Deptula: Austin’s CHMR-AP Gives Public Unrealistic Expectations

[SurelySerious]

https://defenseopinion.com/in-a-dangerous-world-new-pentagon-mitigation-plan-would-hobble-u-s-forces/183/
 

Austin’s report and its recommendations are shaped by recent history. They look backward at an era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in a permissive aerospace environment that dominated U.S. military actions over the past two decades. It has little relevance to the conduct of operations in a major regional conflict, where the magnitude of threats, rapid execution timelines and distributed and decentralized nature of combat will not allow for the studied review this report imagines. 
That does not mean that civilian harm should not be minimized. On the contrary, it reaffirms the importance of the training all U.S. military personnel undergo to ensure that when American military forces take lethal actions, they do so legally under the laws of armed conflict.
 
Given the growth in capability and capacity of peer competitors, which today are equal to or greater than the U.S., the Pentagon is counting on winning future conflicts by achieving an advantage in information assimilation and making decisions at all levels at a rate exceeding that of our adversary. That is the whole point behind DOD’s effort to develop joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) and is at the heart of the U.S. military’s joint warfighting concept. Fundamental to this concept is the realization that U.S. personnel need to be empowered to operate in a distributed mode, executing under mission command in a decentralized fashion.
 
In other words, the DOD is counting on our military personnel to be better at handling the fog and friction of war than our adversaries.
 
Instituting Austin’s action plan has the potential of negating whatever advantage these technologies achieve by adding centralized bureaucratic and political decision layers at every U.S. warfighting echelon…
 
For example, contrary to what many might understandably assume, because the Department of Defense has done such a poor job of explaining to the public just what the laws of armed conflict allow, it is perfectly legal to execute an otherwise lawful attack notwithstanding the knowledge that, in fact, civilian casualties will inevitably occur. Unfortunately, many members of the public may believe that the occurrence of any civilian casualties means something illegal has happened when that typically is not the case…

Of course, we can and must minimize unintended casualties. Moral peoples never want to kill civilians. Some of our adversaries do, as we have seen with Russia’s intentional targeting of civilians in Ukraine, but that is not the American way of war. We must therefore question the morality of any policy that restricts the use of the military—and airpower in particular—to avoid the possibility of collateral damage if it also enables or increases the likelihood of our adversaries committing crimes against humanity.

One excerpt. Interesting from the perspective that major combat would probably be hampered if you apply the same expectations as HVI hunts with Hellfires, which he argues we are doing.