A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007.

The video begins with ground forces requesting support from Crazyhorse, the Apache flight. They mention a group of people, one of whom has a weapon.

It’s hard to see, because we’re looking at a low-resolution version of a low-resolution video looking at a distant target, but the guy does appear to be carrying an AK. It looks like the Apache’s found the group that the ground forces were talking about.

After identifying further members of the group, the Apaches requested and received permission to engage. Only after receiving permission did they first fire weapons. Once they had downed all targets, they stopped firing. They did not fire on the wounded. When a van arrived to evacuate the targets, they requested and received permission to engage. Only then did they disable the van.

Wikileaks is consistently referring to these men as ‘civilians.’ They may not have been uniformed military personnel, but they were definitely combatants; they may not have been currently actively engaged in a firefight, but there had been small arms fire from that area since before dawn that day. The mission of both the Apache element and the ground forces was to eliminate any insurgents and/or weapons caches from the area.

After the fact, it was discovered that two of the people killed were in fact Reuters employees, and that in the van were two children injured by the attack. Coverage of the video has focused on this. It’s tragic, but the newspeople were in the company of armed insurgents and appeared to be part of that group. As for the children, they were simply not detectable from the Apache.

It’s worth looking at the official report. (Local Cache) The results findings begin on page 11 of the PDF. The report contains necessary background information, such as the fact that the infantry less than 200 yards away had been receiving small-arms fire all morning.

There are plenty of people out there calling this a war crime, murder, and worse. That is simply not the case. There are people out there who recognize this (1, 2, 3), but they are too few.

War is a terrible thing, but this was not a crime. This was professional pilots reacting appropriately to a hostile situation. I feel sympathy for the noncombatants in the group, but they brought it upon themselves.

Seoul Incheon: not actually very remarkable. It’s a big modern airport very much like many other big modern airports. It’s not ideally designed: it requires walking maybe 1500 meters from one end to the other, for military arrivals at least. Still, its linear design means it is at least simple. Also, free internet and occasional power ports make things nice.

Beijing: ridiculously, monumentally enormous. The extra open architecture is very pretty and enhances the impression of spaciousness. It’s got a modest selection of duty free shops and restaurants. For all its size, it’s strangely empty: the restroom has queueing lines and handy symbols built in to speed traffic through its 20 stalls and 40 urinals, but I had it to myself. Perhaps the decision not to heat it had something to do with that. There are occasional power ports, but they are of the wrong shape and voltage. Internet is available if you pay cash yuan at the business center. There is no easy way to get cash yuan. Important: do not attempt to connect there using military id and orders in lieu of passport; you’ll be turned back by Customs.

Newark Liberty: relentlessly commercial. Like many US airports, there is pretty obviously more security in place than the architecture was designed for. My overriding impression of the airport comes from one flight where I connected there from Japan: my bag took 90 minutes to emerge from the baggage claim, and then the line to re-check it ate another 150. Needless to say, I missed my connection from all of this. It wasn’t nearly so bad this time, at least. Internet and power are available at business kiosks.

Manchester Boston: a small feeder airport with aspirations to eventually grow into a hub. Its current compact size and low traffic makes it feel very comfortable. Power and wireless internet are both easy to find and free.

Tokyo Narita: efficient, artistic, elegant. Probably the most comfortable airport for its size I’ve ever been in. It’s also one of the more complex, but there is plenty of clear signage to help find the way around. Power and wireless internet are ubiquitous, but the “you’ve successfully joined our wireless page” is actually a multilingual set of links to various ways to pay for the connection to get it to stop redirecting all traffic to the links page.

Military:

RKSM (Seoul Airbase): as my home airbase, it’s the place I’m most familiar with. It’s unique in my experience of military airfields in not having a greasy spoon type diner attached to the flight ops building somewhere. The airbase is actually run by the Koreans, with K-16 being a plot leased to the US military.

RKSO (Osan Airbase): this place is run by the Air Force, so I don’t often go there. Still, if you want to see an F-16, an A-10, or a U-2 on the ramp, this is the place to (occasionally) find them.

RKSG (Camp Humphreys): this is where we actually do most training, as it’s the nearest airbase actually run by the US Army. Here’s where the rest of 2CAB, meaning the Apaches, Chinooks, and another battalion of Black Hawks, are based.

RKSY (Yongsan Garrison): a tiny heliport barely large enough to fit two Black Hawks simultaneously, it’s still a common destination because Yongsan is where a lot of the command structure for Korea is located.

RKJK (Kunsan Airbase): another Air Force base, this one only gets mentioned because it has the nicest Flight Ops building and pilot lounge I’ve ever been in. I believe it homes F-16s.

RKTG (Camp Walker): this place apparently used to have a fairly large air contingent; you can still see the remains of a runway suitable for fixed wings, and there’s plenty of parking and refuel space. However, at some point buildings were constructed over both ends of the runway, leaving only a single helicopter pad. It does have an exceptionally nice USO building.

The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property.

However, the Army Times reports:

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

It’s no secret that the Army’s experiences in Iraq, Somalia, and other low-intensity conflicts have brought new focus to peacekeeping operations. They’ve even got their own Official Military Phrasing: Stability and Support Operations.

From the Army Times:

The 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

…

This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

From the globalsecurity definitions:

Support Operations provide essential supplies and services to assist designated groups. It relieves suffering and helps civil authorities respond to crises. In most cases, Army forces achieve success by overcoming conditions created by man-made or natural disasters.

That’s all right, then; that seems to be the intent of the posting. There’s nothing wrong with using troops to aid in disaster relief, and if the military was overflowing with troops with nothing to do in light of our long history of peaceful foreign policy, there’d be no real problem with designating a unit to that express purpose.

However, it is important to remember that Support operations are extremely closely associated in the military mind with Stability operations:

Stability Operations apply military power to influence the political and civil environment, to facilitate diplomacy, and to interrupt specified illegal activities.

Given troops trained in SASO operations, stationed in the US, I do not trust President Bush not to abuse their capabilities and attempt use them to influence the political and civil environment. Posse Comitatus exists precisely to prevent this sort of use within the US. Now, it has been substantially weakened.

I will close with this section from the wiki:

HR5122 also known as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act was signed by the president on Oct 17, 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Section 1076 (Text of Hr5122) is titled “Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies”.

Removing the legalese from the text, and combining multiple sentences, it provides that: The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines hinders the execution of laws or deprives people of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws. The actual text is on page 322-323 of the legislation.

As of 2008, these changes were repealed, changing the text of the law back to the original 1807 wording, under Public Law 110-181 (H.R. 4986, Section 1068,) however in signing H.R. 4986 into law President Bush attached a signing statement which indicated that the Executive Branch did not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal.

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President Bush Signs H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 into Law

Today, I have signed into law H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. The Act authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, for military construction, and for national security-related energy programs.

Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 28, 2008.

The US Army celebrates Columbus Day with a four-day weekend, which would be a suspicious use of time if it didn’t work to my advantage.

Mostly, I’ve been up to a whole lot of relaxation. Last week my sleep schedule was getting bad to the point of inducing insanity, and it was a huge relief just to get caught up some. I visited a friend for a few hours of anime, viewed and reviewed a few series I hadn’t seen before, and read a novel or three. I’ve made fairly substantial improvements to my webcomic scraping software, such that even new comics with weird formats and multiple images per page take only a few minutes of configuration before my software can handle them correctly. The benefit of having this software is that with a local, hyperlinked copy of the comic, I don’t have to wait for the image to load. In the past, the coding time involved made this worthwhile only for comics with large archives and slow page-load times (hey megatokyo!), but it’s at this point it’s becoming worth it for pretty much any comic with more than a dozen pages of archives.

In conjunction with all this, I finally got high-speed broadband set up. I’ve had basic DSL set up for most of a month, but in this context, ‘basic’ means ‘we constrict your bandwidth to 100k/s down, or 16 simultaneous sockets open.’ It was actually the issues with concurrent connections which made it unacceptable; I torrent a lot (of completely legal stuff, of course), and even checking my email became nearly impossible due to the crazy timeouts. Now, I’ve got a 5mbps cable connection which seems to have no trouble with all the simultaneous connections I throw at it, and I am happier.

The last thing I’ve done is discover and listen to All the beatles albums ever released in the UK, sequentially, in just over an hour. This is possible through digital technology, which allows us to listen to music at eight times its natural tempo. In theory I could decompress it and chop it up and have artifacty versions of all these songs for my personal use, but in practice, that’s way too much effort; it’s not worth my time investment. What the music actually most reminds me of is when you get to the high levels in Tetris, only with demented vocalists churning along just as fast.

My focus right now is on finding housing and moving my stuff down here. Though on-base quarters are technically available, there’s a waiting list longer than I really want to be staying in the base motel. I’d probably rather live off-post anyway, just to add some degree of variety to my life. As for moving my stuff down, I’m set as far as moving my car and whatever I can pack into that. The rest of it will be a while–the Transportation office says that I can’t even set up a time for the movers to pick it all up until after I get back. I’m a bit frustrated about that–I’ve known for weeks that I have to set up an appointment with them in order to get things moved, but I haven’t been allowed to actually go in to try to set it up until today. Even today, they wouldn’t set one up; I have to wait until the day I get back to set up the appointment. At the appointment, I’ll be able to get compensation for the part of the trip I spent driving, and set up the moving company aspect of things. It basically boils down to me living a few weeks with the furniture I can borrow from the base lending closet, and nothing else.

Time runs short–it’s off to the pre-graduation reception dinner.