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'Friendly Fire' Deaths Traced to Dead Battery
Taliban Targeted, but U.S. Forces Killed
_____Special Report_____
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 24, 2002; Page A21
The deadliest "friendly fire" incident of the war in Afghanistan was triggered in December by the simple act of a U.S. Special Forces air controller changing the battery on a Global Positioning System device he was using to target a Taliban outpost north of Kandahar, a senior defense official said yesterday.
Three Special Forces soldiers were killed and 20 were injured when a 2,000-pound, satellite-guided bomb landed, not on the Taliban outpost, but on a battalion command post occupied by American forces and a group of Afghan allies, including Hamid Karzai, now the interim prime minister.
The U.S. Central Command, which runs the Afghan war, has never explained how the coordinates got mixed up or who was responsible for relaying the U.S. position to a B-52 bomber, which fired a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) at the Americans.
But the senior defense official explained yesterday that the Air Force combat controller was using a Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to soldiers as a "plugger," to calculate the Taliban's coordinates for a B-52 attack. The controller did not realize that after he changed the device's battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on displaying coordinates for its own location, the official said.
Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others, the controller had used the GPS receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban position in minutes and seconds for an airstrike by a Navy F/A-18, the official said.
Then, with the B-52 approaching the target, the air controller did a second calculation in "degree decimals" required by the bomber crew. The controller had performed the calculation and recorded the position, the official said, when the receiver battery died.
Without realizing the machine was programmed to come back on showing the coordinates of its own location, the controller mistakenly called in the American position to the B-52. The JDAM landed with devastating precision.
The official said he did not know how the Air Force would treat the incident and whether disciplinary action would be taken. But the official, a combat veteran, said he considered the incident "an understandable mistake under the stress of operations."
"I don't think they've made any judgments yet, but the way I would react to something like that -- it is not a flagrant error, a violation of a procedure," the official said. "Stuff like that, truth be known, happens to all of us every day -- it's just that the stakes in battle are so enormously high."
Nonetheless, the official said the incident shows that the Air Force and Army have a serious training problem that needs to be corrected. "We need to know how our equipment works; when the battery is changed, it defaults to his own location," the official said. "We've got to make sure our people understand this."
Navy Cmdr. Ernest Duplessis, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, declined to comment on the friendly fire incident, saying an investigation "has not cleared our review yet."
In another matter, Duplessis said that U.S. forces have found within the past week a possible al Qaeda biological weapons research site that had been abandoned near Kandahar.
"There was no evidence of any chemical or biological weapons production going on there," Duplessis said. "But there was equipment found -- it had medical supplies, commonly available laboratory equipment suitable for growing biological samples, as well as a variety of other supplies like that. But I have to stress that this lab was still under construction and no samples of biological agents were found at the site."
The discovery of the facility was first reported in yesterday's New York Times.
Taliban Targeted, but U.S. Forces Killed
_____Special Report_____
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 24, 2002; Page A21
The deadliest "friendly fire" incident of the war in Afghanistan was triggered in December by the simple act of a U.S. Special Forces air controller changing the battery on a Global Positioning System device he was using to target a Taliban outpost north of Kandahar, a senior defense official said yesterday.
Three Special Forces soldiers were killed and 20 were injured when a 2,000-pound, satellite-guided bomb landed, not on the Taliban outpost, but on a battalion command post occupied by American forces and a group of Afghan allies, including Hamid Karzai, now the interim prime minister.
The U.S. Central Command, which runs the Afghan war, has never explained how the coordinates got mixed up or who was responsible for relaying the U.S. position to a B-52 bomber, which fired a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) at the Americans.
But the senior defense official explained yesterday that the Air Force combat controller was using a Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to soldiers as a "plugger," to calculate the Taliban's coordinates for a B-52 attack. The controller did not realize that after he changed the device's battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on displaying coordinates for its own location, the official said.
Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others, the controller had used the GPS receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban position in minutes and seconds for an airstrike by a Navy F/A-18, the official said.
Then, with the B-52 approaching the target, the air controller did a second calculation in "degree decimals" required by the bomber crew. The controller had performed the calculation and recorded the position, the official said, when the receiver battery died.
Without realizing the machine was programmed to come back on showing the coordinates of its own location, the controller mistakenly called in the American position to the B-52. The JDAM landed with devastating precision.
The official said he did not know how the Air Force would treat the incident and whether disciplinary action would be taken. But the official, a combat veteran, said he considered the incident "an understandable mistake under the stress of operations."
"I don't think they've made any judgments yet, but the way I would react to something like that -- it is not a flagrant error, a violation of a procedure," the official said. "Stuff like that, truth be known, happens to all of us every day -- it's just that the stakes in battle are so enormously high."
Nonetheless, the official said the incident shows that the Air Force and Army have a serious training problem that needs to be corrected. "We need to know how our equipment works; when the battery is changed, it defaults to his own location," the official said. "We've got to make sure our people understand this."
Navy Cmdr. Ernest Duplessis, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, declined to comment on the friendly fire incident, saying an investigation "has not cleared our review yet."
In another matter, Duplessis said that U.S. forces have found within the past week a possible al Qaeda biological weapons research site that had been abandoned near Kandahar.
"There was no evidence of any chemical or biological weapons production going on there," Duplessis said. "But there was equipment found -- it had medical supplies, commonly available laboratory equipment suitable for growing biological samples, as well as a variety of other supplies like that. But I have to stress that this lab was still under construction and no samples of biological agents were found at the site."
The discovery of the facility was first reported in yesterday's New York Times.
