At first sight these look like inevitable accidents, triggered by technological failures of 21^st-century military technology. But the truth may lie deeper. Blame for such accidents usually lies with the culture of rivalry that pervades the armed services, say safety experts. And the way such “friendly fire” incidents are investigated – with the emphasis on finding individual culprits rather than any organisational failings – means military planners may never get to the root cause.

There is no dispute that high-tech equipment can foster friendly fire accidents. The American and British forces in Iraq use thermal or radar images to engage the enemy at maximum range in limited visibility, says Scott Snook, former head of the Center for Leadership & Organizations at the West Point military academy in New York.

When troops cannot see and check the target with their own eyes, they are more likely to make a mistake. Similarly, electronic identification systems can fail in action: the US Army says a software error led the Patriot system to identify the Tornado as an incoming missile.

NATO is planning an all-embracing digital “combat ID” system for its members’ forces, but this will not be fitted until at least 2006, according to Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). Until then, the MoD expects “fratricide” to account for 10 to 15 per cent of British deaths in combat.

‘Unavoidable feature of warfare’

Even when the system is fully operational, few expect it to eliminate casualties completely. “History shows that fratricide is an unavoidable feature of warfare,” admits the National Audit Office, Britain’s public spending watchdog, in a 2002 report on the MoD’s attempts to improve combat identification.

Yet the number of accidents could still be reduced – and not just by finding technological solutions. “The deeper issues of inter-service rivalry and the difference in cultures between army and air force, and even within those, are very rarely addressed,” says Snook, now at Harvard Business School. “They are often the biggest contributor to friendly fire.”

As an example, he cites the shooting down of two US Army Black Hawk helicopters by two US Air Force F-15s in the No Fly Zone over northern Iraq in 1994. The incident, which killed 26 servicemen, occurred in part because the jet pilots had no record that the helicopters would be in the area.

When asked why the Black Hawks had not been entered on the mission sheet detailing the aircraft in the air that day, the USAF serviceperson responsible said: “We don’t consider helicopters to be aircraft.”

The omission is a startling indication of how communications can break down, says Snook. “Here’s an important word like ‘aircraft’ and that word meant something completely different in these different cultures.”

Systems theory

“We may not have learned all the lessons of friendly fire events,” agrees Nancy Leveson, an aerospace safety expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She believes current investigative techniques tend to be aimed at assigning blame to a person or group. Instead, an inquiry should look at the broader picture.

Leveson has devised a system that can help do this, a full description of which has just been accepted for publication in Safety Science. Called STAMP, for “systems theory accident modelling and processes”, the technique is based on systems theory, the idea of developing mathematical descriptions of complex systems. It can be applied to a range of accidents, from friendly fire incidents to nuclear spills and train crashes.

Friendly fire investigations usually search for one key event that triggered a fateful sequence. But which event in the chain gets blamed can be quite arbitrary. The STAMP technique paints a picture of the whole system and the interdependencies within it, says Leveson. That allows investigators to spot generic safety failures.

Some are sceptical. “Where will the process of data collection and interpretation stop?” asks Jim Armstrong, a systems expert at the University of Newcastle. But Peter Ladkin, a specialist in safety-critical systems at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, says: “Friendly fire accidents seem suited to a STAMP analysis as most are predominantly due to organisational and human factors rather than technology.”

String of errors

The official US Department of Defense inquiry into the 1994 Black Hawks incident found a string of errors on top of the failure to list the helicopters as aircraft. The helicopters used the wrong ID codes and radio frequencies for the No Fly Zone. And the radios in the air force F-15s used anti-jamming technology that made them incompatible with radios in army helicopters.

But far more pervasive failures emerged when Leveson, along with Peggy Storey and Polly Allen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, applied a STAMP analysis. Overall military control structure in the No Fly Zone was badly coordinated, and this led to confusion and a failure to enforce safety constraints, they found. Inadequate training compounded the problems.

The Pentagon is not totally dismissive of Leveson’s results. “We are confident in our assessment of the incident,” a spokesman told ��è����Ƶ, “but also recognise safety issues are complex and typically involve more than one factor. While we appreciate the re-evaluation, and have examined it, we cannot comment on its validity nor discuss its conclusions.”

The Royal Air Force inquiry into the Tornado accident seems unlikely to embrace Leveson’s approach. “It will be the same as any other accident inquiry,” says an RAF spokeswoman, adding that it may be concluded more quickly than usual because the US Army has accepted liability. But that is part of the problem, says Snook. “The overriding emphasis is to find someone to hold accountable. And often that trumps any learning from the incident.”

Another problem is that new rules introduced in the wake of an accident can do more harm than good. “You end up with so many rules to prevent that particular incident happening again, people can’t do their jobs. So they just start breaking the rules,” says Snook. And when everyone is breaking the rules, accidents are more likely to occur.

Snook speaks from experience. In 1983, he was serving with the US 82nd airborne division in Grenada when a US Navy jet opened fire on him and his men. “I couldn’t believe that some of the best-trained and best-equipped people in the world could make these mistakes. Now, 20 years later, I find myself thinking the same thing.”

Harvey Sapolsky, director of the Defense and Arms Control Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is referring to the almost total reliance that the US military now has on precision weapons – “smart” bombs that can be guided accurately to their intended targets and, just as importantly, away from others.

The outcome of the Gulf conflict will depend to an unprecedented degree on the success of this technology. And with it, the political ambitions of the US and Britain after the war, when they attempt to rebuild a nation and garner world support for their actions.

During the Gulf war of 1991 the smart bombs that dominated the headlines were reserved for difficult missions and special operations. This time, around 90 per cent of the bombs hauled to Iraq’s border are smart weapons. And in 1991, the US had twice as many air and ground forces amassed for war as it has this time, even though the objective then was simply to beat back Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

The reduction in manpower is symptomatic of how the military has changed since the days when the strategy was simply to build up an overwhelming force of heavy artillery and tanks.

Now the emphasis is on using small groups of ground troops to pick out key targets and call in precision bombers to destroy them. “Instead of overwhelming force, there is the promise of military magic with precision guided weapons,” says Sapolsky.

Smooth transition

But there is more at stake than just military success. Preventing bombs from killing civilians and destroying infrastructure will pay dividends after the war has concluded, by fostering the public support among Iraqis that will be vital for a smooth transition to a new leadership.

What is more, with many governments and large sections of the public around the world opposing the war, politicians are desperate to avoid harrowing TV images of innocent men, women and children being killed as a result of military blunders. “Given that public support in Britain and the wider world outside the US is borderline, avoiding having massacres is crucial,” says Tim Ripley, a defence analyst at the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies at Lancaster University in Britain.

These concerns have been taxing the US Air Force in recent months. In February, tensions within the service became public when internal discussions over how any air campaign against Iraq should be fought were leaked to the media.

Traditionalists within the USAF favour destroying not just military sites but crucial pieces of infrastructure such as power plants and bridges. Modernisers want to fight as “clean” a war as possible by attacking only targets designed to weaken Saddam Hussein’s army without killing or injuring civilians or damaging any civilian infrastructure. The modernisers appear to have won.

But by following this strategy, the US military will be taking a much greater risk than during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, says Ripley. The US’s effectiveness to fight quickly and successfully relies entirely on these precision weapons. “If this stuff doesn’t work as advertised the war will drag on,” he says.

Laser-guided

Precision weapons first proved they could work in 1972, during the Vietnam war. Years of attacks on the Than Hoa bridge near Hanoi in North Vietnam, involving some 800 sorties and the loss of 10 planes, failed to destroy the target. Eventually, four planes attacked it using laser-guided bombs, and the bridge fell.

Despite their success, however, laser-guided weapons did not gain instant acceptance. In the 1991 Gulf war, only 10 per cent of the bombs dropped by allied forces were guided. The type of laser-guided bombs used then work on a simple principle. Before the bomb is dropped, an infrared laser “illuminates” a spot on the target.

This laser can be wielded by friendly troops on the ground, the plane carrying the bomb, or another plane. As soon as the bomb is released from the plane, an infrared sensor in its nose picks out the laser spot and sends signals that control fins in its tail to steer it to the target.

The trouble is that laser-guided bombs are only accurate when the sky is clear. If cloud, or a sand storm, obscures either the targeting laser or the bomb’s view of the target, then the weapon can go off course and wreak havoc. This happened during the last Gulf war and in Kosovo.

All-weather guidance

In an effort to overcome this weakness, the US has developed all-weather guided bombs, most of which use signals from Global Position System satellites to work out where they are and where they should be going. GPS signals pass through cloud without being distorted, so bombs guided by them can be used regardless of the weather.

Air-force armourers make these bombs by taking a traditional “dumb” bomb and bolting on a kit comprising a GPS receiver and set of fins. The most common of the kits, called JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) costs less than $20,000. GPS-guided bombs were highly successful during the Kosovo conflict, with 96 per cent hitting their targets. Most of the failures were attributed to a fault with the bomb-release mechanism.

But this success rate is by no means guaranteed. With the right know-how and equipment, Iraqi troops could make smart bombs stray off course. Transmitters for sale on the internet can be tuned to emit high-powered microwaves to drown the weak GPS signals.

It is a risky strategy for the defenders, but it could frustrate attacking aircraft, says Richard Langley, an expert on GPS positioning at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada. Tests on JDAMs show they are accurate to within 13 metres if they use the GPS signal. Jam them and accuracy drops to 30 metres, which could be enough to make a pilot abort an attack on vehicles or troops parked near to civilians.

GPS-guided bombs are designed to get round this problem, at least in part, by using a system based on high-precision gyroscopes to monitor the speed and direction of the bomb. This system can take control of the bomb if the GPS signal is lost for any reason. Some bombs have now been fitted with anti-jamming software as well.

Deep bunker

The military value of precision weapons is clear. Hitting targets more reliably means that fewer aircraft and their crews are put at risk to get the job done. And aside from the clear human cost, “a bomb on the wrong person is a bomb wasted”, points out Andrew Brookes, an aerospace analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

However, the technology will not work unless other basic military requirements are met. Without good intelligence, for instance, civilians will be hit just as they were in 1991. “There was a bunker in Baghdad that was clearly designed for either military or police purposes. It was buried very deeply and they sent in one laser-guided bomb after the other,” recalls Owen Cote, associate director of security studies at MIT. “Then they found out it was being used by the families of the military.” The strikes killed 400 civilians. “There are always going to be mistakes,” says Brookes. “People will misidentify targets, they’ll get tired, they’ll be afraid. You can’t get away from that.”

Whether the US’s intelligence capability has improved since 1991 remains to be seen. Satellites and reconnaissance planes will continue to eavesdrop on email and phone conversations to work out who is where and what they are saying. But the most significant step may be the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator.

Satellites can only snoop on an area during the short time their orbits take them overhead. But UAVs can be flown from Kuwait, Turkey or Jordan to provide what the military calls “persistent surveillance”. Real-time video from a Predator can reveal the difference between a convoy of military vehicles and a convoy of refugees. If necessary the drones can even take on the role of a precision bomber, and fire air-to-ground missiles.

Carpet-bombing

Precision weaponry stands to make the indiscriminate carpet-bombing that dominated earlier conflicts such as the Vietnam war a thing of the past. But building a whole military strategy around smart weapons is a big risk.

For instance, the USAF has broken with tradition by drawing up a list of only purely military targets in Iraq. “They’ve made a conscious decision to avoid striking certain targets that would normally have been on the list, like power plants, bridges and water purification plants. All these were targets last time,” says Cote.

While that makes the hawks in the service nervous, avoiding such targets, and doing everything possible to limit civilian casualties, is key to the political success of an attack on Iraq. As Brookes puts it: “If you show the world you’ve done your best to avoid it, they’ll be on your side.” The US has invested a lot of money in smart warfare, Brookes says. “We’ll just have to see now if the technology works.”

The search for alternative fuels, driven by dwindling oil reserves and concerns over exhaust emissions, has lead researchers to investigate more sustainable sources such as vegetable oils. Sunflower oil, soybean oil and even opium poppy oil have all been tested as potential fuels.

Now it is jojoba’s turn. Jojoba is a desert shrub that can reach up to 4.5 metres high and typically lives more than 150 years, producing nuts that yield half their volume in oil. The non-toxic oil is widely used as a non-greasy skin-smoothing ingredient in cosmetics, and as a base for shampoos and make-up.

Engineers think the oil has potential as a motor fuel because it releases a lot of energy when it burns and is chemically stable at the high temperatures and pressures in a working engine.

Dash of methanol

To test jojoba in engines, Mohamed Selim and his colleagues at the United Arab Emirates University in Al-Ain and at the Helwan University in Cairo, connected an array of sensors to a diesel engine and monitored its performance while burning regular diesel fuel.

They then ran the engine on a fuel called jojoba methyl ester, which they made simply by adding a dash of methanol and a catalyst to raw jojoba oil.

Selim’s team reveals in the journal Renewable Energy (vol 28, p 1401) that the jojoba fuel matched diesel for torque and power over the engine speeds they tested, between 1000 and 2000 revolutions per minute. What is more, the jojoba combustion gases took slightly longer to reach maximum pressure in the cylinder, which Selim believes may explain why the engine runs more quietly on the nut oil.

Selim says jojoba is worth pursuing as an alternative fuel because it contains less carbon than fuels like diesel, which means lower emissions of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and soot.

And unlike diesel, jojoba oil contains no sulphur, so not only will the exhaust be free of harmful sulphur oxides, but the cylinders will be spared exposure to corrosive sulphuric acid, so the engine will last longer. Jojoba also has a higher “flashpoint” than diesel, meaning it is less likely to explode while being stored or transported.

Desert lands

Of course, growing enough jojoba would be a huge challenge. “The use of jojoba as a fuel needs huge quantities of seeds, which needs large investment, probably by the government or private sector,” says Selim.

But while jojoba is unlikely to challenge diesel globally, it could gain popularity in certain regions. It can be grown in hot climates, salty soils and even deserts. “It needs to be cultivated in huge amounts, which is easy in the desert lands in many countries,” he says.

The plant has been grown for decades in the American south-west and north-west Mexico. It is now cultivated throughout South America and in several Middle East countries.

Arable farmers in Egypt have already started planting jojoba shrubs specifically to use the nut oil as a fuel.