El Paso Times April 04, 2003
Loss of Navy jet brings missile system inquiry
By Charles K. Wilson
U.S. officials on Thursday began an investigation to determine whether a Patriot missile brought down an American warplane during combat operations near Karbala in central Iraq.
If a Patriot missile is to blame, it would be the third "friendly fire" incident involving the Army air defense weapon, whose crews train at Fort Bliss, since Operation Iraqi Freedom began March 19. Most of the Patriot missile batteries are stationed at Fort Bliss.
The loss of the Navy F-18C Hornet Wednesday pointed as well to the difficulty of avoiding combat losses from friendly fire, even on a high-tech battlefield.
"It seems strange that the Patriot system decided to open up twice on friendly aircraft," said Patrick Garrett, a military analyst at Globalsecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based research group that focuses on defense issues, in reaction to Thursday's reports from Iraq. "Whether it's because it's friend-or-foe system wasn't operating or what, that has to be looked into.
"Keep in mind that friendly fire is a tragic reality of warfare. (Military planners) can take steps to minimize it, but it will never be something abolished from war."
Initial reports from the Pentagon suggested an Iraqi missile had knocked the Hornet from the sky over Karbala, a town that U.S. ground forces had fought their way through the day before. No information was available on the pilot, but standard U.S. military procedure is to launch search-and-rescue missions for downed pilots. Iraqi officials, meanwhile, said that one of their missiles hit the Hornet.
"It's too early for me to be able to determine what the cause was," Central Command's Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters Thursday at Camp al Sayliyah, Qatar.
The first reports were pulled back because Patriot missile batteries, from rear-guard positions, were at work defending the forward lines, Brooks said. He said there were both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air (Patriot) launches at the time the Hornet was lost.
A Central Command spokeswoman from Kuwait late Thursday said she had no information on the type of mission the Hornet, from the USS Kitty Hawk, was flying or which version of the Patriot missile was in use by American forces. Fort Bliss' public affairs office had no information on the incident.
Victoria Samson, a research associate at the Center for Defense Information, said some of the answers to the Hornet tragedy will depend -- if a U.S. missile was involved -- on which version of the Patriot was fired.
Several versions are on the battlefield, she said, and the radar control and targeting is different for each one. Unfinished testing could be a factor, too, Samson said from the Washington, D.C.-based group, which studies high-tech military hardware.
"I think that (friendly fire incidents) are unavoidable, but I think there are ways you can try to ameliorate it," Samson said. "In the Patriot's case, it did not finish operational testing, and there were concerns about its capability. ... It's not surprising these problems keep popping up."
Jean Offutt, a spokeswoman for Fort Bliss, said said she was unaware of any testing scheduled for the near future. The Patriots "are getting their real tests right now," she said. U.S. officials have said Patriots have hit every missile they have "engaged" so far.
The first two friendly fire incidents remain under investigation. March 23, a Patriot hit a British Tornado GR4, killing its two pilots. March 24, an American jet fighter destroyed the radar unit of Patriot battery. There were no injuries in that incident. A team from Fort Bliss was sent to the Middle East to help investigate the Tornado incident.
In the Tornado attack, two concerns have been raised: whether the Tornado's identify-friend-or-foe system failed or whether the Patriot's radar did not recognize the British fighter. In the second, officials are looking into why the Patriot radar locked on to the jet fighter, which then fired on the unmanned unit.
Copyright © 2003, El Paso Times, a division of Gannett Texas L.P.
