>Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field
Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest.
ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.
Most orders to fire will be discretionary, in both if, when and with what to engage it’s fairly rare for an order to engage to be explicit and in those cases they can still request confirmation including from higher up in the chain of command (depending on who is actually commanding the mission) only if it’s a direct order would they have to follow it at that point unless it’s an illegal order.
Pilots drone or not have the best situational awareness and they often scrub missions and even abort after launch if the situation changes to what they would consider unacceptable.
Essentially any type of “fire at will” order is discretionary.
Pilots didn’t sign up to blow up schools and hospitals and they can and are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties they can and do question the intelligence and information which lead to authorizing the strike they’ll asses the strike package and they will assess the situation and the target to the best of their abilities before engaging.
Shit does happen, mistakes are made but they are by far not the norm.
Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets?
The laws both national and international that govern military operations don’t put civilian lives a head of military operations in all cases.
I’m not American but from my experience we had to do a lot of work for risk reduction when planning missions, essentially we perform and throughly document the process in which we reduce the risk of collateral damage that came in form of selecting a strike package to minimize the damage, choosing a time that would ensure minimal non-combatants in the AO and also providing the parameters of engagement to the pilots based on the value of the target.
I can say that out of the approved strikes close to 50% of them were aborted last minute and even after munition launch due to the pilots giving us the no-clear in the last moment and then essentially missing the window of opportunity.
> Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets?
I'm not involved with the military in any way, shape or form. My guess would be that if such a thing happened, it would be buried (see Chelsea Manning, Abu Ghraib etc).
You did say though that pilots are directly liable for any collateral damage, so I was curious as to whether that had any real meaning - would a pilot actually face charges (military or criminal) if they, for example, negligently fired upon the wrong building, or failed to abort launching against a pre-approved target that it later turned out was obviously a school, hospital, wedding party, etc?
Pilots for the most part don’t take on missions that are in clear violation of the military code of conduct and international law, mistakes happen but they are mistakes.
If a pilot tracks a school bus that loaded a bunch of kids and heading into town and calls it a military target and blows it up they will be charged.
Investigations also happen quite often, quite often they don’t result in anything because everyone did what they were supposed to do to reduce the risk and make the best judgment call based on the information they had.
You can’t charge people for making a mistake as shitty as you might think it is war gets people killed by definition and for the most part professional soldiers do what they can to make sure that the people who die are combatants.
Infantryman here, so I can't quite speak to how pilots make their decisions (and I think the sibling comment answers this pretty well).
However, I can attest that pilots routinely provide us infantrymen with information that we weigh very heavily in our decision to engage. Moreover, it is often the case that air-strikes fall under the "close air support" (CAS) category, which in turn means the aircraft shoots where and when the ground troops request it.
In other words: discretion is what separates the professional soldier from the disorganized militia.
Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest.
ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.