This is so retarded. I'm sorry, but trying to minimize Blue on Blue is of course something the military should always work on, but Christ almighty, they account for a quarter of battle deaths not because we're killing more friendlies but because the enemy is killing less of us.

I hate all the prevelance given to this story.

Yeah, we wouldn't want any criticisms of the US military would we?

You know, I'm pretty sure the families of the dead soldiers are fairly interested in what the US military will do to curb these incidents. So far, we appear to be on par with the same order of friendly fire incidents as was the case in GWI.

Great Gary, completely misrepresent what I said. It makes you look really good. Not like an idiot at all.

Russell, it did sound like you just wanted this story to go away.

For what it's worth, the Brits are complaining (politely---they are British, after all) that our ROE are more lax than their own and that as a result, U.S. forces are quicker on the trigger than they need to be.

The Brits have earned the right to complain about this. A considerable portion of Blue on Blue has been American Blue hitting British Blue.

With our vastly superior fire power, maybe we could afford a little more hesitancy. Sure seems worthy of a policy review, in any case. And it's an important story. If it's not reported, where will the pressure come from to review the balance between alacrity and deliberation?

goddamit to hell. That's incredible painful to contemplate.

we spent 12 YEARS planning how to reduce these types of incidents. We could see all the units on the ground they all had GPS identifiers and IFFs. Hell even the "11 Bravo" grunts had GPS damn, damn, damn.

The main cause due GW1 was buck fever and I'm afraid it's going to be the main cause again.

I'm not saying friendly fire shouldn't be reported. I'm not saying failures in the system shouldn't be looked into and fixed. I'm saying the standard news spin is distorting what's actually going on. They quote figures like "one quarter of combat deaths," as if that's supposed to say a lot, but it really doesn't.

In an operation of this size, with this much close fire support going on, a few handfuls of deaths related to friendly fire is pretty damn good, IMHO. They say things like it makes up an "alarmingly high percentage of total deaths," but that's because our military has become so good at protecting its soldiers from the enemy, not because friendly fire incidents are going up.

Friendly fire made up a third of battle deaths in Vietnam, IIRC, a much higher percentage, as well as of course a higher total number. The fact that the military machine has become so complicated and integrated between services and is yet still able to keep that number at a quarter is pretty good.

That's not to belittle the people that died. Thir deaths are a tragedy, but some perspective is in order.

I have to go with Russel here. The people who say that we've done nothing to try to minimize friendly fire are the same people who said we were bogged down in a quagmire 2 weeks ago.

They're using this as an excuse to criticize the war overall.

There's only so much you can do, especially when you consider the different roles that units undertake. When a patrol goes out and has to cross a line of artillery, it's less than ideal to be radioing your position every 15 minutes.

In a hostile environment the split second that you hesitate is the one that gets you killed. Ask those 4 guys who were helping the pregnant woman out of her car.

"Friendly fire deaths lower than in previous war"

Pay attention to the statistics, people. That car-bombing incident with the pregnant woman killed four of our guys, and that's the biggest single red-on-blue incident I can recall. But 18 deaths happened in a single blue-on-blue...

The truth is the Iraqis can only kill us one at a time under most circumstances; our weaponry tends to produce multiple casualties per application, however. That makes the mismatch between enemy-vs.-friendly-fire deaths even more marked.

Yes, matters could be made better. No, it's not as bad as it sounds. After all, we're taking out something like a thousand Iraqi troops for every one of ours -- the one-in-five friendly-fire fatalities is very, very small in comparison.

Pay attention to the statistics, people. That car-bombing incident with the pregnant woman killed four of our guys, and that's the biggest single red-on-blue incident I can recall. But 18 deaths happened in a single blue-on-blue...

The truth is the Iraqis can only kill us one at a time under most circumstances; our weaponry tends to produce multiple casualties per application, however. That makes the mismatch between enemy-vs.-friendly-fire deaths even more marked.

Yes, matters could be made better. No, it's not as bad as it sounds. After all, we're taking out something like a thousand Iraqi troops for every one of ours -- the one-in-five friendly-fire fatalities is very, very small in comparison.

Does MT double-post every time a preview is corrected?