My bad, I didn't read any "I think" type statements in your posts; in fact, your one post made it sound like you actually knew what the requirements for the employment of lethal force was. Looking at your profile, I now see that you were in armor. Even in armor, I am pretty sure that once the battle was commenced, the individual tank commander was responsible for determining who got shot at (not some O-5). My understanding is that plenty of tanks shot before being "fired upon".

If you're not going to supplement what you don't know with the knowledge offered in posts from those that do know (reference the several responses to your first post), your subsequent attempts at just putting your thoughts out there will also fall short.

Just so you know, there is no situation in combat operations and/or employment of weapons that is not affected by (or potentially affected by) the fog and friction of war. So as to not hijack the thread, I'll summarize; those who shoot make the decision to shoot or not do so using as much information as possible. With today's technology, that information can come from many on-board and off-board sources. Because the services have congressionally-mandated manpower caps, they have been resorting to contractor support to augment mostly non-deployable positions (so as to free those bodies to man deployable/military-specific positions). Because those contractors can use today's technology to provide some of that information to the shooter real-time, they can also provide bad information (such as incorrect FMV analysis) that could lead the shooter to mis-employ weapons. Because these contractors are in the kill-chain (which has a legal definition), there is a large grey area as to what their liability (if any) should be. Again, this is all important because there is no situation in real-life that meets your idea of "we're not talking about fluid combat situations. We're talking about finding a high value target and then launching an attack to take out said target. A flying sniper if you you will."