Fratricide is a tragic side efect of combat, especially when using BVR (Beyond Visual Range) weapons such as artillery and air support.
Durning WW1, the French used to say that if you were not taking casualties from your own artillery during the advance, you were too far behind the barrage.
However, to take an earlier point, some of the recent cases (GW 1 onwards) have been due to insufficient training on recognition, particularly by the USAF. Apparently it was the norm in the Cold War to train to recognise US equipement and assume anything else was hostile. It was particularly difficult in GW 1 as both sides were using the same vehicles in some instances.
These incidents may be more noticable as the US has been supplying the bulk of CAS in recent conflicts, and their drive towards IFF for vehicles and the NC battlefield is to be applauded.
In GW 1, the British Army lost more troops to fratricide than we did to enemy action. We also lost more to vehicle accidents than the enemy.
I was told many years ago that the British Army lost more troops every year to firearms accidents than to terrorists. Makes you think . . .
As to the losses in the Kiska Op, I was on a large Ex a few years ago (65,000 participants IIRC) where we lost 18 people to air crashes etc and we weren’t even using live ammunition. I can quite imagine how a number were lost attacking an island in wartime, even without an active enemy. It only takes a small error (small in the sense of a few degrees of traverse or elevation, not in the consequences) to drop artillery on your own troops which is why such errors are treated so seriously.
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