Tough calls in child-soldier encounters

On Jan. 4, while surveying bomb damage from the back of a pickup truck near Khost, Afghanistan, Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman was suddenly struck down by small-arms fire – the first American serviceman to die in combat during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Yet the bullets that felled the seasoned Green Beret came allegedly not from a hardened fighter, but from a 14-year-old boy, according to unconfirmed reports from local Afghan leaders.

If true, the incident underscores how the tragic epidemic of child warriors – with an estimated 300,000 now serving as combatants in dozens of conflicts around the globe – makes it increasingly likely that US forces will encounter children in war. Yet the US military is not fully prepared, tactically or psychologically, for dealing with this "emerging threat," US officers say.

"When that 14-year-old points a weapon at you, what are you allowed to do and not to do?" says Brig. Gen. William Catto, who commands the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Va. "This is about as tough an issue as we can deal with."

The US military needs to refine its doctrine and rules of engagement in order to address the child-soldier problem, says retired Marine Col. Randy Gangle, executive director of the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO), a partnership between the Marine Corps and the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

While it is standard practice for US military personnel to defend themselves against a hostile act or intent, complications mount in gauging the risks posed by children and battling child units, as well as coping afterward with the personal trauma and public reverberations from child casualties.

As such, child soldiers are an extreme example of how US forces must adjust to an increasingly eclectic, unpredictable group of nontraditional combatants who have no uniforms, codes of conduct, or clear organization.

"The days of the professional armies are going away," General Catto said earlier this month at a Quantico conference on child soldiers.

In one of the first Western military engagements with child warriors, in late 2000 a patrol of British soldiers was surrounded and taken hostage in Sierra Leone by a rogue militia made up mainly of children. The squad commander had reportedly refused to open fire on "children armed with AK-47s." Yet a British rescue assault 16 days later left an estimated 25 to 150 enemy forces dead, including many children. "The impact of being fired on by a child is an initial shock, but the soldiers will do their job," says Maj. Jim Gray of the British Royal Marines, who served on a UN observer mission in Sierra Leone in 1999. "But if you don't care for them when they come home, it might destroy them."

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