I haven’t forgotten about the “Leadership” post. I will respond. I have been languishing in busyness…

WP is no different than the tried and true napalm that has been used since WWII.

I agree for the most part. The original article was poorly researched and written, as any Google search would prove. Poor research seems to be an affliction of laziness on “both sides of the aisle”, with vehement ranting replacing sound debate.

My main points are:

• Critiquing someone’s conduct in an incredibly dynamic and stressful situation such as combat should be looked at in context and with relativity.
• The legality of a weapon doesn’t dictate it’s tactical or strategic soundness or prudence on the battlefield. BLU-82s, aka “poor man’s nukes” are excellent weapons, but I wouldn’t recommend using them in an urban area. Rifles are perfectly legal for warfare, but an awful lot of Serbs and Bosnian-Serbs were sent to prison for war crimes using them. Machetes are perfectly legal tools to have, but several thousand people, mostly Tutsis, died or were maimed when Hutus used them as weapons in 1994. Intent matters, most probably as much as the weapon itself, in determining combat “right” and “wrong”. In the WP case the intent seems reasonably justified, considering the ferocity of the enemy.
• The U.S. agreed in no small way to several treaties and resolutions dictating “proper conduct” in a war. The U.S. holds everyone else accountable for abiding by those treaties. It should, in the interests of fairness, do its best to abide by those same treaties and resolutions. If violations are found, they should be examined with much scrutiny to find out what really happened. Otherwise, arguments it makes about violations are moot, pointless, groundless, and hypocritical, and credibility diminishes considerably.

Also, the Pentagon admitted to using them. When after action reports come out saying that you should save the WP rounds for “lethal missions”, that means they were using them for more than screening or concealment. Using them is completely legal, too. Just because it’s legal, though, doesn’t mean it can be legally employed against enemies. Insect killer is perfectly legal for em to use, until I start spraying enemies with it in mass quantities.

While I find debates about “legal war” to be completely silly, that’s what we agreed to operate under through international agreement. I find trying to debate such things about wartime activities to be difficult at best, though. It’s easy to criticize how a soldier conducts his job after the fact and from the comfort of one’s living room. But mitigating circumstances, such as getting shot at or watching friends and co-workers get hurt by an IED as they drive a mail truck through the street, should also be considered. The terrorists in Fallujah were also the same ones who thought it would be a good morale booster by killing four U.S. security guards (the pictures are graphic; you have been warned) and displaying them as trophies on a bridge over the Euphrates River. So I can understand why extreme measures may have been used during that battle, although I don’t necessarily condone them, and wish it didn’t have to happen in the first place.