[JRandomFreeper]

Whose day-code do you use? Navy? for returning to the fleet? Army? for avoiding Patriots? AF? for avoiding air-to-air? Army and AF do a fair job of joint ops, but there is room for much improvement. Did the Navy AC fall under the air boss? Was there an ATO?

Balancing central command and local control leaves room for a margin of fatal error, but everthing that can be done, should be.

Joint Doctrine is the answer.

Prayers, BTW, for the family. But I don't want any family to suffer from a fratricide loss again.

/john

[HerrKobes]

There is always an ATO, despite the best efforts of the Navy to avoid it.

Basically, the air war is controlled by the COAC - Combined Air Operations Center.

Underneath that you've got planners who come up with the ATO 48 hours in advance, and then Current Ops who'll run that ATO.

As for IFF? It is certainly not a question of codes (that was standardized long ago) - more a question of whether the IFF is used. The Army has a history leaving it off, strangely believing that their IFF serves as a beacon to the enemy (look up the friendly fire incident in Iraq involving USAF F-15s and Army Blackhawks in 1993, I think).

In this situation, the key was a technical glitch regarding the failure of IFF interrogation. You can't expect Patriot battery operators to look through an ever changing ATO within seconds to launch a missile. The key is IFF and rational flight profile matching.

[Doohickey]

Doesn't matter. A contact squawking mode 1 or 3A is enough, and all ships and aircraft do. There's a mode 4 theater code, so it isn't a question of getting the right CMS loaded.

Though I will say that I've always found the APX-72 to be a complete piece of crap.