One day in April 2003, during the invasion of Iraq,
I was an embedded reporter sitting in the 3rd Infantry Division's
Divarty TOC when an MLRS rocket was accidentally fired into the middle of a
city. The errant rocket was the result of target grid coordinates being off by
a single digit. A roomful of officers watched a computer screen as the rocket
tracked into a densely packed neighborhood instead of hitting the Iraqi
artillery battery that had been targeted. The room fell silent as everybody
realized what had just happened. The officer who made the mistake was visibly shaken.
This weekend, ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal suspended the use
of HIMARS rockets after Marines fighting in the Marja offensive in southern Afghanistan
called in a strike that hit a compound and killed 12 civilians. HIMARS is a
truck mounted mini-MLRS system, firing the same rockets as its bigger cousin.
At the al Sawha blog site, Josh McLaughlin recounts a story
from 2008 when he was in Iraq
serving as the Task Force Fire Support Officer in the TOC when a platoon from
his battalion was hit by a complex attack. Gun runs by OH-58 Kiowas were not
enough to run off the insurgents so the soldiers on the ground called in an air
strike on a mosque from which they were taking fire. They decided to drop a 500
pound bomb from a pair of F-16s overhead.
"We
checked and re-checked the engagement location with the ground elements,
running their grids through our targeting systems to ensure we were about to
target the correct building (in this case a mosque). After doing this multiple
times, attempting to confirm visually through our sensors, we finally received
clearance to engage. As the F-16 began its final run-in, we were told by the
powers that be to abort the 500 pound bomb drop. Hellfire strikes from the
OH-58s coupled with advancing US and Iraqi elements were able to finally gain
control of the situation.
As
the event culminated, I sat and watched in amazement as the elements on the
ground cleared a different mosque than the one we had seemingly confirmed a
dozen times over. The grid my team in the TOC was provided with over and over
again was not the location the ground element was clearing. My Fire Supporters
in the TOC took the grid from the ground element and the building description
and found a match. What we did not realize is that there were multiple mosques
in the area matching the description, and one of them was too new to be on our
newest and most up-to-date imagery."
As
McLaughlin writes, there are many different eyes, human and electronic,
involved in today's sensor to shooter links. Mistakes can, and will, happen at
some point along that process. It's an important reminder that in today's "wars
amongst the people," on battlefields that will always be populated by
civilians, the use of much high-tech weaponry in kinetic strikes can often
produce tragic results.
