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March 08, 2005
A Professional View of the Sgrena Incident
Andrew Olmstead is a Major in the Army Reserve, and his unit is involved in training National Guard and Reserve soldiers before they go into combat overseas. Here is his very informative post that details the complexity and pressure that every soldier must deal with when fighting in Iraq. He relates the types of problems the soldiers face in dealing with civilians on the battlefield, and he then writes about how his trainees learn to clear urban buildings, any room of which might contain either friend or enemy.
He then moves on to the radically different assignment of manning a roadblock. In light of the recent friendly-fire event concerning Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, Major Olmstead's professional take on the difficulties that must be dealt with (emphasis mine):
A traffic control point presents a different stress, of course. There is not the constant ebb and flow of adrenaline presented when a soldier has to clear multiple rooms. Instead the soldier has to balance the boredom of standing at a checkpoint with limited traffic with the knowledge that a TCP is a target for enemy forces and any vehicle which approaches the checkpoint may contain a lethal threat to that soldier. Yet most vehicles which approach contain nothing more lethal than local Iraqis who are indistinguishable from terrorists. So every vehicle which approaches the TCP is a game of chicken that forces the soldiers to decide whether or not it is a threat in seconds. A vehicle approaching a TCP at 60 miles per hour will cover 88 feet per second. Assuming the TCP is set on a straightaway with 300 feet of visibility in all directions (not always an easy condition to meet), that gives soldiers less than four seconds to decide whether or not to engage a vehicle approaching at high speed. Even a vehicle moving at 30 miles per hour gives less than eight seconds for soldiers to react. If vehicles coming towards the TCP don't slow down, the soldiers are forced to make a life-or-death decision almost immediately.
Major Olmstead thoughtfully questions whether we could do better. His conclusion, I think, is correct, and ehoes my own: That these kinds of events have been occurring since war was invented; that when leaders say that we must be prepared for tragedies and hardship, this is the reality they were talking about; and that the best we can do is train our troops as completely as we can while integrating the most recent lessons learned, and continue to believe in the correctness of our mission.
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