Deadly Mistaken Identity

As the two helicopters sliced through the blue skies over northern Iraq last Thursday morning, a U.S. Air Force AWACS reconnaissance plane picked them up on radar. The AWACS crew immediately radioed a pair of U.S. F-15C fighters and asked them to take a closer look. Though there had been no reported violations of the no-fly zone over northern Iraq since January 1993, Iraqi helicopters had been a problem in the past, when Saddam Hussein used them to suppress the Kurdish rebellion that erupted after the Gulf War ended in 1991. The crews of the F-15Cs twice flew past the copters and identified them as Russian-made Hinds flown by the Iraqi military. The fateful, terse order came back from the AWACS to fire. Moments later, the blasted helicopters, each of them struck by an air-to-air missile, plummeted to the ground.

As horrified Pentagon officials quickly discovered, however, the two / choppers were not Hinds but U.S. Black Hawks. On board were 21 allied military and civilian officials, including 15 Americans and five Kurds; all of them perished. They had been on their way to meet with Kurdish leaders in the northern Iraq town of Salahuddin, part of the safe haven created for the Kurds after the Gulf War. The crews of all five aircraft in the tragedy were slated to attend a rehearsal one day earlier in which they had reviewed flight routes, radio frequencies and the timing of Thursday's mission. "There were human errors, probably, and there might be process or system errors as well," said Defense Secretary William Perry. Postponing a long-scheduled trip to South Korea and Japan, Perry ordered one investigation into the event and another into the rules of engagement that govern the two no-fly zones in Iraq, as well as the one over Bosnia. He acknowledged that the rules in Iraq did not require fighter pilots to issue a warning to their targets.

Lives lost to friendly fire are a devastating cost of battle. Almost one- fourth of the 148 American combat deaths in the Gulf War resulted from accidental assault by their own side. The Pentagon established a Fratricide Task Force to develop ways to avoid such accidents. Even during the war, however, when hundreds of planes representing more than two dozen allied nations filled the skies, none of those deaths involved aircraft firing upon one another.

Some military analysts believe that deadly misjudgments are made more likely by battlefield technology that hands over decisions to computers. Defense officials acknowledged that last week's mishap is likely to hamper efforts to improve the capability of new U.S. weapon systems to fire on an enemy from far away. "We were just really beginning to push beyond-visual-range technologies," says an executive at McDonnell Douglas, builder of the F-15C. "This is going to put a brake on that."