No. of Recommendations: 8
This is a lot more than one cabinet entity shooting at another cabinet entity's property.
This is:
- a complete lack of coordination, and even more specifically:
- the absence of battlespace deconfliction
- a lack of centralized command and control
- unawareness of a friendly operating nearby
This is amateur hour. Things happen, there is fog of war, but this is silly. I'm sure there will be a truly ugly "blue on blue" (friendly forces shooting at friendlies, with lethal munitions) situation eventually. And again, that happens - even with highly trained units like the Rangers - Pat Tillman was killed by "friendly" fire.
But when it happens next it will be because of lousy coordination, poor situational awareness, loose and poorly understood ROE, etc.
One of the most formative events of my young Army officer career was the Jessica Lynch raid. Not so much the raid itself, which went well (we all saw her on CNN) but that the Rangers dug out other members of her Company, with their bare hands. We weren't anticipating that - we learned on the objective from the hospital staff that there were Americans buried in shallow graves in the adjacent soccer fields.
They dug them out, because they leave no-one behind. I still have occasional bad dreams about the smell.
Those deaths in the 507th maintenance company were largely avoidable. They were poorly trained, and we threw them into the crucible.
When we have blue-on-blue, sometime soon, it will be avoidable.
Even worse, we're closer to another Kent State, by my reckoning. Hell, maybe that's what we saw, twice, in Minnesota - at a smaller scale.
