Quote from thisnameistaken :

And fails. In the Falklands war the British navy shot at its own jets a few times. And in Iraq there was the american jet pilot who had to destroy a Patriot battery on the ground that had targeted him, and IIRC another Patriot installation identified an incoming British aircraft as an enemy missile.

Problem is they use too complicated systems and do trust them blindly, they should took simplest method and use it as a helpful addition.

This is good movie to watch, sadly that is not so much fiction as some may think. It is silly how much money and lives they loose because of greed companies that sell crap systems.

Sickening. How do they let this happen? Whatever the circumstances, someone at some time decides to fire on a target which he/she OBVIOUSLY has not verified the identity of. They just assume that the target is the enemy? "This piece of paper says there aint no goodies in these parts, therefore it must be one of them there baddies."

Too many people with too many guns. The more bullets are fired the less they think about where they fire the next lot. Soon shooting at stuff and telling people what to kill becomes the everyday norm, and they do some really, really, really, stupid things, I mean "Don't kill your allies" must be rule number 2 after "Don't kill yourself" right?

I just hope they care when it happens, but it happens so much, so who knows. It would be really sick if somewhere there was a number for "Acceptable Friendly Losses".

War is very bad for enviroment too, pollution, I could almost bet that if there would not be single car in whole Finland it would not be enough to overcome pollution that this war has caused and still there is big debate how car pollution is needed to decrease in here illepall

sinbad, of course there is number for acceptable friendly losses, as there is number for acceptable deaths caused by alcohol etc.

Swords are just enough powerful weapons, no need for anything else, would be best for all, imo. Just how to get rid of all weapons, hmm, got it, need time machine who has one to spare?

Quote from JTbo :

sinbad, of course there is number for acceptable friendly losses, as there is number for acceptable deaths caused by alcohol etc.

Those two things are worlds apart.

Isn't it just a great big confession of total incompetence to write anything but Zero next to the words "Acceptable Friendly Fire Losses"?

That's like Ambulance drivers writing "1" next to "Number of acceptable road deaths caused by the Ambulance each month", a doctor being told he's allowed to kill 3 people through gross negligence every year, or an automatic door manufacturer saying it's ok for their doors to kill 2 people every 5 years.

Doors killing people O.o
to me Casualties are acceptable not deaths.

Quote from sinbad :

Those two things are worlds apart.

Isn't it just a great big confession of total incompetence to write anything but Zero next to the words "Acceptable Friendly Fire Losses"?

That's like Ambulance drivers writing "1" next to "Number of acceptable road deaths caused by the Ambulance each month", a doctor being told he's allowed to kill 3 people through gross negligence every year, or an automatic door manufacturer saying it's ok for their doors to kill 2 people every 5 years.

You don't need to like it, but that is how it is, there is not 0 put next to anything, it would be too expensive is comments when asked why not

So there certainly is analysis done and there is certain amount of deaths allowed even it sounds sick.

Nobody seems to care about the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed by the excessive bombing of the cities, they seem to be an acceptable figure too.

The question I keep asking is which is the biggest crime, 9/11 or the War on Terror? Slowly and steadily our governments are taking away our human rights and slaughtering innocent people.

well, it all depends...for a single incident, 9/11 was larger, but cumulatively, the War on Terror has been much worse. Eroded rights by the govts, more americans killed than in the 9/11 attacks, in addition to all of the ally losses, innocent Iraqi losses, and insurgent losses.

to the US govt, this was originally a very arrogant war (quick and easy), and is ultimately a very ill-thought-out war.

imo this all came about to miss-information. in the vid, you can clearly hear the pilots ask if there were "any friendlies this far north?" several times. and at each time they were given the same answer, "no friendlies this far north". so in the mind of the pilots, their actions were justified. but once the abort was ordered the "mood" changed in the cockpits.
i don't think anybody likes the idea of blue on blue. but imo people shouldn't argue who is to blame but discuss how to avoid this in the future.


to learn from our mistakes, first we have to make them.

i tend to leave the politics to the polititions because they make much better liers than i do.

They asked if there were friendlies in the area... they were told there weren't. That would, in my mind at least, tell me that whatever vehicles I saw moving - they weren't friendly... valid targets in their minds. This comes down to sh*tty, and negligent, intel and commanding.

I agree with ATC_Quicksilver... no-one seems to care about the Iraqis... lest we forget they're human too.

all a war needs is two men and two pistols at 500 paces

Quote from sinbad :

Sickening. How do they let this happen? Whatever the circumstances, someone at some time decides to fire on a target which he/she OBVIOUSLY has not verified the identity of. They just assume that the target is the enemy? "This piece of paper says there aint no goodies in these parts, therefore it must be one of them there baddies."

It would appear from the video that the A-10s had been sent out to find and destroy enemy armoured vehicles. They found some armoured vehicles in their search area and confirmed that there were no friendly units nearby. Given that information, the pilots should have opened fire. They didn't assume the target was hostile, they acted on information which was repeated to them several times.

Are you saying they should have opened up their canopies and asked for ID?

Quote from StewartFisher :

Are you saying they should have opened up their canopies and asked for ID?

don't be silly...they have to land, shut off the engines, get out of the planes and walk up to the trucks. too much noise otherwise

Should we help them a bit and get send pair of these over there?

Quote from JamesF1 :

I agree with ATC_Quicksilver... no-one seems to care about the Iraqis... lest we forget they're human too.

actually.. we do care about them in the war; for some time we also tried to get them to leave the country.. many didn't, i can see why, and i dont blame them; but nowadays with technology and our weaponry (ours and the british i will add) using GPS we can put missiles in a specific corner of a room, so when you think about it, our men are really doing all they can not to kill innocent iraqi peoples

but you also have to keep in mind that war never has been a fair game; someone that may look innocent may have some guns hidden under there and will take you out in the blink of an eye which.. happens all the time

@ATC Quicksilver... yep.. and they have been increasingly ever so slightly over the past decades and will continue to until the world turns into the book 1984

Quote from XCNuse :

but you also have to keep in mind that war never has been a fair game; someone that may look innocent may have some guns hidden under there and will take you out in the blink of an eye which.. happens all the time

they also booby trap themselves, their children, and deadbodies with explosives and detonate them whenever allied troops get near them.

Quote from StewartFisher :

It would appear from the video that the A-10s had been sent out to find and destroy enemy armoured vehicles. They found some armoured vehicles in their search area and confirmed that there were no friendly units nearby. Given that information, the pilots should have opened fire. They didn't assume the target was hostile, they acted on information which was repeated to them several times.

No, they didn't assume the obviously unidentified target was hostile (hence the repeated questions and references to the orange), but someone, somewhere (perhaps whoever was on the other end of that transmission), did.

Quote from XCNuse :

but nowadays with technology and our weaponry (ours and the british i will add) using GPS we can put missiles in a specific corner of a room, so when you think about it, our men are really doing all they can not to kill innocent iraqi peoples

Hmm, something that I would not brag about too much, if bombs are very accurate then users have made quite bad errors...

Also some material I have seen has shown what kind of attitude some soldiers has, does not really help to prevent civilian casualties.

But generally sure idea is to avoid civilian casualties, it just has not gone too well so far.

Quote from JTbo :

Hmm, something that I would not brag about too much, if bombs are very accurate then users have made quite bad errors...

not always
as said basically said before; a man can only be as good as his intel is on a battlefield; crappy intel = misinformed soldiers = a huge screwup (usually)

no one can really say anything about this topic because its like finding a needle in a haystack when there are some hay "disguised" as a needle

Quote from sinbad :

That's like Ambulance drivers writing "1" next to "Number of acceptable road deaths caused by the Ambulance each month", a doctor being told he's allowed to kill 3 people through gross negligence every year, or an automatic door manufacturer saying it's ok for their doors to kill 2 people every 5 years.

If you continue on that argument we'll have a nanny state that monitors us 24/7, prevents us from doing anything remotely enjoyable in case it's unsafe and comes up with slogans like "speed kills".

<thinks>

I've seen that somewhere before. It'll come to me in a minute...

I'd say that Simbad hit the nail on the head with the text you quoted from him, it is unacceptable what happend here and you probarly didn't hear who (in the tape) was to blame for the mis inforamtion. All the stations do is feed the information they have been given, they clearly wern't informed that there was any friendlys up there.

You see all these adverts on TV about joining the army and how they all rely on each other as a team, why 1 part of a team doesn't pass on information to another is beyond me.

I do however like the words of remorse for the pour soldier that he killed "We're gong to jail dude" Yea, nice....

Quote from XCNuse :

actually.. we do care about them in the war; for some time we also tried to get them to leave the country.. many didn't, i can see why, and i dont blame them; but nowadays with technology and our weaponry (ours and the british i will add) using GPS we can put missiles in a specific corner of a room, so when you think about it, our men are really doing all they can not to kill innocent iraqi peoples

Well, the thing is, a large number of bombs are not guided at all, the guided ones can still fail and most importantly, you can only guess what's inside the room you're trying to hit in the first place.

If you watch the video in this thread for example, the problem wasn't lack of precision. They weren't targeting Iraqi military vehicles and hit British ones on accident, they hit exactly what they were aiming at. Considering errors like these happen despite orange "ally" markings, it's not too difficult to imagine what the situation with civilian buildings is like. After all, neither military nor civilian ones are marked as such and they aren't going to report their position either.

In my opinion, precision-guided weapons are a two-edged sword. On the battlefield more precision is a good thing of course, but at home it's yet another thing that helps portray war as clean, good old-fashioned patriotic entertainment, which may lead to bad decisions being made.

Quote from Christofire :

If you continue on that argument we'll have a nanny state that monitors us 24/7, prevents us from doing anything remotely enjoyable in case it's unsafe and comes up with slogans like "speed kills".

<thinks>

I've seen that somewhere before. It'll come to me in a minute...

Since you quoted me. That was not an argument. It was a comparison. The things I mention are absurd, as absurd as the discussed "Acceptable Friendly Fire Losses Quota".
The idea that it makes it less wrong to do something like that, just because someone at the top has plucked a number out of the air, written it on a piece of paper, and said "As long as we don't go over that number, we're ok" appalls me

Quote from Christofire :

"speed kills".

yes but everyone that says that is all wrong

its not the speed that kills you, its the sudden stop

(lol sorry for the randomness)

Quote from Bawbag :

You see all these adverts on TV about joining the army and how they all rely on each other as a team, why 1 part of a team doesn't pass on information to another is beyond me.

I do however like the words of remorse for the pour soldier that he killed "We're gong to jail dude" Yea, nice....

Things go wrong - humans make mistakes and because we build and operate the machines we can't rely on them to always be right.

As for the pilots words, I doubt he fully realised what had happened. People in difficult jobs mentally distance themselves to help them deal with what they see and do. Ever tried topping a paramedic at a sick joke competition? I wouldn't recommend it. :/