infantry officer and start out as O-3s for the most part, so they often are not really 100% on what goes on outside the wire (probably a good thing overall, but it does lead to a certain disconnect). The doctors and nurses were the only ones on my FOB except the chaplain that weren't required to carry a weapon at all times, and if you wanted to go to sick call, you had to turn your weapon into the Arms Room first, because God Forbid someone have a pistol at an aid station while they're asking for motrin.

Thus the red crosses probably won't come off any time soon, and unfortunately we'll probably be stuck with the whole 'wait for an escort' thing too, which ties up airframes and crew, slows down reaction time but probably does keep the medevacs from getting messed with as much as they could be. And by the way, slapping a couple 240s on medevac bird isn't really the same as having an AH-64D flying cover for you. The problem is that at no point are you going to find an officer with the authority to do so, to make a call and say, 'screw waiting on an escort, people are going to die' because even if it retroactively turns out to have been the right call, his career is still done.

It's true one could remove the Red Crosses and arm Dustoff (although it would no longer be dustoff). The real question is "What is there to gain" or "Is there a probelme that needs to be fixed?" The fact of the matter is there is not a problem. Yon is just looking for something to get his name in the paper.

B5 is on the case





Yon cares about Yon.

Interesting place. I like to lurk, but some of the guys there are all kinds of fucked up on technical matters. One of them was arguing with another guy about a UAV (that I helped design) and was throwing his credentials around in assuring a non spec-ops guy that he knew how it worked. He wasn't even CLOSE! :)

They get crap about weapons wrong all the time too. But on operational stuff, they're a wealth of experience and knowledge.

To be clear, the Geneva conventions apply ONLY when engaged in conflicts with other signatories.

We also need to ditch the hague conventions.

It's OK to shoot someone with a .50 BMG, but shooting them with an expanding 5.56mm bullet is "inhuman?" WTF!?

To accuse someone of murder is one thing, to pull it out of the closet after 6 years because someone didn't not endorse his idea or questions his motivation/credibility is another. In all seriousness, in the civilian world if you witnessed an acquaintance murder someone and you failed to report it you are at very least an accessory to the crime. In addition, should you decide to accuse someone of murder you had better have the proof to avoid penalties of slander and defamation, secondly no one in their right mind is going to make those accusations on a Social Network or Public Forum.......unless of course you are looking for attention.

That is messed up and brings into question Yon's credibility and true motivations.

A buddy and his fellow combat medics had to revolt because some idiot was trying to insist they wear brassards with the Red Cross on them when the enemy has been intentionally targeting medics.