Amicicide The Problem Of Friendly Fire In Modern War

Friendly fire incidents often disrupt the close and continuous combined arms cooperation so essential to success in modern combat, especially when that combat is conducted against a well armed, well trained, and numerically superior opponent. This study, by presenting selected examples in their historical settings, is intended only to explain a few of the most obvious types of friendly fire incidents and some of the causative factors associated with them. By directing the attention of commanders and staff officers responsible for the development, training, and employment of combat forces to the hitherto little explored problem of friendly fire incidents, this study is intended to generate interest in and solutions for the problems outlined. The scope of this study is limited to incidents involving US forces in World War II and Vietnam, although some evidence is available from other conflicts in the twentieth century has also been considered. In sum, this study can claim to be no more than a narrative exposition of selected examples. Although its conclusions must be considered highly speculative and tentative in nature, this study can be of substantial value to an understanding of the problem of friendly fire in modern war. Chapters one through 5 of this report discuss: Artillery Amicicide; Air Amicicide; Antiaircraft Amicicide; Ground Amicicide.

From surveys of much of the existing literature on World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, the author has extracted examples of friendly fire involving U.S. ground forces and has categorized them according to types of incidents. In this narrative, he draws tentative conclusions about the causes and effects of friendly fire and offers recommendations for those who expect to study the subject further.

On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure--to complete his explanation. His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.

The term "friendly fire" was coined in the 1970s but the theme appears in literature from ancient times to the present. It begins the narrative in Aeschylus's Persians and Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story. It marks the turning point in Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Chanson de Roland, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. It is the subject of transformative disclosure in Jaan Kross's Czar's Madman, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods and A.B. Yehoshua's Friendly Fire. In some stories, events propel the characters into a friendly-fire catastrophe, as in Thomas Taylor's A Piece of this Country and Oliver Stone's 1986 film Platoon. This study examines friendly fire in a broad range of literary contexts.

With its impressive breadth of coverage – both geographically and chronologically – the International Encyclopedia of Military History is the most up-to-date and inclusive A-Z resource on military history. From uniforms and military insignia worn by combatants to the brilliant military leaders and tacticians who commanded them, the campaigns and wars to the weapons and equipment used in them, this international and multi-cultural two-volume set is an accessible resource combining the latest scholarship in the field with a world perspective on military history.