The issue is the politics allowing the rules of engagement to literally be up to lawyers and politicians discretion. It's not solid. It's not consistent. It encourages the use of human shields because they work. When you punish a troop for downing a terrorist because he hide behind a female, so you just send a bullet through both of them; it makes other troops not want to go that route. In turn, these fucks just hide behind children and women. When you're only allowed to shoot when they present a direct threat, it leave a lot to interpret. Is a armed man whose watching you like a damn hawk standing near an ISIS flag with several buddies all dressed and blocking their faces a direct threat? No. But if you dropped the group, you'd save yourself some future problems. But not allowed to do that. To me, the problem isn't the tactics or training the military provides. The problem is the ever changing RoEs that have no consistency and seem to punish troops for doing their job and reward guerilla warfare.
So you're suggesting we return to the same deprived tactics of punishing and mass murdering entire villages of people who are victims of the enemy like we did in Vietnam? That's not only disgusting, but it completely contradicts, in absolutely every imaginable way, why we are fighting this war.
I'm just guessing here, but I assume you don't have any combat vets as friends. Such actions are just as destructive to their minds as it is to anyone else who might witness it. Some people struggle to justify it, others outright regret it. Both of them live with it for the rest of their lives. Knowing they've killed woman and children in some land they barely understand for some cause they struggle to understand.
Your words actually make me depressed, as I'm very close friends with both a Vietnam and Afghanistan combat vet. The moral things things they struggle with are nearly identical. Like they've lived the same war in different generations..... Both of them are very good people.... Both of them carry memories of killing and death they'd rather not have.... Knowing what I know about them and their service, comments like this really disturb me, to say the least....
But morality aside, let's speak of pure statistics. Since 9/11, and our declaration of war on terror, terror attacks and terrorist ideology has only increased multiple times over.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/18/fivefold-increase-terrorism-fatalities-global-index
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/28/bloody-tide-terror-deaths-increased-8-fold-since-2010-says-study.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/are-we-any-safer/492761/
http://www.businessinsider.com/are-we-safer-now-than-on-911-2016-9
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447882/terror-attacks-rising-immigration-safe-havens-play-role
I can cite and cite this trend endlessly. The very obvious and clear fact is that what we've doing is only making the problem worse. And it has nothing to do with RoE. It has entirely to do with our lack of it and the Muslim worlds perception of our interventions. When we invaded Vietnam, the southern government was already hated by the huge majority of Vietnamese. However, our invasion inspired far more of them to take up arms or otherwise actively work against us. To the Vietnamese, the conflict had nothing to do with America. It was their own war, and our intervention was not welcome. The Vietnamese have an ancient history of reppelling foreign invasions. An unconquerable land if there ever was one.
We lost that war, and ironically, everything I've just said about Vietnam can equally be said about Afghanistan (and in some sense Iraq). Our war on terror inspired a massive rise in Salfi Jihadism, especially with the Iraq war. Because to Muslims all over the world, our war was completely unjust and a declaration of war on their religion itself.
Fact is, the more we deprive ourselves of common decency, the more we lower ourselves to their level of bloodlust, the more we kill Muslim people in things that do not directly concern us, the more gunpowder we give our enemies to load new shells. New generations of what we are fighting.
Loosening the RoE is one of the worst things we could possibly do at this point. We tried the body count tactic in Vietnam. It proved to be an utter failure when it became clear we could not face the entire country of millions of pissed off people. Now in this case, we're talking potentially hundreds of millions of people.
That is absolutely not a war we can possibly win through a body count strategy. Nor should we be lowering ourselves to such disgusting depravity and inhumanity to achieve it. Otherwise, we are exactly the enemy we're fighting.