John Bernard is a twenty-six year veteran of the United States Marine Corps, and in his retirement blogs at Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home. His mission is to highlight the absurd rules of engagement imposed upon members of the U.S. military, and to expose the insane and dangerous policies of our political leaders.
Last week Vlad Tepes interviewed Mr. Bernard on skype. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the resulting video is so low that it is difficult to hear it clearly. With Vlad’s help I transcribed the entire conversation, and am posting the first of four parts of it below. To improve the flow of the narrative, I edited out all the hesitations, placeholders, self-corrections, and repeated words and phrases.
John Bernard is an example of the extraordinary quality we have come to expect from American soldiers, sailors, and Marines. He is intelligent, lucid, well-informed, and devastating in his analysis. If only our political leaders would pay heed to him.
Readers who are interested may watch the entire interview on Vimeo, or in two parts on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2. The full transcript is available here.
Interview With John Bernard, Part 1
Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home!
July 26, 2010
Your principal concerns are the rules of combat that make the war in Afghanistan dangerous and absurd. Is that correct?
Yes. You look at the rules of engagement as a stand-alone doctrine, or a stand-alone directive, then it’s an almost impossible fight.
You can’t discuss the rules of engagement without discussing strategy that bears that. In every strategy — I don’t care whether it’s on the battlefield or if it’s on the streets with the police force — everybody that bears arms is governed by a specific set of rules that tell them when they can engage whoever it is that they have the authority to engage.
In this particular case, the strategy changed somewhere around 2009 to almost exclusively counterinsurgency doctrine. And counterinsurgency doctrine really is run very much more tightly than the police on the street. So rules of engagement are intentionally tight to allow them to operate under the doctrine of counterinsurgency.
Part 2: A couple of examples of the rules of combat as they now apply in Afghanistan.
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