#Reviewing: Military Virtues
Joseph O. Chapa
October 9, 2019
In 2015, a U.S. Air Force crew flew an MQ-9 Reaper—a remotely piloted aircraft—somewhere in the Middle East.[1] The crew was supporting a friendly ground force involved in a village clearing operation. As the situation on the ground developed, a battle broke out and friendly forces formed two elements to converge on the enemy fighters in between. The Reaper crew maintained contact with a joint terminal attack controller who watched the Reaper’s video feed in real time from his position on the ground. The controller passed an attack briefing and asked the Reaper crew to engage enemy forces at a specific coordinate location. After looking at the fighters on the screen, however, the Reaper pilot and sensor operator disagreed with the controller’s assessment. “These guys’ tactics, the way they’re dressed, the weapons they’re carrying; they seem way too organized for the type of enemies we’re [used to] seeing in these villages and I don’t think these are the bad guys,†the sensor operator told me after the fact. After confirming “two or three times†with the controller on the ground, the controller insisted—even after reviewing the video feed—that the fighters under the crosshairs were “not his guys.†After another discussion among the crew, the Reaper’s pilot in command refused to take the shot, confident in his assessment that the fighters under the crosshairs were friendlies. “It was probably another eight to ten minutes,†Lt Clifton explained, “once the firefighting on the ground had stopped that the [controller] had realized, ‘oh, yeah. Those are our guys.’â€
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/10/9/reviewing-military-virtues
