IT KILLED 35 troops during Operation Desert Storm and was considered one of the biggest problems facing U.S. forces on the battlefield. A decade later, little has changed. The U.S. military calls it “blue on blue”–but most people know it as “friendly fire” or “fratricide.” The problem of friendly forces killing their own has been a danger throughout history. Though the rate of friendly fire deaths has declined since the Gulf War, the combination of more rapid movement on the battlefield, more precise weaponry, and the increasingly close ranges within which these weapons are being employed in modern warfare has made the chance of fratricide more dangerous–and more deadly.
U.S. commanders were keenly aware of the dilemma in Iraq. Still, forces that deployed during the war were often ill prepared to deal with the potential for blue-on-blue strikes. Sometimes life and death hung in the precarious balance between the gut feeling of a Marine or soldier on the ground and a pilot’s targeting computer in the air.
During the Vietnam war U.S. aircraft and some troops on the ground carried a system called Identification Friend or Foe–essentially a radio transponder that sent a coded message to another transponder that identified the sender as a friendly aircraft. These systems were sometimes transferred to ground units to let aircraft high above know who the good guys were in the dirt. But IFF systems were prone to interference and the codes could be broken or mimicked. Over the years, various updated versions of the IFF system were developed, but never universally employed.
Decades later, both U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq were forced to settle for more low-tech approaches to the dilemma.
Standardized communications such as the so-called “nine-line” brief–a detailed list of coordinates dictated to pilots by ground units calling for close air support; well defined forward lines of control and “kill boxes” that designate where friendly troops are positioned and where U.S. forces are free to engage any target that’s moving; and some ingenious tricks such as affixing strips of tape to helmets and jackets that glow green when viewed through night vision goggles are but a few of the methods by which U.S, and coalition forces kept from killing one another in the wide open deserts and village warrens of Iraq.
But that still didn’t prevent blue-on-blue casualties. At least two British fighters were shot down when Patriot missile batteries mistook them for Iraqi SCUDs; a Marine AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter shot and disabled an American M1A1 Abrams tank, injuring its crew; and at least six Marines were killed when an Air Force A-10 Warthog attack jet engaged them during the battle of An Nasiriyah on March 22.
New systems are being supplied to forces in Iraq such as the Blue Force Tracker–the most modern version of the IFF–and futuristic technologies are being developed which could give weapon sights a “shoot, no-shoot” signal or even disable the weapon if it is pointed at blue forces. But the U.S. military is still a long way from getting the problem licked.
“We’re the most technologically advanced country in the world,” remarked the Marines’ top commander in Iraq during an interview at his Camp Babylon headquarters. “Shame on us as we continue to kill our young people because we haven’t developed something that ‘beeps’ or ‘squawks’ or sends out a transmission or something that tells our troops ‘oops, that’s a friendly vehicle.'”
A recently concluded Joint Forces Command exercise conducted in Gulf waters off Florida and meant to tackle the problem is a start. But if the post-1991 Gulf War efforts at eliminating friendly fire are any indication of this nation’s progress, the services still have a long way to go.
Christian Lowe is a Staff Writer for Army Times Publishing Company and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. He recently returned from a six-week assignment to Iraq.
