Tech to Reduce Friendly Fire Still Lacking

April 15, 2003 -- 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.

The Army spent some $100 million to develop and test BCIS, analysts say. But to equip the Army with such automatic identification systems would have cost as much as $40,000 per vehicle.

What's more, BCIS equipment would have had to have been added to other equipment — strike planes in the U.S. Air Force's and other allies' arsenals — that would have made the whole program "cost-prohibitive," says Garrett.

The program was completely scrapped in 2001 because BCIS, designed for ground combat, couldn't be adopted for effective use with aircraft, said Maj. Amy Hannah, a public affairs officer for the Army.

"It was difficult to integrate, and the system's limitations didn't answer the challenges that were added to the [project] requirement," says Hannah. "It just didn't provide what we want or needed."

Halt! Who Goes There?

Instead, the Pentagon has focused its efforts to reduce fratricide through other means. Chief among them is to use the U.S. military's clear advantage in advanced sensors and information technologies to improve so-called situational awareness among friendly fighting forces.

Under a program called Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, or FBCB2, the military plans to create wireless local data communication networks that tie in various source of information. Computers and software would be able to collect video from unmanned drones, the position of friendly forces with GPS location systems, and data about the enemy from spy planes such as the JSTARS.

By gathering such disparate information together into one "battle space picture" and distributing it to everyone on the field, it's hoped that even the common foot soldier will know where friends and foes are relative to their position and situation.

One Army unit, the 4th Infantry Division, has already been equipped with such digital communications technology. But since the division was kept out of most of the fighting in Iraq, it remains to be seen if the system really could help in reducing fratricide.

For now, the United States and its allies are relying on much less sophisticated technologies to try to reduce friendly fire tragedies.

All of the coalition's tanks and vehicles, for example, are equipped with panels that give off a unique signal visible only to those equipped with thermal sights. Meanwhile, foot soldiers wear tape on their uniforms that reflect invisible infrared light to help identify themselves as part of the coalition forces.

These may seem like low-tech approaches to a problem that has plagued armies since the dawn of warfare. But they're approaches that have to be taken, given that combat still involves flesh-and-blood warriors.

"We're working toward better technologies," says Hannah.

But, she added, "No matter how good the technology, warfare is still a human endeavor and humans are a big contributing factor to fratricide."