CHANGING BATTERY IN GPS DEVICE LED TO 'FRIENDLY FIRE' DEATHS

The Buffalo News ^ | March 24, 2002 | Vernon Loeb

[Marianne]

WASHINGTON - The deadliest "friendly fire" incident of the war in Afghanistan was triggered in December when a U.S. Special Forces air controller changed the battery on a Global Positioning System device he was using to target a Taliban outpost, a senior defense official said Saturday.

Three Special Forces soldiers were killed and 20 were injured when a 2,000-pound, satellite-guided bomb landed, not on the Taliban outpost north of Kandahar, but on a battalion command post occupied by American forces and a group of Afghan allies, including Hamid Karzai, now the interim prime minister.

The U.S. Central Command, which runs the Afghan war, has never explained how the coordinates got mixed up or who was responsible for relaying the U.S. position to a B-52 bomber, which fired a Joint Direct Attack Munition at the Americans.

But the senior defense official explained Saturday that the Air Force combat controller was using a Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to soldiers as a "plugger," to calculate coordinates for a B-52 attack.

The controller did not realize that after he changed the device's battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on while displaying coordinates for its own location, the official said.

Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others, the controller had used the GPS receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban position in minutes and seconds for an airstrike by a Navy F/A-18, the official said.

Then, with the B-52 approaching the target, the air controller did a second calculation in "degree decimals" required by the bomber crew. The controller had performed the calculation and recorded the position, the official said, when the receiver battery died.

Without realizing the machine was programmed to come back on showing the coordinates of its own location, the controller mistakenly called in the American position to the B-52. The bomb landed with devastating precision.

The official said he did not know how the Air Force would treat the incident and whether disciplinary action would be taken.

But the official, a combat veteran, said he considered the incident "an understandable mistake under the stress of operations."

"I don't think they've made any judgments yet, but the way I would react to something like that - it is not a flagrant error, a violation of a procedure," the official said. "Stuff like that, truth be known, happens to all of us every day - it's just that the stakes in battle are so enormously high."

Nonetheless, the official said the incident shows that the Air Force and Army have a serious training problem that needs to be corrected.

"We need to know how our equipment works; when the battery is changed, it defaults to his own location," the official said. "We've got to make sure our people understand this."

Navy Cmdr. Ernest Duplessis, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, declined to comment on the friendly fire incident, saying an investigation "has not cleared our review yet."

[Marianne]

(emphasis mine)

Previous reports:
FRIENDLY FIRE KILLED A BAND OF BROTHERS LINK
WHY 'SMART' BOMBS DON'T END FRIENDLY FIRE LINK

[b4its2late]

Damn.

[Hodar]

The controller did not realize that after he changed the device's battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on while displaying coordinates for its own location

Don't you just hate it when you re-boot a device, and it doesn't magically know what you want it to do? I can't count the number of times I have unplugged my computer, re-booted it, only to find that the website I had only just viewed, or the game I had just played, is not where it was. What an idiot. The controller should have known this, it's pretty dog-gone obvious that a GPS would not 'guess' the co-ordinates of an enemy after the batteries were changed.

[tracer]

The whitewash of this will begin with the indictment of the Energizer Bunny.....

[babyface00]

I'm surprised a military-quality GPS doesn't have the ability to remember some coordinates after a battery change. A little non-volatile memory would seem like a prudent addition to this device.

I don't know a lot about GPS's, but it would seem that people could die in the time it would take to recalculate a firing solution during combat. Seems like a bad idea for such an apparently key piece of equipment to be so vulnerable to the inevitable battery change.

[Steve0113]

it's pretty dog-gone obvious that a GPS would not 'guess' the co-ordinates of an enemy after the batteries were changed.

This could be avoided if the units had flash RAM. Or if the operator had a brain.

This was completely avoidable. What a waste.

[Steve0113]

Great minds...

[narby]

Someone wrote a really bad specification for the GPS "plugger". I guarantee that the GPS itself had some kind of non-volatile memory to remember satellite ephemeris data from the SVs. But the plugger software was probably done on a different board, and I have no idea if it had any non-volatile memory on board. If it did, then its even worse. Just a little software would have fixed this stupidity.

If anything, it shouldn't have been able to send targeting coordinates for its own position.

[fish70]

Oh yeah, the old battery change story, that's the ticket.

[vbmoneyspender]

this isn't a training problem. this is a hardware issue that needs to be fixed.

[vbmoneyspender]

exactly. or at the very least an alert should be shown that someone is calling in a strike on their own position

[FRMAG]

I have two sons on active duty both NCOs and both Staff Sergeants. Both boys learned map and compass as Boy scouts and Land Navigation and Orienteering from me (active duty Army NCO then.)

I have questioned both recently about the "pluggers" and from what they tell me dependence on those devices is viurtually universal as today's soldiers are very poor at Land Navigation.

Both of my sons still carry both a compass and an altimiter and routinely use them to back check what the "plugger" tells them.

There is also the issue of degraded battery performance in very cold environments.

[vbmoneyspender]

I appreciate the response. I have never served in the military and was looking at this as a technical problem. My take on this is that any time you have human beings trying to do even moderately complicated calculations, eventually they are going to make mistakes, particularly when they are operating under stress. So, instead of relying on humans to do the calculations, our military has developed these GPS devices to do the job. You certainly know better than I, but are these GPS devices as reliable as they seem to be? If so, then it seems that this was a situation that the programmers didn't account for and what is needed is some sort of warning that alerts people whenever an airstrike is being called in on the position of the GPS unit.

[Fury]

Blue on blue fires unfortunately do happen. It sounds like this could have been prevented, several of the Gulf War blue on blue incidents were the result of what I consider "too much" information being presented to decision makers and they basically becoming overloaded.

The military and the USAF in particular, are working hard to improve the "sensor to shoot" time. With that, comes increased risk that decision makes will be overloaded with data - and that can lead to blue on blue fires.