The Washington Post April 07, 2003
Accident Reminds Some of 1991 War; U.S. Vowed Then to Reduce Friendly Fire
By Jonathan Weisman
The worst fratricidal incident of the 18-day-old war in Iraq prompted pointed questions yesterday about whether the U.S. military has done enough since the Gulf War of 1991 to combat friendly fire casualties.
At least 21 Kurdish fighters were killed and three U.S. Special Operations troops were injured when two American warplanes bombed their convoy in northern Iraq.
But this is only the most recent incident in a conflict that has been marred by fratricidal attacks and accidental deaths.
So far, at least 13 of the 71 American service members killed in action may have been brought down by friendly fire. An Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crash last Wednesday that took the lives of six soldiers may also have been caused by friendly fire. The British have lost five service members to friendly fire.
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when 35 of the United States' 148 combat casualties were the result of friendly fire, the military pledged to do something about it. Since then, the Defense Department has abandoned the most advanced of its friendly fire avoidance technology programs. And the most sophisticated communications systems, designed to give soldiers the broadest understanding of the battlefield, are not used by the forces currently in Iraq.
"On balance, [combating friendly fire] wasn't quite the priority it should have been," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "It looks like our investments were not well targeted."
Some former military officers and friendly fire experts say technological advances will never eliminate, or even greatly mitigate, fratricidal combat losses. And as U.S. military dominance grows and combat casualty numbers shrink, the percentage of deaths by friendly fire may rise.
"There have been friendly fire incidents in every war in the history of mankind," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. "There are portions of this battle space that are enormously complex, and human beings are human beings, and things are going to happen."
Fratricide emerged quickly as an issue in the Iraq war, when on March 23, four days into the conflict, a U.S. Patriot missile shot down a British Tornado GR4 jet near the Kuwaiti border, killing the two crew members. The next day, a U.S. F-16 fired on a Patriot missile battery in central Iraq after the Patriot's radar "locked on" to the jet.
On March 25, two British soldiers died and two were critically injured when one British Challenger tank fired on another. Four days later, U.S. Central Command launched an investigation to determine whether nine Marines killed near the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah were felled by friendly fire.
The same day, an A-10 Thunderbolt attacked a British convoy of five armored vehicles, killing one soldier, wounding four and triggering some of the most bitter recriminations of the war. Lance Cpl. Steven Gerrard, a commander of one of the vehicles attacked, called the pilot a cowboy who "had absolutely no regard for human life." Another soldier questioned whether U.S. pilots "are just trigger happy."
On Thursday, a Patriot missile is believed to have shot down a Navy F/A-18, shortly after six soldiers died in a Black Hawk crash that also might have been the result of friendly fire. Also that day, an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle is believed to have fired on U.S. troops, killing three and wounding five. And a U.S. soldier examining a destroyed Iraqi tank was mistaken for an Iraqi and shot to death.
"Nothing you do can compensate for the confusion of battle, number one," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a commander in the 1991 Gulf War. "Number two, mistakes are made."
Besides, the more cumbersome the anti-fratricide effort becomes, the more likely it is that soldiers will be killed by the enemy, said Ivan Oelrich, who, in 1993, authored what may be the most exhaustive look at friendly fire for Congress's now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment. "One way to reduce friendly fire is to ask for two forms of photo ID before you shoot, but then enemy losses will go up," he half-joked. "There is a certain danger of firing when you shouldn't, but there is also a danger of not firing when you should."
After the Gulf War, the military tried for a fix. Efforts to find a technological answer were given additional incentive in 1994, when two Air Force F-15s shot down a pair of Black Hawks in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, killing 26 passengers and crew members, including United Nations observers and military officers from Britain, France and Turkey. Friendly fire incidents bedeviled the U.S. military in Afghanistan, too.
Over 10 years, the Defense Department spent $ 175 million on the Battlefield Combat Identification System (BCIS). The idea was ambitious: Tanks, armored personnel carriers, jets, helicopters and even individual soldiers would carry transmitters that would seek encrypted "friend or foe" signals before firing at their targets.
As that was under development, the Army took a broader approach, developing what it called its Force 21 Battle Command, Brigade and Below system to paint a broad picture of the battlefield for all friendly combatants. Computer screens aboard combat vehicles would show friendly forces as blue blips and enemy forces -- when found -- as red. Combat forces would become more integrated and effective. Reducing fratricide would follow not as the program's main aim, but as its result.
BCIS ended in 2001, when Pentagon officials decided that at $ 50,000 a vehicle, it would be too expensive and too unreliable. Force 21 survived, but it has yet to arrive on the battlefields of Iraq. The Army's most "digitized" unit -- the 4th Infantry Division -- will not reach Baghdad until later this month.
Instead, what troops have is decidedly low-tech: thermal imaging "patches" that show up on night-vision goggles, and light-emitting diodes and glint tape that appear under infrared light. The battlefield is also divided into grids -- called "phase lines" -- and troops are supposed to radio commanders when they cross from one to another so officers know where they are.
Given the high-profile friendly fire incidents, the second-guessing is bound to be fierce once the war is over, said John Pike, a military technology analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. The military poured money into systems to increase soldiers' lethality, to allow them to kill from longer distances and to protect themselves with body armor. But the promises made after the Gulf War about friendly fire have largely been unmet, he said.
"For fratricide having been such a big issue a dozen years ago, basically what they've got is some improved low-tech things, like thermal panels," Pike said. "But the 'gee-whiz' fact is that the available high-tech solutions to fratricide either got canceled along the way or have not been fed onto the battlefield yet."
Copyright © 2003, The Washington Post
