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

"There are more beyond-visual-range engagements, since we no longer wait to see the whites of their eyes before we fire at the enemy," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.

"So there are more chances for mistaken identity."

In addition, combat jets are becoming so high-tech and complicated that it increases the danger that the pilot will have a hard time keeping up with everything - both inside and outside the cockpit.

One Gulf War veteran recalls that as one of the first commanders of a Navy air wing featuring single-seat F-18 Hornet attack aircraft, he argued for making the plane a two-seater so that there would be another set of eyes to keep track of everything. He was voted down by his fellow aviators who thought they could handle the aircraft by themselves. (It was single-seat F-16s that bombed the Canadians last April.)

At the same time, say some observers, the US military has not worked as hard as it might have to design devices able to distinguish friend from foe on the ground.

"The military services have sometimes made it a higher priority to use high-tech for lethal fire than for making it possible for US troops to talk to and recognize each other, particularly between different services," says defense expert Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. "That command-control-communications part of the effort needs to catch up with the lethal-fire part."

• Contemporary soldiers are much more likely than their predecessors to actually fire their weapons. In World War II, fewer than half of all riflemen ever fired at an enemy, according to Army studies - and military historian S. L. A. Marshall puts that figure at less than 25 percent. This was due to fear and lack of sufficient training, but also because many soldiers thought it was wrong to kill - even in wartime - according to other studies.

As a result, the Defense Department changed its training to teach soldiers to shoot reflexively (rather than reflectively) by, among other things, using man-shaped pop-up targets instead of bullseyes.

Such training "maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy," writes Maj. Peter Kilner (USA) in a recent edition of Military Review, a publication of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. "Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so."

The result? Firing rates rose to 55 percent in Korea and 90 percent in Vietnam. With additional bullets-per-soldier flying around, the risk of friendly-fire grows.

It's this combination of increasingly lethal firepower, fluid battlefields, complex communications, and the notorious "fog of war" that can add up to friendly fire losses.

"Frequently the cause is an interaction of individual error and the operating environment," says Marcus Corbin, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

"Is aggressive action being informally pushed or downplayed?" Mr. Corbin asks. "Is the equipment too complex, or does it give too much information to process effectively in the stress of combat?"

Those who may fight with American forces in Iraq are concerned about friendly fire as well.

Former British Gulf War commander Andrew Larpent recently accused the Ministry of Defense of "serious negligence" in failing to produce an "identification friend or foe" system to prevent such accidental casualties. Lt. Colonel Larpent commanded a unit in the Gulf War that saw nine soldiers killed and 12 seriously wounded when they were mistakenly attacked by a US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt tank-buster aircraft.

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph last week, Larpent wrote: "Our chiefs of staff and politicians should consider very carefully ... how they will answer to the nation if yet more British soldiers become casualties in similar circumstances."

It's a warning heard by American officials as well.

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