10 ms·

For Humanity’s Sake, Keep Red Crosses on Medevac Helicopters

78 points by 737min 5y ago

oneoff786 5y ago
Is the recommendation to replace the cross with machine guns figurative or literal? It doesn’t seem obvious why the cross needs to go if the gun is added?
- p_l 5y ago
  It needs to go if the vehicle becomes a combatant vehicle. The crew using personal weapons in self defence doesn't count, but medevac helicopter equipped with weapons to lay down support in hot landing zone is no longer a vehicle that can claim protection of red cross/red crescent, but a valid target for fire.
- rafael09ed 5y ago
  It's literal. The red cross is supposed to mean that it's humanitarian, neutral and carries no weapons.
  - randyrand 5y ago
    You don't see them medevac-ing the enemies, so they are not neutral. A big reason for medevac is to free soilders from caring for the wounded, so they can continue firing weapons at you. Neutral seems like a crazy idea to me. It's a critical part of the offense.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      I don't see it, so it does not exist?
    - pigbearpig 5y ago
      Do you see a lot of medevacs? The Geneva convention basically states that whomever the injured is in the care of is charged with giving them adequate care. If that care requires medevac it's going to happen. The protections accorded the wounded and sick apply to friend and foe alike without distinction https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31133-FM_4-02-000-WEB-1.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31133-FM_4-0... https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule110 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
      - oneoff786 5y ago
        Have the opponents of the last few decades of us war followed Geneva conventions?
MattGaiser 5y ago
Why not just have it be contextual? Keep the cross if fighting an actual country. Remove it if fighting terrorists or other non state groups.
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  That was my thought as well. If you're a boxer, you have rules that you must follow. In a match you don't need to worry about getting hit below the belt. If you ended up in a street fight however, you can't make that same assumption.
- mter 5y ago
  It's not just the markings, it's training for the crew since being a gunship vs being unarmed is different, different equipment inside for the litter vs door guns, less medical equipment because you need to have ammo, different crew since a gunner isn't a medic, etc
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
Rules of war are predominantly to protect the losing side. US troops in Middle East should allow enemy or neutral non-combatants to evacuate enemy wounded without a fight. In terms of what US should do to evacuate it's wounded, it's a utilitarian rather than moral decision based on what's less likely to sustain additional casualties and whether enemy forces are inclined to respect unarmed red cross vehicles/personal or use them as easy targets. Let's hope we don't live to see a conflict where US is at the mercy of rules of law to protect our own troops and civilians. I am also not advocating our asymmetric engagements, just pointing out that our primary protection there is our own military superiority.
renewiltord 5y ago
Interesting. Does medevac actually result in improving combat effectiveness directly? It seems that in a great-power war you rescue a fraction of combat personnel who will be injured and they will not return to combat any time soon. The value then is entirely in believing that your guys have your back if you’re hurt, which I can imagine has a massive effect on morale. I suppose the existence of dedicated medevac also provides some constant reminder of humanity, which also has a similar effect plus the additional motivating factor of outrage when your med guys are hit. Of course I could be entirely wrong and we could be frequently rescuing soldiers and putting them back into duty quickly. Curious to see what the numbers say.
- kodah 5y ago
  In modern theater, if you're getting put on a bird you're probably going home. I've seen this with a few exceptions. CorpsMen and medics can take care of a lot of stuff in the field, and many things will just get wrapped up until you get back to base. The emphasis on modern military medical care is to return the troop to combat effectiveness, but a bird being called usually means you have exceeded what can be offered locally.
- dmckeon 5y ago
  A wounded combatant who could benefit from medevac is no longer a (edit: combat) asset to their fellow combatants, but is someone who may need one or more other people to try to keep them alive, or more people to carry them to a safer location. Their wounds or injuries may prevent the group from moving as easily. In the cold calculus of ground warfare, a wounded combatant in the field is more valuable to the opposition than a dead combatant precisely because a dead person needs less support from their fellows. Rapid medevac has changed the historical wounded:killed ratio from about 3:1 to about 4:1 in recent US ground wars. Getting a wounded combatant to definitive medical care in the first hour after they are injured makes a huge difference in outcomes, which benefits troop morale.
ec109685 5y ago
The link where the author cites citizens are asking for machine guns in medvac helicopters goes here: https://medevacmatters.org/ https://medevacmatters.org/ Most of those posts just seem to be arguing for better training?
- tyingq 5y ago
  Here's one that is arguing for dropping dedicated medevac: https://medevacmatters.org/2012/02/28/the-politicization-of-medevac/ https://medevacmatters.org/2012/02/28/the-politicization-of-...
  - ec109685 5y ago
    That seems different where medvac’s can be converted to standard choppers versus evacing troops from helicopters with machine guns on them as standard operating procedures.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      It does specifically mention armed helicopters, several times: "The MEDEVAC leadership refuses to remove the red crosses and arm their helicopters even though doing so would allow faster responses to some requests for evacuation of wounded troops." "AMEDD is pursuing a public relations campaign to stop the movement to arm the MEDEVAC helicopters as reported by this email to Michael Yon site in early February 2012"
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> He felt that bringing a just war to a swift end justified almost any act. Looking at recent history, I find myself agreeing more and more with him. War is horrible. War always involves innocent people dying, even if it is just you 18 year old kids either forced or enticed to join the military. War creates casualties both physical and mental in the people that fight it. I would bet if you include mental health, the vast majority of people who were actually involved in combat, came away with some kind of long term consequence. Yet at the same time, war can be a necessity. Take of example WWII. There was no way Hitler could have been stopped without war. At the same time there was a lot of damage to German civilians. The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war. Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along. If it worth killing people for to achieve you objective, then go do it, and try to make it as short as possible. If it is not, then don’t start a war. But making War into a type of game (these people are ok to kill, these people are not, and lawyering over how connected something is to war), I actually find kind of sick, as if it was just a big game.
- thaumiel 5y ago
  Ok, so killing non-combatants aka civilians to trying to force the opposition to stop the conflict faster? More biological and chemical weapons, which causes mass amount of damage by not killing people but by remove their combat effectiveness to also able to stop the conflict faster?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war. Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along. If you don't want the other guy to gas your troops, you can agree to in exchange not gas their troops. There's nothing artificial or contrived about that.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    The whole “you can’t gas my troops, but you can shoot them or blow them up, or burn them to death with a flame thrower, seems pretty contrived. World War II didn’t have gas, but it was still pretty horrific.
kodah 5y ago
One thing I think should be made clear, that I don't think the author spells out for people who just know war by book, is that enemies frequently don't respect that red cross. In fact, like a swinging radio antenna from a backpack, it is a target and tactical advantage to pin ambulatory vehicles - whether they be airborne or land-borne. Some of this probably has to do with some knowledge that foremost military institutions will prioritize evacuation of injured and casualties at a high threshold in the face of their own safety.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war. A lot of online commenters make a big deal out of the military's rules of engagement and how they're "more strict" than police. What they don' tell you (or don't know) is that in Iraq, US soldiers were often given engagement rules like "from this point on the map onward, shoot anything that moves." In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.
  - kodah 5y ago
    I wasn't in Iraq so I can't speak to that. > In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke. I can speak to this though, I was in Afghanistan in 2011-2012. It was my job to aid troops in getting drone and air support. Can you be specific about who operated the drones you're mentioning? In the DOD we required three levels of verification to occur; every request started with "troops in contact" which requires that not only are troops engaged, but they have to be able to demonstrate that they cannot move (eg: "we are dead in the water if we sit here.") In the midst of this they had to be able to concisely define the target, usually with a building grid, but also describing the target with orientation (trees, other objects, etc), and third someone like me had to verify all of those facts by feeds, radio, binoculars, or sight on seen to pass order to an Air Officer who would design a proposal, which usually got passed all the way up to regimental office. As far as I know, for CentCom under Mattis this was not unusual - if provably difficult. With respect to ROE, the ROE in Iraq and Afghanistan were different. The one in Afghanistan required you be shot at in order to engage. This resulted in an abundance of injured or mamed troops, because the way the military does operations require them to blanket and leaflet towns they're going to invade. So yes, the Taliban usually knows you're coming weeks in advance, and the townspeople who aren't Taliban affiliated have left. That's not to justify, "This area is a free for all", and doesn't sound much like the military I know. Edit: I do highly support the idea of boots on the ground over drones. We never had any missed targets that I was aware of and BDAs (battle damage assessments) were always accurate to our desired outcome in my experience. That said, the reliance on drones in areas where we couldn't bring artillery created a real race for resources, which is where you get stories like Dakota Meyers. Edit: Last one, I promise. > Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war. This is junk. War is messy, it's the byproduct of deplomacy breaking down. It's on everyone who has experienced the theater of war to talk about how the rules were or were not applied. Sometimes you may not like the answer that results in an exception, but it's useful for warrior to understand the baseline reality that they will face and expect - I say this on either side, whether you're a US troop or a warrior in the Taliban. These laws come into conflict in complicated ways many times. One classical example: When I first learned to shoot the M2 (which is a 50 caliber machine gun) I learned you cannot shoot them at people. You can, howver, use them to assault vehicle born targets, targets with necessary distance, targets behind cover, targets using armor, etc... When you have a vehicle loaded down with explosives racing through a winding ingress point, knowing in all likelihood of they succeed that another attack is imminent, do you debate the law of land and warfare or do you zero in on the engine block and let fate take it's course?
sdoering 5y ago
When reading pieces like that, and watching a lot of documentaries on the First and Second World War I always am reminded of a quote my SO presented me once: "In war, people who do not know each other kill each other on the orders of people who know each other but do not kill each other." But on topic: I just don't know what happened to the world and to political doctrine in the last 20 to 30 years. I just don't understand this world anymore. I grew up near the iron curtain on the western side. Filled with propaganda about how the West (and especially the US) were the better system. How democracy made people free and how socialism put people behind walls and made them unfree. I grew up in a system of socially responsible capitalism with the government and other institutions somewhat ensuring that the everybody participated in economic uplift. After the Wall fell it seems to me the west did not habe to pretend anymore and more and more restraints fell. Everything became capitalized as well as we are allowed to do everything because we are the good guys seems to have become a thing (or more of that at least). I can't understand killing civilians with drone strikes at weddings (or anywhere), waiting for the ambulance and others to help and then striking again. I don't understand pushing Russia even closer towards China. I don't understand the EU pulling refugee boats back into the Mediterranean to sink there. Somehow I am only in my forties and the world doesn't make any sense to me anymore.
- hmmmzzz 5y ago
  - sdoering 5y ago
    Wow. Now it is my duplicity? I colonized half the world? Sorry, but this generalization doesn't necessarily strengthen your argument. And just as a question: When did Germany ever use a nuclear weapon against another nation? Because you vitriolic rant is surely targeted against the wrong populace. Would love to know what made you think that adhominem attacking me would make me think positively about you.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      > When did Germany ever use a nuclear weapon against another nation? A war crime that Germany has not committed! Although, for lack of technical capacity, not lack of will. Seriously though: I don't think he was attacking you- it was the plural 'you', 'you, the west'. And westerners are largely the unreformed heirs of the colonial system - Germans included! There's a reason why the conference that initiated the carving up of Africa was held in Berlin.
wikidani 5y ago
If I rememeber correctly, in Korea medevac helicopters were marked as per the international conventions (Geneva or Hague, not exactly sure) and they still took fire anyways. Also, there's another issue that won't and can't be mitigated by any visual means, many aerial engagements on a peer to peer conflict happen outside of visual range and on that case any non visual IFF would have to be radio based and due to the inherent proximity of medevac missions to the forward line of contact would be very susceptible to electronic warfare. So I'd argue that red crosses on front line medevac helicopters aren't that important
rasz 5y ago
If only Namir Noor-Eldeen insisted on strapping red cross to a random Van trying to rescue him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqY12VHFv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqY12VHFv4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...
mgarfias 5y ago
> First, if a situation is so dangerous that a medevac cannot land, it will require more than helicopter-mounted medium machine guns. Instead, it calls for a full gunship escort. Ltc kettles would disagree: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/23/lt-col-charles-kettles-vietnam-era-huey-pilot-and-medal-of-honor-recipient-has-died/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/23/lt-col-c...
dirtyid 5y ago
Advancement in medevaccing wounded within golden hour reduce body bags. Body bags on evening news end wars. Reduced casualties is how lopsided forever wars go on maintenance mode. For humanity's sake, show the inhumanity of war. Peer warfare is another discussion.

78 points by 737min 5y ago

Is the recommendation to replace the cross with machine guns figurative or literal? It doesn’t seem obvious why the cross needs to go if the gun is added?

p_l 5y ago
It needs to go if the vehicle becomes a combatant vehicle. The crew using personal weapons in self defence doesn't count, but medevac helicopter equipped with weapons to lay down support in hot landing zone is no longer a vehicle that can claim protection of red cross/red crescent, but a valid target for fire.
rafael09ed 5y ago
It's literal. The red cross is supposed to mean that it's humanitarian, neutral and carries no weapons.
- randyrand 5y ago
  You don't see them medevac-ing the enemies, so they are not neutral. A big reason for medevac is to free soilders from caring for the wounded, so they can continue firing weapons at you. Neutral seems like a crazy idea to me. It's a critical part of the offense.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    I don't see it, so it does not exist?
  - pigbearpig 5y ago
    Do you see a lot of medevacs? The Geneva convention basically states that whomever the injured is in the care of is charged with giving them adequate care. If that care requires medevac it's going to happen. The protections accorded the wounded and sick apply to friend and foe alike without distinction https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31133-FM_4-02-000-WEB-1.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31133-FM_4-0... https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule110 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Have the opponents of the last few decades of us war followed Geneva conventions?

MattGaiser 5y ago

Why not just have it be contextual? Keep the cross if fighting an actual country. Remove it if fighting terrorists or other non state groups.

dinkleberg 5y ago
That was my thought as well. If you're a boxer, you have rules that you must follow. In a match you don't need to worry about getting hit below the belt. If you ended up in a street fight however, you can't make that same assumption.
mter 5y ago
It's not just the markings, it's training for the crew since being a gunship vs being unarmed is different, different equipment inside for the litter vs door guns, less medical equipment because you need to have ammo, different crew since a gunner isn't a medic, etc

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

Rules of war are predominantly to protect the losing side. US troops in Middle East should allow enemy or neutral non-combatants to evacuate enemy wounded without a fight. In terms of what US should do to evacuate it's wounded, it's a utilitarian rather than moral decision based on what's less likely to sustain additional casualties and whether enemy forces are inclined to respect unarmed red cross vehicles/personal or use them as easy targets. Let's hope we don't live to see a conflict where US is at the mercy of rules of law to protect our own troops and civilians. I am also not advocating our asymmetric engagements, just pointing out that our primary protection there is our own military superiority.

renewiltord 5y ago

Interesting. Does medevac actually result in improving combat effectiveness directly? It seems that in a great-power war you rescue a fraction of combat personnel who will be injured and they will not return to combat any time soon. The value then is entirely in believing that your guys have your back if you’re hurt, which I can imagine has a massive effect on morale. I suppose the existence of dedicated medevac also provides some constant reminder of humanity, which also has a similar effect plus the additional motivating factor of outrage when your med guys are hit. Of course I could be entirely wrong and we could be frequently rescuing soldiers and putting them back into duty quickly. Curious to see what the numbers say.

kodah 5y ago
In modern theater, if you're getting put on a bird you're probably going home. I've seen this with a few exceptions. CorpsMen and medics can take care of a lot of stuff in the field, and many things will just get wrapped up until you get back to base. The emphasis on modern military medical care is to return the troop to combat effectiveness, but a bird being called usually means you have exceeded what can be offered locally.
dmckeon 5y ago
A wounded combatant who could benefit from medevac is no longer a (edit: combat) asset to their fellow combatants, but is someone who may need one or more other people to try to keep them alive, or more people to carry them to a safer location. Their wounds or injuries may prevent the group from moving as easily. In the cold calculus of ground warfare, a wounded combatant in the field is more valuable to the opposition than a dead combatant precisely because a dead person needs less support from their fellows. Rapid medevac has changed the historical wounded:killed ratio from about 3:1 to about 4:1 in recent US ground wars. Getting a wounded combatant to definitive medical care in the first hour after they are injured makes a huge difference in outcomes, which benefits troop morale.

ec109685 5y ago

The link where the author cites citizens are asking for machine guns in medvac helicopters goes here: https://medevacmatters.org/ https://medevacmatters.org/ Most of those posts just seem to be arguing for better training?

tyingq 5y ago
Here's one that is arguing for dropping dedicated medevac: https://medevacmatters.org/2012/02/28/the-politicization-of-medevac/ https://medevacmatters.org/2012/02/28/the-politicization-of-...
- ec109685 5y ago
  That seems different where medvac’s can be converted to standard choppers versus evacing troops from helicopters with machine guns on them as standard operating procedures.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It does specifically mention armed helicopters, several times: "The MEDEVAC leadership refuses to remove the red crosses and arm their helicopters even though doing so would allow faster responses to some requests for evacuation of wounded troops." "AMEDD is pursuing a public relations campaign to stop the movement to arm the MEDEVAC helicopters as reported by this email to Michael Yon site in early February 2012"

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> He felt that bringing a just war to a swift end justified almost any act. Looking at recent history, I find myself agreeing more and more with him. War is horrible. War always involves innocent people dying, even if it is just you 18 year old kids either forced or enticed to join the military. War creates casualties both physical and mental in the people that fight it. I would bet if you include mental health, the vast majority of people who were actually involved in combat, came away with some kind of long term consequence. Yet at the same time, war can be a necessity. Take of example WWII. There was no way Hitler could have been stopped without war. At the same time there was a lot of damage to German civilians. The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war. Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along. If it worth killing people for to achieve you objective, then go do it, and try to make it as short as possible. If it is not, then don’t start a war. But making War into a type of game (these people are ok to kill, these people are not, and lawyering over how connected something is to war), I actually find kind of sick, as if it was just a big game.

thaumiel 5y ago
Ok, so killing non-combatants aka civilians to trying to force the opposition to stop the conflict faster? More biological and chemical weapons, which causes mass amount of damage by not killing people but by remove their combat effectiveness to also able to stop the conflict faster?
whatshisface 5y ago
>The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war. Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along. If you don't want the other guy to gas your troops, you can agree to in exchange not gas their troops. There's nothing artificial or contrived about that.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  The whole “you can’t gas my troops, but you can shoot them or blow them up, or burn them to death with a flame thrower, seems pretty contrived. World War II didn’t have gas, but it was still pretty horrific.

kodah 5y ago

One thing I think should be made clear, that I don't think the author spells out for people who just know war by book, is that enemies frequently don't respect that red cross. In fact, like a swinging radio antenna from a backpack, it is a target and tactical advantage to pin ambulatory vehicles - whether they be airborne or land-borne. Some of this probably has to do with some knowledge that foremost military institutions will prioritize evacuation of injured and casualties at a high threshold in the face of their own safety.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war. A lot of online commenters make a big deal out of the military's rules of engagement and how they're "more strict" than police. What they don' tell you (or don't know) is that in Iraq, US soldiers were often given engagement rules like "from this point on the map onward, shoot anything that moves." In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.
- kodah 5y ago
  I wasn't in Iraq so I can't speak to that. > In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke. I can speak to this though, I was in Afghanistan in 2011-2012. It was my job to aid troops in getting drone and air support. Can you be specific about who operated the drones you're mentioning? In the DOD we required three levels of verification to occur; every request started with "troops in contact" which requires that not only are troops engaged, but they have to be able to demonstrate that they cannot move (eg: "we are dead in the water if we sit here.") In the midst of this they had to be able to concisely define the target, usually with a building grid, but also describing the target with orientation (trees, other objects, etc), and third someone like me had to verify all of those facts by feeds, radio, binoculars, or sight on seen to pass order to an Air Officer who would design a proposal, which usually got passed all the way up to regimental office. As far as I know, for CentCom under Mattis this was not unusual - if provably difficult. With respect to ROE, the ROE in Iraq and Afghanistan were different. The one in Afghanistan required you be shot at in order to engage. This resulted in an abundance of injured or mamed troops, because the way the military does operations require them to blanket and leaflet towns they're going to invade. So yes, the Taliban usually knows you're coming weeks in advance, and the townspeople who aren't Taliban affiliated have left. That's not to justify, "This area is a free for all", and doesn't sound much like the military I know. Edit: I do highly support the idea of boots on the ground over drones. We never had any missed targets that I was aware of and BDAs (battle damage assessments) were always accurate to our desired outcome in my experience. That said, the reliance on drones in areas where we couldn't bring artillery created a real race for resources, which is where you get stories like Dakota Meyers. Edit: Last one, I promise. > Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war. This is junk. War is messy, it's the byproduct of deplomacy breaking down. It's on everyone who has experienced the theater of war to talk about how the rules were or were not applied. Sometimes you may not like the answer that results in an exception, but it's useful for warrior to understand the baseline reality that they will face and expect - I say this on either side, whether you're a US troop or a warrior in the Taliban. These laws come into conflict in complicated ways many times. One classical example: When I first learned to shoot the M2 (which is a 50 caliber machine gun) I learned you cannot shoot them at people. You can, howver, use them to assault vehicle born targets, targets with necessary distance, targets behind cover, targets using armor, etc... When you have a vehicle loaded down with explosives racing through a winding ingress point, knowing in all likelihood of they succeed that another attack is imminent, do you debate the law of land and warfare or do you zero in on the engine block and let fate take it's course?

sdoering 5y ago

When reading pieces like that, and watching a lot of documentaries on the First and Second World War I always am reminded of a quote my SO presented me once: "In war, people who do not know each other kill each other on the orders of people who know each other but do not kill each other." But on topic: I just don't know what happened to the world and to political doctrine in the last 20 to 30 years. I just don't understand this world anymore. I grew up near the iron curtain on the western side. Filled with propaganda about how the West (and especially the US) were the better system. How democracy made people free and how socialism put people behind walls and made them unfree. I grew up in a system of socially responsible capitalism with the government and other institutions somewhat ensuring that the everybody participated in economic uplift. After the Wall fell it seems to me the west did not habe to pretend anymore and more and more restraints fell. Everything became capitalized as well as we are allowed to do everything because we are the good guys seems to have become a thing (or more of that at least). I can't understand killing civilians with drone strikes at weddings (or anywhere), waiting for the ambulance and others to help and then striking again. I don't understand pushing Russia even closer towards China. I don't understand the EU pulling refugee boats back into the Mediterranean to sink there. Somehow I am only in my forties and the world doesn't make any sense to me anymore.

hmmmzzz 5y ago
- sdoering 5y ago
  Wow. Now it is my duplicity? I colonized half the world? Sorry, but this generalization doesn't necessarily strengthen your argument. And just as a question: When did Germany ever use a nuclear weapon against another nation? Because you vitriolic rant is surely targeted against the wrong populace. Would love to know what made you think that adhominem attacking me would make me think positively about you.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    > When did Germany ever use a nuclear weapon against another nation? A war crime that Germany has not committed! Although, for lack of technical capacity, not lack of will. Seriously though: I don't think he was attacking you- it was the plural 'you', 'you, the west'. And westerners are largely the unreformed heirs of the colonial system - Germans included! There's a reason why the conference that initiated the carving up of Africa was held in Berlin.

wikidani 5y ago

If I rememeber correctly, in Korea medevac helicopters were marked as per the international conventions (Geneva or Hague, not exactly sure) and they still took fire anyways. Also, there's another issue that won't and can't be mitigated by any visual means, many aerial engagements on a peer to peer conflict happen outside of visual range and on that case any non visual IFF would have to be radio based and due to the inherent proximity of medevac missions to the forward line of contact would be very susceptible to electronic warfare. So I'd argue that red crosses on front line medevac helicopters aren't that important

rasz 5y ago

If only Namir Noor-Eldeen insisted on strapping red cross to a random Van trying to rescue him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqY12VHFv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqY12VHFv4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...

mgarfias 5y ago

> First, if a situation is so dangerous that a medevac cannot land, it will require more than helicopter-mounted medium machine guns. Instead, it calls for a full gunship escort. Ltc kettles would disagree: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/23/lt-col-charles-kettles-vietnam-era-huey-pilot-and-medal-of-honor-recipient-has-died/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/23/lt-col-c...

dirtyid 5y ago

Advancement in medevaccing wounded within golden hour reduce body bags. Body bags on evening news end wars. Reduced casualties is how lopsided forever wars go on maintenance mode. For humanity's sake, show the inhumanity of war. Peer warfare is another discussion.