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You put this up as shit chucking...note the beer.

   

Only you could see 5 men in a bubble bath as a good time.

   

Beer.

Enjoy wiping you ass with baby wipes.

   

   

   

Oh no having to justify and explain your self, the horror.

Which is why we have work up training, to make sure people know the stuff they should know before going into an operation. But this is beside the point, which was that at least in my unit the offerice were trained like the enlisted soldiers when it came to weapons. I would expect them to either know what they are doing, or be willing to ask for help like anyone else.

And I'm saying that isn't how it went down with my unit, I'd expect my officer to be as good with the weapons he uses as anyone else, individual skill of course accounted for.

The patrol commander doesn't carry a MG. However, I'd expect him to be able to use it, and use it well. I would expect anyone in my patrol to be able to use all the weapons my patrol carries. Officers and senior NCO's included. You don't have a luxury of extra people to have someone that doesn't realy know how a weapon works, at least in the smaller recce patrols that I was a part of. And if armour can train everyone to use everything officaly and proficiently short of vehicle weapons why can't everyone else?

I don't expect an officer to be great at doing a lot of tasks, but weapons use is not something you skimp on. More so for junior officers that are out in the battlefield as part of a fighting force.

But the WO does run the show, sure the officer may be the link to higher command, but how everything was set up and done is the WO's game.
Nice to be confident up until it turns out you don't know what you are doing.
Do you have any evidence that the WO was a moron in this case? Other than that people got hurt?
So you do that, and the RSO tell you how it will operate, and what passes for an in theater TOETs are conducted.

But accidents can still happen. In hindsight you might be able to say, well as a reasonable person it would have been reasonable to do this, but when you are on the firing line, what you are doing then likely seems reasonable.

Again another aspect that needs to be remembered when passing our hindsight judgement on the Major is that this range was being conducted in a hostile area, with very real threats from a wide range of sources.

In your drive for range safety, did you ever need to take steps to ensure you didn't come under attack, or get ambushed on your way back? When I was on the range in Afghanistan I was thinking part range safety, part IED safety, part ambush safety, part wild life safety, part the million and one things that can go with with my vehicle safety.

Is I followed the eastablished procedure not enought of preventative action?

Well that's what has been reported from the court-martial that the claymore malfunctioned.
What happened was the mine blew up in part omni directionaly rather than in the normal manner, which is safely in the direction it's pointing. So your 3 ways it went wrong are all wrong. Other than your undefined statement about the safe distance. Do you know what the safe distance for a claymore is listed as?

I like how you say a safe distance rather than giving an actual distance, nice open ended answer. How about a safe distance by the published weapons guide, isn't that a safe distance?
Further this is Afghanistan, all pers have full PPE on when outside of designated safe areas. They very much had their gear on if they were doing a range out in the desert, if they did not something was very wrong that goes far past this.

I can also think of a few ways that someone still could have been killed even with the action you suggested were taken. Sure it's into the golden BB range, but then what we have come down to is a risk management assessment. You think the risk is low enough inside a vehicle, or in a shellscrape, and I agree that's a high standard of risk reduction. But it could still go wrong. At which point someone would say, why didn't you move the vehicle back farhter or dig the scrape deeper or farther away.

Their is no upper limit on the ability of someone to look back and say "Well if you did this..."


If the mine had malfunctioned in a firefight, this would be an accident.

It's not arm charing, but it's sure hindsighting.

Wow. So in summery so far it's officers don't get as much weapons training as the enlisted do, but an enlisted soldier can't practice on a weapon he is qualified to use if the officer doesn't know the weapon well enough to be a safety expert.

Because no one else in the whole army can be trusted.
The WO is there to tell the officer what to do, and pretend like he is making a polite suggestion or is sharing some advice. That's why you put the guy with 2 years of time in, with the guy with 20. Or when the WO can't be around to keep the officer from stepping on his own dick, you give the officer a loud watch dog to try help him out.
I wasn't going to say that in that manner. Under the current system, which because the military is more based on tradition than any rational calculation of benefit, officers are on the hook for a lot stuff that people under them do.

But thinking that it's good to do it that way realy comes down to mentality.

A matter of schools of thought realy. You seem to be of the old school, with it's roots back in the days of only the officers being able to read orders and trusted to follow them. That makes sense to make an officer this all seeing all doing master of the military, and having the buck stop with him.

I'm of the school of professional soldiers with each individual being a highly trained, self directing, thinking reacting figher. Which means that often when someone screws up, the only one to blame is that person. And that when trying to figure out why something went wrong it doesn't as often come back to the people above that person for failing to properly train or mentor or whatever the guy that screwed up.

I'm all for the boss being on the hook for what the boss should be doing. In this case, the RSO or the apointed ARSOs or the WO doing the training, if they let the soldiers training do something unsafe, those people have some of the blame for the accident hurting people. But I can't see the logic in making the platoon officer the one mostly at blame to the degree of charging him with causing the death of one of the troops.

I don't agree with the line of reasoning that leads upto the charges, or with the charged he was convicted of. So all of the above realy comes down to 'I don't think it's valuable to have the system set up as it currently is.'
~
I recall being asked by a new guy why everything has an overly complex safety requirement, my answer was paraphrased 'Beacuse some poor sucker got hurt or killed by some freak accident that might have been avoided by doing it like this, so now we all have to do it like this.'

   

Alright,this is going to be more painful for me than you. Mostly because from what I can see you're a moron and the stupid doesnt burn you like the rest of us:

Firstly just because you spent 20 min in the military and attained the lofty heights of Cpl, obviously shows you have little knowledge of how ranges are run and what Sr NCOs and Officers actually do. It might be completely different for armored units, but I REALLY doubt that. Again the shave tails might have gotten the same training as a guy just getting off basic training, but would never have as much training on a weapon as say someone who has been in for 5 years. It wont nor should it happen, Officers are supposed to have overview of the battlefield, and you cannot do that as #2 rifle man in a section attack. You are also fucked in the head if you think an officer should be.

Then the officers in your unit must have had A LOT of time on their hands or you all had low standards for weapon proficiency.

Tell me, if the RSO runs the range and he has several ARSOs at his disposal what is the point of a Range OIC? I have a feeling you've got no fucking clue.

As for evidence that the WO was a moron and didnt take range safety seriously:

Yet another reason why, you need to just let the grown ups talk.


Those things are not hard to play for, you have sentries out like any other fucking range. If the area is so active that you cannot conduct safely you dont fucking run the range.


I have no fucking clue what shit is coming out of your mouth here.


Where has the word malfunctioned been used? I have seen several times the word accident, but never malfunctioned.


15 m to the rear, 300 m to the front and the template for the front is convex due to the shape of the charge (I think its something like 270 degrees but I could be wrong on that). Rear safety also depends on the ground, it is reasonable to triple that distance if you are on a rocky surface. The ground is not an issue though as it has been stated in almost all the articles that the injured were hit with the ball bearings.

So do you want me to tell you how the claymore is constructed? Because if you think that ball bearings can just fly backward you obviously have no clue on how a claymore is put together.


Yes there is a limit, its called the fucking pubs. These guys were firing them off, out of cover and standing up taking video. If you look hard enough you can find the video they took.


If you want to give an opinion on something be my guest, just be sure your opinion isnt asinine or it will get ripped apart by people who know more than you.

   

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