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Comment by kjjw | Hacker News Reader

A terrible article entirely predicated on anecdotal evidence. I have no doubt that most of the 'technologically advanced' equipment Americans put into and will put into wars will ultimately fail to live up to expectations.

But let's give another anecdote about the A10. In Iraq, the A10, just like the B52 in Afghanistan, was responsible for killing two truck loads of British soldiers. Its pilot mistook the luminous arrow signs that indicated friendly forces for missile systems.

In Afghanistan, an American Apache mowed down a platoon of British troops after being called in as air support and mistaking the troops for the enemy.

The thing that links all these incidences is not low or high tech but the American military. Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly. Just a bunch of reckless idiots. Much like the government that sent them.

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> Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly. Just a bunch of reckless idiots. Much like the government that sent them.

And this is not "entirely predicated on anecdotal evidence"? You've described two incidents, and extrapolated from there to call an entire military (in this case, more than 2 million people) improperly trained "reckless idiots."

The incidents are serious. But without any attempt to qualify the rate of these accidents relative to the number of engagements, or a comparison to other militaries in other conflicts around the world, it sounds like you're just riding an axe.

> * The thing that links all these incidences is not low or high tech but the American military. Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly.

No, the thing that links them all is war - it's incredibly messy and people have been killing the wrong people in wars for as long as men have been fighting.

Whilst you are correct, and every conflict has blue on blue engagements, the US military have a very bad reputation for being bloody dangerous to their allies. Mission videos that do emerge of incidents where US aircraft, helicopters and drones end up engaging friendly or non-hostile targets commonly show a marked desire to engage the enemy and view any and all information coming in as confirming that initial prejudice.

I'm not saying this applies to all US military personnel or that other militaries do not have problems.

I honestly believe this is largely the result of the U.S. performing the vast majority of sorties flown.

Deploying air forces in an expeditionary capability is difficult and expensive. It's much more difficult than deploying a ground unit. Few forces have this capability.

When you're in Afghanistan, and 90% of the CAS sorties are performed by the U.S., then it stands to reason that if an incident occurs, it'll likely have been a U.S. aircraft based on odds alone.

I suspect you're correct. Issue is, from what I read, it would perhaps be better if most of those sorties were never flown. It seems that use of air power will tend to prioritise the lives of soldiers over civilians. ('Blue on blue' not withstanding, but then my point above was not really about that, but about the anecdotal nature of much of the conversation.)

If I'm reading you correctly and I take this to it's logical conclusion, one could correctly assume that in any war, regardless of the precautions, technology, and training, you will have civilian deaths. You'll have terrible incidents where friendly forced were shot at, or buildings misidentified and a family of four blown up.

It's probably drifting out of scope of this conversation, but it can probably never be reemphasized enough that these will be the consequences of any war, and as such, a war should never be seen as a favorable outcome. In that, I definitely agree with you.

Indeed agreed.

As long as wars are fought by humans, friendly fire incidents are going to happen. No amount of training will eradicate it.

More training will reduce it.

>> In Afghanistan, an American Apache mowed down a platoon of British troops after being called in as air support and mistaking the troops for the enemy.

Do you have a link for this?

Here's a list I found that doesn't seem to mention w whole platoon getting killed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_friendly_fire_incident...

What do you actually know about the CAS mission and NATO SOP to be making such inflammatory claims?

Maybe British FACs just suck. <--I can generalize too.

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