I read that the death of a soldier was described as the fault of a ‘non-hostile weapons discharge.’ My newspeak is shaky and I am not that good at doublethink. A weapon is hostile, and a weapons discharge is, too. How does something non-hostile cause a death?
It means it was accidental, or possibly self-inflicted. At least, that’s how I’d read it.
formally called “friendly fire”
Well, it says right there in the third paragraph:
If it’s accidental why isn’t it called accidental weapons discharge? I cannot figure anyone so high-faluting or ignorant as to have a problem with the old ‘accidents happen’ adage. Is there another category that influences this, e.g. enemy weapons discharge?
It could be that the weapon discharge was intentional, but the bullet hitting the particular target it did was accidental. It wasn’t hostile, since nobody meant for it to hit him, so it was a non-hostile weapons discharge.
It appears you’re confusing hostile with lethal. Weapons can be lethal, but they’re not hostile. Their use can be hostile, as can their users. They can be discharged without hostile intent, which is presumably the case here.
I have also read about such incidents from people shooting “for the fun of it.” E.g. they’re target shooting bottles and not being careful about what’s behind the targets. Or people letting off steam by shooting in the air. Stuff like that.
Soldiers are just like civilians, only better armed (usually).
I take it that it’s a term to combine everything not related to someone knowingly and deliberately trying to kill you: negligent/accidental discharges, intentional self-inflicted ones, “friendly fire”, shots-in-the-air, etc. Of course, it sounds deliciously obfuscatory because, well, that’s the nature of the operational culture. It DOES have the useful application of allowing you to identify the incident as something different from enemy action while the investigation is in course to determine if this was the result of accident, suicide, recklessness, or what.
So what did cavemen call friendly fire before we had fire?
“non-hostile pointy-stick thrust” 
For one there is no such thing as an accidental discharge. If someone fired a weapon without meaning to it is a negligent discharge. Of course that is just Army-speak but I think it is an important distinction. Theres is no “Oops” when you are talking about popping off a round. Then there are the other scenerios which others have brought up including self-inflicted.
Friend go WHOMP!
“Remember, fire not kill people, Dinosaurs kill people! That why pointy end of Dinosaur called Thagomiser, after late Thag Simmons.” 
Apologies to Gary Larson… 
I’ve just looked in my copy of Roget’s Thesaurus under friendship.
The first adjective given is friendly. The second is nonhostile. Someone is obviously working his way through the entries.
When nonhostile becomes too hostile for the public to stomach look out for adjective no. 3 (amicable). However I’m willing to bet that adjective no. 6 is omitted from the sequence. We can’t have loving fire.
Can we?
You are correct they don’t use friendly fire anymore. It is called fratricide. I generally dislike using corporate speak but the army actually got it right. Instead of hiding behind nice sounding phrases like “friendly fire” and “accidental discharge” they changed it to fratricide and negligent discharge. In case anyone is wondering this predates the current conflict by many years.
You are correct they don’t use friendly fire anymore. It is called fratricide. I generally dislike using corporate speak but the army actually got it right. Instead of hiding behind nice sounding phrases like “friendly fire” and “accidental discharge” they changed it to fratricide and negligent discharge. In case anyone is wondering this predates the current conflict by many years.
No need to apologize; it’s now the official name for that body part.
Friendly shooting, most likely. It seems unlikely to me people referred to firing weapons before the invention of firearms.
That is incredibly cool!
This is true. An arrow or bolt (from a bow or crossbow) is loosed, not fired (and similarly, a crossbow is spanned, not cocked, and a bow is nocked or notched).
Even so, I suspect that prior the introduction of firearms and a “modern” military (replete with Buzzwords and Acronyms), the term for “Friendly Fire” was “Oops” or “Oh, Shit… Sorry about that!”
Indeed, it appears to have been seen as something of an unfortunate inevitability that one’s own troops might accidentally shoot at members of the same side- I’ve not seen a reference to “Friendly Fire” that pre-dates WWII, FWIW, but that doesn’t mean the term or the concept wasn’t in use before then.
There have been anecdotal stories of the Army classifying soldiers’ suicides as “accidental firearms discharges” and the like, out of courtesy to their families.