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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
What the Pentagon isn't telling you about friendly fire.
Apr 5, 2004 | The battle for An Nasiriyah, Iraq, in March 2003, best known for the digitally recorded rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch nine days later, was supposed to be the Pentagon's shining first moment of the new and controversial war. And yet, underneath the gripping Lynch rescue saga lies one of the great tragedies of the war: Nasiriyah was also the site of the deadliest outbreak of friendly fire since Vietnam. The long-awaited investigation of the incident, finally released last week by U.S. Central Command, singles out only a misoriented Marine forward air controller for the tragedy, but this simplistic explanation is one that many in the ranks find suspect.
Minus Jessica Lynch, the battle of An Nasiriyah isn't the type of story that Americans as a whole like to hear. Beneath the seductive mythology of Yankee know-how lies a murky, little-probed reality: On the modern battlefield, friendly fire is so pervasive that the greatest threat to American servicemen is often their own comrades. For reasons that have never fully been explained, the United States has never developed technologies to aid pilots and other trigger pullers in distinguishing our friends from our foes. Sometimes it seems as if our war machine can do everything but stop.
The chaos of An Nasiriyah was typical. The Marines of Charlie Company had been cut off from their comrades early in the battle, fighting for their lives behind enemy lines for two hours before the vaunted American air armada finally showed up. They had already taken five wounded and lost a mechanized vehicle by the time they heard the friendly jet's fire echoing against the buildings. It was an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt, a gangly airplane expressly designed to kill tanks. Its huge 30 mm cannon shot slugs the size of milk jugs, and the Marines hoped that as it flew low it would kill the scores of fedayeen who were swarming around them.
Then the Thunderbolt pressed its attack, and it became clear that it was the Marines, not the fedayeen, that the pilot was aiming at.
"Abort air! Abort air!" one of Charlie's officers screamed into the black handset of his radio, while others fired red flares into the air, but the Thunderbolt made seven more gun runs that day. Eyewitnesses say the American jet killed 10 U.S. Marines -- although because of the disparate fire from friendlies, fedayeen and the Thunderbolt, it was impossible to tell with any semblance of clinical certainty who had shot whom.
Taken in context, the incident at Nasiriyah seems to fit into a larger pattern of overwhelming American power and technology, intersecting with a pervasive fog of war. Whereas in all of America's previous wars, the fratricide rate hovered between 2 and 12 percent of the total casualties suffered, in Operation Desert Storm this figure jumped to 24 percent. Further, some Gulf War veterans contend that the 24 percent figure is too low and point to instances where commanders urged their troops to keep a lid on accusations of friendly fire for fear of the crisis of confidence that it might engender in the ranks. In one way, friendly fire is like rape on college campuses: It is frequently underreported.
Comparing Nasiriyah to the Gulf War's deadliest engagement, the battle for Khafji, one sees a familiar script emerging: American and Iraqi forces clash unexpectedly, and in the ensuing chaos, the Iraqis are defeated but with an unnecessary loss of American lives via fratricide. All 11 U.S. Marines who lost their lives at Khafji in 1991 did so by friendly fire, seven of them notably by an Air Force A-10.
For many Marines, the Air Force A-10 has become the symbol of all that is wrong with the modern American fighting machine. To them, it seems that whenever A-10s show up, their buddies start dying. Critics of the A-10 point to ill-trained pilots who aren't proficient in distinguishing friendly fighting vehicles from enemy ones and who don't train alongside their Marine counterparts nearly enough. Lt. Col. Jim Braden, a Marine attack helicopter squadron commander who helped orchestrate the latter stages of the Nasiriyah battle, personally ordered two A-10 pilots to abort a rushed airstrike there. Braden says, "A lot of Air Force pilots I've worked with just seem to be looking for an excuse to pull the trigger and aren't really concerned about where friendlies are located. Their attitude is 'Just give me a GPS grid coordinate and let me do my thing.'" And while he concedes that, on the whole, Air Force pilots are a committed, professional bunch, he argues that their perception of ground-support tactics varies widely from that of chest-thumping Marine pilots who pride themselves on their nap of the earth modus operandi.
The A-10 controversy has also had ramifications on the larger American-led coalition in Iraq. In January 2003 -- two months before the battle for Nasiriyah -- British Army Lt. Col. Andrew Larpent, whose unit suffered nine dead and 12 wounded when an U.S. Air Force A-10 mistook them for enemy troops in 1991, called on the British military to implement a system to protect British troops from American fighter pilots before sending them into battle in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Asked to characterize the nature of problem, Larpent responded, "It is a lack of care by U.S. pilots who should take more care."
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