Anatomy of a Drone Strike: Deliberate Targeting

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground we have all seen footage of military air strikes but have you ever wondered how this process works how do the pilots know where to drop the bombs and how do we find the Target in the first place and how does all of this come together for that Split Second of a building going boom today we're going to dive into the very large topic of kinetic targeting by starting with deliberate targeting as one might expect this is a very very large topic and is usually taught in military schools over a period of weeks or even months sometimes years so consider this to be really two sorts of things uh one a general crash course into the general principles of of targeting but also some anecdotal stories or evidence if you will from my own perspective and from my own past career which kind of helps fill in the gaps and make a lot of this Doctrine make a little bit more sense sense ironically this sort of halfhazard sort of slip shot approach is how a lot of targeting works in the real world as well up first we have to know the two main targeting processes we have deliberate targeting and we have Dynamic targeting deliberate targeting is just like it sounds a more deliberate targeting process that is used mostly to streamline the process of death and destruction as part of a larger military campaign doctrinally speaking deliberate targeting is any targeting conducted to support a future military operation Operation linebacker to the massive and Infamous B-52 bombing campaign of North Vietnam was a textbook case of deliberate targeting same with the surgical strikes in bagad on the eve of the Iraqi Invasion generally speaking when you think of a massive bombing campaign this is what's going to fall under deliberate targeting as a side note much of my own personal experience from this topic comes from this side of targeting in practicality deliberate targeting is primarily used for structures or fixed positions like that uh depending on which definition you're going with uh structure can be defined a little bit differently in each sort of situation however most of the time we're talking fixed deliberate positions when it comes to deliberate targeting the other side of targeting is dynamic targeting again as you might expect this process is a more expedient cycle to function in combat on the ground this is a cool kids table when it comes to targeting uh this is what Tac PS and jtacs do and most close air support or cast is nestled under Dynamic targeting later on in my professional career this is what I did in Afghanistan a lot of the times uh with regards to like the Intel side of of that there shouldn't really be an Intel component to Dynamic targeting because Dynamic targeting is more self-defense kind of thing but again that's a a longer story for another time Dynamic targeting can apply to anything such as Vehicles parked cars roads observation posts whatever right however Dynamic targeting is limited to mostly self-defense situations and is limited in scope to only the Munitions necessary for selfdefense both processes both deliberate and dynamic have unique rules and regulations right but they are honestly completely different different worlds right someone who spends their entire career in one world or the other will have very different experiences and very different outlooks on the whole targeting process so let's start today by taking a look Through My Lens at the world of deliberate targeting and work through the assembly line process from start to finish I should note that I am going to be describing both of these processes through the lens of counterinsurgency the deliberate targeting process has been around since World War II right big massive B17 or B25 raids on you know ball bearing factories and Germany or Poland or something like that you know the things that we see from oldo Old School World War II movies that's deliberate targeting really you know Target for tonight that is a deliberate targeting process but since the United States has largely been fighting low intensity conflicts and counterinsurgency conflicts since well really the Korean War I guess this is what I can personally speak to in my own past career it is essential to understand that targeting is done differently everywhere this is supposed to be a joint process that is kind of uniform and standardized across the services at least in you know military the US military so targeting for the Navy and targeting for the Air Force and the army is all supposed to be the same it's not in the real world it's very very different and even when you come to the Joint targeting environment you see these little habits and Doctrine kind of make their way through so despite what the manuals may want to tell you targeting is really different no matter where you're at same thing with NATO or the United Nations or or any kind of military pact that is outside the United States depending on which nation you're in it can be very very different I personally worked in several targeting shops throughout my career and as missions varied widely so does the process right even the exact same targeting shop can change their process over time so even people who served in the same exact unit but a year apart well they can have vastly different experiences I'm saying this right up front so that there is no confusion or disappointment that what I say doesn't match up with a textbook or uh some other uh targeteers uh experiences were different um it's it's such a big world and even people who I've talked to that were in the same unit that I was in but a couple of years later they have a totally different view of targeting than I do even the whole process is different right generally speaking the same general principles are there but the way that it works out in real in the real world is is very very different and this can change by General changing by uh emission changing it it just there's just so many variables it's really hard to nail down and say this is how it's done so like I mentioned treat this content today as anecdotal primary source material with a little bit of Doctrine thrown in right the source is me and I am by no means infallible or even correct much of the time since my own pedigree doesn't really mean too much in the long run you know nor should it these ideas must stand on their own so I'm going to be talking a lot of Doctrine but I'm also going to throw in some anecdotes and personal experiences for myself that may help kind of bridge the gap and in plain English kind of expl what a lot of this stuff means my goal is not to teach everything there is to know about this topic but rather give you all some things to think about especially when it comes to what's kind of going on in the world today but I should say if you want to learn this process straight from the horse's mouth you can read the deliberate targeting Bible joint publication 360 I will state right up front if you want the textbook answers this is your Source I will be talking about my own experiences and the targeting process that I myself have experienced in which sometimes is not the most doctrinal right but it's what we did so so as I go along the sources for what I'm saying or some helpful research material in general that's going to be along the bottom of the screen here sometimes there are things mentioned in jp30 that don't really happen or are just glossed over in the real world um likewise the experience is not described in jp30 can fill volumes so please keep this in mind as we go along I say this in the interest of preventing others from leading people astray I know quite a long disclaimer right to start with but in the interest of posterity I I think it's necessary so deliberate targeting let's start with the beginning generally speaking the entire deliberate targeting cycle can be described in one acronym F3 e a d which means find fix finish exploit analyze disseminate or dissemination now I know that all the military guys watching would find it criminal if I did not mention every operations Major's second favorite acronym the first favorite of course being mdmp but as for me in the real world uh I almost never use the term f3ead um in my targeting shop it was only referenced as a joke most of the time sort of like an army or Air Force slogan that is supposed to be the Bedrock of how something work works but in reality nobody really uses it uh that's kind of what f3ead was for me the process we followed very generally Loosely followed f3ead uh but a s but but an acronym is simple is this didn't really like encapsulate you know the targeting process there's a lot going on and you know F fix finish really just doesn't cut it right it's just more of like a you know slogan that people just kind of say in general it's not really what we did you know every single day like nobody would come up to me and say hey are you on the fix stage yet like that's not that's something that no one would say that vernacular just would not make any sense in the real world somebody might ask have you got any collections on the POI yet or anything from the sign guys in this grid from last night things like that you're not really going to say what stage of f3ead are we on right that's just not something that would happen however if you read about it on the Internet f3ead is like the number one acronym in targeting whereas for me I just I just didn't never really see anybody like actually reference it so I thought that was kind of interesting for me things like f through EAD are are are kind of a form of shth right something that somebody might say that hasn't really worked in targeting that much and it kind of is an indicator that maybe they didn't have the same experience as I had so as you can imagine in the world of drone strikes kinetic targeting industrial killing on a grand scale uh this topic is full of little shth moments where someone can say or do something to kind of tip you off that well maybe they had different experiences or in some in some I guess sort of rare cases maybe they're just completely lying about the process altogether so uh really this is how I sort of think about things like f3ead and you know find fixed finish that sort of mentality so so with that kind of in in our minds let's go ahead and start with the process the life cycle of a Target begins with intelligence or at least it should uh the analyst has to find out where the bad guys are located and when uh almost always this starts with a single uh GPS grid coordinate uh either that is mentioned in like some kind of intelligence report of some kind hum report cigarette report something we're going to get a grid from somewhere that says hey something's going on at this location we don't know what but here's the here's the GPS coordinate this location we call a POI or a point of Interest this is the find step of f3ead for those of you who are kind of following along although it's sort of lumped into the fix uh stage as well and right up front uh right would just the very first very first step we find the origin of our first problem justification what is supposed to happen is the analyst Gets a Clue that something is going on at this x location right and they're supposed to be objective they're supposed to use the intelligence cycle they're supposed to use any number of structured analytical techniques in order to remain objective and find out what is really going on we're trying to solve a mystery here we're investigating if nothing is going on it's you know like if it's a false report or something we're supposed to let our analysis guide us in a different direction we're not supposed to just keep like trying to justify investigating this one thing however what happens a lot of the times is retroactive analysis uh in other words the Intel guy is being told to find a reason to strike this location or you've got to find a few targets within this city you know well maybe there aren't any Targets in this city so we can see how how how the the beginnings of problems start start uh stacking up right to start start with but you know we'll come back to this in a bit for for now we have to move into really the initial stages of database management deliberate targeting is a big process uh and there are thousands of military analysts and targeteers working on hundreds of thousands of targets all around the world at this phase the targeting analyst might have a grid and a few intelligence reports indicating some Bad Dudes living or working at this location right so usually once an analyst has an idea of location they want to make sure that this this site this POI is worth their time we call this process triage before we go too far uh we want to check on a few things uh one has this target been struck before uh if so is it still worth pursuing is it still being used by bad guys uh is this Target in range of aerial collections because if we can't collect more intelligence on it you like if it's out of range of like a drone or something like that you know it probably won't be struck anytime soon so you know that one may have to go on the back burner uh more importantly I guess is any is anyone else developing this target but most important of all is is this target or is this target within range of a c one no strike entity mosques hospitals schools daycare facilities track and field uh facilities water treatment plants anything like this right anything that would cause harm to a civilian populace this is the Crux of the whole targeting process right contrary to popular belief the United States military doesn't just go dropping bombs willy-nilly and interestingly enough we're supposed to have these expectations of Any Nation that we export arms to you know dropping bombs randomly or without any kind of justification or just randomly targeting that's some CIA crap the US military the green side of operations the the uniform services of the United States of America has a process there have many processes there are processes that describe other processes for the US military for the uniform services there are very very strict criteria when it comes to no strike entities or facilities basically you can't strike these look loc or anywhere near these locations all of this data is documented in a database uh per the doctrine that you can see down below you can see how it all works but uh generally speaking after a quick check of this location in whatever database they're using uh we can put this location into the database to let others know hey we're working on this one and now we can move on to Target development within a few minutes or hours or whatever of this target being put into the database uh now we start to change the wording here and this is where kind of people like me sort of are not quite correct sometimes up until now we have called the target a POI we haven't called it a Target okay it's called a POI then when it goes into the database or whatever uh it gets a number and a name to track it by uh and at this point we start referring to this GPS coordinate as a Target instead of a POI uh this doesn't really mean we're good to go uh and this is kind of where people you know who are in the targeting World well we just call every grid a Target it doesn't mean we're going to strike it uh that's just something that you need to kind of understand is that sometimes we we mix our terminology up so when we mean POI we really mean Target or when we mean Target we really mean POI the terms should not be interchangeable but they kind of are sometimes so you know please forgive me if I myself you know slip up and say Target when I mean POI but in any case now we're talking about targets as soon as the target has a tracking number the analyst goes to work on a few different things all at once personal preference usually dictates the order of what to do next at this point the analyst who found this location found this target right is responsible for it okay and it is this person who is going to guide the target through this process to a point this can change uh sometimes we hand off targets to somebody else or if somebody's got some free time we'll just pass this location over them and they'll start developing it and and so on but somebody's got to work it right so this is kind of how the meat and potatoes uh come together right so the very first thing that an analyst does with their target is they're going to want to beg borrow and steal as much intelligence collection of that grid as possible um you can see this outlined in the collection requirements in JP 360 or uh the collateral damage estimate Publications there are a few at least that I know of but basically we want to get the US Air Force or whatever Assets in the area to burn a lot of holes in the sky uh circling that Target usually with a drone for a very long period of time as soon as the target gets designated as as a Target as soon as it gets a tracking number and all that uh the analyst can then take that to the collection manager again there's a whole other manual on collection management uh that you can kind of read and go down but basically it's a person or a job or a position that manages all the drones or aerial intelligence collection assets right so this person is going to be responsible for racking and stacking targets to make sure that you know we have an efficient use of resources again contrary to popular belief the United States military just doesn't have unlimited drones uh there are not thousands of drones there are a few dozen U couple of hundred maybe globally I mean you can look it up the numbers are public but but you know generally speaking you may have like the Iraq Syria war against Isis right uh you may have that war everybody who's fighting in that war may have to share a dozen drones half a dozen drones so basically we've got to make doe with the resources that we have uh so a collection manager is needed to say all right well this guy's targeted over here is that's really good there's like really good you know Intelligence on it there's like a lot of bad guys there very it's starting to be a little bit more important than striking this old bunker over here you know uh or some old observation post that doesn't really matter or you know we're not going to send I mean we'll probably drop a $600,000 bomb on it anyway uh just some hole in the desert but this building over here is a little more important The Collection manager's job is to discern this right to to figure out what is a higher priority than others and rack and Stack The Collection needed technically for those of you following along this is the fix stage of f3ead but again nobody ever called it that right another important distinction to make and this is something that even Intel people forget most of the time which is that uh we we don't just request a drone uh we request a capability and then the collection manager's job is to match an asset to that capability so you say all right I need full motion video of this Target and I need as much of it as you can give me between these hours or uh during this time of day or whatever right and the collection manager will take that and figure out what assets they have that are capable of that you you know you say okay well I just need a still image okay well that's one type of asset or I need a a 360 degree uh view of something well you know it's going to be a little bit harder or say you don't even need an image at all you just need a pilot to look at something and tell you okay is there a car sitting in this compound you know depending on what your needs are that collection manager's job is to do this efficiently and figure out what your needs are and you know make sure that they have the most efficient use of the resources as possible at the early stage of the targeting cycle once we just have a grid to go from uh we have to get as much coverage as possible because it really really does take time you you know you may have a Target and you may have to wait a couple of weeks before you get a drone to fly over it and as we all know you know close air support is something that happens in minutes not weeks so similar idea with deliberate targeting like a lot of times I can't wait two weeks because the enemy the front is going to move uh this Factory is going to shut down and move to another place you know so on and so forth so you really have to you know kind of be a Salesman a little bit and try to convince the collection manager that your Target's more important than everybody else's and is at this stage you know the the the hardships of targeting kind of come in and I must digress a little bit because unfortunately this is where politics comes in a lot of the time um you know I found that for me I was you know a comparatively low ranking enlisted guy working in targeting and you know the collection manager Air Force captain or Air Force Major they look at me and basically put my targets on the very bottom of everyone's priority all the officers got higher priority because well their I guess their promotion was deemed to be a little bit more important than everybody else's I guess you know for me the number of targets I process really didn't matter uh but I guess for them their career progression depended on it so you know they got they got more coverage and they got uh uh more opportunities than say you know somebody like me would you know sometimes that happens um another thing that that really uh was a huge problem and how should I say this delicately um there were uh when I was working in targeting there were an awful lot of young um attractive uh female intelligence analysts who seem to magically get uh a lot of their targets higher on the priority list than say someone like me would uh for I guess no reason at all um I think you guys can probably put two and two together so I'll just kind of leave it at that but unfortunately these things do happen and and this unfortunately I hate to say it but this unfortunately comes back when we talk about things like war crimes uh so just keep that in the back of your mind that unfortunately um sometimes the military targeting world is not um not the most professional or um good organization I guess so your relationships matter so somebody like me who's enlisted you know uh you know I wasn't Junior enlisted at the time but I was enlisted um and a dude right uh working in a shop where I'm kind of like the only enlisted dude trying to develop targets because the rest of them were officers really and uh I had to do a lot of different things to kind of like you know do do what I could to to kind of help the process along so uh what I would always do personally is I would always request really weird collection I would request like really weird assets that never really get used I would always like try to find a capability that no one ever requested something really even if it didn't help me right I would I would really try to find something that was like really rare uh knowing full well that assets that rarely get used would get called into action right no matter where you're at in the world even if you're outside the military people want to do their job okay most of the time they they want to feel like they're useful they want to contribute right especially in the military so if you become known as the guy who always tasks out like certain assets for like Recon missions or uh something like that so they can actually get outside the office for a little bit you know this this may be actually pretty helpful and productive for you and you'll find that people will really jump at the opportunity to help you a lot of the time for instance I would always put in a request an RFI a request for information from say a a special Marine unit uh that was at the next base over uh knowing that they had a few assets of their own not really anything special not anything big or anything particularly useful but I would be able to get something and as as I did this more and more often started develop a relationship started become friendly with these guys I started sending them emails saying hey this target that you helped me that you got a picture of last night well this is what this is what we're doing with that these kinds of things really help out quite a lot especially if you're in a political world where everyone is trying to you know wrestle each other for promotion points and I'm just here trying to do my job right this kind of thing really helps uh you know set things sort of apart so you can see how Politics the art of relationship you know all of this stuff really does come together uh sometimes it's it's not sometimes it's pretty bad sometimes it's not good but other times it's not really that bad at all and it's just kind of how humans interact with one another so again reading jp30 you're not going to know this you're not going to get the feel for how this stuff comes together but hopefully this kind of explains how relationships really do matter so continuing on with the process uh we get to what we call P analysis or pattern of Life analysis why is it that we're trying to get all of this collection why is it that we need a drone to to cut circles in the sky around a Target well we're trying to figure out what's there uh for two reasons one are the bad guys there but also and I think more importantly are there any civilians there uh or are there any innocent people that might get hurt at some point during this operation now this is uh completely removed from you know all the cool guy kind of stuff like following an Insurgent around a city with a drone or something like that you know doing some kind of you know Homeland Tom Clancy Enemy of the State kind of NSA spy stuff yeah no it's this is you know probably the most important part of the whole targeting process uh and that is to find out what's going to happen when we strike this place or St to get the idea we want to figure out what is the pattern of Life there what does normal daily life look like for this Target location basically this is watching a drone feed for sometimes or usually hours and hours and hours on end uh trying to determine if this location is a legitimate wholesome family home or if this is an Insurgent headquarters or something in this phase we also count the number of men women and children uh in the Target compound or in the general adjacent area usually it only applies to the Target compound but again we'll come back to that when we count uh the men women and children in this compound again this is from a counter Insurgency perspective we call this a slant count uh mostly because of how it's formatted uh you'll see it formatted like this uh three numbers separated by uh Ford slashes uh designating the number of men women and children uh in a particular Target compound as a minor side note uh the term slant count depending on your era of military service uh this can mean a lot of different things uh in the counter Insurgency example it it means men women and children uh however it can also refer to main battle tanks ifvs urals or you know transport trucks or or really anything you want um the term slant can also be an acronym standing for size location activity number of troops and time sort of like a modified solution report uh so so keep this in mind if you ask for a slant count uh make sure that everyone's on the same page with what slant you mean right for today we're going to be using the slant count to measure the number of men women and children at or in the vicinity of our Target it's a minor detail but kind of important so I'll mention it now the targeting analyst themselves doesn't really monitor this footage uh this really really you just get a rollup a summary document from the processing exploitation and dissemination crew or ped crew uh which is a crew that is responsible for controlling the Drone flying it controlling the sensor all kinds of stuff like that so after working with a ped crew for a little while you you may start to you know get familiar with them start to get on you know a a named basis and maybe a first name basis you start you know uh kind of developing this relationship again you know relationships matter so you might find that if you befriend a ped crew um and you need some extra uh coverage of your target uh you may find that they mysteriously need to do a sensor calibration directly over your Target or the pilot needs to you know perform a maintenance check or something over your target instead of flying onto someone else who's more important than you you see how you know relationships can kind of matter so you can actually end up squeezing some more coverage out of something if you're nice to people again relationships matter quite a lot especially considering that when I was a professional analyst if you want to call it that uh the r on my collar really was not high enough uh to get anything important uh you know I may have had some pretty good Intel of people you know bad guys in you know this target Target compound harassing locals hurting people kidnapping kids all basically the worst possible Hollywood movie plot I've got going on in my target compound here but nobody cares uh because well you know polit politics I guess so uh this is why I've mentioned before that a lot of times what I would do is get a nib or non-interference based collection basically as a drone is flying from one place to another I can get them to while they're flying and not looking at anything swing the camera towards my target you know and uh give me 30 seconds or a minute or so as you fly by it just kind of do a you know drive by you know with your sensor and see what you can get it's not much uh but sometimes you may get lucky you know so you may literally find you know hey swing your sensor over here by this you know this target oh there's a zpu on the roof now um you know that's kind of a you know something that's a little bit more high priority than say you know a goat herder's you know Shack in the mountains you know um so sometimes you get lucky uh doing that sort of thing and you know we can definitely see how the art of relationships kind of matters a lot for this sort of thing so but anyway uh War Stories aside we can see how intelligence collection at this phase in the targeting cycle is a tangled web of relationships and unfortunately a lot of times politics um this really rears its ugly head when it comes to PO analysis you see some analysts don't like it when they request collection they get the the PED crew gives them their roll up and they look at the product and they see a slant count that says 249 meaning there are two men Four Women and nine children at their target what does that mean well this means that this isn't a bad guy's location probably this is probably just some family's house maybe bad guys spent the night there but and that may be how you know about the location but with this many kids there and this many women especially in like the Middle East this is probably not going to be struck anytime soon doesn't mean that it's not being used for nefarious purposes right as we all know insurgents know all of this they know that women and children the United States government tries to not kill right with a strike so they know this so they use you know the whole concept of human Shields quite a lot in the Middle East uh doesn't really change much right because just because we know a human Shields being used doesn't mean that oh well that's a human shield to strike it anyway no like human Shields are effective and they work at least for the insurgence sort of thing so when you have a slant count that high that tells me that this target is not getting struck like it's just just might as well just put it right back in the database and just go on something else because it's not worth your time right trying to get this target across the Finish line and convince a general or somebody that you know you know these nine kids are insurgents it's just a laughable concept you're just not going to do it because it's just obviously not a good Target so move on to the next one there's plenty of others right and this really does matter because that slant count that is logged right there's always a paper trail and even if we do get this target through even if let's just say we put a hundred hours a hundred hours of collection on this target we we put a a a Reaper or something overhead or a predator or something overhead for 100 hours and we got the most nefarious bad guy stuff going on in this compound like every Hollywood cliche of a bad guys is going on inside this compound doesn't matter because that first slant count is logged so when we go through the approval process later down the line that General that that Target engagement Authority that person who's going to sign off on the strike is going to look back back at that and say a lot of things he's going to look at me and he's going to ask well what changed okay you know why is the slant count now low and all this bad guy stuff's happening in this compound but why is it why was it not a good Target you know when we first got started with this did you just retroactively try to find a bunch of bad stuff even though you know you knew the target wasn't good when you started did you get you know intelligence collection during something like prayer time or evening or night or different times of day or you know in the Middle East a lot of times you know the family members especially like women and children will sleep outside on the roof so did you get you know pictures of that can you really get a more accurate slant count like you know what's going on here you know was the collection evenly spaced or was it just all at once on one day you know one day of the week you know uh was it random enough to get accurate and non-biased uh view of what's going on at this compound how confident are you in the fact that the PO analysis has changed and why are you that confident do you see how all of these questions just kind of add up and it really means that even if you have the most bad guy stuff going on at a compound that first slant count is really going to torpedo your target right and it's just not worth it but for most for most people in the American targeting process right now I will note that some analysts can get really slimy with this uh and and usually they get rooted out later on but I'll just mention it now uh for instance that slant count is is interesting because it has legal connotations that we'll get to later on with CDE or collateral damage estimation um but if you wanted to be a dirt bag uh you could assess meaning your opinion you could assess that the slant count is transient meaning meaning that you say oh those nine kids that were in that compound that they don't live there they were just passing through right they don't live there so we're not going to count them so really your slank count is 240 or those women that were in that original slant count they're transient they they don't live there they were just walking through the area so really our slank count is two good to go right do you see how this is a problem uh you know this is why po analysis is very very important to get right uh because we don't want aama a hospital that some analyst made out to be a weapons cach or something because they needed a resume bullet point right this is ridiculous and this is a war crime we want to prevent war crimes right so this is where those cat one facilities kind of come back in sometimes we get a report you know from the PED crew that details a slant count of 09 236 right you know knowing what we know now it should be fairly obvious that this target is a school right it's an actively used School uh and if this happens you know thankfully we got this collection uh because we now we know that we can't strike this site like this there's this just not going to happen right it it would be very very very unlikely for this target or a target with such a slant count to be approved right so um bringing back in that whole protected category thing um in addition to just the whole concept of well this isn't really a bad guys place this is a civilian residence but speaking of cat one facilities specifically you know speaking of my own experiences the US military almost never strikes cat one facilities you can look up the list of of uh of all of the types of facilities that are no strike entities and you can see what types of facilities are protected right now there is a difference between a no strike entity and a protected Target uh but it's it's a little bit of a gray area uh as to why all we know is hey look we're just not striking it you know it's you know we we just don't strike cat one facilities like it's just not something that's done in the US military now other agencies I can't speak to um and I think we can all see where that kind of goes but as far as the US military is concerned even if Osama Bin Laden himself was hanging out of a hospital window and waving at us we couldn't strike that place you know we're just going to get them another way right we're going to get them coming or going out of a facility we're not going to bom a hospital because there's a bad guy there you know a bad guy being at a location believe it or not as far as American targeting guidance a bad guy being at a location doesn't mean that's justification to kill people strange concept I know but it turns out that it's the juice is not worth the squeeze so generally speaking when it comes to even the baddest of the bad guys we don't strike protected facilities or we don't strike targets that are in you know really densely populated areas or other things like that we just don't do it so yeah hopefully that kind of shows well you know cat one facility is they are no strike entities they they don't get struck because the risks and the you know it would be a it would be a war crime or something like that now during the PO analysis phase one of the primary goals is to not just learn about cat one facilities or develop a slant count or countless civilians in a local area but it's also to determine whether or not a facility is dual use or not a dual use facility means that bad guys are using the location in conjunction with legitimate civilian use for instance in Iraq and Syria it was extremely common for a school to legitimately teach children during the day right but at night when the children have all gone home for the day insurgents would come in and make use of that safe space they know that we don't strike schools so they would use that school to make their IEDs uh so in this case that location would be dual use and therefore very unlikely to be struck interestingly enough this doesn't always happen just in the Middle East we saw this happen in Ukraine with Ukrainian forces literally advertising that they are building drones and assembling explosives in a school gymnasium so don't think that this is just something that insurgents do nation states do this too so um I don't Russia probably does the same too I know people are going to freak out that I mentioned Ukraine in a negative light but this does happen right uh Russia may or may not do it too but here's the video that shows that Ukraine does it for sure now of course there are exceptions to this rule uh for instance technically you can do what's called a cat one lift meaning that there is a legal process again outlined in Doctrine uh to to prove that a Target is no longer a cat one facility uh or nor is it dual use so in my own experience es I uh saw or helped perform you know of course with you know proper like authorization and legal stuff being involved uh I authorized a cat one lift I think twice over a period of targeting in Iraq and Syria uh in both cases the targets were the ruins of old schools that had already been bombed by the Russians and there was nothing left but like but the walls were still standing the windows were blown out uh there was nothing left you could with a drone you could very clearly see that there was there was nothing there uh except for a couple of mortar sites they had cut holes in the roof uh and they were shooting mortars uh through one of the classrooms out so facility was a school couldn't Bomb It ordinarily uh couldn't you know do anything with it uh so we had to do a catw one lift uh and you know because the target was still listed as an active which it it it wasn't um a lot of people think that cat one lifs are very sketchy and they can be but I personally in uh Iraq and Syria at least I never really saw a sketchy cat one lift being done everybody was too terrified of being label a war criminal um to let that happen for me dual use targets were a little bit easier uh to get approval for but me personally I never tried to I never tried it I never pursued a Target that was dual use because to me the the process was just is just not above board it's not moral it's it may be technically legal but it's not right uh so I Didn't Do It um and uh those targets that were dual use ended up getting passed off and either shelved or worked by somebody else most of the time by the time it came to be struck anyway through the deliberate process the special forces or the CIA had already struck it anyway so it didn't matter uh but generally speaking uh dual use targets no strike entities you know these things didn't really get approved right you know they they really did not get approved um and the ones that were approved were only like very very special circumstances so um I say that in the interest of posterity because many years later I don't think that's being done now I don't think that uh I think that even when I was kind of like you know on my way out um with my rotation I could see more and more dual use targets coming up in the approval cycle I think the last week I was there um I saw the target board the target list and they were all they were all dual use and I thought this isn't right hopefully these don't get through now that it's been several years I don't I don't know and you know I just have a sneaking suspicion that uh my own experiences should be documented for posterity because I don't think I don't think they're the same experiences that are being you know seen now but in any case in my shop the terms cat one and dual use were were were labels that applied to Target so whenever I heard a Target being introduced as like you know blank blank Target whatever dual use right we all groaned because we knew that that Target was not going to fly that was a bad Target we just knew that wasn't going to get approval uh you know again politics come into play though uh so you could have a dirty analyst uh they gets a Target and they they scrap together enough Intel to to support their Theory uh but if you look at it objectively if you look at it morally it's just not worth killing people over because the enemy just isn't there right that's the biggest thing that I saw I didn't see I did see quite a few war crimes uh with regards to targeting but I didn't see uh as many war crimes happening as as fraud waste and abuse when it comes to you know the fight against Isis and Iraq and Syria when it comes to deliberate targeting I don't think any analyst who was there would disagree with me when I say we struck empty buildings almost all the time uh yeah they were legitimate targets but the process moved too slow and the enemy moved on and we just struck empty buildings almost all of the time so anyway uh you know in some cases you may have a dirty analyst though and they can slap that dual use label on a Target so you get a Target there a school right and they say well dang it it's a school I'm not I'm not getting anywhere with this right you know some people might be relieved and say oh thank goodness we learned out that this was a school and now we're not going to kill innocent people but other analysts who are looking to to get a job at an agency or they're looking to make promotion or something like that they may look at this and say dang it I can't strike a school now so what am I going to do well I'm going to put that dual use label on I'm gonna say that Isis is using it at night when I know that they're not right um you know sometimes you'll see this dual use label get applied to a Target that is single use single use by civilians only meaning the enemy isn't there but the analyst wants to make people think they are so uh generally speaking what do we do what do we do if our Target is a cat one dual use facility well most of the time that Target is sheld like it's just not worth bombing and killing civilians potentially uh over a Target that's not likely to impact the war very much remember deliberate targeting is intended to impact future operations and one target no matter how juicy it is it's not really likely to matter that much in the end uh because of this most targets that don't pass the sniff test meaning that the whole Affair just doesn't smell right these targets get put back into the database and never touched again uh some analysts make good by you know bringing old targets off the shelf you know if new Intel pops up and the and the the front changes or the situation changes but you know most of the time a Target that died on the vine as we call it uh wasn't really resurrected it just kind of sat there and was untouched mostly at Le at least not that I saw so you may show up to a meeting with a Target that is a cat one and everybody raises their eyebrows because we all know that the bar is extremely high for dropping a bomb on that location uh in fact it was such a concern uh that we were ordered to present our targets to the approving General like in the you know approval process we're presenting the evidence to the general uh we we had to use like a brief introductory script that went something like this target 01 is whatever uh Target is not cat one or dual use CDE is one low that's how we would introduce this target uh that last bit refers to the next important factor uh that the analyst must consider which is DDE or collateral damage estimation or estimate in short we want to know that if we do uh strike this location how many innocent people are going to die obviously we want this number to be zero and this is a hotly debated Topic in the targeting world and CDE within the field of deliberate targeting is where you can find out um whether or not you're working with or for a psychopath or a mass murder ing uh lunatic um and I and I don't say that lightly I say that in the most literal of Senses uh quite a few serial killers work in the United States military not very many but a lot of them do I've seen them and they all have stars on the collar so that's just something to keep in mind uh when you see stuff like this um I personally saw it that's my personal opinion that's my personal testimony take take it you know as you will I guess but CDE collateral damage estimation is where you you see how dark human beings can really get so obviously the number of innocent people that could potentially be killed by an air strike is dependent on the type of Munitions used if we're using a 2,000lb bomb in a densely populated city we're going to kill a lot of innocent people shocker right we're going to kill a lot of very innocent people for basically no gain uh so we might want to consider in that situation a low CDE munition like a small diameter bomb or sdb or maybe the uh the ninja Hellfire right that that recently became public knowledge the AGM 114 r9x uh which was developed during the Syrian War uh for striking targets without harming innocent people uh who might be really close to the Target remember insurgents are really smart and they figured out that uh if they keep a lot of women and children within arms uh length of themselves at all times especially when they're out in the open like walking down the street or something uh that we wouldn't strike them or so they thought um the ninja Hellfire was kind of developed to counteract that but just as a brief side note whenever I see someone uh you know using one of those um like leashes for their child you know like in the mall or something you see somebody walking around with a leash like a little backpack or something on their kid and like a a tether to make sure their kid doesn't run off you know um that's that's what I think of because I saw an awful lot of PE a lot of bad guys in Syria with leashes on their kids and they would tie them to their belt uh so that the kid would never get more than like three or four feet away from them they would tie kids to themselves uh so that we wouldn't strike them so you know it's one of those things that you can't unsee once you see it but um yeah uh anyway weapon earing uh the the art of using the munition that's not the targeting Analyst job believe it or not that's at least when it comes to deliberate targeting and Target development that's that's somebody else's job that's for the fires shop uh these are the guys who are going to be using various Point mensuration techniques uh to drop joint desired points of impact or jdpi for the various Munitions we might use again the United States in particular uses Precision guided Munitions so we can drop a pretty accurate pinpoint of where that bomb's going to land how far it's going to Pierce through the ceiling of say a mud hut or something and how high off the ground it's going to detonate inside that room all this kind of stuff is you know all this kind of like um you know uh science stuff is really uh really part of the fire's job it's not so much a targeting shop uh Believe It or Not uh but you still do need to know uh you need to have like a general idea of what Munitions are going to be used uh when you're going through the targeting cycle so you know you may not know like absolute details of you know whatever the GBU 31 or something like that and how it's going to you know come through the ceiling or how it's going to impact at what angle and you know you may not know all of that but you can definitely know that you know hey we're not going to use a 2,000 PB bomb on this hot dog cart in the middle of Baghdad you know you know that we're we're going to use something else if we're going to strike it at all so once the target gets you know a little bit further down the process uh we'll get an official like an official legal uh CDE call that is approved by the legal department right this is where the lawyers get involved the the military attorneys get involved and say you know is this CDE call appropriate right is this legal uh and they and they have a whole process you can actually read the the CDE manual here and you can see the levels there's a lot of Handy charts I would recommend reading through it yourself because it really shows the mindset the military targeteers are working through when it comes to Warfare um but yeah things like slant count po analysis uh population density tables uh all kinds of mathematical formula are trying to determine what is the risk of killing an innocent person um again you can check out this this pretty handy chart here this is a quick reference chart that shows the five levels of CDE uh you can look through it on your own but I can just tell you right off the bat that in my own experience Es at least 99% of the targets I personally worked on I never saw my whole team work on a Target that had a CDE assessment of higher than one or two I never worked anything higher than that uh usually it was taken to to do by some you know somebody else or uh you know we just didn't do it because if you're starting to get up to CD3 or four or five this is not a good Target we shouldn't be striking this play place but the United States will do it they just won't do it with the military they'll do it like the CIA or something so you know a level one uh cde1 low you know means that we have you know positive identification that a bad guy is at this location uh we're relatively certain that no civilians will be hurt or killed there's not going to be any property damage you know stuff like that you know of course we can't guarantee this war is risky and war is horrible no matter how you swing it it's just awful um but we're trying to make it not as horrifying uh so you know we can't guarantee that the CDE will be low every time uh but there is this is not just a a guess this is not just some you know Hip Pocket assessment here this this is not just some random guess uh there is a whole long drawn out process for assessing collateral damage estimates right and you know again this is not just something that I work through because the US Army or the US Air Force has got a cool nice little chart for me to go through now this is a whole process for this uh but to keep things simple most of the time we assumed that basically if a structure existed in the first place uh somebody's going to have to be using it for something so we we have to assess a CDE of at least one right because the scale doesn't really go any lower than one you can't have a CDE of zero you have to assume that if you're going to Target something there's a person there right so that's kind of the whole point of this now of course in Warfare we can't avoid killing all civilians and if we strictly abided by mathematical tables uh no bomb would ever get dropped so out comes a very powerful and sketchy word mitigation in short we can use smaller bombs and or drop the munition at certain times of day to bring the CDE call down we can mitigate it down so if we start with like a CDE of three we can mitigate it to a one by changing the bomb changing the time of day so on and so forth um for instance if if we know that a target's family if we've done the PO analysis if we put that drone overhead enough and we know that the target the guy we're trying to go after right the very the the bad guy uh if we know that he leave his family leaves the target compound every day at roughly the same time to take the kids to school or you know so on and so forth we can list the CDE call we can assess it to be lower during that time right as you can imagine this gets really sketchy really really quickly uh but it's fairly common to do in population dense areas for instance the approval Authority can prove the target contingent on striking it at a certain time of day uh for instance I I think that the classic example is insurgents making a bomb in a school well you know obviously we don't want to strike the school during the school day right uh you know we don't want to strike it when there's kids there uh but if we know that kids don't sleep at the compound we know that like between midnight and 2 am the only people in this building are going to be bad guys and we we see them go to the building and we see them you know carrying in explosives do you see how we can drop the CDE call down and be you know um a little bit safer with with regards to that of course the moral quandaries still exist as to whether or not we should have mitigated a CDE call or just sheld this Target and moved on all right there are plenty of opportunities to stop bad people from doing bad things that don't involve this much risk especially in deliberate targeting now Dynamic targeting is a whole different story Dynamic targeting we're talking about immediate risks to life and limb okay the most clear-cut case of self-defense that's Dynamic targeting deliberate targeting we're dropping bombs on buildings for a planned operation later on and we can see how with deliberate targeting we can get a little bit more nefarious with our use depending on you know what what a person's goals are most of the time CDE is not something that you can mitigate that much uh a lot of times you'll say all right you know General so and so uh we had a CTE call of like three for this building but we've mitigated it down to one and here's how we're going to drop a smaller bomb and we're going to do it in the middle of the night and general says that's not good enough uh you can't guarantee that that's going to happen you know it's a holiday people are probably not going to you know um be moving around too much you may have uh not seen people enter the compound you haven't gotten P collect recently you see you know it just it just kind of falls apart when you try to mitigate it sometimes so um really the point for me talking about CDE is that this is one of those things that can make you sound smart to all of your friends uh for instance if you see anywhere in the world a a high-profile air strike on television or something you can Wonder aloud hey that looks like an act L used hospital I wonder how they mitigated the CDE call right knowing full well that basically nobody ever has you know uh you know some targets like in you know extremely population dense cities they just can't be mitigated right this is why we cannot win Wars from the air alone uh sometimes you need the door kickers uh in war not every problem can be solved with a bomb or a missile sometimes you have to get in there and kill people with small arms and hopefully not shoot the neighbors next door this may seem obvious to a civilian audience but you would not believe the generals who do not understand this remember they have been given the power to approve air strikes and kill people so air strikes are obviously the only solution to the problem this is the epitome of the hammer and nail quandry right if you immediately want to become a social Pariah do this go into a targeting meeting and suggest that we raid the compound instead of striking it with a bomb or a missile or something everyone will look at you like you've lost your mind ask me how I know this I remember one Target in particular that was a bad Target uh you high CDE call garbage slant count lots of women and children all over the compound and hundreds of hours of coverage uh that that should be a hint in and of itself when you see a target has got hundreds of hours of coverage that means that the coverage theyve got to begin with wasn't any good so they're trying to retroactively justify it and say oh no no the first coverage we got showing this wasn't really a Target was wrong here are these other hundreds of hours so anyway everybody spent weeks trying to get this target across the Finish Line when the obvious solution obvious solution was just to hand it over to the local Special Forces team to kick in the door from a leadership perspective you know this was the only option right that that the remotely made any sense whatsoever uh we could get so much to right instead of you know blowing things up and killing people we could get uh you know arrests we could have people to interrogate you know we could have PE we we could do sensitive site exploitation or ssse we could get laptops and hard drives and cell phones we could get you know post- raid collection you know we could see who's on their cell phone or who's watching The Raid going down and you know we could start developing out the whole network throughout the whole area we could get a wealth of information on this target um and and other targets as well and on top of that we would strengthen the relationship between say the targeting guys and like the Special Forces teams uh that were working things on the ground you know and they maybe one day uh might be inclined to return the favor but no um I personally sat through many hours of a general acting like a petulant child wanting to use their own toys in their sandbox almost all engagement authorities uh I ever met were absolutely incapable of admitting that it was better to raid a Target than to bomb it it was literally a blind spot for them and completely Unthinkable sounds like relationships and politics are a much bigger part of the deliberate targeting process than we first thought huh anyway but digressions aside uh the targeting process continues on uh so let's take a look at what we've got so far we've got our database checks complete uh and we've racked and stacked the target for collection whatever that may be we managed to get a few more intelligence reports from multiple reliable sources in addition to some other sources and you know maybe some things that aren't just human some other things like signals intelligence or signant or mazant maybe uh We've managed to get maybe a few dozen hours of FMV Drone footage uh and this Drone footage has indicated a slant of 4 uh so there's no p in the compound there's there's no indications of a normal family life this compound looks very odd in the neighborhood all the neighborhood around it looks you know like a normal family life but this one compound looks looks like there's nobody living there but there are people there so you know that kind of shows you what's kind of going on there the CDE for this target legal is already kind of like giving us a heads up CDE is going to be you know basically one low for this for this compound so that if we do strike it none of the other people around that Target will be harmed only the people in that compound are going to get taken out and there's not going to be any property damage of any of the other buildings that may be around it so so far this target is looking pretty good uh so since we're doing pretty good with it we're still working on it but it's looking pretty good and we might want to schedule it for its first major hurdle a Target development working group or a tid wig uh this is a meeting uh that takes place uh when a handful of targets are getting ready for approval it's it's a working group right um basically at this meeting uh the analyst has to justify their target right so it's kind of um getting everyone in the shop and in the approval process kind of on the same page getting familiar uh with this with this target again you can read the doctrine on you know tid wigs and all that kind of stuff but basically uh really this is just a way of removing bias uh sometimes uh at this stage you might find that you might want to move some analysts around so sometimes especially if a Target is not looking good um but you might want to take it to a twig anyway and hand it off to somebody else so sometimes an analyst because remember this is their Target and they may be getting a little bit too attached to it and they may not want to look at things objectively whereas somebody else in the shop it's not personal you know it's nothing personal but you may want to hand it off to them and have them take a look at it you know uh and you can do this at a tid wig right you can do this at a tid wig meeting so what happens at a tid wig meeting well basically a little bit of everything analyst briefs are Target we find out hey are they are they are they attached to this target or not or is is this like still good Target or they just trying to slip something through it's a good check and balance to make sure the analyst is is is staying above board and they're not uh they're not going down a bad path you got all kinds of people weighing in legal weighs in it says hey you know I don't really see any problems coming forward with this but you know we we might want to consider this this or this the fires guys show up the guys who are going to be you know dropping the bombs uh show up and say all right you know these are these are some considerations sometimes you'll get to a meeting and you know you just clear the the air a little bit like the analyst thinks they got a good Target right legal says ain't nothing wrong with it but the fires guys show up and say well we don't have any bombs to strike this effectively with so our CD is going to be like a five you know like and then okay well now we know you know I'm not a weapon ear I I don't work to you know drop the jdpi myself uh so sometimes you know you find well you know better look next time kind of thing uh really uh this is also where um personal relationships can kind of uh or or bias with regards to relationships can come out so say for instance you know a collection manager who doesn't really want to uh who wants to help out their friends but not help out like other targets you know their boss can direct them say hey look this is a really good Target why is a collection manager not giving you any more collection for this well that can get fixed at a tid wig right so you can the collection manager can say oh okay this is good this is also where people can come together say okay well maybe we've got multiple Targets in the same area so maybe we want to talk about striking them all at once or having a different kind of Post strike intelligence collection to see who comes and picks through the rubble to see if they can find any weapons or bombs or something you know things like this so the The Twig meeting is a good way uh to determine if the target should go uh through the approval process again you can read the doctrine for yourself and see what it's supposed to do just speaking in generalities here this is also where uh unfortunately uh sometimes we can start to see the bias that no one can do anything about um like I mentioned some sometimes you know it tid wig kind of points out uh the bias that a um an analyst might have with their with their target so you may have somebody who's work been working on a target for weeks and they just have that you know instinct to know there's something bad going on here um these bad dudes are using it for this but they're slippery they're real slick they're real smart and we can't nail them down to any one time of day but we're going to remove the house that they're using so they don't have a place to hide you know that happens a lot but sometimes an analyst gets too close to their target and you know it's nothing personal uh but sometimes at a tid week it kind of highlights hey you know this guy's trying to get through a Target that isn't really good so maybe we need to take this Target and hand it off to somebody else have them kind of Bounce some ideas off or maybe have this target reviewed by somebody else uh just as a way of uh reducing bias right and I saw that happen a few times I don't I don't think it ever happened to me but uh you know sometimes you know I I did myself pass off a couple of targets that I didn't want to work because I didn't think there was anything there and somebody else tries to take it and two weeks later they find out yeah there's nothing here so you know tiwi is a place for that to happen uh ATIV is also a place for the scheduling to occur for the next step which which is the JTC B their joint Target coordination board now uh again I must bring up an unfortunate um an unfortunate aspect of targeting sometimes and uh this is my own personal anecdotal experience so take it for what you will I saw a double standard uh a lot uh towards the end uh of my time in in deliberate targeting for Iraq and Syria I saw some really really bad things or really bad situation starting to add up for instance um me uh as a uh you know enlisted male uh was not allowed to brief the general um a lot of times uh because this particular General did not like talking to enlisted people I preferred to talk to like Air Force officers or something like that with the exception being enlisted females uh so you can kind of see how this sort of works out where the only enlisted people in the room that are allowed to speak to the general are attractive young enlisted females who just so happen to have basically zero Intel for their target and it's being treated seriously so you've got like say an Air Force or Marine Captain over here in the corner who's got a Target that's basically like you know Bin Laden's compound like a seriously good Target like very bad dudes there you you know you know kind of exploiting citizens basically you know a poster child for like a Hollywood movie and he is just getting Rak over the coals uh for his Target and I'm sitting there thinking why like this is a good Target like I understand we want to remove bias and stuff but literally the Air Force E4 um female who just briefed her Target um had like three human reports and nothing else and you're going to seriously consider that one like there's nothing there or you know hopefully there's nothing there there could be a family there we don't know and you're seriously considering it but you're giving this Air Force Captain a hard time so we can see how the potential for war crime Stacks up real quick uh based on um the impropriety of a Target engagement Authority now I'm sure a lot of people will claim this doesn't happen but I saw it myself so I am the witness uh I saw this happen quite a lot uh unfortunately so this is something to keep in mind uh is that the United States military particularly at the general officer level is not uh sometimes an honorable entity and I'll just leave it at that so again the next step for this is the jtcvs is about but basically your target is on trial uh and the jud's jury and executioner is the target engagement Authority or usually it's a general uh who has been designated by the president of the United States uh this is where the decision is made to strike the Target or not uh based on the evidence brought forth by the by the analyst sometimes the analyst is you know switched after the tid wig like I mentioned uh Sometimes some analysts are given higher priority than others um for those of you who are in maybe the civilian space and you don't understand what I mean when I say a lot of generals in the US military are very strange people they have very strange habits uh you know sometimes this is a factor in jtcvs like you know they only prefer to be briefed a certain way or they only want a certain binder with a certain cover on it with a certain slide you know the the the um the ultimate dictators or or stereotypical dictator activity or or mentality is is definitely the general officer and they have very strange habits uh sometimes so uh usually the JTC is a very formal Affair uh you've got a lot of people in the room it's basically like a bigger tiwi uh except where the general is deciding who gets to live and who gets to die at this phase so um the general uh Target gets briefed General decides makes the decision legal weighs in legal signs off on it so on and so forth um if the target is approved at the JTC B it's usually racked and stacked for a strike as soon as possible this can be for a very good reason or for a very bad reason depending on the context uh for one we don't want the information to go stale if we know there's bad guys at a place and they're hurting civilians and they're and they're they're do they're doing bad stuff we want to remove them from the battle space as fast as humanly possible however uh if the target's not good if this is a bad Target and there's no evidence that there's bad guys there sometimes the general doesn't want to give anybody the opportunity to prove that this is a civilian site you know can you imagine what would happen if a Target gets approved and then we get some more Drone footage after it gets approved but before it gets struck so like between the approval and the strike we get some intelligence that suggests oh goodness there are civilians there can you do you see how this could be a problem so now that General has one less strike they you know they have to P to strike off so you know this can be good or bad you know depending on the person's mentality you know depending on whether or not the person is a psychopath or not and I again I say that in the most literal and very serious sense um you know I I I didn't see a lot of generals in uh like the air force of the army who were successful uh in their insanity uh at some point somebody checked them along the way and stopped their strike uh but the potential was there and it could have gotten really really bad so uh I'll just kind of leave it at that for now uh the last part of the deliberate targeting process is the strike itself um and interestingly enough uh this is the part that most analysts don't even see uh most targeting guys in the liberate process don't watch their their own targets being struck but some do so like if guys who just get started and the the younger guys usually do um you know but you know once the strike is approved it's it's out of the Intel shop and it's into operations or fires or something like that um it's not uh it's kicked over to operations you know who carries out the the strike in accordance with the General's instructions so uh you know at that point you know bombs or missiles are slung on pylons you know the pilots take off and strike the target um you know that that one sentence is is usually how the strike ends you know it's pretty underwhelming huh um I'm sure a lot of people were expecting there to be more to it uh and there certainly is uh there's a lot to it more to it once that strike gets approved and the the details and the minutia of how you know the weapon earing occurs and all that kind of stuff um you know anything everything from the air crew who maintain the aircraft you know the weaponers who provide the targeting data you know the pilots who get a brief on it you know they they go through a whole process right you know whether or not there are additional assets on station to kind of videotape the whole thing or do Post strike collection or battle damage assessment all kinds of stuff like that um but generally speaking it it's really simple you know Target gets approved bombs are loaded on aircraft aircraft take off bomb the target that's really how deliberate uh the the deliberate process kind of ends so I'm sorry to be a little bit disappointing for now I'm sure a lot of you were expecting this to be a little bit more exciting uh but during the deliberate targeting process these details don't really matter uh they just don't factor in too much um for dynamic targeting the exact opposite is true uh we can get it to the nitty-gritty details that do matter um during a dynamic strike you know the chances are you got a full ISR stack you've you know got a ground force close air support assets you know the whole shebang right but for the deliberate process the most interesting part for most people really isn't that interesting and honestly it's very anticlimactic um after the strike uh a process called battle damage assessment or BDA is supposed to be conducted uh simply put we need to find out how effective that strike was and if our intelligence was correct uh if we strike an abandoned building there was supposed to be a weapons cache uh and we get massive secondary explosions so the bomb explodes and then something inside that building also explodes uh you know we know without a shadow of a doubt uh that that was a good strike uh if we get nothing uh and the place appears to be empty you know well now we've got to re-examine our whole process you know and especially the Intel that led us to that place I say this is what is supposed to happen uh because most of the time uh BDA is done halfhazard uh with minimal effort put in um because we're already on to the next Target and nobody cares out of all my time doing targeting in Iraq and Syria I think I saw a a legitimate like concern for BDA like I always looked at the BDA reports because I I cared but nobody else seemed to um I only saw like General concern with BDA uh when there was like a CIVC allegation or just you know a couple of times um very rarely like when there were supposed to be like a huge Target like a really big weapons cach or something and nothing happened that was the only time where I saw people you know really care about BDA so you know when it comes to BDA you know again this is my personal experience I'm sure people will have very different experiences with regards to BDA um but for me I saw the military-industrial complex really kick in at this stage more than anywhere else because nobody really cared if we actually impacted the war at all uh BDA was not factored in hardly at all I there was there wasn't even anyone interested in whether or not the bombs hit the target uh because again contrary to popular belief um and I and I'm afraid I'm afraid to say this and I don't mean to point any fingers but uh it turns out a lot of Pilots have a hard time hit their target and I agree they got a hard job to fill uh they got a hard job to do but in my experience I would look at a BDA product and say that bomb missed that Target by like a 100 feet you know this is a GPS guided Precision guided munition and you missed happened a lot happened a lot we missed the target a lot so uh you know it's just one of those things where it's like oh okay you you pull up the database for a Target you say oh this target was struck uh you know we've already developed this this target was approved and struck and all that stuff and then I'm looking at a drone feed of the building fully intact like we never hit it so it's like what's the point what's the point in all of this but you know anyway I I I really personally saw at least 80% of all of the deliberate air strikes in Iraq and Syria at the height of of the uh war on terror there uh almost 80% of these strikes happen for nothing at all uh all of the Isis militants were long gone from almost all of the locations we struck thank goodness to be honest um because really if someone is if a Target engagement of thought not because I support Isis or anything but because if a Target engagement Authority is going to be so loose with their approval process that they strike an empty building that building could just as easily have been filled with a family and if you're going to not recognize that the enemy is not there and you're still going to approve the strike anyway that proves to me a lot of things so that was that's kind of my opinion on that um you know nobody uh nobody really wants any of this in their file right they don't want this on their end of tour award uh they want their deployment record to read something like you know was instrumental in the kinetic targetting of over 500 Isis facilities in Iraq and Syria devastating Isis command elements and personally winning the war himself you know that's what they want their award or their their little campaign medal to read they don't want their award to read something like they blew up 500 empty buildings in Iraq and Syria since nobody wants us here anyway so our hum is garbage and the militants were too smart for us to actually Target them effectively only getting killed when they were stupid enough to get caught up in our ridiculous game of wacka it doesn't really make for too many awards if you know what I mean but it's the truth for almost every you know targeting analysts that ever you know served in the fight against Isis so that's it then really or is it well one final question remains with regards to deliberate targeting and that is what happens when we do kill civilians well allegations of CIVC or civilian casualties as we call it are quite rare in the deliberate targeting process due to you know the high standards and the very intense Target approval process um almost all CK's allegations come from Dynamic strikes uh which we'll cover next uh however since The Grieving families on the ground uh don't know uh how the bomb leveled their house uh the deliberate targeting shop the deliberate side of targeting uh they do get involved in the process uh most military commands uh have a dedicated CIVC shop uh that handles all CIVC or civilian casualty uh allegations it's usually a joint Mission uh so a collection of people from all branches and sometimes different nations like if it's a coalition targeting uh thing a few different nations will get together uh to to determine if a CIVC allegation is true and you know if legal actions need to be taken or if you know the investigation needs to go further um generally speaking the first step in the civk allegation is the allegation itself uh in the Middle East most of the time this involve the affected party uh claiming that a bomb destroyed property or in some cases killed a family member uh the the C's allegation doesn't always have to come from the victim uh sometimes there are no victims or or rather there are no surviving victims so there's no one left to stand up for them so a lot of times a cfa's allegation will come from social media uh Twitter or something like that or Facebook in the Middle East of somebody who saw a bomb kill an entire family and they say what's going on here right uh so from the initial like notification uh the civcast team has got to get a grid coordinate of of where the strike took place and and start the investigation process or start you know start working down the process most of the time uh this starts with a phone call over to the deliberate targeting shop to check you know our database uh for any information on any strike in that area uh most of the time this database check results in nothing uh because almost all ckz incidents involve Dynamic strikes uh which are not documented that well uh sometimes you know it's kind of like um that old episode from Mash where they have that bomb land in the in the in the camp and they're trying to figure out what you know what what is it what's going on who owns it so they're calling around trying to figure out what kind of munition is it what serial numbers on it the same thing happens in real life a lot of times we get a phone call saying hey you know this house got leveled I know you guys don't have anything in your database but do you think you might know who it might be you know uh well we can try to figure out who's operating in the area uh sometimes we can find out based on the crater analysis what kind of bomb it was uh and kind of narrow it down from there to see okay well who has these kinds of bombs in this in this area sometimes it's not even the United States sometimes it's like Russia or Syria or some like some other entity and we're trying to figure out okay well this is an improvised ammunition so it's probably not the Americans who did it it's probably somebody else um so you can see how this you know kind of we start to try to figure out what's going on um just as kind of a point of record for me personally uh for all of the CIVC complaints uh or allegations that I personally saw in Iraq and Syria um almost none of them were legitimate complaints from the military side of things um pretty much all of them turned out to be some farmer who would go out into his field and dig a hole dig a crater and then uh you know claim that uh we destroyed his crops and can I please and thank you have 10,000 you know shiny American dollars uh sometimes we would get guys who we knew were Isis we knew they were criminals we knew they were trying to hurt the local population and they were building IEDs or something like that and they blew themselves up you either either building the IID or placing it and their family would come forward to claim compensation claiming that we did it you know uh and of you know of course that doesn't that doesn't fly very well so you know uh sometimes we did see that now uh in Afghanistan I did see uh one military strike which ended up killing a goat uh in my area and uh I think we paid a few hundred dollars for that goat but you know by and large uh I I just didn't see it that much now I will put a link uh to a New York Times page that has a PDF PDF document of what an official civcast credibility assessment report looks like uh this document was classified uh but it has been Declassified and redacted as part of a Freedom of Information Act request so it's all above board it's all legal for us to view and everything it's in the open space uh world right so it's just kind of the initial look uh into this it kind of helps explain things so it's quite a fascinating greed and I would encourage you to take a look at it if you've got the time or if you're interested in that sort of thing but you know of course this isn't to say that the United States does not conduct Shady strikes that kill civilians you know uh you know alleging otherwise alleging that the United States oh we don't ever do anything wrong you that smells a lot like the whole uh you know we've investigated ourselves and found ourselves to be completely innocent kind of thing you know which is no good right it's obviously not true uh you know bad strikes do happen uh but again they're almost always from the dynamic targeting side of things where you're you're moving fast you you're you're in self-defense uh mode and it's a little bit different than kind of the everyday business business as usual targeting uh that is the deliberate side of things so so what have we learned so far uh We've covered the basics of the deliberate targeting process uh which is mostly used to further a military campaign uh we know the general process of how a Target is developed starting with the intelligence that leads us to a point and how that Target develops over time uh in preparation for being struck we've learned about the legal challenges and little tidbits like collateral damage estimation or CDE uh dual use and Cat one or no strike entity facilities uh which are usually sticking points for targeting uh but especially useful for Citizens outside the military who want to make better informed decisions about military operations and perhaps most importantly uh throughout the process we've learned the importance of relationships and how the information not in the manual uh can sometimes be all the difference in the world deliberate targeting is not only not cool uh but it can lead to some pretty dark things unlike Dynamic targeting we are not usually killing people in self-defense uh in the deliberate process nobody shot at us first uh because we're sitting behind a desk you know deciding who lives and who dies uh it would be fine if the job is boring or something like Logistics you know which isn't exactly you know highp speed but it's still very important no deliberate targeting is is usually more increasingly depressive uh the more you think about it it's almost impossible to see any progress uh being made in the war since no single strike has the potential to change the entire conflict but on the flip side you know that one single strike can kill an entire family uh so that strike had no bearing on the war but it sure changed that family so this is why I think it's important to understand the boring paperwork the and the legality of air strikes and kinetic targeting in general you know we say a strike is illegal you know what does that mean well this is really hard to explain but generally speaking we have regulations and we have military orders or or laws passed by an elected body on the military side uh we can have general orders which may say something like hey you know make sure your strikes are in accordance with JP 360 or the Rules of Engagement as defined in appendix a or uh the law of armed conflict in general you know we could have an order issued by a commander that says something like that so for all the people that look at you know targeting Doctrine like JP 360 and say wait a minute this isn't a law this is a regulation this is a manual this doesn't have any like weight to it by itself that's correct you know something like JP 360 doesn't have weight you know by itself but at some point a law or some kind of authoritative body points to to it uh and says go by that publication that's where a strike can be made illegal you know nothing in jp30 will say You must follow this or face the consequences right uh but there's probably a law or a series of laws stacked on top of that uh to make that the case and you don't really see those a lot of times and this may have wider implications than you may think not just for the United States but for other countries as well you may be a foreign country receiving Munitions from the United States and you may be telling the world well we don't go by jp30 uh because that's an American Doctrine and we don't go by CDE guidelines uh and we don't have a no strike list uh we strike everything you know that Nation may exist uh but in the fine print of the arms export treaty there's a line that says oh and by the way uh you can't just use these bombs however you want uh you have to at least adhere to like the basics of American Doctrine as a condition for getting these Munitions and for this arms export treaty to exist this may or may not be happening around the world as I speak right uh you know while people are saying well actually you know this strike on CNN is perfectly legal in that country you know we forget about things like laws that point to other laws which point to regulations that are being violated making the whole show illegal you know but for most citizens you know these ideas probably don't mean too much uh you know just cutting right to the chase uh for the private citizen looking to survive a drone strike for instance you know having a good understanding of the deliberate targeting process doesn't help you at all uh but there are some nuggets of knowledge that you know may be useful for thinking more strategically with Dynamic targeting you may have more opportunities to to game the system and play that dangerous game of Pat and mouse you may be able to survive or evade a dynamic strike uh maybe but with this process uh with the deliberate targeting cycle your house could explode with no warning no ground force no front line no helicopters overhead nothing your house was approved for a strike days ago with you being none the wiser so quite a sobering way to wrap up such a seemingly boring to topic but it's reality and it's important to understand when we talk about Dynamic targeting intelligence practices and you know how to survive a drone strike if that's possible generally speaking when making decisions more information usually helps when you're thinking about the grand strategy of warfare the best military Minds in history have usually not relied on some secret trick to win most military strategy simply relies on having more options open to you when your adversary does not knowledge is a powerful force multiplier in that regard at least and it's a very cheap way to increase the efficiency of your actions and keep your options open down the line and since knowledge takes time to develop the earlier you start understanding these Concepts the more options you will have later on in short sometimes we got to learn about the boring stuff first but especially if if we have to fight in the shade