One thing is sure: it was a classic case of mistaken identity in which 26 lives were snuffed out in seconds. What deepens the mystery is that all three types of American aircraft involved routinely train and fly together and have the capability of instantly communicating orally and electronically with each other. Special care had been taken to ensure that the aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone got it right. This was not a haphazard or sloppy operation that became so routine it was treated as a big yawn. Pilots were chalk-talked and rehearsed in detail for the special mission.
Only days before the disaster the air force general responsible for operations over the no-fly zone flew both in a helicopter and in an F-16 fighter on patrol duty to personally eyeball procedures and look for operational flaws. He gave both operations a green light. But on hot or potentially hot battlefields that contain both human beings and high-tech equipment, something invariably goes wrong.
Mistakes, misidentifications and friendlies killing friendlies are the curse of warfare. Whenever there are armed men living in a kill-or-be-killed environment, where decisions to fire are made in a split second, errors happen. This has been the experience of armed combat since cave men threw rocks at each other. But today, the rocks travel at thousands of feet per second and are awesome in their destructiveness and accuracy. As warfare becomes more high tech, it has also become more lethal, and the chance of error has multiplied exponentially.
Military historian Col. Trevor Dupuy estimates that probably 100,000 U.S. casualties in World War II were the result of Americans firing on Americans. The Korean War was even worse. The firepower was more concentrated and far more plentiful during my three years of ground combat there. My units were bombed, strafed and blasted from the Pusan perimeter to the Yalu River and back again by enthusiastic U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots and army gunners. In Vietnam, friendly-fire casualties-or “fratricide,” as the Pentagon calls them-skyrocketed to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all casualties. That was because of the close-in jungle fighting, the poorly trained and badly led American soldiers and the Pentagon’s penchant for heavy firepower.
In my paratroop battalion alone, there were at least 400 men killed or wounded by friendly air and artillery during a one-year tour. In a single fight at Dak To in 1967, paratroopers suffered 42 dead and 45 wounded from USAF bombs that missed their target. Many of the hundred other U.S. battalions had similar horror stories. The invasions of Grenada and Panama saw more casualties from friendly fire; on a percentage basis, they were even more common than those in Vietnam. During the fast-moving and high-tech air-land battles fought in the Persian Gulf, fratricide casualties were, in percentage terms, higher than in any other conflict recorded in U.S. history.
After Desert Storm, the Pentagon, for the first time, got serious about this longstanding problem and kicked off a well-thought-out program designed to reduce friendly-fire casualties. But the Pentagon’s post-cold-war shortage of money has pretty well scuttled many of the recommendations to reduce the problems such as adding “identify friend or foe” systems to armored vehicles to electronically signal other friendly aircraft and ground vehicles. In any case, the problems will never be zeroed out as long as Murphy’s Law exists: if something can go wrong, it will.
The U.S. military has the most experienced combat pilots, who undergo the toughest and most professional aviation training in the world. They’re total pros. You don’t climb into a combat aircraft’s cockpit unless you’ve been rigorously out, know your stuff and are the best U.S. aviation commanders are constantly updating procedures and refining techniques to cut down on friendly-fire casualties. Their pilots are in an almost constant state of near-combat operations, stretched from the Korean peninsula to the skies over Bosnia to the Persian Gulf. They’re used to playing hardball, and they do it damn well.
It’s easy for laptop commandos and armchair generals to criticize what happened the morning after. Some will say the pilots had itchy fingers, were reckless Rambos too eager to kick ass or that people were asleep at the switch. But for those of us who were not there aboard a fighter flying 600 knots with a possible bogey behind every cloud, on a chopper skimming across the nap of the earth or in an AWACS plane talking to dozens of aircraft, it is better to defer judgment on what happened until the Pentagon’s high-powered investigation is over. But that assessment will not bring back the dead or erase the scars and nightmares of those forever-tortured souls who will be found responsible for shooting before they identified “friend or foe.” For them, the disaster will always be a tragic, irreversible mistake.
