When you are fighting a major war, or even a minor one, things don't always go according to plan. Many accidents occur in wartime and some of them have tragic results. In just about every war, troops have been killed by what is know as "friendly fire". I personally hate that term and I am sure that we could have come up with something more to the point. Even "misdirected fire" sounds better. I just can't see anything that would indicate that being fired upon is friendly. Well, be that as it may, thousands of military men in the U.S. forces have died this way. Even civilians have been killed by accident. I thought that we might investigate a few cases concerning these mishaps, which again is not the correct word since it is not strong enough, let me rephrase this, I thought that we might look into a few of those deaths.

Glenn Miller was a famous big band leader. During World War II he was in a plane with some band members flying around to entertain the troops. Miller's plane disappeared. It is believed that the plane was over the English Channel at the time. For many years people have searched for the plane but nothing was ever found as far as I know. It was one of the great mysteries of the war. It was presumed that the plane had been shot down by the Germans. In 1985 an article appeared in the New York Times. It quoted two former members of a Royal Air Force bomber crew from World War II as saying that they thought that a British plane which was ditching it's bombs over the Channel before landing, dropped it's bombs, in error, near Miller's plane and the shock waves blew it out of the sky. They stated that they saw a plane of the same type Miller was on, fall into the Channel. The story is refuted by the Air Ministry which replied that no planes were flying that day due to bad weather, except for the returning bombers who were coming back from an aborted mission.

People don't realize it, but flying is a very tricky business in war time. Oh sure, you could get shot down, but I am not even talking about that. There are a lot of planes of all types taking off and landing and filling the unfriendly skies. An example of one of these type of accidents occurred during the Gulf War when two Royal Navy helicopters crashed into each other. Planes that are deployed off of carriers have a primary mission of protecting their ship. Civilian planes can be placed vertically and laterally to avoid other planes but carrier planes are limited to being moved vertically with very little lateral movement. This makes it more dangerous for planes landing on carriers than planes landing at an air strip. Another problem for planes during wartime is that they may all have to fly under enemy radar limiting their height and putting more planes in the same area which can lead to more accidents. Why the two copters crashed into each other remains a mystery but I am sure we can now see how something like this happens.

In 2002, in Afghanistan, American F-16s were sent on a bombing run. They dropped a laser guided bomb near Kandahar on what they thought were terrorists. The problem was that the bomb was actually dropped on Canadian soldiers. Four of the soldiers were killed and eight others were wounded. Canada was sent into mourning and six of the wounded soldiers were injured enough to be returned home. The pilots stated that they had been fired upon from the ground. Could terrorists have been near the Canadian positions and set up the Canadians? The two pilots were punished. Sometimes, during wartime, not enough information is obtained or given to the parties involved. This may have been one of those cases, since one of the pilots stated that he was never told that the Canadians were there, just that the Taliban were active in the area.

American troops are aware of the friendly fire problem. They are receiving "anti-fratricide" training. The purpose of this training is to prevent us from mistaking coalition troops for the enemy and attacking them. Why did the U.S. feel that they needed their troops to undergo this training? Maybe it was the fact that 32 attacks by us against coalition troops had taken place in the twelve months before. Most of these incidents took place at night. Is all this training working? I guess we will just have to wait and see and hope that it is effective.

When the gulf war first started, and the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq, one of the very first things that we did was shoot down a British Tornado fighter bomber. Following that, a tank battle started between two British Challenger tanks and one destroyed the other. In the first Gulf War an American A-10 completely destroyed a British armored vehicle. An article on the causes of friendly fire blamed new technology for many of the friendly fire mistakes. It asserted that when you are using equipment that only sees a thermal image of a target, you can't be 100% certain that it is an enemy target. You sometimes assume that you have no troops or equipment in a certain area, but there are cases where vehicles move faster than anticipated and land up in an advanced area where no one suspects that they are for one reason or another. These vehicles could become targets of friendly fire.

In 1994 two U.S. helicopters were patrolling the no fly zone in Iraq. The helicopters were Black Hawks. Two U.S. F-15s saw them and shot them down. The U.S. F-15 pilots had no record of any U.S. aircraft being in the area. Again information never got to where it had to go. Lack of information had caused the deaths of 26 men. What caused this mistake was the fact that the military didn't consider helicopters aircraft, so they didn't list them as aircraft being authorized to be in the no fly zone.

Will we ever be able to solve the problem of killing our own men and women by mistake? Let's hope so. Equipment is being developed, that can be put into vehicles, that would put out a signal to indicated that the vehicle is not an enemy vehicle. It would be similar to what is used in aircraft. Will this help? It should help somewhat but with it might come other problems. What if an enemy vehicle is capable of putting out the same signal? Will this allow an enemy tank to get near enough to our troops to fire on them? We have to make sure that this doesn't happen because if it does, more soldiers could die from this than from us firing on them by mistake.