SKluck said:
Honestly, standard practice.
Actually no. Standard practice is to send in both a ground team and a recovery vehicle.
Vehicles that are dismantled like that are destroyed so A) They can't steal our shit and B) They can't use our shit against us.
The vehicle wasn't disamtled - it WAS destroyed, or more appropriately 'rendered combat ineffective, ablaze, and abandoned'.
I know they were just arabs, but if we were fighting the chinese, it is so they can't steal it and reverse engineer it or something of that sort.
"Dumbest post in show"
You think that people need to reverse engineer anything in a Bradley fighting vehicle that has been existence since 1981? Then they are going to what, take the burning pieces to the nearest Kinkos and Xerox the schematics? Iraq is not some third world country, and the insurgents obviously don't need to 'study' anything in the vehicle for some obvious reasons:
1) They have already shown that they posess Soviet MANPADs in fairly significant numbers from I dunno, the huge as fairly technically sophisticated army that Iraq had. They weren't throwing rocks at approaching aircraft or anything.
2) Anyone trying to 'study' it wouldn't have to means to manufacture anything there.
3) Most of the 'apparently super secret' stuff they are going to get out of the bradley can be picked up 'off the shelf' in the state or perhaps any one of a number of nations which we SELL the bradley to.
And if they were recieving fire, shit, you can't just sit around, maybe someone might've had an RPG too. You never know. Were they supposed to run away?
Your willingness to make a strong comment without facts or apparently following up on the story is disturbing. The vehicle was fired upon to prevent looting - not because the burning vehicle was returning fire.
Someone that close to a burning heap of a MILITARY VEHICLE is not just 'curious'. They plan on taking something or celebrating.
Right, because no one ever investigates the site of a burning vehicle. So the next time we see people around a car trying to pull people from it in video footage from like an air strike in Gaza, its because they are taking the corpses for loot.
Sucks innocents died, but there wasn't a viable alternative course of action.
Right, because conducting air strikes in civillian population centers is par for course. Heaven forbid a F-117 crash or something, next you'll be saying we should nuke the site from orbit or some other foolishness.
Yes innocent people die in wars all the time, yes civillian casualties are not always preventable, but you don't fire high explosive munitions into populated areas. THAT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE. What the hell is wrong with people. I hope that the tapes give cause for firing on a population center where people are known to be (and congregate) because to do otherwise is actually a war crime.