Battling friendly fire

Michael Moran Senior correspondent

On the second night of the Iraq war, two British Tornado ground attack aircraft began their descent into Ali al-Salem airfield in Kuwait after a successful night raid on Iraqi anti-aircraft radar sites around Baghdad. The first of the two jets, maneuvering through a “safe corridor” toward its base, landed without incident. The second was blown out of the sky by an American Patriot air defense missile, killing two RAF airmen. Their deaths were the first reported fratricide or “friendly fire” of the war, and both British and American military commanders winced over the implications.

“That was a bracing event,” says retired Col. Kenneth Allard, a military analyst for MSNBC and former president of the U.S. Army War College. “There will always be incidents like this in war, of course. But a lot of changes in command and control had been made to try to apply the lessons of the first Gulf War, and shooting down an Allied plane in the first 48 hours of the war seemed a bit ominous.”

There was some basis for these fears. Some 24 percent of all U.S. combat deaths in the 1990-91 Gulf War — 35 out of 148 killed — were so-called “blue-on-blue” incidents, primarily fast moving aircraft opening fire on allied troops or vehicles. Add friendly fire deaths among Gulf War allies, including nine British troops killed by U.S. forces, and the Gulf War percentages are even worse.

Early on, the Iraq War showed signs of keeping that bloody pace. In the first two weeks of the invasion, another Patriot missile brought down an American warplane; a U.S. F-15E dropped a bomb that killed three American artillerymen; and British tanks opened up on each other, killing two of their own.

Yet early concerns about a fratricidal bloodbath in Iraq proved unfounded. While the results were not the dramatic improvement military officials had hoped for, assessments of the combat phase of the Iraq War – which the Pentagon defines as March 20 to May 2, 2003 – found friendly fire incidents had been somewhat reduced when compared to 1991 – perhaps to 18 percent of all combat deaths.

“You’re safe in saying it was lower than in the first Gulf War,” says Danny Allen, a senior official at U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., charged with developing new systems for avoiding such accidents. “However, we all recognize that it’s still a problem that even one event is too many.”

Reaching a threshold
Improvements in command and control systems, training and the deployment of primitive ‘blue force tracking” systems like reflective tape on coalition soldiers, are credited with helping to lower the friendly fire rate during the push on Baghdad. Now, however, the military believes it is on the threshold of a breakthrough in this area as it prepared final tests on new systems that would give U.S. and allied forces the ability to recognize each other almost instantly without giving away their position to the enemy.

Allen’s “Joint Fire Division” is planning a huge multi-national exercise to test new “battlefield identification” technologies. Working with U.S. military labs, a dozen defense contractors and five NATO allies, the exercise, dubbed “Urgent Quest” and scheduled for September at Britain’s Salisbury Plain training ground, involves dozens of different systems aimed at helping aircraft, artillery and tank crews, helicopter gunships and infantry quickly identify allied forces. This is the third and last field test of four major technological approaches to the problem, to be followed by recommendations that are likely to result in major purchases from some of the largest armed forces in the world, including the American military.

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