Reading about the 2 U.S. soldiers being killed by our own bombs. Got me wondering. What happens next? Is there a formal procedure?
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011205/ts/afghan_americans_killed.html
“Friendly Fire” fatalities are very common in war. I think more Americans were lost to friendly fire in the Gulf than were killed by the Iraqis.
Unless the bomber pilots were grossly negligent, nothing will happen. It was an unfortunate incident. If the bomber pilots were negligent in some way, they will be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has its own charges and punishments. It’s *highly unlikely that anyone would do jail time over something like this, and much more likely that they’d just wind up with a note on their service record or some other administrative punishment.
Having read the article, I don’t believe the pilots will be charged with anything. It looks like an honest accident - either a guidance failure in the bomb, or an incorrect drop. Either way, stuff like that happens. A battlefield is a dangerous place for everyone.
I think that it was a guidance failure of one bomb, so the bomber pilot or bombedier should not be faulted. All the other bombs went where they were supposed to. These things can and will happen in any war. So let us not put the blame on anyone. They are doing their jobs as best they know how to do them.
The pilot of the A-10 who attacked two British IFVs during the Gulf War, killing nine and wounding eleven, was never prosecuted. That was a deliberate attack based on mistaken identity. This was, I’m led to believe, an entirely accidental bombing.
It’s war. Lots of people die in war: enemies, civilians, innocents. If you could be prosecuted for killing someone wrong accidentally, who’d fight? Of course if you deliberately dropped a big bomb on a city just to see people die they’d prosecute your behind. Anyway, the military has their own tribunals, no Johnny Cochrans there.
The procedure will be to check on the failure. If it waa equipement failure then testing and other procedures regarding the mechanics of the equipment will be checked for adequacy.
If it was a matter of misidentification of the target, training will be reviewed to see if the process can be improved.
Every effort is made to correct such mistakes, but equipment fails and will continue to fail. People make mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. The thing to do is reduce such things as far as possible (without stopping all activity before it starts).
I don’t pretend to know the first thing about military law, but a google search for “UCMJ” turned up this:
http://jaglink.jag.af.mil/ucmj2.htm#919. ART. 191. MANSLAUGHTER
I suspect if you look into this more deeply you will find all sorts of exceptions in the case of personnel who are on an authorized operational mission in a combat zone.
I’d like to point out that this is another example of why the media’s approval ratings are so low with the American people. Three soldiers were killed by accident, bringing the total U.S. casualties to FOUR, while the enemy has suffered tens of thousands of casualties.
Yet CNN has devoted almost the entire day today to coverage of ‘what is going wrong’ in the war. Asking stupid questions like, “If FOX tv can track a hockey puck on the ice, why can’t we keep track of where all our soldiers are on a battlefield?”
There was a time during wars when the media would play up the military’s successes and downplay the losses for the good of the war effort. Now it seems like they are running around frantically trying to dig up any dirt on the military that they can, and heavily over-covering whatever military failures there are.
God help us if the military actually loses a battle and gets overrun and loses a few hundred people. The media will try and turn it into the story of the century.
Perhaps, and perhaps those kinds of circumstances are taken into account when determining what constitutes “culpable negligence.”
But I don’t really know.