COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The tragedy of the event is manifest. In any case, as I stated before, COIN is inherently a very tough nut to crack, and a VERY personal war. It certainly varies from city to city, but I know Samarra personally and I can attest to the dangers of the place. Yes, the responsibility can be placed upon the soldiers. Was it within the rules of engagement (was the warning escalated properly, did the soldiers attempt to stop the car, etc?). I can only speculate on legality, but we faced situations like this before (panicky civilians speeding through clearly labled checkpoints, with wounded and dead resulting, albeit very seldom). The consequences of even legal and sanctioned violence at the soldier can have strategic ripple effects (as we see in this case).

Disabling a car is difficult. Bullets aren't stopped by anything in cars except the frame and engine block (and even then, metal on metal causes ricochets). This is certainly not like the movies. You can only aim center mass of the engine (not tires). Combine this with a speeding car, and you have only the split second reaction of a soldier behind a machine gun or rifle who must rely upon his or her training and judgement. Counterintuitively it is the trained combat arms soldier (the trained killer) that does this the best. He, more than the rear-echelon soldiers, possesses the best judgment, skill, and leadership that actually mitigates the problem of illegal shootings. If it was a traffic control point, then it was combat arms soldiers (infantry, cavalry, armor, artillery, or even engineer). You also don't get any idea of the threat in Samarra, where the threat of a vehicle borne IED has always been high. We had a soldier stand one down, wounding and stopping the driver of a VBIED with his M4 rifle, causing him to detonate the VBIED with in 20 meters of the soldier. He was slightly wounded from a huge explosion that disintegrated the car. His judgment and skill earned him a Silver Star. Such is Samarra (not just SOME city north of Baghdad).

I am sure the soldiers that shot the car are the ones that dealt with the dead and treated the wounded on the scene after it was over. A terrible tragedy, and if the violence was illegal, then they will be punished (we do not hide soldier crimes).

As far as the tactics and techniques of check point operations, they are sound. Nevertheless, bad things happen during COIN, even when soldiers are operating within Law of Armed Conflict and the ROE.

I'm no rubber stamp of military doctrine or decisions made prior to the war. I for one am very confused as to why our Army was so averse to training our junior leaders on how to fight a counterinsurgency, if as the generals the criticized Rumsfeld, the planning for an occupation of Iraq was 12 years in the making. If that is the case, it was never translated into doctrine, and doctrine drives training. No Arabic classes. No studying of successful COIN operations in history (Malaysia) nor failures such as Vietnam. No attempt to develop a Lawrence of Arabia model. No studying of Mao, or of the Algergian wars. COIN was, until recently, relegated to the Special Forces of the military. It wasn't until it slapped us in the face that it became a priority. So those that argue about troops numbers are, in my humble opinion, are dead wrong. More soldiers trained in the conventional war model would have made no difference if they weren't TRAINED to deal with a potential counterinsurgency.