My apologies for the wait. Work intervened
That assumes you have a surplus of combat resources available, enough that you can dedicate a helicopter or drone to loiter around them (and you'll note that in my example, the infantry can't reach them).
Then how the fuck did they get there? Did they teleport?
If you dont have sufficient combat resources, you should not have invaded a god damn country in the first instance, because that necessarily entails taking prisoners. Unless you invaded intent on completely annihilating the population.
If you are the one being invaded and thus may be facing a superior opponent, the argument could be made, but only if, for example THEY were intent on wiping your population off the face of the earth. The inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto could be considered justified if they dont take german prisoners. The US army invading Iraq is not so justified.
I was referring to a more general case.
Urban warfare IS the general case now.
Ideally yes. But conditions aren't always ideal.
Modern militaries have not found themselves in conditions of starvation for 40-50 years. Developed world militaries might, but those are not known for even pretending the follow the geneva conventions.
And possibly doom a lot of people (the battle I mentioned above? Let's assume that the mission was make or break, that the Gush would definitely have fallen without them, and on the other hand could hold on until reinforcements came if the supplies made it through. Defeat means the death of the defenders*)
Then your position was untenable and you should not have attempted to hold it in the first place. In point of fact, like a LOT of current settlements, that particular bloc of land was allocated to the Arab State by the original partition, and constituted an illegal occupation anyway.
In the general case however.
Known Facts
1) You have a forward base well behind enemy lines that is under siege
2) any supplies you might send covertly are A) by nature of covertness of insufficient volume to lift a siege and B) are sent at high risk because you have to send them overland through your enemy's native territory. Not land you or they OCCUPY, but land that has a large number of civilians.
3) you CAN reinforce the base later with a number of troops sufficient to hold it in perpetuity.
You have two viable options.
You can surrender the base and retake it as well as the territory between you and it, at a later date thus ensuring a stable supply line. If you had evacuated the territory in the first instance, perhaps after arranging a regional cease fire to permit the evacuation, you save yourself a number of headaches.
or
You can send sufficient supplies that you sacrifice covert insertion, the cost being that you must protect those supplies adequately, which is in itself a military campaign sufficient to lift the siege on its own.
Trying to resupply the base with covertly inserted supply convoys is a poor military decision in the first instance, because any quantity of supplies that will be meaningful is of sufficient quantity that covert insertion is impossible.
Or, simply put... some peasant should not die because the brass are morons.
Depending on the mission, that could take days.
Further indication that your command structure has a screw loose. You are trying to bring in supplies sufficient to relieve a besieged force, without being noticed, days into enemy territory overland. That is stupid. The only way you are keeping that a secret is if you slaughter several villages worth of arabs. By the way, the Waffen-SS just called. They want their invasion and occupation tactics back.
So first, you've got to work out how to communicate with your prisoners, since they may not be on your radio frequency, to tell them to move and in which direction.
It is called a Megaphone, or a set of loud speakers. Last I checked, those are readily available.
Second, a multi-million dollar aircraft has got to travel at walking pace to escort a couple of prisoners to base. Close to the ground, and in hostile territory. It isn't sufficient to be high up and far away buzzing around, because you've got to keep your prisoners close together and away from bolt-holes.
Or you can hang around in the area, waiting an indefinite amount of time for ground support. In hostile territory. I believe I've already covered this problem.
They actually dont. Presumably, these are ground-support craft. They are intended, typically, to operate in close support of your infantry. If the helicopter is under fire at the time, any surrender is likely not in good faith, but you dont have to stay on station. You can let your infantry know where they are, call in artillery if they start shooting, or capture them if they dont.
If the helicopter is not under fire (say, it is dealing with a small group of insurgents in occupied territory) and they run for bolt holes...
A) they void their surrender. You can shoot them
B) they have lost their superior position
C) they have lost organization.
If your infantry is halfway competent, they should be able to deal with that. Oh, and they are unarmed now. You win either way.
There's some talk about whether the surrender is sincere, as if it makes a difference. The surrender can be completely sincere, and I have assumed it was in my posts, but a surrender is null and void as soon as it cannot be properly enforced. Honestly, if a opponent got the drop on one of your nation's soldiers, causing him to surrender, and then the opponent wandered off elsewhere, what would you expect your soldier to do? Would you expect him to walk up to the enemy headquarters and turn himself in? Or pick his gun up and high-tail it off in the opposite direction?
That depends on other factors, actually. If the area is seriously contested, hell yeah I expect my soldiers to keep fighting. If they are stuck behind enemy lines however, caught by a chopper with nearby infantry? They know he is there now. He is not getting away. Surrender is better than death in that case (usually).
Simon, what people will learn from being shot up by helicopters when attempting to surrender is, you cannot surrender to aircraft. You want to surrender, find some infantry. Being shot up by a machine that you can't defend yourself from isn't very nice, but you decided to take that risk when you decided to fight in the first place.
And, as I have mentioned previously, some of these people are not combatants. This is my primary point. On a set-piece battlefield like the Battle of the Bulge or the Somme, things might well be a bit different. But in the instances were are discussing, it is all urban combat. There is significant uncertainty as to whether or not someone you see on a 1970s monochrome TV camera at 800 meters is or is not a combatant. Those people who "cannot surrender to aircraft" might be someone carrying any number of tube-like objects. You need some way for someone to say to that helicopter "I am not a combatant, please dont shoot me".
Or you can take the sane route, and either upgrade the optics on your choppers to modernity, redesign your choppers for urban combat (yay development hell) or *gasp* not use them for urban patrols.
If we're talking about the same video with the journalists being killed I can see someone sitting in the passenger seat which I know, due to the report to be a child, but I'm not sure how the gunner is suppose to know given the quality.
In all honesty, it does not matter if they knew or not. A van was clearly picking up wounded, they should not have shot at it at all, let alone chomped at the bit to get authorization. If you watch (I would not recommend it), one of the journalists was still alive, and the gunner kept him in sight, basically begging him to pick up anything that looked like a weapon so he could be killed. They they proceeded to browbeat whoever it was on the other end into letting them shoot up a van full of people rendering what was obviously medical aid.
It is fucking disgusting.
After the fact, there is an exchange inside the helicopter "Well its their fault for bringing kids into a battle"
"that's right".
If that is their attitude, they should not be permitted in the air.
Poorly worded on my part. Of course a combat zone would have nothing to do with the quality of your optics. What I meant by that is in a combat zone things can be much more easily mistaken for as weapons and I wonder if you have tried to distinguish weapons for objects that could resemble them.
I have not. On the other hand, it is not as if they were being shot at. They were not. The men on the ground had no idea an apache was there until they were being shot.
So, is the report of the recovery of a RPG and two AK-47s by the responding ground team bullshit?
Maybe, maybe not. I hate having to say it, but the army has a track record of planting weapons on civilian kills in Iraq. That said, it is more likely that they saw armed men--who may or may not have been insurgents, given that everyone is armed there, hostile or friendly-- who just so happened to be walking with a pair of journalists, and they could not differentiate weapon from tripod.
The alternative to firing at 800 meters was to get the soldiers a short walk away to come up and say hello. At which point, you have however many POWs or sad now-disarmed civilians (if they were not insurgents, the still-living journalists would vouch for them, I imagine), no dead journalists, no dead kids. If they started shooting, well... you have a pair of apache helicopters still on station and the journalists would have been legitimate collateral casualties.
First of all. It isn't that they weren't sure. They believed they were carrying weapons and if the recovery of the weapons from the ground team is an accurate report then they were correct.
People can be very sure of something, and still be dead-wrong (pun so very intended. I apologize for nothing). When I said the response should have been "I am not sure", I included the implicit assumption that they are aware of the limitations of their equipment with regard to resolving the identity of longish objects at 800 meters. I suppose that might have been trained out of them or something.
You also have to take into consideration the actions of the reporters which included aiming in the direction of the ground troops that the Apache's were providing support for. Basically, the camera crew was trying to get pictures of coalition forces.
Which is what reporters...
do
You can see this happen on the video and the gunner is clearly heard saying "He's getting ready to fire". Was that all an act so they could murder people and eventually children?
No. Just someone with A) shitty equipment B) an expectation that all armed men in a country that is in complete fucking chaos are hostile C) Unimaginably hyped up to kill. D)
