Friendly Fire - the Accidental Shootdown of the US Black Hawks over Northern Iraq by Scott Snook - Essay Example

Guide 15 February Book Review of "Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks Over Northern Iraq" by Scott Snook, "Friendly fire" is a military phrase and refers to the unintended attack by friendly forces, largely as a result of mistaken identity. Historically, its occurrence has been steadily increasing in US warfare from the killing of Confederate Lieutenant General "Stonewall" Jackson in the Civil War to that of Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan (Jones 38-41). This book, by Harvard University Associate Professor Scott Snook, a retired Colonel in the United States Armed Forces, deals in depth with one such inadvertent fratricide involving the shootdown of two helicopters by air force jets. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Harvard Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Professor Snook writes from a rare vantage point, having been a victim of friendly fire himself in Granada in 1993. 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 passengers onboard, who were on a peacekeeping Operation Provide Comfort mission to a Kurdish village. The tragic incident took place in broad daylight and had highly qualified and experienced crews in both aircraft, who, furthermore, were monitored by a US AWACS (airborne warning and control system) flying above them. In response to this disaster the complete gamut of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures was run through. This incident has been investigated by (in chronological order) an USAF Aircraft Accident Investigation Board, by the US General Accounting Office review of that report [GAO 1997], by the book under review [Snook 2000], by the mother of one of the officers killed [Piper 2001], and by Nancy Leveson, Polly Allen and Margaret-Anne Storey [Leveson 2001]. On the morning of the shootdown, the two F-15 fighter pilots, used to high altitude air-to-air combat, were assigned to sweep the no fly 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. As a result of different codes being used by the two service branches, the Army helicopters answered the Airforce pilots electronic query with the wrong code, and were identified as enemies (Snook 157). 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. When asked to confirm by the lead pilot, the second pilot replied "Tally Two" meaning that he saw two helicopters. This was misinterpreted by the lead pilot as confirmation of their enemy status. This misidentification was confirmed by the second pilot 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. The AWACS crew, flying their first mission together, were also of little assistance. The AWACS replied, "Roger, engaged." The pilots assumed this as permission to fire the missiles and triggered their release. The Air Force pilots saw US helicopters where (they thought) they should not be, when they were not expected to be, using a wrong frequency of IFF, and shot them down as enemies. All 26 people on board the helicopters were killed instantly. Whenever different service branches of the US armed forces work together in a military operation, a common plan is formulated detailing the rules and codes. Operations Plan 91-7 described the rules governing Operation Provide Comfort. However elaborate, this plan failed to influence the on field exchanges between the services. Communication was especially hampered by a large number of misunderstandings caused by different meanings being attributed to the same terms by the Army and the Airforce. Firstly, the word 'aircraft' in the order forbidding the entry by aircraft into the No-Flight zone before the enemy radars were 'sanitized' by F-15s was understood by the Air Force to include helicopters, but by Army pilots to exclude helicopters (Snook 163). As a consequence, the Air Force pilots did not expect any American helicopter to be present in the no-fly zone, while the Army pilots did not think they were breaching the order. Furthermore, the AWACS crew thought it was responsible for planes, but not helicopters (Snook 163). Secondly, the two key acronyms, AOR (Area of Responsibility) and TAOR (Tactical Area of Responsibility) were interpreted variously by Army and Air Force. "To the Army, AOR meant the area outside northern Iraq; to the Air-Force, it meant just the opposite."(Snook 157) These different interpretations concerning both the 'where' of the aircraft and the 'when' of their presence, contributed to the misperception of the two Black Hawks as enemy helicopters by the fighter pilots. Thirdly, the Air Force and the Army helicopters interpreted differently, for a long period of time up to the accident, the rules governing the electronic exchanges used to identify other aircraft as friend or foe (the so-called IFF system, for 'Identify Friend or Foe'). The pilots did not learn of their mistake until much later on CNN. The shootdown resulted from a combination of wrong identification by fighter pilots, non-intervention by an AWACS crew, and non-integration of air force and army activities in a purported joint operation. These errors lend themselves to analysis at the individual, group, and organizational level. Karl Weick, whose theories on sense making offered a strong framework for Snook's interpretation, has admirably illustrated this : At the individual level, the wrong identification is attributed to ambiguous stimuli, a powerful set of expectations, and a strong desire by the pilots to see what they wanted to see. To illustrate, the distinguishing features of the Hinds helicopters that fighter pilots are taught are the same features found on a U.S. UH-60 helicopter when viewed from above. Training photos of the U.S. helicopter, however, are shot from ground level looking up, so trainees never see this overhead view. Furthermore, as F-15 pilots are trained for high-altitude air-to-air combat, they have little incentive to learn about aircraft that fly below 500 feet. The orders for the day on April 14 listed no takeoff times for helicopters and listed the two fighters as the first aircraft into the secure zone that day. In the pilots' words, "If it's not there on the tasking orders, then it shouldn't be happening." The lead pilot was junior in rank to the second pilot, who was his commander. And in this "inverted hierarchy" the lead person wanted to impress his commander and also assumed that if he had made a misidentification, surely his superior officer would catch it. At the group level, the non-intervention is attributed in part to a weak AWACS crew and diffusion of responsibility. The two friendly helicopters were clearly visible on the AWACS radar scopes at 10:26, four minutes before they were shot down. The technician with responsibility for surveillance in the secure zone was on his very first mission, and the person who usually sat next to him and could have helped was moved to another scope because the adjacent scope was inoperative. This crew had not worked together before. The on-board commander, the highest ranking person on the aircraft, testified both that he had no idea what those radar blips meant ("I'm like a pig looking at a watch," (Snook 127) and that the fighter pilot sounded so confident when he identified the Hinds that the on-board crew who thought the helicopters were friendly assumed they had made a mistake. To confuse things even more, there was a top-heavy leader-to-led ratio on board the AWACS: seven officers, two additional officers who were "shadow crew" to assist the seven, and six subordinates supervised by the nine officers. In the eyes of the technicians, if the radar scopes were being misread, surely one of these nine would intervene. At the organizational level, the non-integration is illustrated by the fact that the helicopters consistently used the wrong friend-or-foe electronic identification code when they were in the secure zone. The policy that all aircraft would use one code outside the secure zone and a different one inside had been set two years earlier for reasons no one could recall. This change had never been communicated to the helicopter operations. And if it had, it is not obvious it would have been implemented, since the helicopters did not consider themselves aircraft. There had been a near miss two years earlier where F-111s had almost shot down two friendly helicopters (p. 215), yet this event was not examined, nor was it treated as an indicator that there might be larger problems in the organization. (Weick 2001) The entire accident has been explained by the concept of "practical drift" or "the slow uncoupling of local practice from global written procedure." (Snook 225). What is normally attributed to human error is in reality the loss of co-ordination in a once tightly coupled system with internally consistent rules and safeguards, which have subsequently been loosened to accommodate "local practicality". As Snook observes, "local adaptation of specific work requirements in pursuit of expertise obtained through a subjective process of boundary exploration often results in posthoc attributions of human error" (p. 197) Many of the patterns of behavior displayed in this tragic incident can be traced to principles enshrined in Natemeyer and Mcmohan's "Classics of Organisational Behaviour" as detailed below : 1. The concept of practical drift proposed by Snook to explain systemic failure is in line with the concept of adaptation and differentiation propounded by Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch in their essay "Environmental Adaptation Through Differentiation and Integration." Organizational sub-units, such as sales or production are shown to be more effective when their operational features fit with the degree of uncertainty characterized by their environment. Sub-units within the organization become differentiated as they change to match their environment, and the degree of differentiation determines which methods of integration are required. If sub-units are very different, then supplemental integrating and coordinating processes, such as cross-functional teams will be needed, and this has direct implications for where and how conflict will be resolved. (Lawrence) This last feature was sorely lacking in this accident. 2. The interactions of various actors is evocative of three of the five bases of power according to R P French and Bertram Raven as essayed in "The Bases of Social power"(Classics 2001): a. Expert & Referrent : All the technical staff in the AWACS deferred to their superiors on the mistaken assumption that their superior expertise would help in alerting them if anything was amiss. Likewise, the lead pilot, a junior in rank to the second pilot, fired the missiles only after obtaining what he thought was a confirmation of his assessment that the helicopters were Iraqi Hinds. b. Legitimate : The AWACS staff deferred to the assessment of the men on the field since they felt that the leaders (pilots) had a legitimate right to influence their judgement. 3. The conformity trap into which the F 15 pilots fell in letting their perception be dictated by their intense desire to see what they wanted to see rather than the ground reality and the affirmation and reinforcement of such 'mindless' behavior by AWACS commanders suggests the powerful influence of Groupthink on the players' desire to conform and not dissent. Groupthink was defined in "Victims of Groupthink" by Irving L Janis as the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. The term refers to deterioration in mental efficiency, realty testing and moral judgements as a result of group pressure. 4. The formulation of a written down procedure and detailed "tightly coupled" plan for the Operation Provide Comfort brings to mind "Bureaucracy" as envisioned by Max Weber (Classics 2001) with fixed and official jurisdictional duty areas, well defined authority hierarchy and execution of these duties by qualified personnel as provided in any armed forces manual. 5. Chris Argyris on the other hand argues for the reason why such a tight coupling is bound to fail if the human "self" and its personality traits are not considered in any hierarchy. Man is by nature free and holistic, whose parts and whole maintain and sustain each other, and seeks internal balance or adjustment and external balance or adaptation, propelled by both psychological and physical energy and expresses itself through its abilities. The mature human personality is inherently incongruent with the needs of a formal organisation with its basic characteristics of logical foundation, task specialization, Chain of command, unity of direction and span of control. Argyris posited that this incongruence increases with the increasing maturity of the person, tighter coupling of the formal structure, as one goes down the chain of command and as the work becomes more mechanized and monotonous. In fact, Argyris seems to have anticipated practical drift and implies that any tight coupled system is bound to be loosened over time as human beings customise the global rules to local needs, thus negating the original purpose. In the end al is perception and sense making. Nothing could be sadder than the disturbing revelation by Snook towards the end of the book that the same tragic blunder could have been committed by any other man since the complexity of the system made it ripe for such a normal accident in a high reliability system. As Weick says, "Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice. When action is the central focus, interpretation, not choice, is the core phenomenon" (2005 409)." I could have asked, "Why did they decide to shoot" However, such a framing puts us squarely on a path that leads straight back to the individual decision maker, away from potentially powerful contextual features and right back into the jaws of the fundamental attribution error. "Why did they decide to shoot" quickly becomes "Why did they make the wrong decision" Hence, the attribution falls squarely onto the shoulders of the decision maker and away from potent situation factors that influence action. Framing the individual-level puzzle as a question of meaning rather than deciding shifts the emphasis away from individual decision makers toward a point somewhere "out there" where context and individual action overlap _ _ _ _ Such a reframing-from decision making to sensemaking-opened my eyes to the possibility that, given the circumstances, even I could have made the same "dumb mistake." This disturbing revelation, one that I was in no way looking for, underscores the importance of initially framing such senseless tragedies as "good people struggling to make sense," rather than as "bad ones making poor decisions" (Snook 206-207). Works Cited Jones, Charles A. Put an End to Fratricide. U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 130:38-41 November 2004. General Accounting Office, USG. Operation Provide Comfort: Review of U.S. Air Force Investigation of Black Hawk Fratricide Incident. Report to Congressional Requestors, Report GAO/OSI-98-4, November 1997 Piper, Joan L.A Chain of Events: The Government Cover-Up of the Black Hawk Incident and the Friendly-Fire Death of Lt. Laura Piper. Brassey's Inc, 2001. Leveson, Nancy G and Allen, Polly and Storey Margaret-Ann. The Analysis of a Friendly Fire Accident using a Systems Model of Accidents, 02 July 2001 Snook, Scott A. Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks Over Northern Iraq. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Weick, Karl E and Sutcliffe Kathleen M, Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking, Organization Science Vol. 16, No. 4, July-August 2005, pp. 409-421. Weick, Karl E. Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq. - Review - book review. Administrative Science Quarterly, March 2001, pp. 1,2 Natemeyer, Walter E. and Timothy, McMahon J., Classics of Organizational Behavior Prospect Heights, IL : Waveland Press, Third Edition, 2001. Read More