| Review of U.S. military in Iraq finds problems with friendly fire at 16:09 on October 2, 2003, EST. |
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WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. military fell painfully short of its goal of equipping its forces with ways to minimize "friendly" fire attacks during the war in Iraq, according to a top general who compiled a "lessons learned" report for the Pentagon. Too little was done to minimize the incidents of inadvertent attacks by U.S. forces on U.S. or coalition troops, according to Admiral Edmund Giambastiani Jr., chief of Joint Forces Command, which compiled the war review. Giambastiani testified on the report for the first time Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee. In advance of the hearing he discussed it in an Associated Press interview. Fratricide is a problem in every war, but after the 1991 Persian Gulf War the Pentagon vowed to invest heavily in new technologies that would reduce inadvertent killings to an absolute minimum. Giambastiani said in the AP interview that the Pentagon fell painfully short of achieving that goal. "We've just got to do better," he said. "We've spent a lot of time and money on it since (1991), but frankly we just weren't there. We didn't have it deployed with all our forces. We were doing it at the last minute. It wasn't a good story." Ground force commanders used an imaging system called "Blue Force Tracker" that gave them a view of the battlefield that showed locations of U.S. and coalition forces. However, that did not enable an American pilot, for example, to communicate in the heat of battle with a tank or other obscured object on the ground to determine for certain whether it was friend or foe. Lt.-Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which linked with the army's 3rd Infantry Division in toppling Baghdad in early April, told reporters recently that while Blue Force Tracker was a useful tool, it was not an adequate answer to fratricide. Overall, the Pentagon review found the military achieved a historic level of co-ordination of air, land and sea power but fell short in other respects, at the cost of American lives. In his testimony, Giambastiani said he applied "ruthless objectivity" to studying the lessons of war in Iraq and that the military will make comprehensive changes to its war-fighting doctrine and establish new training methods to "ensure an ever-transforming dominant joint force." Portions of his report, which has been briefed to President George W. Bush, are classified for security reasons. In addition to friendly fire, the Giambastiani report found fault in a number of other areas, including: - Assessing damage inflicted on Iraqi forces by U.S. air and ground fire. Timely assessments, a key to an efficient offensive, were hampered by the speed at which U.S. ground forces advanced through the Iraqi desert. "We couldn't keep up with operations," he said. "(Ground forces) were moving so quickly, it was difficult to assess how well we were doing." - National Guard and Reserves. The troops performed well, but the Pentagon bureaucracy needs to improve the way it alerts, mobilizes and trains reservists, Giambastiani said. In many cases reservists were given too little advance notice - only a few days in some cases - and in some instances troops who were mobilized had to sit around for weeks before they were used. - The sharing of battlefield information with coalition partners. The problem was not a reluctance to share but the application of U.S. government policy restrictions that prevented coalition partners from getting the information in a timely manner. In his testimony, Giambastiani added another point: the military's ability to collect human intelligence in Iraq - as opposed to intelligence gathered from intercepts of communication or from aerial or satellite photographs - was "seriously deficient" and must be improved. ROBERT BURNS |
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