Tech to Reduce Friendly Fire Still Lacking

April 15 -- From precision-guided bombs dropped from high-flying B-2 stealth bombers to smart, autonomous cruise missiles, digital technology has given a considerable edge to coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But for all the advantages of high-tech weaponry, modern military forces still face a tragic, age-old problem: "fratricide," otherwise known as "friendly fire" incidents.

During the first days of the Iraq war, two British pilots were killed outside of Najaf in central Iraq when a Patriot missile mistakenly identified their jet fighter as a threat and fired upon it.

Last week, a U.S. F-15 Eagle strike fighter mistakenly attacked a coalition armor convoy near Mosul in northern Iraq, killing 20 allied Kurdish fighters and an embedded journalist and injuring an undisclosed number of U.S. special forces and others traveling with the convoy.

By some accounts, such "blue-on-blue" incidents have killed at least 13 American and five British soldiers in Iraq so far. That's substantially lower than the 35 American and 10 British friendly fire casualties that accounted for up to 24 percent of the combat-related deaths in Operation Desert Storm 12 years ago.

But many military experts say the U.S. military has yet to deal fully with how to prevent troops from mistaking friendly forces for foes and engaging them, often with tragic results.

Friend or Foe?

After Desert Storm, the Pentagon conducted extensive research into developing ways to distinguish friend from foe, but ended up ditching many of them due to cost.

One such program — called the Battlefield Combat Identification System, or BCIS — would have been an ideal setup for helping to prevent fratricide, says Garrett.

The system was similar to automatic identification systems developed and used by aircraft since the advent of radar.

Under BCIS, every combat vehicle in the U.S. Army was to be equipped with a small transmitter and receiver. When one BCIS-equipped tank targets another tank or vehicle, the transmitter sends out a quick pulse of energy. If the target has BCIS equipment, it would send a coded signal back in less than a second, identifying it as a friendly tank and warning the shooter not to fire.