I used to be attached to a US Army Infantry unit. I’m no expert but I’ve been there & done that …
In any infantry engagement yuo’ve got the probem of your people & enemy people getting intermingled. It’s hard enough fighting as a unit when the enemy is generally in one direction from your team. But when your unit and their unit are meshed together, it’s a disaster. So that MUST be prevented. Your loss ratio skyrockets in a melee.
Shooting corpses just to be sure is not Kosher. The next best thing is to quickly prove they’re no longer a threat & move on. And by “quickly”, I mean in a few seconds per corpse, tops.
For those of you who are not familiar with real grenades, I’ve uploaded a short video to UTube. You gotta view it quickly before Hollywood gets ahold of it and adds a big orange fireball or something!!
I’m not a military person, but it does make a great deal more sense to deal with them quickly. If you spend 20 minutes trying to hook a body with a fool-proof rope system, the other 40 so-called corpses in the area — or the snipers 500 yards away — have plenty of time to pick you off while you’re thus focused on one corpse.
I don’t get this at all. You are in the middle of an active battle, advancing over unsecured ground, with potential back-shooters laying around. I’m assuming that they are uniformed differently than your people, or otherwise distinguishable by sight. Why waste a second on any of them? Bullet to the head as you go by, let Intel deal with them later, after the mission is completed and the area secured. Especially since the OP specified a terrorist unit as the enemy. F*ck’em. The only godd terrorist, etc.
I know for sure that it’s a waste of ammunition. Your rifle needs reloading a few rounds sooner than it would have done otherwise, and that could cost you your life and the lives of your fire team or more.
I’m not sure about this, but if the enemy is laying on the ground wounded and without their hands on their rifle, they’re not longer posing an immediate threat, and dont need executing. It’s not wasting time checking them (quickly), it’s saving ammunition and, depending on the situation, possibly gaining information.
Killing someone whilst returning fire is a little different to shooting a downed enemy in the back of the head. I think the rules of engagement must change. Once again, though, I’ve not actually seen action or served in a deployable unit so I’m not the best to advise on that.
As long as you have not passed over the enemy, you can shoot them. Once you pass them, and leave them alive, you cannot kill them unless they become a threat again.
So basically, if you are clearing the objective and find several severly wounded and harmless looking enemy in front of you, you are okay to kill them. However, if you step over one that you didn’t notice or something, and you hear moaning behind you. . . you can’t go back and kill him. Now he’s an EPW.
So, you can kill them during the assault, even if they’re very wounded and can’t hurt you anymore. But once you hit the limit of advance and go back through your objective, you have to provide medical aide for all living enemy.