friendly fire?

The BBQ Pit
1

What the fuck is friendly fire all about?
Don’t get me wrong I’m not totally against the war, but I’m not convinced that I’m for it, yes Saddam is a fuckwit and something needs to be done about him, Whether war is the best solution I don’t know but.
What is wrong is that every time there is conflict and the British back up the Americans the Americans manage to kill more Brits than the fuckin enemy does?
How the fuck does that work? I mean for fuck sake, I can almost understand the Americans doing it because they are so trigger happy that I can imagine a conversation being: -
“Hey Chip, do recognise that plane/tank/soldier?”
“Yo Chad, I couldn’t give a fuck who’s it is, I don’t think it’s flyin’ the stars an stripes so just blast them!”
But now even the Brits are blowing up their own tanks.:confused:
Am I the only one who doesn’t understand this?
How can you not see that a big fuck off tank is one of your own?
Would it happen in the NFL? Would a Quarter back throw the ball to the opposition
“Gees, sorry coach I didn’t realise they were on the other team!”
Same colors = same team. It’s really that simple.

And another point if George “dubba ya” could have managed to catch Osama would he still want a war with Iraq?

2

No. There are others that apparently can’t grasp military history.

Well, war tends to be somewhat confusing at times. This type of thing happens to every army.

Um, no it’s not.
PS> The following was posted by Hypocolius over at JREF, and it sums this up nicely: Soldiers have been accidentally killed by their own side, in war and peace, ever since Ug accidently hit his brother Og over the head with a tree when he was attempting to ambush Grunt from the neighbouring valley. The only difference these days is that the weapons used are infinitely more potent, and they happen on our TV screens.

3

/shrug Friendly fire, isn’t

4

Quarterbacks throw footballs to members of the opposite team rather often, actually.

Trinopus

5

Picture this:

Your sittin in the desert, you’ve been hauling ass across the desert for 3 days. Between lack of sleep, fear, being shot at and chemical weapon attack drills you shouldn’t be holding a tv remote much less a fully automatic weapon.

Then all of a sudden, a tank appears infront of you. The only way you can see it is because the muzzle flash from it’s gun, which is pointing at you, lit it up in the night.

Until you can fit every soldier with some sort of computerized imaging system that displays the battlefield and shows all friendly units in a headsup display you’re going to get exhausted, terrified soldiers shooting at what they think a threat is.

6

Friendly fire has been around since King Harold warned one of his Dukes to “Watch out for that archer over there, he’ll have some buggers eye out soon!”

7

As Billy Connolly put it so eloquently, “When you’re lying in a bed wi’ your balls shot off, is it any consolation knowing that it was a friend of yours that did it to you?”

And CRorex, as was proved recently with the Patriot missile attack on a Tornado, sometimes the computer gives the wrong answer and mis-identifies a target.

The key aspect in most friendly fire incidents is the lack of time to make a proper identification, more that (in my opinion) the state of mind of the troops involved, although clearly well-rested soldiers do better.

Picture this: You have between 1 and 5 seconds at most to decide whether the big ugly thing coming towards you is friend or fucking deadly. If you wait too long, then you may get killed and the people around you may get killed. If you incorrectly guess “friend”, then you may get killed and the people around you may get killed.

So the people involved are trained to make the best target identification they can, and to react quickly and decisively. The fact that there are so few friendly fire incidents suggests that this is a good methodology. And this is also why, since World War II, friendly tanks approaching a base will turn their turrets away from the base they are approaching. It is surprisingly hard to distinguish a friendly tank from an unfriendly tank, but you can usually figure out which way the barrel is pointing.

Note that this does not excuse (for example) those two fuckwits from the USAF ANG (Umbach and Schmitt?) who bombed the Canadians in Afghanistan. These two went looking for a fight, and engaged more-or-less in violation of an AWACS command not to attack because “they felt theartened by small-arms fire on the ground”.
Of course, by this point they were outside their patrol area and flying lower than their planned altitude. All Umbach and Schmitt had to do was fly away, but that wasn’t sufficiently manly for these two refugees from the Testosterone Addiction Clinic. Fuckers should be hung up by their balls next to the Canadian flag.

8

A question I’ve asked to many people with this line of thought:

Would you feel better if the Iraqis killed 50 times more British soldiers than they do, making the friendly fire casualties seem irrelevant?

9

Than they did.

10

No, it’s really not that simple, fuckstick.

As has been mentioned, yes, quarterbacks throw the ball to the other team rather often. And in football, each team wears different color jerseys.

As far as war is concerned, have you not noticed that virtually everyone is wearing some version of camouflage uniform? And that from a distance, with reduced visibility due to nightfall, dust, smoke, etc., it can very difficult to distinguish a U.S. Abrams from a U.K. Challenger from an Iraqi T-62? And with the logistics of moving tens of thousands of vehicles and troops, it may be easy for units to lose track of each other, and not realize that the unit up ahead is friendly?

No, of course you don’t. Because while its completely understandable for someone to bemoan casualties due to fratricide, only a asswipe like yourself would say that it’s because Americans “are so trigger happy.”

11

Something impossible to calculate (since the principles are normally dead) – There is a mirror situation to “friendly fire” – I’ll call it “mistaken failure to defend against unfriendly fire.” It’s impossible to calculate (at least IMHO), but still worth pondering if you’re gonna throw around ideas like “trigger happy Americans”

How many soldiers died because they held off too long thinking (wrongly) “it’s a friendly”? How many American soldiers died because they held off too long thinking (wrongly) “it’s a Brit friendly”?

It cuts both ways fuckstick (I like that term, robby).

12

Now, I’m mature enough to realise that War is not a computer game. It’s dirty, it’s bloody, it’s fucking horrible, and it’s worse if you’re there. And I know the enemy don’t have little red symbols over their heads to identify them as “the enemy” (they sometimes don’t even have uniforms - they’re even dressing as civillians in hospitals, for heaven’s sake).

But there are simply TOO MANY friendly fire incidents (and yes, I agree it’s a stupid name for killing your own in a stupid mistake).
One such incident is too many.

WE’RE ON YOUR SIDE SO JUST STOP SHOOTING US.

This was billed as a clinical war - straight in, straight out, precision-guided laser-operated-GPS-enabled smart weapons that would lock on to Saddams arse and as soon as Dubya pressed “fire” that’d be it - all over, Iraq is free.

Clearly it’s not. It’s messy, it’ll drag on, and Saddam might even get off scot-free just like Osama did in Afghanistan. And then what?

Don’t discredit the OP, just because he referred to “trigger-happy Yanks”. They’re grunts trained to kill, they’re hungry to fight. They’re living on edge, because the attack could come at any moment… Of COURSE they’re trigger happy. If not, they’ve certainly got an itchy trigger finger.

And you must be able to tell if this big hunk of metal firing IN THE SAME DIRECTION AS YOU ARE is one of yours… given the technology, the thousands of satellites hovering over Iraq, the radar (not even a modern invention), the communication systems… each plane has a unique signature on a radar… so why aim at a FRIENDLY sig?

Something’s screwed up. British bodies are coming home in binbags, and the vast majority have got “made in America” on the bullets that killed them.

I’m an armchair war watcher. i’ve never picked up and fired a gun in anger. I’ve never had my life threatened. So of course I don’t know what it’s like. But stop making excuses for what must be easily avoidable mistakes THAT KILL PEOPLE, especially if your experience of war is limited to Medal Of Honour on your Playstation.

Er, fuckstick.

13

While I’m extremely sorry for the loss of your servicemen, and I am deeply grateful for their dedication and sacrifice, I must disagree with the “made in America” part of your post.

Please see this site.

Once again, though, I just want to extend my gratitude to the British, as well as all of the other coalition forces, for helping to bring this war to the fastest possible conclusion.

14

The reason friendly fire incidents are magnified in the last couple of wars…Gulf War I, Afganistan, Gulf War II…is that OUR side is shooting a hell of a lot more ordinance than their side. In Vietnam and Korea and WWII and WWI, the enemy put up a strong fight, and killed a hell of a lot of our soldiers. Compared to what the enemey was doing, a few friendly fire incidents seemed minor.

In the last few wars, the enemy had very little opportunity to kill our soldiers. However, our soldiers were still running around with their lethal hardware. If our rate of friendly fire is 1/10th what it was in WWII, but the enemy kills 1/100th the number of soldiers they did in WWII, then it will seem that the friendly fire rate is 10 times as severe, when in reality it is 1/10th as severe.

The OP is an example of simple failure to understand statistics. I welcome this opportunity to fight ignorance.

15

Its not the number of casualties or goodies vs baddies ratio that bothers me its the fact that it happens.

We are not talking about fucksticks (like that word too) with guns squinting at a dot on the horizon; these people have been highly trained, and have the best technology available (I hope) and I have the utmost respect for them but, I’d expect someone like me (untrained, unfit, quite cowardly, and no idea what combat is like) to shoot at everything that moved, which is why I’m not there and hopefully for everyone’s sake never will be.

16

Is this a logical question, or a strawman?

  1. This article, from before the war started, gives the concern of a British senior officer whose unit was hit by friendly fire in the last Gulf war, and who claims no identification improvements have been made in the last 12 years:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/06/1041566358550.html

  1. This report tells of 19 current casualties due to crashes (no enemy involved):

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/wariniraq/stories/Detail_LinkStory=54491.html

  1. This link says the current total UK casualties are 20, of which only 2 are due to the enemy:

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/03/25/50813-ap.html

  1. 24% of the US casualties figures from the last Gulf war were friendly fire (there were only a handful of UK casualties, but they were all friendly fire):

http://www.janes.com/defence/land_forces/news/jdw/jdw030122_1_n.shtml
So it seems that you need to justify your ‘50 times casualties’.

17

**I have NEVER heard it described in this manner. You are a fool if you believe that.

**and

**You did not have to make this second statement, it is painfully obvious. You either are an idiot, or prone to hyperbole, or both.

**I do not own a Playstation, I have never played Medal of Honor. I do, however, have real medals earned in combat. Wanna talk?

**

Quite.

18

That being said to address one post, the issue of Friendly Fire Deaths is tragic, painful, and a sign of weakness with the military. It is also part of life and death in war, unfortunately.

The RAF Tornado incident is unclear to me. I understand the Patriot was on “automatic”. It is unfathomable to me that procedures would not be in place to address an Allied Aircraft returning to friendly forces (RTF). These procedures are clearly spelled out to both sides. Something went wrong.

It could very well have been the RAF crew who did not follow procedure. If, and I do mean IF, there are rules to follow to identify oneself as Friendly, and those rules are not followed, and that bogey is fired upon, whose fault is it?

19

Well done. Medals earned in combat. In sincerity, I take my hat off to you. So you, above most who post in this thread, are qualified to talk about this (as I was at pains to point out). However, I fail to see what the point of your post was, other than to denigrate my point of view. Fair enough - that’s your perogative. But what is your view of this thread? War is good? Bad? “Friendly” fire is unavoidable? What?

Perhaps I am an idiot - I’m certainly no genius - and I am prone to hyperbole. In fact, I hyperbolize like no other. I’m also prone to flippancy.

But the war WAS billed as a clinical operation. Until non-Iraqui soldiers started dying. Because, you see, the popular vote isn’t in a view of war where good, clean-living Western soldiers and/or innocent civillians get killed. Would popular support have been behind the “let’s go to war” brigade had they known what it would REALLY have been like?

For the record, I think we should be at war, and (and this’ll please you) I’m damn glad I’m not the one fighting. Is that wrong? I’m also frustrated that the biggest risk to “our boys” is “our boys”. Again, is that wrong?

20

damn! I had this all written and the hamster ate it.

War is a horrible thing. War is “bad”. But there are also “bad” people in the world, in powerful positions, and there are times when that Bad Person is “less bad” than War. That, in itself, is a tragedy.

Friendly Fire deaths are not entirely Unavoidable, just as deaths by Enemy Fire is not entirely Unavoidable. But deaths by enemy fire are expected, and planned for. It would be a shock to have none with any significant contact. Noone advertises a war by saying how many deaths we expect on our side, that is poor salesmanship.

Friendly Fire deaths are much less likely, but the chances rise with Joint Operations (two different countries’ forces working together), and vary depending on the complexity of the situation. They are tragic on all sides, but probably most tragic to the person who pulled that trigger.

You should feel anger, frustration and confusion over Friendly Fire deaths, that is expected. They should not happen. But there will always be the chance that they will occur, and those chances should decrease for each conflict.

You should also be glad you are not the one fighting, we in the States call that “sanity”.