The thing that worries me about Britain going into Iraq with the US Military is the number of troops they are likely to lose lives to US friendly fire. Britain lost 24 soldiers in the Gulf War; 15 killed by the Iraqis, nine killed by the Americans. With this kind of average, what chance has Britain got fighting alongside the USA?
This doesn’t sound like a GQ kind of post; I can’t imagine what the factual answer would be. It probably belongs in Great Debates, but don’t re-post it there yourself! That’s called “cross-posting,” and it’s against the board rules here. One of the moderators will probably come along at some point and move this thread to the proper forum.
I’m also not too sure what the question is, but friendly fire has been with us for far longer than the last decade, and it’s not something unique to US forces (although the sheer mass of firepower the US has been able to amass in recent wars means that any friendly fire incident is likely to be devastating). It also gets reported far more prominently these days.
24 Brits were killed out of 45,000 in theater. A tragedy, for sure. 9 by fratricide, a bigger tragedy. All in one incident on Feb 26, 1991, when a Warrior was hit by A-10s firing Maverick Missiles at 3:20pm local time. Eleven survivors were injured. The British troops were preparing to blow up a captured Iraqi artillery position in Kuwait at the time of the attack. The air was thick with smoke and oil from the oil well fires. Visibility was poor. The pilots made a tragic mistake.
This is known as the Fog of War, and it is a tragic fact of life in the military. People die in wars. Accidents happen, mistakes are made, and people die. The incidence rate for fratricide in the Gulf War was high. It was a very short period of time, and people were to take a breathe and count the dead and do investigations. In a running battle of weeks, more would have been killed, and possibly fewer would have been classified fratricide. The improvement in guided munitions increases the frequency of hits and kills, so there may very well be the same number of mistakes being made while pulling the trigger, or even fewer, but the accuracy is such that the lethality is greater.
540,000 US Forces were there, 148 died, 35 fratricide. If the British Forces fight alongside US Forces again, there will likely be US Forces who kill British Forces by accident. There will be US Forces who kill US Forces by accident. And there very well may be British Forces who kill US Forces by accident.
If amphetamines were to blame, there would’ve been many more mistakes made, since most if not all pilots on long missions areusing them. Pilots working long hours in a cramped space may well be performing better with amphetamines.
>> If amphetamines were to blame, there would’ve been many more mistakes made, since most if not all pilots on long missions areusing them.
Not necessarily. What is probably more true is that if they were not taking amphetamines there would be fewer mistakes.
>> Pilots working long hours in a cramped space may well be performing better with amphetamines.
Except that the same government which forces its employees to take the drugs, incarcerates its citizens for doing the same thing. It doesn’t make much sense to me.
“It has been calculated that 21 per cent of U.S. casualties in the Second World War were from friendly fire. In Korea it was 18 per cent, in Vietnam 39 and in the Gulf War a whopping 49 per cent.”
>> “It has been calculated that 21 per cent of U.S. casualties in the Second World War were from friendly fire. In Korea it was 18 per cent, in Vietnam 39 and in the Gulf War a whopping 49 per cent.”
That makes it look like things are getting worse and it brings up a very interesting discussion about the math and the numbers and the statistics.
Let’s look at a hypothetical: Suppose we go to war and our expectation is to lose 1000 of our men, 900 of which to hostile fire and 100 to friendly fire. That is 10% lost to friendly fire.
Now, just before we are to start I prove I have an invention which will save about 700 of the 900 we expected to lose to hostile fire. By using my invention we can expect to lose a total of 300, 200 to hostile fire and 100 to friendly fire. That’s 33% .
The chiefs of staff would reject my invention on the grounds that it raised the percentage of our forces lost to friendly fire?
I read a great quote from some general that served in Desert Storm that explained why friendly fire accounted for such a high percentage of deaths in the Gulf. The basic gist of it was, “The reason our friendly fire percentages are so high is because the Iraqis aren’t doing something that every other enemy has historically done - Fighting back”
And just for posterity, in addition to the visibility problems that resulted in the loss of British lives in the Gulf, that collumn had wandered into an A10 kill-box, a zone designated very specifically as an area where anything moving is a target.
“The reason our friendly fire percentages are so high is because the Iraqis aren’t doing something that every other enemy has historically done - Fighting back”
What is that supposed to mean? Hardly very reassuring coming from a General in a professional army is it? We can’t kill them so we’ll kill each other…
And didn’t some US special forces call in an air attack on some of their own in Afghanistan recently? It was caught on TV as I recall.
No, you missed it. Accidental deaths are gonna happen, darned near guaranteed in an operation of any size or length. Normally, the enemy shoots and kills a lot of “good guys”. Lets say a three week slug fest with 100,000 servicemen is expected to result in 5000 deaths, or 5%. Of those 5000 deaths, we expect about 10% of those are from friendly fire. That is 500 people. So knowing this, we attack. The bad guys don’t fight back, they don’t aggressively defend their positions, they don’t accurately target their artillery, they surrender in droves, unexpectedly. All of a sudden we don’t have those expected 4500 killed by the enemy, but only 500. Just because THEY are not firing does not mean WE are not firing, and we have about half the normally expected number of accidental deaths. There. We have just gone from an anticipated friendly fire death rate of 10% to 25%.
This is just for when the Mods move it to the proper forum.
Paul Fussell’s WARTIME (1989, Oxford University Press) has an extensive chapter devoted to friendly fire and other blunders of war, specifically WW2.
For example:
Sicily July 1943, ‘American navy and ground gunners had been told that transports and gliders carrying the airborne troops would be flying over them, but at the crucial moment they seemed to forget and blasted away, some of them shouting “German attack! Fire!” Before the shooting could be stopped, some 23 planes had been shot down, carrying 229 men of the 82nd Airborne Division to disaster. … Ernie Pyle witnessed the Sicilian debacle but either chose not to mention it in his dispatches or, more likely was forbidden to.’ p.21.
749 American soldiers and sailors in a training operation (Operation TIGER) at Slapton Sands,Devon, April 1944. ‘Their bodies were secretly bulldozed into a mass grave on the Devon farm of Mr. Nolan Tope…it is said the casualty figures were simply added to the Normandy totals run up some five weeks later.’ p.25
Operation COBRA July 24-25, 1944 near St. Lo. 136 Americans killed and 600+ wounded by American bombers. p.17
August 1944 near Falaise. several hundred Canadian troops were killed by RAF Bomber Command. p18.
…and the list goes on and on…
“The loser of this war will be the side that makes the greatest blunders.” Adolph Hitler. (‘From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany, 1945-1949’ (New York, 1985), p147-148.) p19.
Also, there have been changes made to some of the weapons systems to hopefully reduce the chances of forces being hit by friendly fire. These have yet to be tested in battle, and it’s possible than an enemy will find a way to “clone” these devices and thus get their forces marked as “friendlies.”