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Military Rules of engagement

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King_Willie

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Sep 17, 2018
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Hey, guys,

I wonder if any of you could help me on the subject of combat rules of engagement.

Say you're on patrol and you run into a bunch of your guys pinned down while the local militia advances shooting at them, seconds away from flanking them.

You're what, 12-strong? Caught them from behind but they're superior numbers, say 30.

What are the rules here, do you identify yourselves, "stop or we will open fire", or do you just mow them down before the element of surprise is lost?
 
The only thing better than surprise is for the enemy to run out of ammo. :D
 
TxRad said:
The only thing better than surprise is for the enemy to run out of ammo. :D
Click to expand...

And to have been given responsibility for hauling their general's chow wagon and wine shelf around.
 
Rules of engagement are not set in stone. In Vietnam, for example, rules of engagement were strict, and contributed to a humiliating defeat.
In the current conflict in Iraq, it was more relaxed under Bush, but you still couldn't just start firing at will whenever you rolled up on a town full of hostiles.
Under Obama, the rules were tightened substantially, even going so far as to publish a withdrawal time line, and not permitting engagement is areas said to be withdrawn from.
Now, under Trump, the rules are set by individual commanders in the field, by far the most effective method. You will get the occasional civilian casualties that way, but our media is too tied up with their efforts to impeach Trump to notice anything about Iraq and Afghanistan.
All that being said, even the strictest rules of engagement allow you to come to the aid of friendly troops under attack.
So fire away!
 
King_Willie said:
What are the rules here, do you identify yourselves, "stop or we will open fire", or do you just mow them down before the element of surprise is lost?
Click to expand...

As a Vietnam vet, I an attest that there is no version of ROE that is too ludicrous for fiction.

as an example:

When on night perimeter guard duty, the ROE was:

yell Halt, Dung lai.

yell Halt, Dung lai.

Fire one warning round, sixty degrees above the intruder's head.

yell Halt, Dung lai.


as might be expected, the order of operations was often confused, but we were cautioned severely not to forget to fire the warning shot so that we could show at least two expended rounds.
 
We had rules in Vietnam made by Pentagon fags, and we ignored the rules. The usual way around the rules are free-fire zones that prohibit civilians.
 
ROE vary depending on where you are and when you’re there, even during the same war. They can be locally modified. They aren’t set in stone. Where is your story set? As importantly, WHEN is your story set?
 
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Thanks, guys.
My story's set in Bosnia, during the SFOR peace keeping mission, so around 1998.
I believe no marine lives were lost there, so I don't expect to be changing history but they were involved in a couple shootouts (a Canadian camp came under bombardment) and riot control missions gone south, so there's some latitude.
 
ROE differ from mission to mission and can be set at almost any level, from local to national. Sometimes they vary between partner nations during an international op. They are often classified so as not to provide useful intel to the bad guys.

UN peacekeeping ops usually had incredibly tight ROE so as not to compromise the theoretical neutrality of the UN force. It was not uncommon, particularly in the former Yugoslavian mess, for a UN troop to be denied permission to fire on a sniper targeting civilians. Now if the UN observers themselves were under fire, they could shoot back, but not to prevent kids in a schoolyard from being shot. More than a couple of PTSD cases there, I suspect.

I know of one highly-classified operation in which the ROE not only required friendly troops to be under enemy fire, but actually had to have taken casualties before they could return fire. What chairborne warrior thought that one up still is a puzzle.

All that said, SFOR was a NATO operation, not a UN one. Further, it was a Chapter VII op, peace enforcement vice peacekeeping. The ROEs were more robust, but not wildly so. There was one incident described on CNN which might offer some insight if you read between the lines.

Bottom line however - in Bosnia, with a USMC force dealing with openly armed forces, you would be safe to quote Sgt Schock: There is no overkill, there is just 'Open Fire!' and 'I need to reload!'
 
Rules of Engagement from around the world...

1. If they are shooting at you, shoot back and shoot to kill. No warning.
2. If they are shooting at friendlies, shoot back and shoot to kill. No warning.
3. If they have guns and out number you and you know them to be unfriendly, shoot and shoot to kill. No warning.
4. Other than the above, follow the ROE of your unit.
 
King_Willie said:
Thanks, guys.
My story's set in Bosnia, during the SFOR peace keeping mission, so around 1998.
I believe no marine lives were lost there, so I don't expect to be changing history but they were involved in a couple shootouts (a Canadian camp came under bombardment) and riot control missions gone south, so there's some latitude.
Click to expand...

Ah.

I was in Kosovo in the spring of 1999. NATO. Our ROE were restrictive enough to virtually prohibit anything except proportional response. Indirect fires had to be approved by the next guy down from Wes Clark. Every civilian official in every KFOR-contributing country was inexpressibly risk-averse. Lives were lost in our task force, and yet our troops were so paranoid about getting into trouble over ROE that almost nothing but warning shots was ever really fired, other than a dumbass machine gunner who emptied his 9mm through a closed door. The immediate response was to ban every pistol in the battalion.

In short, if I’m reading a military story set in the Balkans where NATO (or, worse, UN) ground troops are shooting, I’m likely to stop reading then and there.
 
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The rule ought to be:

Make the other guy die for his country while you stay alive.

But politicians write the rules.
 
oggbashan said:
The rule ought to be:

Make the other guy die for his country while you stay alive.

But politicians write the rules.
Click to expand...

Ahhh, would that it were so simple. The rise of militias in various nations who owe allegiance to parties or movements rather than to “countries” has led to a hazy hash of grey areas for the soldiers sent to cope with that nebulous situation, especially considering those soldiers are themselves representing not their ”country,” but a movement like NATO.

To be fair, the Balkans of the 1990s were the greyest of grey areas. It was sort of a nonpermissive combat environment, sort of not, depending on whether you were talking about the old Yugoslavian government, the brand-new breakaway governments, or the international clusterfuck that Kosovo was.

The OP mentions a notional situation in which a choice is made about “mowing [people] down before the element of surprise is lost.” With respect to the OP, and understanding I wasn’t in Bosnia, that choice of words is so ludicrously beyond my experience that it made me chuckle. And I was a light infantryman from an “elite” formation at the very start of a NATO incursion; it was very clear to us all that this was a peacekeeping operation, not a “combat” operation. Our civilian leaders reinforced this with every press conference they gave.

People forget, now, how crazily cautious Bill Clinton was about taking casualties. It made us HIGHLY annoyed because we felt less safe.
 
Rommel made an interesting observation as a field commander in the first WW. His troops were wary of engaging ANZACS ( Australian and New Zealand ) troops. They had routinely adopted the habit of not taking any prisoners when they were engaged against the Turks at Gallipoli. The Turks never regarded this as particularly extraordinary but it was definitely contrary to cultural norms when ANZACS arrived on the Western Front in 1916.

It has been suggested that the custom of killing all prisoners had originated with the Maori (Polynesian) troops in the NZ contingent. Apparently it was an insult to a worthy warrior if he lost and was left alive. It is not easy to get official historians to admit to that however. Rommel thought the NZedders were the best troops he ever faced, more reliable than the less disciplined Australians.

US troops first engagement in WWI was at the Battle of Hamel on July 4 1918. Monash the commander commented in his personal papers that the 'green' American troops which were integrated with the experienced Australians were resolute and picked up their allies habits, both good and bad with remarkable speed. Many of the German survivors had only pants and tunics; all their personal possessions, including boots had been souveneered. On a darker note and almost uniquely for WWI the defenders, Germans, suffered more fatalities than the attackers, Australians and Americans.

Bosnia. My nephew was there in the Royal Engineers and he described the ROE as utterly farcical. He commanded a group involved in disabling/disposing roadside bombs/and other stuff; he was particularly critical of the European troops whose performance, with or without the ROE was worse than useless. The current EU concept of a European Army is in his words insane because no-one would ever make a decision.

My own experience in Aden (Yemen) in the 60's was that the ROE were lot simpler if the BBC was nowhere in the vicinity.
 
Damn, those were some sobbering posts.
Thanks for the insight, guys, I had heard about troops' discontentment on the field over this issue, but I had no idea it was this bad.
The main reason why I did this thread was because as I was doing prep work for this story, I kept hearing a voice in my head: "do not fire unless they fire at you first".
Guess the voice wasn't that far from the truth.
 
King_Willie said:
Damn, those were some sobbering posts.
Click to expand...
You can set your tale in a fictional universe with fictional rules. Just like most pr0n. Real facts only apply to real worlds. LIT fantasyland ain't there.
 
King_Willie said:
Damn, those were some sobbering posts.
Thanks for the insight, guys, I had heard about troops' discontentment on the field over this issue, but I had no idea it was this bad.
The main reason why I did this thread was because as I was doing prep work for this story, I kept hearing a voice in my head: "do not fire unless they fire at you first".
Guess the voice wasn't that far from the truth.
Click to expand...

No. In my experience, it IS the truth.

For NATO, the Balkans was not a war to be won. It was a peace agreement to be enforced, and that was drummed into us at every level.

Too, I wouldn’t call it “discontentment;” I don’t recall being all that discontented, but then I was in a great battalion led by one of the army’s rising stars. In a less-well-disciplined unit, the entire operation was probably very frustrating.

But you MUST remember that no civilian leader in the Clinton years wanted a repeat of Somalia. That was THE driving force for Slick Willy’s military policy, and the result was indecisiveness at key moments in Rwanda, the Balkans, and against al-Quaeda. This risk-averse priority was, as I recall, very well-understood in the US Army at that time, or at least the high-speed deployable part of which I was a member.

I received small arms fire three times and returned it once, with just two rounds. I recall being exceedingly worried, even as I pulled the trigger, that my fire might go through a wall (we were indoors in the middle of the night) and strike a civilian somewhere.

That is not a desirable mindset in a soldier. But it’s what we had. We were shooting not at “enemy soldiers,” but at looters and arsonists in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
colddiesel said:
Rommel made an interesting observation as a field commander in the first WW. His troops were wary of engaging ANZACS ( Australian and New Zealand ) troops. They had routinely adopted the habit of not taking any prisoners when they were engaged against the Turks at Gallipoli. The Turks never regarded this as particularly extraordinary but it was definitely contrary to cultural norms when ANZACS arrived on the Western Front in 1916.

It has been suggested that the custom of killing all prisoners had originated with the Maori (Polynesian) troops in the NZ contingent. Apparently it was an insult to a worthy warrior if he lost and was left alive. It is not easy to get official historians to admit to that however. Rommel thought the NZedders were the best troops he ever faced, more reliable than the less disciplined Australians.

US troops first engagement in WWI was at the Battle of Hamel on July 4 1918. Monash the commander commented in his personal papers that the 'green' American troops which were integrated with the experienced Australians were resolute and picked up their allies habits, both good and bad with remarkable speed. Many of the German survivors had only pants and tunics; all their personal possessions, including boots had been souveneered. On a darker note and almost uniquely for WWI the defenders, Germans, suffered more fatalities than the attackers, Australians and Americans.

Bosnia. My nephew was there in the Royal Engineers and he described the ROE as utterly farcical. He commanded a group involved in disabling/disposing roadside bombs/and other stuff; he was particularly critical of the European troops whose performance, with or without the ROE was worse than useless. The current EU concept of a European Army is in his words insane because no-one would ever make a decision.

My own experience in Aden (Yemen) in the 60's was that the ROE were lot simpler if the BBC was nowhere in the vicinity.
Click to expand...

History shows Winstio and King GEORGE killed most of the Tommys
 
colddiesel said:
...
My own experience in Aden (Yemen) in the 60's was that the ROE were lot simpler if the BBC was nowhere in the vicinity.
Click to expand...

American military commanders were jealous of the UK's media restrictions during The Falklands War. One even said that under such limited press reporting the US would have won in Vietnam.
 
Despite the C-F nature of FRY operations, high-intensity fighting involving UN forces certainly did occur during the UNPROFOR mandate. Casualties were taken and inflicted, medals were awarded, governments tried to pretend it never happened. It was one of many reasons that NATO eventually moved in - the UN has some strengths here and there but is hopeless when it comes to managing combat or near-combat ops.

While I don't think the OP scenario is fanatically realistic in an historical sense, a) this is a fiction site and b) lots of stuff happened that wasn't publicized. Frankly, a low-level Marine commander on the ground having to make a moral decision when faced with a choice between strict obedience to ROE and saving fellow troops could if well-written make an interesting backstory.

I'd go for it, personally.
 
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CPLD DIESEK tell us about the glorious Tommy victory at Galliupoli. The war was all about Churchill controlling the passage to the Black Sea.
 
FEELINGLUCKYPUNK said:
CPLD DIESEK tell us about the glorious Tommy victory at Galliupoli. The war was all about Churchill controlling the passage to the Black Sea.
Click to expand...

Wrong. It was about forcing Turkey out of the war, and if Churchill's instructions had been followed it would have worked.

What Churchill asked for was a surprise naval attempt to force the straits using obsolete battleships that were useless in a modern naval battle. If some of those ships had been lost or damaged it wouldn't have affected the allied naval battle strength. Once through to Constantinople/Istanbul they could have threatened to destroy the city.

The naval commanders ignored Churchill's instruction. Instead of sending obsolete battleships which Turkey wouldn't have been worried about nor would intelligence notice the movement of ancient ships - they sent modern ones. Instead of surprise, they telegraphed their intentions by sending scouting ships. The main Turkish battery was out of shells when the fleet retired for the night. The big ships turned in the same bay every time, giving the Turks an opportunity to lay the world's most effective minefield, damaging/sinking modern ships. If they had been the old ships Churchill had wanted, that wouldn't have mattered strategically but the loss of modern ships was too much so they switched to a landing but again lost the element of surprise. A landing in force had not been suggested by Churchill - just a low cost naval attack.

Churchill's idea was sound - a surprise naval attack by small forces that were otherwise useless. The execution was botched and nothing like his requirements. It came very close to succeeding despite the errors. After that - the landings, which Churchill hadn't wanted - were botched too.

If Churchill's plan has worked it might have shortened the First World War at minimal cost. The disaster wasn't his fault but that of the commanders who implemented it.
 
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