As everyone knows, hearts and minds are the key to winning counterinsurgency war. Failing that, they’re also the best place to drop a target with one round.
A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents
[…] “Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”
Ludicrous as it might seem this “baiting” tactic makes a certain sense as an answer to the maddeningly inchoate nature of insurgent war. Fielding the best-trained shooters on Earth (apologies to british SAS) only takes you so far when the opposition refuses to stand apart from the general population. Obviously if the enemy would stand up and attack us like the Russians were supposed to we would win, but then the enemy knows that if they did that they would lose. We have to deal with the fact that our opposition is not stupid and (mostly) not suicidal.
The same focus on identifying the enemy, what the army calls “separating tourists from terrorists,” shows up in the sales pitch for a new microwave-like active denial system from Raytheon. Hose a crowd with an agonizing pain ray, wait to see who doesn’t run (i.e., insurgents) and shoot them. Hearts and minds!
Look, I appreciate that insurgent war poses real problems for the army, and it makes sense to exercise some American entrepreneurial spirit in trying to fix it. The problem is that all of these “solutions” strike me as tactics smart (if that) and strategy foolish. In both cases the obvious likelihood of false positives (most cities hire people to pick up street trash) pretty much ensures that the system will casually murder any number of innocents among the actual hostiles. We would go berserk if someone operated that way on American soil and we shouldn’t accept it in Iraq.
On a more philosiphical level these micro solutions to a macro problem seem like stopgap efforts to manage a conflict when their necessity proves we have already lost. Granted that we started with one hand behind our back – we failed to plan for post-Saddam Iraq. Modern armies don’t fight insurgencies well. Our genius war cabinet stuck their fingers in their ears long after adapting might have done some good. By the time signs of desperation like ‘baiting’ started to appear the various insurgent groups deeply rooted themselves in the population at the the same time that we became hopelessly alienated from it.