Officer to Criticize Air Force in Bombing
Jan. 16 -- The commanding officer of two U.S. Air Force pilots facing possible charges of manslaughter in a military court after mistakenly bombing Canadian forces in Afghanistan last spring is expected to give testimony highly critical of his superior officers and their conduct of the air war.
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Col. David Nichols, of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group, spent 13 months as a commander in the Middle East, overseeing thousands of air sorties, and was the commander of Majs. Harry Schmidt and Bill Umbach at the time of the friendly fire incident.
He could testify as soon as today or Friday in the military's article 32 hearing that began Tuesday to decide whether Schmidt and Umbach should be court-martialed for bombing a Canadian training exercise near Kandahar last April.
Read Nichols' statement.
Four Canadians died and eight others were wounded when Schmidt hit their position with a 500-pound bomb. The pilots could face charges including involuntary manslaughter and dereliction of duty, and could be sentenced to up to 64 years in prison.
The Air Force says Schmidt and Umbach were told to hold fire and should have fled the area until commanders could figure out whether there were friendly troops in the area.
Click for video recorded from the cockpit the day of the bombing
But Nichols wrote in response to an official reprimand of his own actions in the incident, that instead a "failure of leadership" is to blame. He has documented his own and other commanders' repeated, unsuccessful efforts to focus the Air Force higher command on problems with the conduct of air operations that they believed would lead to fratricide.
In his statement, obtained by ABCNEWS, Nichols cites numerous examples.
"I, my deputy and my OSS/CC called the CAOC (Combined Airspace Operations Center) Director and multiple people on the J3 staff over 100 times with concerns over the lack of friendly ground order of battle information and airspace control measures," he wrote.
