Why is it that every war in which the US military has strict "Rules of Engagement" the US never wins?

Question

US troops during the Vietnam war had almost the exact same "US Rules of engagement" that US troops in Iraq have today.

And guess what, not only do those rules put US troops at much greater risk of being killed or wounded, they keep US troops from winning wars they should win relatively easily.

How the hell can US politicans send US troops into wars in which US troops can't use all of their training/gear to kill the enemy?

And it ain't the libs who make the Rules it's the Pentagon/White House. Why is Bush/US Generals stabbing US troops in Iraq in the back with their rules which gets them killed & will never allow them to win the war?

Answer 1

Quick answer: It isn't a WAR, It is a POLICE ACTION.

WAR is never limited, war is total. WWII was the last REAL war.

Answer 2

The military is a "killing machine." It is designed to be. They have the ability to absolutely destroy any enemy. If they had no "rules of engagement" they would likely destroy the enemy "indescriminately."
The attempt is to be "humane" about war (which is ridiculous, but that's the attitude.) War is killing.
If there were no restrictions, and we decided that Iran, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Iraq were our "enemy" then the right thing to do would be to totally eliminate that enemy. The result would be a nuclear destruction of the entire country. The problem we have is defining "who is the enemy?" You see, if it is Iraq, then we would destroy all Iraqi's. The current thinking in the US government is that the Iraqi's are NOT the enemy, only the "Iraqi government" was. Well, we successfully eliminated the Iraqi government. Now we want to "make peace" not war. To make peace, we want to hand Iraq back to a new government that we are not at war with. The problem there is that there are still factions of this government that are fighting against this plan. Some Iraqi's still see us as an enemy. How do you nuke some of the people, without nuking them all? The answer is "rules of engagement." If they shoot at us, then we can be certain they are enemies. If they don't, can we know they are friendly? Not really.
The result is a quagmire. We now don't know who to shoot. In order to succeed, we have to find all the enemies, and eliminate them. Well, we don't know who they are until they shoot at us. So, we actually encourage that. We give them "targets" and then we protect those "targets." When they get shot at, we can identify the enemy, and eliminate them.
But what if the enemy replaces its numbers faster than we can eliminate them? Well, that was the justification behind the "surge." We'll outnumber them.
We're getting very close to leaving the Iraqi's alone, and coming home. We'll do that just as soon as we believe we've got "friendlies" in place, and eliminated enough of the enemy that they are no longer a viable force. Who knows when that will be?

Answer 3

Oddly enough, the two aren't really directly related. Also, there have always been strict ROE's.
One of the peculiarities of counterinsurgency warfare is that aggressive patrolling but limited shooting tends to get the job done best. In those few in which we've actually come out well, we did less well when shooting the place up and better when we adopted a more nuanced approach. That's also been true on a local level when done piecemeal, as in Vietnam.
Look at it from the enemy's perspective. He's fighting a fourth-generation war because it offers a chance of success, where a standard second-generation war like Hussein tried to fight is sure to be clobbered. That means that political considerations are much more important than tactical ones. In Vietnam, he lost every battle and won the war. To win against that approach, we have to beat him at fourth-generation war, not keep score with second- or third-generation methods. It's a corollary to gaining more yards but still losing a football game. That means occasionally showing restraint in order to gain political objectives, and that means being very cautious about calling in fire support. Killing a few insurgents is counterproductive if you engender distrust among the local populace, and bombing the crap out of their houses sometimes does that. It's a darned shame that so little training and education has gone into 4th-gen warfare. If we don't recognize what kind of war we're fighting, and learn how to go about it, it's very hard to win.

Answer 4

ROE are essential to all wars, and actually every war has them. If a war had no ROE, it would be nukes from the sky until nothing was left. The goal in Vietnam was not to kill everyone. If they wanted to kill everyone then trust me, everyone would be dead. Vietnam is small enough that a dozen nuclear warheads would take everyone out. But, the goal was to take out the rebels. It doesn't help your public image (which is needed to get more funding) to be killing innocent troops. This is the same in Iraq. The goal is not to kill the Iraqis. They are not the enemy. The insurgents are. Yes, ROE are detrimental to the soldiers on the ground. Yes, it does cripple troops. But, it is better in the long run. The UN would kick us out of Iraq if we used chemical warfare to kill everyone, or we shot anything that moved. Remember when France got all mad at us for going into Iraq? Remember how we all boycotted them? Think about that, except with every nation in the world against us. ROE are to prevent WW3 from happening.

Answer 5

Vietnam was not a declared war. Therefore some restrictions were put in place.

Iraq is not a conventional war anymore. The Iraqi army was wiped out fast. Now it is underground warfare against an army. The US army is trying to keep civilian casualties to a minimum but in many places the civilians are helping the underground (as always). In some or even many cases the civilians are unwilling participants and aid givers (forced) and do not come forward as once the army leaves the enemy returns and kills the families that talked.

This is the worst kind of war to fight as you don't know the enemy on sight as they are not in uniform. If the Iraqi gov't would get its crap together they could take on the task of going door to door searching for the enemy and not be chastised as the US would be if it did it.

Answer 6

I think your "question" is more of a 'true-ism' or a good observation.

Here is the way I think we should fight a war based on how we won WWII:

We should follow a very strict code and set of rules of engagement. And every time we accidentally break one of those rules, we should publicly appoligize, and if it is found that the persons involved were extremely negligent or acted with criminal intent, they should be punished.

But HERE is where my rules change - any time the enemy breaks a rule, if there is not a SWIFT appology, followed by corrective action then that rule is ERASED. For example, if the rule broken is that you never attack civililans (e.g. civilian contractors) and there is not an immediate appology followed by an investigation to find out who it was, then there is NO LONGER a rule prohibiting attacking civilians. I call it the "gloves off policy".

Also, the rule is never reinstated until that current war has ended.

Answer 7

The ROE in Korea, at least as my grandpa rembers them, was find a threat, shoot the threat. Don't dick around with, is it a civilian, is a something else, is it a Chinaman, is a Soviet (whoops they weren't officially in Korea), etc.

I agree with the above poster, WW2 was the last real war fought by the US of A. All the others were limited violence controlled by politicians for political goals and objectives. You can't win like that when Clauswitz said, "war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means." he didn't mean politicians control warfare for political reasons.

There hasn't been a single politician in the Western World who understood both war and politics since Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt.

Answer 8

Actually no the ROE are not set by either the president or the Generals. Its usually a case of the congress and State Dept setting the regulations for the military.

Answer 9

at this point in the game who says we are not doing exactly what we (the president) wants to do KEEP THE WAR GOING
you did not have rules of engagement in ww1 and ww2 doesn't make much sense does it