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The worst fratricidal incident of the 18-day-old war in Iraq prompted pointed questions over whether the US military has done enough since t...

The worst fratricidal incident of the 18-day-old war in Iraq prompted pointed questions over whether the US military has done enough since the first Gulf War to combat friendly fire casualties.

So far, at least 13 of the 71 US soldiers killed in action may have been brought down by friendly fire. An Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crash last Wednesday that took the lives of six soldiers may also have been caused by friendly fire. The British have lost five service members to friendly fire.

8216;8216;On balance, combating friendly fire wasn8217;t quite the priority it should have been,8217;8217; said Michael O8217;Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. Some former military officers and friendly fire experts say technological advances will never eliminate, or even greatly mitigate, fratricidal combat losses.

8216;8216;There have been friendly fire incidents in every war in the history of mankind,8217;8217; Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on Thursday. 8216;8216;There are portions of this battlespace that are very complex, and human beings are human beings.8217;8217;

Besides, the more cumbersome the anti-fratricide effort becomes, the more likely soldiers will be killed by the enemy instead, said Ivan Oelrich, who in 1993 authored the most exhaustive look at friendly fire for Congress8217;s now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment. 8216;8216;There is a certain danger of firing when you shouldn8217;t, but there is also a danger of not firing when you should,8217;8217; he said.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when 35 of the US8217; 148 combat casualties were the result of friendly fire, the military pledged to do something about it. Efforts to find a technological answer were spurred on in 1994, when two F-15s shot down a pair of Black Hawks zone over Northern Iraq, killing 26 passengers and crew, including UN observers and military officers from Britain, France and Turkey.

Friendly fire incidents bedevilled the US military in Afghanistan too. Over 10 years, the Defence Department spent 175 million on the Battlefield Combat Identification System BCIS. The idea was ambitious: Tanks, armoured personnel carriers, jets, helicopters, and even individual soldiers would carry transmitters that would seek out encrypted 8216;8216;friend or foe8217;8217; signals before firing at targets.

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As that was under development, the Army took a broader approach, developing what it called its Force 21 Battle Command, Brigade and Below system. Computer screens aboard combat vehicles would show friendly forces as blue blips and enemy forces 8212; when found 8212; as red. Reducing fratricide would follow not as the programme8217;s main aim but as its result. BCIS died in 2001, when Pentagon officials decided that at 50,000 a vehicle, it would be too expensive and unreliable.

Force 21 survived, but it has yet to arrive on the battlefields of Iraq. The Army8217;s most 8216;8216;digitised8217;8217; unit 8212; the Fourth Infantry Division 8212; will not reach Baghdad until later this month. Instead, what troops have is decidedly low-tech: thermal imaging 8216;8216;patches8217;8217; that show up on night vision goggles and diodes and glint tape that appear under infra-red light. The battlefield is divided into grids 8212; 8216;8216;phase lines8217;8217; 8212; and troops are supposed to radio commanders when they cross from one to another so officers know where they are. LAT-WP