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"Friendly fire"
Friendly fire
Supporters of Maj. Harry Schmidt, whom the Air Force is court-martialing for dropping a bomb on friendly Canadian troops in Afghanistan, ask this question: Why hasn't the military filed such serious charges against other pilots in a series of "friendly fire" deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan? Maj. Schmidt, an F-16 pilot in the Illinois Air National Guard, dropped a bomb on the Canadians after seeing flashes of gunfire he thought were antiaircraft guns. It turns out the fire came from the Canadians' live-fire exercise. A spot check of after-action reports in other "friendly fire" cases show similar mistakes. -An F-15E pilot flying over southern Iraq saw gunfire flashes near the town of Karbala on April 2, 2003. Minutes before, a Patriot battery had mistakenly shot down an F-18, killing the pilot. The F-15 pilot thought this meant enemy air defenses were in the area and mistook the fire of a U.S. Army rocket launcher as an Iraqi air defense gun. Three U.S. soldiers were killed. "The F-15E, and his wingman, believing that they had just witnessed an enemy SAM launch and unaware of the presence of any friendly forces, began a bombing run, dropping one GBU-12 bomb," a U.S. Central Command report says. -Over the Godoria Range of Djibouti in Africa, a B-52 crew mistakenly targeted a group of Marines on the range instead of the target they were pointing out for the bomber. One Marine officer was killed. A investigation discovered that one of the navigators moved the bull's-eye from the target to the Marines to judge the distance between the two, but then never moved it back to the target before nine, 750-pound bombs were dropped. [To Tex Houston, this is an article about military aviation] |
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