As I have stated in other comments:

“To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in an unjust war or inversion…”I will repeat it over and over again.

I joined the military before it was known where I would go. I joined before we knew about WMDs or the lack thereof. I joined to give to something bigger than myself, and serve my nation. It was an idealistic view of civil service, and I was deployed to a theater I did not want to be in. The military doesn’t choose where we go. Elected officials do. Enlistments are 4-6 years in length. I watched the towers crumble in high school and signed the recruitment documents.

While deployed I rebuilt infrastructure, brought cooking oil to families, created wells for water, rebuilt community, and in 10 months we went from casualties every single day to press being able to walk the streets openly daily without issue. We treated their people with dignity and respect. We ensured women were present to search other women at traffic security points. We took our boots off in reverence when entering homes to speak to leaders. We learned Arabic to ensure communication in stressful situations could be maintained.

I stood on top of IEDs as part of my job, and placed my whole body over a family in a living room of their home when an insurgent was firing into their living room. He was shooting at us because I had rendered safe two blast grenades he stages by the road side to kill people that I was still holding.

So no, I do not want nor justify any use of military force beyond defense of our own sovereignty. Once deployed, enlisted personal are under oath to follow all orders deemed legal by the UCMJ. Which include, killing people who shoot at you, in urban areas, near civilian populations.

A CWO5 ordered me to shoot a child while deployed. He was running towards our vehicle with a bulky vest under his shirt. 2 weeks before that the parents of a child rigged a suicide best to him and detonated it to kill marines. I shouted in his language and mine. I tried desperately to think of something as this kid was not stopping and the crew served weapon on top was rotating to mow him down. I ran at the kid and hugged him, picked him up, and figured if I was wrong it would just be me as I carried him away. Kid had had a back brace for spinal deformity. I would rather be wrong, and die, than be wrong and kill an innocent person.

War is a horrible practice. It should never be entered lightly, as no conflict will avoid harming innocent people fully. They are the monument to all our country’s sins, but in the case of Platner he did his job and did it with more than enough due diligence to say with certainty it was not a war crime.

I don’t know how so many keep missing the point here.

Routinely, one weapon system is not authorized for use, when another of lesser explosive yield is authorized for use.

They did not, due to concerns for collateral damage, want to use the higher powered indirect fire option (mortars). So the marines created a way to calculate trajectory for use of a lower powered option (40mm grenades).

Every single conflict in the last 100 years occurred with noncombatants in the theater of conflict. None, I repeat none, hold themselves to the standard of never using a munition is it could harm a civilian at all. We try like hell to avoid it, and you do due diligence to target attackers embedded in civilian infrastructure as precisely as possible.

In the very same deployment, in the very same AO, the same command team did change authorization later for the larger indirect fire munition (mortars). There was no evacuation of civilians. Decisions on what weapon to employ are made based on ground conditions at the time.

Tell me this; what is the standard of when you can use a munition? 90% confidence no civilian casualties? 99%? 99.99999%? If it is 100% no military force could ever fire a shot, so why does this use of force in a calculated way to avoid civilian collateral damage not make the cut but other instances do?

Alright, so again, I didn’t just randomly google these topics. I was in Iraq at the same time. I was a marine. I am deeply intimately familiar with the system in question. I currently synthesize high explosives. I have participated in ballistics research and high explosives effects research in Aberdeen proving grounds.

I was there, and used the weapon system in question.

That out of the way, here is some nuance.

Marines taking indirect fire were authorized at the time to use indirect fire weapons to suppress that indirect fire. By definition, indirect fire lands on a target you cannot observe. When an infantry rifle squad employs indirect fire from say, a M203, it is because you cannot hit the target with direct fire of a rifle or cannon.

A mk19 is simply a larger version, but the rounds almost universally issued as HEDP. The majority of their utility is in being light armor penetrating because they are constructed with an inverted cone that is base detonated. It sends the majority of its energy into the direct front of the impact in a focused plasma from the explosive detonation in the projectile. It is surprisingly ineffective as an area fragmentation weapon, even when labeled as dual purpose. I watched them get fired at attacking insurgents where the grenades detonated right next to them along a wall and do no damage to anything but the small hole in the wall of that explosive jet. On multiple occasions.

As for employment, we used indirect fire, regularly, in theater against incoming indirect fire. This was done in often, urban environments and cities. Most of all the fighting in the country after the initial invasion weeks occurred inside those cities, because no real point in fighting in open desert for nothing.

So to be very clear, mk19s were employed OFTEN in operations in urban areas, against indirect fires, as indirect fire suppression.

Further still, it is the literal smallest indirect fire weapon option to exist in the arsenal, so you could not be more judicious to respond to incoming fire than the use of a 40mm grenade.

I personally watched firefights where we used them to similar effect though not anywhere near as much advanced planning was used as he described in that Reddit post. Using the marine corps published calculations for trajectories, mapping out impact areas in advance to ensure accuracy to the limits you can within a remote FOB, is the work mortar men do to ensure accurate fire returned.

So if every single incident of returning indirect fire is a war crime, then there are a hell of a lot more war criminals in the military that need prosecution.

To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in unjust war or inversion, but it is incredibly clever ingenuity that chose the minimal explicit yield possible, with lots of effort specifically to avoid collateral damage when used. The pre-sighting described and calculating trajectories is not the work you spend weeks on if you intend to harm the wrong person.

You can believe no indirect fire weapons should ever be used in cities, and that is a fine enough opinion. You would be saying that in he face of everyday single conflict in the history of warfare in the last 100 years though and all people involved in indirect fire in places not entirely around military occupants as war criminals. Done enough opinion, but that is a vastly different interpretation that what is currently followed as a war crime in ANY modern conflict.

I have addressed this before.

Nothing about that post is a war crime.

At that time, the BC did not want to authorize mortars for returned fire when getting hit with indirect fire, that was detected by acoustic sensing to translate the source firing positions.

So the marines created an even less explosive yield return fire solution that he is talking about. A 40mm HEDP grenade has a smaller blast radius substantially than a mortar. They are authorized to use indirect fire weapons when attacked. They spent a lot of time and effort to calculate exact trajectories and angles needed to return fire to the calculated coordinates.

In sum, he created a less harmful indirect fire solution with a lot of due diligence to make it accurate to the threat.

It not a war crime.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/s/K9KxRNLr0k

Safety is absolutely being impacted.

It’s been a crunch my Republican talking point for a while.

Some counties have voted to remove it based on inconclusive data from some studies on fluoride exposure.

Problematically the results to childhood issues require doses far in excess of the FDA minimum. More problematic is the example we have of a similar country with similar demographics removing it, and seeing a massive uptick in oral cavities. So we know what happens as a massive test already unintentionally from Canada.

The will do nothing but cause harm to long term oral health.