Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq. - Review - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2001 by Karl E. Weick

Scott A. Snook. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2000. 257 pp. $35.00.

"Friendly fire" is a military term that refers to casualties unintentionally inflicted on one's own forces. The incidence of this glaring organizational failure is surprisingly high. Twenty-four percent (35 of 148) of all U.S. fatalities in the Persian Gulf War were caused by friendly fire. Twenty-six more people died by friendly fire during peace-keeping operations after the Gulf War on April 14, 1994, when two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters shot down two U.S. Army helicopters as a crew of 19 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) air traffic controllers in charge of those four aircraft looked on. That shootdown is the subject of this remarkable book by Scott Snook. Snook, an army lieutenant colonel and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior who is currently teaching at West Point, was himself a victim of friendly fire in 1983 on Grenada. Snook was wounded by machine gun fire from a U.S. Air Force A-7 and by a bomb dropped from a U.S. Navy A-6 aircraft. When he dove for cover, Snook landed alongside an Air Na val Liaison officer who had the only radio that was able to coordinate air attacks on the enemy positions that were Snook's targets. The radio didn't work, but the weapons on the aircraft did. And Snook developed an intense personal as well as theoretical interest in the conditions that lead up to friendly fire.

What makes this such a good book is that there is no dispute about what happened in the shootdown itself. A definitive, uncontested, and triangulated re-creation was possible because there were video records of the shootdown, both from ground level and from the attacking fighters, video records of what was on the radar screens in front of the AWACS controllers as the shootdown unfolded, interviews with all personnel involved, complete investigations by each of the services involved, a report by a joint investigation commission, and the complete record of the court martial of one of the participants (acquitted), all of which were available to Snook. The event itself, while not in dispute, has a sufficient number of strands that I can only hint at them. Any lapses in description are my fault, not Snook's, because his portrait is a model of completeness, written with elegance.

The basics of the incident are these. Two army helicopters (UH-60s), based in Turkey, had been assigned to land at a village just inside the Iraqi border, pick up high-ranking UN personnel, and ferry them deeper into the Iraqi secure zone to meet with Kurdish leaders. The helicopters were visible only intermittently on the air force AWACS radars because their signals would fade in and out as they landed or flew behind mountains. Radios in the army helicopters were incompatible with those in the air force fighters. Furthermore, the helicopters did not use a different electronic identification code when they flew in Iraq from the one they used in Turkey, even though all other friendly aircraft did. This discrepancy had continued for almost three years of the peace-keeping operation. On the morning of the shootdown, two air force F-15 fighter planes, accustomed to air-to-air combat at high altitudes, were assigned to sweep the secure zone for enemy aircraft. They believed that they were the first aircraft in the secure zone that morning, and when they spotted the two helicopters on their own radar screens, they tried unsuccessfully to identify whether they were friend or foe. The AWACS crew, flying their first mission together, were of no help. The fighters then decided to attempt a visual identification. The lead pilot flew above and to the left of the low-flying U.S. helicopters and misidentified them as Russian Hind helicopters while trying to avoid flying into a mountain. This misidentification was confirmed by the second fighter pilot, and both fighters circled around behind the helicopters, turned on their missiles, and informed the AWACS crew that they had "engaged two Hinds." This meant that they were ready to fire on the targets. All the AWACS said back was, "Roger, engaged." The pilots assumed this meant that it was permissible to fire the missiles and triggered their release. All 26 people on board the helicopters were killed instantly. The pilots did not learn of the error until five hours later when the y heard about the shootdown on CNN. The shootdown resulted from a combination of misidentification by fighter pilots, non-intervention by an AWACS crew, and non-integration of air force and the army activities that supposedly were a joint operation. These three errors lend themselves to analysis at the individual, group, and organizational level. After chapters on each of the three levels of analysis, Snook concludes with two additional chapters, one describing a provocative cross-level theory of practical drift to explain the event and the other focusing on lessons learned.

To illustrate how errors at each level interweave and move relentlessly toward shootdown, Snook develops a complex causal map of the incident on page 21 which, for all of its numbing detail, begins to grow on you because it keeps everything in play. You might want to do as I did and make an enlarged photocopy of the diagram so that you can keep track of what is happening as more and more twists are introduced throughout the book. Here is a quick sampler, and it is only that, of some of the gems produced at each level of analysis.