GPS default
setting blamed in deadly friendly fire event
g
Bomb attack:
The men were killed when their gear programmed in their own
location.
By The Washington Post
April 24, 2001
WASHINGTON – 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
Saturday.
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 commanded 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 at the Americans.
But the senior defense official
explained Saturday that the Air Forcecombat controller was using a Precision
Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to the 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 are 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 that the
machine was programmed to come back on showing the coordinates of its
own location, the controller mistakenly called I 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 the 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 out people understand
this.”
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