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]