Friendly fire lessons not learned, says U.S. pilot

Glen McGregor, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen

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OTTAWA - As investigators probe the friendly fire incident in Afghanistan that this week killed a Canadian soldier, a former fighter pilot involved in a similar tragedy in 2002 says he fears that the U.S. air force may have never properly addressed the communication problems that surfaced in his case.

William Umbach, a retired major, was one of two Illinois Air National Guard F16 pilots who faced criminal charges after they mistook a Canadian training exercise near Kandahar for enemy fire and dropped a laser-guided bomb, killing four soldiers and injuring eight.

On Monday, Canadian troops operating in the same region were again victims of fratricide, when U.S. A-10 Warthog jets strafed their position west of Kandahar with cannon fire. Pte. Mark Anthony Graham, a former Olympic sprinter, was killed in the accident. NATO commanders have promised an investigation into the cause of the accident.

Umbach said the report from an inquiry into his April 2002 incident failed to address the key problem that he said is common to almost all such friendly fire cases: the breakdown in communications between air and ground forces.

"The report did not address why we did not know and where the link got broken," he said. "We made that clear in the beginning: If you put the blame on these pilots and ground them so they don't fly again and hope this will prevent it from happening again it won't."

Umbach says he hopes that the air force learned from the 2002 accident, but he is not confident.

"I would like to think they made steps in other areas, but certainly nothing in the report would have encouraged them to, other than the people who were at one end or the other of the misinformation, shrugging their shoulders."

Also accused in the 2002 case was Maj. Harry Schmidt, the F16 pilot who dropped the bomb on the Canadian position. His lawyer, Charles Gittins, said the air force's command and control structure for Afghanistan never took responsibility for errors that resulted in the accident.

Gittins singled out the U.S.'s Combined Air Operations Centre or CAOC for failing to tell the pilots that Canadian troops were training that night near Kandahar.

"The problems that existed for Harry was the CAOC didn't know who was there," Gittins said. "They never resolved that. That issue still is a problem on the ground."

It is still unclear, however, whether a similar failure of communications contributed to the incident on Sunday. The A-10s had been called in to provide close air support for the Canadian assault on Taliban positions west of Kandahar, according to reports. NATO will convene a board of officers to investigate.

In 2002, the U.S. air force initially brought criminal charges of manslaughter and assault against the two pilots after a Canadian board and a coalition board found them responsible. The charges were later reduced to dereliction of duty.

Schmidt received non-judicial punishment. He is still employed by the Illinois Air National Guard in a non-flying role but flies for a charter airline when off-duty, Gittins said. He intends to retire next year and work as a commercial pilot.

Umbach retired from the military after receiving a reprimand, and flies as a commercial pilot for United Airlines. Four years after the accident, he says he thinks about it daily.

"It's not like every morning when you wake up," he said, "but it's more so than (memories of) graduating from high school or getting married. It's very current."

He said he feels for all the parties involved in the most recent friendly-fire case.

"War is a terrible thing and there's always the possibility of somebody dying, but you never feel comfortable accepting that you could die by your own forces," he said.

"That's the part that's incredibly painful."

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