FATAL FRIENDLY FIRE 1
On February 17, 1991, at approximately 1:00 a.m., a U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicle and an armored personnel carrier were destroyed by two missiles fired from a U.S. Apache helicopter. Two U.S. soldiers were killed, and six others were wounded. This friendly fire tragedy took place in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm. The incident occurred after U.S. ground forces, which were deployed along an east-west line about 3 miles north of the Saudi-Iraqi border, reported several enemy sightings north of their positions. In response, ground commanders called for Apache reconnaissance of the area.
Apache cockpits have two sections: the front seat is reserved for the gunner and the back seat for the pilot. The pilot controls the flight pattern, and the gunner engages the target with the helicopter’s weapon systems. Both sections of the cockpit have flight and weapons control if one must take control of the other.
Every night for the first couple of weeks of February, battalion helicopters responded to reports from U.S. ground forces of apparent movements of Iraqi vehicles, all false alarms. A U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel was the Battalion Commander of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter strike force. Just days before, helicopters from the Colonel’s battalion misidentified and fired on a U.S. Army scout vehicle, missing it without damage or injury—a near hit.
U.S. armored forces on the ground operating in the area reported possible enemy sightings—suspected Iraqi armored vehicles moving toward a U.S. tank squadron. Commanders of the ground forces asked for aid from the Apache battalion based about 60 miles south of the border to explore the area and to engage them if enemy presence was found. The Colonel with his copilot and two other Apache helicopters responded quickly, urgently directed to patrol an area north of the line of U.S. tanks. Because of an imminent sandstorm with intense winds and low visibility, the Colonel decided to command the lead Apache himself, in the gunner’s seat, even though he had only 3 hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours. They launched at 12:22 a.m. Due to the urgency of the request, a normal, detailed premission briefing was not done.
Upon arriving on station at 12:50 a.m., the helicopter’s target acquisition system detected the vehicles. Two suspicious vehicles appeared near the eastern end of the line of U.S. ground forces, noting the targets’ locations by measuring their distance from the aircraft with a laser beam, automatically entered into the weapons fire control computer. The Colonel estimated the suspicious vehicles were about a quarter mile in front, the first mistake. He misread the grid coordinates of the alleged targets on the helicopter navigation system, reading instead the search coordinates that he manually entered into the navigation system while in route early in the flight. As a result, he misidentified the target vehicles’ location as being north of the line of friendly vehicles, which coincidently were in the exact location of previously reported enemy sightings.
A discussion ensued between the three Apache pilots and the ground commander to authenticate their identity. Apache helicopters were not equipped with IFF—an automated system referred to as “Identification Friend or Foe.” In the darkness, the vehicles could not otherwise be identified.
The ground commander insisted that no U.S. forces were ahead of the line, that the vehicles must be enemy, and twice replied to the Colonel, “Those are enemy. Go ahead and take them out.” Pilots of the other two Apaches also thought the vehicles were enemy. More ominously, there were persistent search-radar alerts being received in the cockpit, adding to the stress of the moment. These alerts, responding to radar emitted by friendly forces, were misidentified by the Apache computers as an enemy system. Even the Colonel’s copilot prompted him, “Do em!” more than once. Yet he felt uneasy as to the identity of the vehicles. The Colonel is recorded to have said, “Boy, I’m going to tell you, it’s hard to pull this trigger,” asking for help to verify current helicopter heading and bearing to and grid coordinates of targets. He states the targets’ grid coordinates aloud, again misreading them, the second mistake. No one recognizes the error. His copilot states, “Ready in the back.”
The Colonel decided to fire on the vehicles with the Apache’s 30-millimeter cannons (machine guns), which would have inflicted less damage than a missile just in case they were friendlies. The gun emitted only a few rounds before jamming (sand). He then fired two Hellfire missiles* at the suspected vehicles—the third, but deadly, mistake. Shortly thereafter, the Apaches received a cease fire order. The missiles had already been fired and both vehicles, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and an armored personnel carrier, were destroyed, killing two U.S. soldiers inside. The Colonel softly said, “I was afraid of that, I was really afraid of that.”