Mark Begich and Susan Collins support the troops (really)
“I am troubled if we are putting our troops at greater risk in order to go to such extremes to avoid Afghan casualties,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who at a hearing last week urged Pentagon leaders to determine whether new rules of engagement — the classified directives that guide the use of force — are unnecessarily endangering U.S. troops.
As military operations intensified in Afghanistan this summer, the number of times that coalition troops came under fire increased more than 30 percent compared with the summer of 2008, but the number of air munitions used fell by nearly 50 percent, according to Air Force data. When troops are in firefights, warplanes often shoot flares or fly low in a “show of force” to temporarily frighten insurgents away.
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