What the hell is up with those fly-boys?
The headline reads "Leaked video details friendly fire kill". Then when you see the video, it's the cockpit video from an A-10 warthog. When you listen to the audio you hear one pilot identify that the target is marked with an orange panel, and yet they swoop in and fire on it after being (incorrectly) advised that there are no friendly elements in their area of operations. Immediately after engaging the target, the pilots are advised that there is indeed friendly unit operating in their area. After the smoke cleared, Lance Cpl. Matty Hull was dead and 4 other members of of the Blues and Royals Household Cavalry Regiment were injured. Immediately after being informed that friendlies were in their area the two pilots reacted with by saying:
Pilot 1: "I'm going to be sick."
Pilot 2: "Ah fuck."
Pilot 1: "Did you hear?"
Pilot 2: "Yeah, this sucks."
Pilot 1: "We're in jail, dude."
If this were a singular incident, I could perhaps understand -but- there seems to be a never ending stream of these friendly-fire incidents involving Air Force jets and ground troops. The question that I'm struggling to understand is this. If you're entrusted with a lethal piece of hardware like an A-10 warthog attack jet... How can you squeeze the trigger without positively identifying your target? It's not like an A-10 attacks from 30,000 feet above. The A-10 attacks low & slow compared to most modern aircraft.
When I was in the military, vehicle identification was beaten into our heads using low-tech flash cards (like pictured here), photographs, models and just descriptions. Our TOW missiles could engage a target all the way out to 3,750 meters (well over 2 miles) and the M1's were firing even further than that. I doubt that an A-10 attacks from much further away than that. We were trained to positively identify our targets before loosing that destructive power. Our NCOs would take these playing card-sized flash cards out to a distance of 100 meters or so and would intentionally obscure the images so that only a small piece of the card was visible and we had to identify them while looking through binoculars. I personally had them drilled so deeply that to this day I can't see an image of an armored fighting vehicle without identifying it (much to my wife's dismay). Perhaps if those two pilots had spent a little time studying this card they might not have fired on Lance Cpl. Matty Hull's panel-marked vehicle and a lot of pain and suffering could have been avoided. So before buying another high tech, expensive gadget for the air force, perhaps that DOD ought to pull these cheap cards out and require pilots to study them. Don't get me wrong, mistakes happen in combat, but firing on a clearly visible vehicle without determining what the vehicle is just seems a little ludicrous to me, especially when our vehicles are marked with blaze orange panels that these pilots clearly identified.
Pilot 1: "I'm going to be sick."
Pilot 2: "Ah fuck."
Pilot 1: "Did you hear?"
Pilot 2: "Yeah, this sucks."
Pilot 1: "We're in jail, dude."
If this were a singular incident, I could perhaps understand -but- there seems to be a never ending stream of these friendly-fire incidents involving Air Force jets and ground troops. The question that I'm struggling to understand is this. If you're entrusted with a lethal piece of hardware like an A-10 warthog attack jet... How can you squeeze the trigger without positively identifying your target? It's not like an A-10 attacks from 30,000 feet above. The A-10 attacks low & slow compared to most modern aircraft.
When I was in the military, vehicle identification was beaten into our heads using low-tech flash cards (like pictured here), photographs, models and just descriptions. Our TOW missiles could engage a target all the way out to 3,750 meters (well over 2 miles) and the M1's were firing even further than that. I doubt that an A-10 attacks from much further away than that. We were trained to positively identify our targets before loosing that destructive power. Our NCOs would take these playing card-sized flash cards out to a distance of 100 meters or so and would intentionally obscure the images so that only a small piece of the card was visible and we had to identify them while looking through binoculars. I personally had them drilled so deeply that to this day I can't see an image of an armored fighting vehicle without identifying it (much to my wife's dismay). Perhaps if those two pilots had spent a little time studying this card they might not have fired on Lance Cpl. Matty Hull's panel-marked vehicle and a lot of pain and suffering could have been avoided. So before buying another high tech, expensive gadget for the air force, perhaps that DOD ought to pull these cheap cards out and require pilots to study them. Don't get me wrong, mistakes happen in combat, but firing on a clearly visible vehicle without determining what the vehicle is just seems a little ludicrous to me, especially when our vehicles are marked with blaze orange panels that these pilots clearly identified.
Labels: Middle East, military
posted by G-Man at 12:18 AM
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