Putnam got up and poured himself and Sam some more coffee. He sat back down.
"The other part of it is that we've never solved the problem of civilian casualties. I spent a lot of time in Iraq trying to get our military and the civilians to recognize that just doing less collateral damage than we did in Vietnam wasn't necessarily doing good.
"Let me state the case for collateral damage, for risking harm to civilians, as ruthlessly as it can be stated. When you are fighting an enemy whose cowardice or strategy results in his hiding in the midst of innocent people, you cannot kill him without risking killing some of them and their children."
His voice raised and became more intense, as he began jabbing his finger in the air. "An enemy or insurgent who hides behind children is …show more content…
It is the argument of The Magnificent Seven, in which the villagers finally rose up and killed the bandits, once they had been helped by the mercenaries. Just a movie, though a classic— one we borrowed from the Japanese. But Kennedy's statement about Vietnam─'It's their country'─was much more than a movie. It was almost a policy. Almost, but never carried out.
"Pacification becomes occupation, and when you are the occupier, you become the target, not the bad guys. You mobilize the insurgents when you harm the civilians. And if the civilians are just waiting to see when you will leave─you have no business being there in the first place.
"COIN doctrine says the people are the prize. Therefore winning their hearts and minds becomes the goal for COIN tactics. But it is profoundly illogical to say you can do this by firing into buildings or places where people are hiding among the innocent. And you lose all hope of any moral position when you risk harming the innocent. The 3-24 doctrine says little about this dilemma, other than to vaguely warn against it. That's part of its moral