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...respond, you are going to create collateral damage. He's going to blame that on you. Even if you kill the insurgent there - and in many cases you don't, you just destroy a lot of things - you get a tactical success and near-term satisfaction because you went after the fly with the sledgehammer. What happens is, you have made the insurgency wider. You are going to run into more IEDs (improvised explosive devices), you are going to run into more insurgents, you are going to run into a more difficult place...
...directive. And it provides my intent on how we are going to execute operations in general [to be released soon]. But specifically, the use of deadly force. The reason I spent a lot of time personally writing that intent is because I wanted to make sure that before they went into the specific dos and don'ts, that they understood the framework and the concept behind it. And the concept behind it is that although you are still authorized to use close air support when you need to - and I lay out some very specific conditions that they must meet...
...with the 82nd Airborne Division when a flaming F-16 jet plowed into a parked C-141 at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, killing 18 of his troops as they prepared for parachute jumps. This mention in the interview was accompanied by an instant change in tone. He went from animated to muted, and there was a long silence of nine seconds.] I had been in command for almost a year ... We had just finished a joint readiness training, where you build up a team. What we had done, we had a year of team-building in preparation...
...build maturity and restraint - there is a time to kill, but that time is very carefully thought through, and it is as precise as you can be, and it is when there are no other options. So I think the human-being part of it ... if we went back to the concept of shock and awe, those are designed to shock command and control systems. And nations. You can shock and awe human beings, but it doesn't last. I've seen operations where kinetic strikes would go in on a target, and the enemy would come out shooting. They...
...anecdotes to share? There have been an awful lot. Let me think ... There are a lot of them, and all teach me something different. Spring 2008, went to a FOB [forward-operating base], we had launched a raid, and our guys had been in combat at 5-m distance, so much so that one of the young sergeants had to pick up an enemy machine gun and keep fighting. Another had, although wounded, already picked up a hand grenade that came on his position and attempted to throw it back and lost half of his arm in the process...