Well, that’s the thing. In most of the areas where the US is employing drone-strikes, there really aren’t official “emergency responders” in uniforms and marked vehicles with flashing lights and sirens - it’s mostly just villagers and bystanders providing what little aid they can. Sure, some of them are often sympathizers or even full-on al-Qaida/Taliban themselves, but not always, and not all of them, and there’s no way to tell. The numbers of women and children casualties is telling, though.
Pretty much the same deal with the Apache attack in Iraq that is mentioned in that article. That’s the footage known as “Collateral Murder” which was leaked by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks. If you haven’t seen it, and aren’t squeamish, Google it and watch how they engage the unarmed civilians in the van (with two children inside) that was just passing by and stopped to render aid to the wounded. And that’s much less excusable than the drone attacks on tribal areas, since we had ground troops in the area, and they could have easily tracked, intercepted and inspected the van, or otherwise just met them at the hospital.
So, it might be hard to accept, but it shouldn’t be hard to believe - it’s pretty much indisputable that it happens.
When I worked in Baghdad in 2006, these were very common and got increasingly sophisticated. There would be a bomb, then a bomb to catch people running from the first bomb, then a third bomb to catch responders to the other two bombs.
Some Iraqi colleagues of mine were sitting in traffic when a bomb went off ahead of them, they jumped out of their car and ran away from the area. A second bomb went off to get people fleeing the first and that bomb was hidden right next to our project’s car. It absolutely shredded it and if my colleagues had stayed in it, they would have been killed. We towed the car back and it sat in our parking lot for a while, it was not a morale boost to see that every day.
We just called those kind of attacks synchronized bombings.
Isn’t this just the bomb version of the tactic used by the sniper in Full Metal Jacket? What’s it called when a sniper merely wounds an enemy out in the open to draw his comrades into his field of fire?
My BIL the USMC (multiple tours in 'Nam) stated that the policy was not shoot to KILL, but to shoot to ’MORTALLY WOUND’.
The idea was to take 3 enemy out of action - the one you shot plus the 2 who would stop firing to assist their gonna-die-anyway comrade.
In that case, you didn’t worry about trying to nail the helpers - just take them out of the fight.
I saw a video of the Sioux version of the Little Big Horn - the Indians used a version to draw Custer to split his forces. The first encampment he found was a small one - he dispatched some troops to chase down the fleeing Indians.
Then he rode over the next ridge and saw the real camp - with 1500 warriors (not soldiers) pre-positioned behind the hills and ridges.
Things kinda went downhill for the 7th Calvary about then.
The OP has an interesting question actually, I agree with you regarding the above terms.
There is the tactic of the ‘come on’ which the above could be considered to be a variation of but its not the same thing as thats an attempt to lure security forces into the target area before initiating the attack but I suppose a small explosion could be considered the prelude to the main event.
The Narrow Water ambush was a particularly effective, and nasty, example:
It was also the standard tactic in WWII to burn down a city by dropping high explosive to knock buildings down, incindiary to set the rubble on fire and delayed bombs to kill the firefighters. Used by at least the German, UK and US forces, not sure about Soviet or Japanese. Don’t know who “did it first”, but it is not a new tactic for US air forces.
The term I’ve always heard referring to deliberately fusing bombs to explode some time after being dropped is delayed action. Weapons are still designed to do this, for example runway cratering bombs such as the Durandal will both explode immediately and leave delayed action secondary charges that will explode hours later, complicating the task of repairing the runway.