In era of high-tech warfare, 'friendly fire' risk grows

Getting word that a loved one has been killed or wounded in wartime is devastating. Finding out that the casualty was caused by comrades can be even worse.

Such "friendly fire" is at issue in a military proceeding that began Monday in Louisiana to determine whether two American pilots should be court martialed for accidentally killing four Canadian troops and injuring eight in a bomb attack near Kandahar, Afghanistan, last April.

As the US prepares for war in Iraq, the issue of friendly fire is much on the minds of military leaders and defense experts - particularly since such incidents, as a portion of overall casualties, are growing.

There's a confluence of reasons behind the trend, which became obvious during the Gulf War (in which friendly fire accounted for 24 percent of US combat deaths - much higher than in previous wars), continued in Afghanistan, and may plague any war in Iraq.

• The United States is dealing with enemies and situations where casualties due to hostile fire are diminishing. American forces are in a position of overwhelming superiority, giving enemies less opportunity to do damage. So friendly fire incidents and other war-zone accidents - which can be much harder to deal with psychologically and politically - are becoming a greater fraction of the whole.

Before the Gulf War, the Pentagon estimated that a battle to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait would involve more than 600,000 US troops and result in as many as 20,000 casualties (deaths and injuries). Instead, the ground war was over in 100 hours, and the US lost just 147 troops during the hostilities.

But among those, 35 were killed by their own forces.

"To put it simply, we are doing all the meaningful shooting," says Daniel Goure, defense analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "When the enemy can't kill anything, a single friendly casualty looms large." Dr. Goure also points to an increase in night combat. "Although we can see at night," he says, "we can't always tell who is who."

British and other allied soldiers were lost to friendly fire as well, and thousands more American troops later succumbed to "Gulf War syndrome" - the suspected consequence of US actions such as destroying Iraqi chemical stocks and firing cannon rounds made of depleted uranium, exposing friendly troops to low-level radiation.

This record contrasts sharply with the friendly-fire record from World War II through Vietnam, when such casualties amounted to less than 3 percent of the total. In the Gulf War, more than 17 percent of American casualties were due to friendly fire. This was particularly true in the brief ground war - and especially in the intense tank battles, where more than three-quarters of all damage to US armored vehicles was the result of fratricide.

• Modern war seldom involves "front lines" any more. Instead, fights take place in a violent, confusing swirl of friends and foes, sometimes directed from afar with imperfect communications systems, and often in settings that include opponents indistinguishable from civilians.

"The flaw here is our lack of intimate understanding of the human terrain," says Larry Seaquist, retired Navy warship commander and Pentagon strategist. "While the American military is touting their 'total situational awareness' conferred by advanced sensors, we still have only a very hazy understanding of the human realities."

Captain Seaquist points to the attack on the Chinese embassy during NATO's Kosovo-Serb war and to a series of friendly fire incidents in Afghanistan.

"Expect a lot more of this in Iraq," he says.

• Perversely, advances in technology can increase the danger of friendly fire. For instance, with lasers and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, combatants are apt to feel more confident that they can come close to their own troops.

One example: Shortly after US troops went to war in Afghanistan, a 2,000-pound bomb wounded a number of US and allied soldiers fighting to gain control of a prison compound near Mazar-e Sharif. The accident was caused when a soldier changed the batteries in his GPS unit and neglected to reset the coordinates, which meant that the bomb (which came from a US aircraft) was directed to his position rather than that of the nearby enemy.

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