Rules Of Engagement In Vietnam War

The United States military has had one of the most effective Rules of engagement in the world. But in the past couple of years the ROE have provided ineffective when fighting this new type of enemy. Rules of engagement are defined as “a directive issued by a military authority specifying the circumstances and limitations under which forces will engage in combat with the enemy.” If you look at in the military point of view “I can only engage the enemy when certain criteria is meet or approved. Whereas a civilian would view them as soon as a guy says shoot you go into a type of firing squad mode. Rules of engagement came about to limit the death rate among non-combative threats or how you say innocent people. And to reduce collateral damage witch

The casualty rate has increased form the stricter ROEs get. The reason being that if I see a threat and cant engage it when I know I can stop the threat from causing harm/damage. In the Vietnam War the casualty rate was far higher. The reason there being that the ROEs where so closed in the beginning that even if you did see the threat that you could not and where not allowed to engage the theat. I am not saying that this is the only reason that the Vietnam casualty rate was so high but is one of the leading factors. Another thing that causes problems is that the ROEs that are in place now don’t allow our troops the ability to do their job effectively. For example say you are an engineer (the people that do the building in the military community) and your unit is deployed and you are put out on patrol and you see an individual/group carrying a RPG (rocket propelled grenade) and see them heading toward one of you group of people working on a house/building and realize that they have intent to attack your guys but you can engage him because he has not engaged anyone yet that you are aware of. You guy side and you feel as though you are the reason that your brothers died. You could have stopped it. Along with that go with the fact that if you feel as though you are going to be killed or wounded you will try to a job as quickly as possible. If you do something quick you are likely to do something wrong/screw up. Along with the fact that you will most likely not have the objective completed on schedule/time. One of the better effects is that it makes troops responsible for their own actions meaning that if you are to engage an individual. Meaning that the military can’t be charge by group or other countries in the fact that the force needed is self-determined by the