The Boston Globe April 08, 2003
Some analysts see greater risks with latest weapons
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON -- Between eight and 28 US and British military personnel out of 116 killed in the Iraq war have fallen to friendly fire, according to military and news reports.
Two more US Marines attempting to secure bridges on the eastern fringe of Baghdad were killed yesterday in what was suspected to be another such incident, when artillery punched through their armored vehicle. Eighteen Kurdish fighters were killed Sunday along with at least one US soldier in the bloodiest friendly fire incident of the war.
''There have been friendly fire incidents in every war in the history of mankind,'' Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters last week. ''Human beings are human beings. And things are going to happen. And it's always been so, and it will be so this time. It's always sad and tragic and your heart breaks.''
It is a problem as old as organized combat, but some military experts argue that as the US and its allies have become more efficiently deadly for the enemy, it has carried over for their friends.
''When you increase the lethality of your weapons, the immediate cost of each error of friendly fire goes up, because you don't miss,'' said retired Army Brigadier General John Reppert, executive director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School.
Reppert recalled participating in a heavy machine-gun battle in Vietnam with a group of enemy several hundred meters distant. After 30 minutes and thousands of rounds fired, he discovered that he was exchanging fire with another American position. ''Those kinds of near-misses happen less today because our rounds go where we want them to go,'' he said.
The increased lethality of US weaponry was on display in Sunday's occurence, as well as in two other cases where Patriot missiles apparently shot down allied jets. While identifying signals should have prevented such mistakes -- and another where a US F-16 hit a Patriot installation but didn't cause any casualties -- the breakdown in communication remains a mystery.
''The system has turned on itself and we're eating our own,'' said Robert David Steele, a retired CIA officer who runs OSS.net, a website that advocates for intelligence reform.
Part of the problem, he said, is that the US has invested a great deal in creating incredibly accurate, lethal weapons, but the ability to obtain and process the intelligence needed to identify targets has not kept pace.
''For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost -- that's where we're going with this,'' he said.
Indeed, the Department of Defense invested $175 million in the Battlefield Combat Identification System, called BCIS, before canceling the project in 2001 for cost reasons.
Soldiers, vehicles and aircraft all would have carried secure transmitters identifying them as friendly forces. Instead, US forces have put cheaper thermal panels on vehicles that will show up if the vehicles are viewed through thermal imaging systems used for targeting by many allied forces.
The Fourth Infantry Division, the Army's ''digital division,'' is outfitted with equipment that is supposed to allow them to identify and track each other, but they are still being deployed to Iraq.
''They're going to revisit the BCIS cancellation issue,'' said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. ''They're certainly going to look at how well the 4th mechanized division does when it gets out on the battlefield.''
But others questioned the extent to which the problem will be addressed once the war in Iraq is concluded.
''It's something that has everybody's attention, from the president on down, during the fight. The moment the fight is over, it's forgotten,'' said David Hackworth, a retired US Army colonel who now writes a syndicated column.
And other specialists cautioned that regardless of technological advances, the underlying cause of many friendly fire incidents remains human error. For example, special forces operatives in northern Iraq said after Sunday's incident that air force pilots have been showing signs of weariness after two weeks of nearly round-the-clock strikes.
''Normally it's not the technology to blame. It's the people using it,'' said Jason Amerine, a special forces team captain who served in Afghanistan and is taking this year for graduate studies. ''Any guy who has even been to a firing range for training at some point has fired off a round a little too close for comfort to his fellow soldiers. The slightest mistake with a 2,000-pound bomb is going to get people killed. I wouldn't doubt that some of the accidents are a repeat of accidents we've made before. We're just going to keep on doing that to ourselves. It's a reflection of the freedoms we have to use the munitions.''
Amerine added: ''It's unfortunately the number of casualties we've suffered because of our own fire, but it will be far lower than if we hadn't used this technology.''
John Donnelly of the Globe staff contributed to this report; David Filipov of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Kanlian, Iraq.
Copyright © 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
