Friendly Fire
Imagine you’re an active member of our military and your platoon is out on an objective at night. You are keeping on your toes because just this morning your squad was attacked and one of your very good friends died. You and others see movement in the distance and your platoon leader starts shooting at the target and your comrades quickly join as the target shoots back. Your fighting for your life and country while bullets whizz past your nose. Your also fighting for the soldiers who died in this war and thinking how much you just want to kill these guys and get the heck back to your friends and family. As they eventually stop returning fire, your platoon moves in and finds that you have wounded and killed fellow Americans. In war, these situations are very hard to deal with. Many times the public blames this on the soldiers responsible because it seems the most logical option. The public is not out there in the battlefield though, on the edge fighting for their lives. I say that friendly fire is inevitable. There will always be some sort of situation that will result in friendly fire. The Department of Defense however is working on new identification technologies and strategies to further avoid these situations of fratricide. Even though friendly fire is inevitable, the Department of Defense needs to team up with our allies and our military to further reduce fratricide incidents in our wars by using new technologies and strategies.
Fratricide has always been an issue in every war. Fratricide, or friendly fire, is when members of the same side confuse the other for the enemy in combat and attack them. This can happen in many ways but most common in our wars are air strikes against our ground troops and ground to ground confusions. Mostly, the main reason why this confusion happens is when the men/women responsible have to make a quick decision in combat. In the book “Where Men Win Glory” Krakauer writes of a friendly fire situation in the battle of Nasiriyah. Radio communications broke down because “overexcited [marines] inadvertently thumbed the “talk” buttons on their microphones even when they weren't speaking- a phenomenon known as “hot milking””(Krakauer 223), thus when a marine called in air support the radio communicator decided to target these vehicles that were past their position thinking it was enemy vehicles (Krakauer 223-224). Sadly the air strike killed many of fellow marines. This is just and example of many mis-identifications from aircraft and the persons responsible for calling in the attack. In Vietnam, there was much confusion because the land was so hard to navigate and maneuver through and sometimes our military got turned around and attacked our own men (Killed by Their Comrades). “Sometimes in Vietnam my boys and I dodged more American stuff than enemy fire” (Killed by Their Comrades quoting Hackworth). These situations along with many others have occurred in our wars because people had to make quick decisions to try to save lives, just sometimes it actually ends many.
What if that day in Nasiriyah, the two A-10 Warthogs had a device that would tell them before they attacked the targets that they were friendly? If we can create these devices this would reduce our fratricide percentage immensely by reducing confusion in battle. Ever since Operation Desert Storm occurred where “fratricide accounted for about 24 percent of U.S. fatalities” (Li), The Department of Defense has worked with our military and allies to come up with such technology. “Their efforts have focused on developing new equipment and technologies as well as new tactics, training, techniques and other solutions” (Li). But “as the memory of the Gulf War receded, so did the urgency of addressing the fratricide issue” (Mazzetti). When we were in the period between wars, the Department of Defense relaxed and there was no urgency to get anything done with this issue. “The military has focused on a long-term technology fix, but it has yet to field a comprehensive short term solution” (Mazzetti), but making this long-term technology has many requirements. First off these technologies need to “give us more info without letting the enemy attain more than us”(Li). If we install some sort of device in all of our soldiers to tell them from the enemy in combat and one of them is taken prisoner, the enemy could use this device against us in some way like being able to reverse it and locate American troops. Or if we use one of the ideas the Department of Defense had like using radio transmissions, the enemy could use our radios they obtain to get an advantage on our own. “These technologies also need to “cooperate with NATO alliance”’ (Li) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In other words these technologies also need to identify other countries troops along with our own to avoid “friendly fire during coalition operations” (Li). Another importance is to be compatible. They cannot be to intricate and complicated to operate. Battles are very fast and stressful as you can imagine. These systems need to be easy to use so troops don't spend 10 min trying to figure out what side the convoy is on approaching their position. Yet the “Department of Defense lacks a blueprint or plan of action to develop a family of combat identification systems” (Li). Without this necessary plan of action the Department of Defense could find themselves with with “combat identification systems that are duplicative, not interoperable, and unnecessarily costly to maintain” (Li).
So why doesn't the Department of Defense adopt this plan of action and create these effective systems that meet the requirements that they laid our in front of them? Money. The lack of funding is due to the “difficulty of reflecting such efforts in DOD’s budgets in a timely manner and addressing competing service funding priorities” (Li). “Why wouldn’t our Department of Defense devote more money if this issue is so hard to deal with and occurs so often?” (Hill). Even though fratricide is a huge problem in our wars, the Department of Defense still doesn't find the urge to put most of their funding into solving this issue. An example of that is when the army created the Battlefield Combat Identification Systems. The Battlefield Combat Identification System was a microwave system that was going to be installed on every vehicle to identify other friendly vehicles, but the program was cut in 2002 to pay for future, high-tech systems (Mazzetti). Others argue that the problem is our training instead of our technology (Mazzetti). Even though our the U.S. military has the most experienced combat pilots who undergo the toughest and most professional aviation training in the world (Hackworth) and our ground troops are some of the best trained in the world as well (Li) there are still mistakes made. The military is constantly going through exercises to avoid friendly fire in our wars. The carryover to actual battlefield situations however is the complication. It is easy not to get nervous during a basketball practice, but when your on the free throw line and your teams down two in the championship game everything changes. They need to put our troops through more pressure situations that will carry over to the battle field. The Department of Defense needs to focus on re-funding programs that create new friendly fire reducing technologies, focus less on meeting the long-term requirements of these technologies, and work to create new strategies and fratricide incidents will decrease indefinitely.
When you hear about events of friendly fire, many will just go ahead and blame the soldiers responsible. They were the trigger happy soldiers who killed all those men, or that was the guy who ordered the air strike that killed that platoon. Have you ever thought about the situation they are in? It’s easy for us Americans who sit on the couch at home watching the news on how 10 people died again today from friendly fire (Hackworth). I admit I myself used to be like “wow our army is so disorganized if we keep having these mis identifications of our own men.” Most of us however have never put ourselves in their shoes. Men on active duty are in constant pressure during wars. Even when they sleep they always have to be ready for an ambush or to mount up and go support other platoons or squads. “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” (Hackworth). When you are in battle, there is no room for hesitations. You have to go with your gut many times and try to do what is right for the men and women you are fighting with. Yet many times that decision is the wrong one. We are only human, every human makes mistakes. This is also very “demoralizing for the troops as well as the people in America” (Hill) Imagine you killing one of your own men and having to deal with that the rest of your life? So if you want to be critical and point fingers and say that it is their fault because they actually were the ones to pull the trigger, then look at the three fingers pointing back at yourself. If you were a trained solider fighting for you life and the life of your comrades you would most likely make many of the same situations. Don’t be so quick to blame it all on the soldiers, everyone makes mistakes, they’re mistakes are just fatal.
Is friendly fire inevitable? Should we just throw in the towel and just tell everyone it is going to happen anyway? It is a truth that there is no way we can block out friendly fire completely but throwing in the towel is just throwing lives away. It’s true “the problem will never be zeroed out as long a Murphy's Law exists: if something can go wrong, it will” (Hackworth), but we can always reduce this problem. As I stated before, if the military and the Department of Defense works on new technologies and strategies, the percent of fratricide incidents will go down, but we can not give the false hope of eliminating the problem completely. With this new technology, warfare will become more high tech and the chance of error will multiply exponentially (Hackworth). So as “the U.S. overpowers it enemies with torrents of bombs and bullets, the greater the risk of fratricide” (Mazzetti). So with trying to come up with more and more ways to overpower our enemies and reduce fratricide we are still creating more ways that it can happen. Friendly fire will never be inevitable, but we still have to try to reduce it as much as possible.
With our Department of Defense and our military working hard on new technologies and strategies, friendly fire will be reduced in our wars. We have the best trained soldiers in the world, yet it is impossible to erase the problem completely due to our military always trying to overpower our opponents with new weapons. If the Department of Defense funds this issue and everyone cooperates, this horrible tragedy will be reduced. Hopefully sooner rather than later, our county will hear less and less about friendly fire.
Works Cited
Krakauer, Jon. Where Men Win Glory. New York: Random House, 2009.
Li, Allen. "Combat Identification Systems: Strengthened Management Efforts Needed to Ensure Required Capabilities: GAO-01-632." GAO Reports (2001): 1. Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
Hackworth, David H. "Don't blame the fighter jocks." Newsweek 25 Apr. 1994: 27. Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
Mazzetti, Mark. "FRIENDLY FIRE." U.S. News & World Report 134.8 (2003): 17. Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
"Killed by their comrades." Newsweek 118.21 (1991): 45. Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.
Hill, Fenton. Interview by Josh Hill.
