DRONES STOP FALLLUJAH FRIENDLY FIRE

Usually, a big bat­tle to take a city means a bunch of “friendly fire” casu­al­i­ties. But in November’s assault on Fallujah, no U.S. troops were killed by these so-​​called “blue-​​on-​​blue” inci­dents, the Marines are say­ing. According to the L.A. Times, fly­ing drones and care­ful plan­ning were big rea­sons why.

Col. John Coleman, chief of staff for the Camp Pendleton-​​based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said new tech­nol­ogy, rushed to Fallouja within days of the bat­tle, allowed air and ground units to know the pre­cise loca­tion of U.S. forces in real time. Among the improve­ments was bet­ter intel­li­gence gath­er­ing by ScanEagle, the unmanned recon­nais­sance air­craft that cir­cled Fallouja and con­tin­u­ously beamed back infor­ma­tion on U.S. forces and the loca­tion and move­ment of insur­gents…
In Fallouja, the chances for friendly-​​fire deaths were sig­nif­i­cant, as more than 10,000 Marines and sol­diers and dozens of war­planes were involved in a crowded, fast-​​moving bat­tle in an area roughly the size of a Southern California sub­urb.
The U.S. used sev­eral unmanned air­craft dur­ing the bat­tle. Unheard and largely unseen, they broad­cast infor­ma­tion to forces on the ground, air units and top brass at a com­mand post.
“It’s been a great tool for us,” Coleman said dur­ing a wide-​​ranging inter­view about Fallouja and other aspects of the Marine mis­sion in Iraq.
Brig. Gen. Joe Dunford, assis­tant com­man­der of the 1st Marine Division, said in a sep­a­rate inter­view that, along with tech­no­log­i­cal advances, good “sit­u­a­tional aware­ness” among troops on the ground thanks to advance plan­ning helped avoid friendly-​​fire casu­al­ties.
“Technology is an enabler, but there’s no sub­sti­tute for the engage­ment of Marines, sol­diers, sailors at all lev­els in good cross-​​talk,” Dunford said.

Last year, I wrote about new-​​jack ID tags that could be used to pre­vent friendly fire. That arti­cle, for the New York Times, is here.

January 19th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.