CaptainSpaulding71 wrote:
I saw the 'leaked' 15 minute video clip. it seemed to me that the pilots got farked up orders from his air controller on what to hit. there was initially like 5 mins of 'should we or shouldn't we' talk as well as mentioning that there were no friendlies in the area. i could hear the pilots expressing due diligence in making sure there weren't any friendlies around. however, i guess it would have made sense to do a low pass to confirm. Only few mins after attack did they get 'abort' message from a brit. i'm suprised the pilot didn't curse the controller for saying it so late!
now on the video (it's grainy) you can barely make out the road as he's shooting. he's also moving at quite a clip (it's a jet for cripes sake). so how is that pilot going to make out a union jack 2x3 feet flying on the back of a tank? the flag might not have been fully flying. reports also indicate that there were surrendering iraqis from the nearby town wandering about. again, it's very hard for me to see that stuff from the video. On the counterargument - one might have been able to see that they had orange panels (indicating friendlies) and note that they were not in fact rocket launchers.
what should happen is more use of RFID or GPS tech to prevent this. they already have the tech and it is in use for ground units (tanks, hummers, etc). if this could be made to work between coalition forces, that would be great. of course this is a security thing. we'd never likely go to war with the UK but this kind of thing must be guarded tech otherwise enemies can use it against us.
tragic situation for sure.
so again, i'd say if people are pointing fingers, let's focus on the people ordering the pilots to attack and improving processes to ID friendlies to reduce this in future.
being in the military and deployed to iraq i can tell you...
The digital package the vehicles carries is one thing. It will tell you the rough area of where a friendly unit is.
Sometimes we have rolled up on allied units not being tracked by our systems. Also not every country is using the SAME system. due to OPSEC, and COMSEC we do not share crypto. and when a truck gets hit that has a digital communications package and we cannot get to the harddrive or destroy it completely we have to redo comsec. ot just for our unit. For the WHOLE Theater. you can get bumped out of the track net very easily. Or for some silly reason, you can only self track or vice versa. The system is fairly new there are bugs involved that are getting hashed out. the current system is being replaced by a new system, and that new system is also be talked about as being replaced for a newer system. The digital commo we have is like a PC. and everyday PCs are getting improved. same with this system, every day there are new capabilities being tested, and new units being tested. I personnaly on my stryker have 3 different systems that do roughly the same thing, and thats track friendly units and keep the unit cnnected digitally so we can post enemy icons or operation overlays.
Besides we have "other" equipment that kills our GPS feed. Not that i mind any that equipment is keeping me from getting blown off the face of the planet.