The "fog of war" is an oft-mentioned, if imperfectly understood, factor in combat. Noise, smoke, faulty communications, tension, hyperactivity, and fear all conspire to mask from the soldier and his leaders the true situation on the battlefield. When accurate information regarding the location and activity of both friendly and enemy forces is lacking, one result is often the unintentional placement of fire on one's own troops.

A less serious problem in the days of small armies, circumscribed battlefields, and line-of-sight weaponry, the engagement of friendly forces by friendly fire has become important in the present era of large and highly mobile field armies, enormous battle areas, and weapons of greatly increased range, lethality, and complexity employed in the indirect fire role.

While there is reason to believe that the casualties attributable to friendly fire in modern war constitute a statistically insignificant portion of total casualties (perhaps less than 2 percent) and have generally only a transient effect on the progress of major operations, numerous specific instances can readily be cited in which friendly fire has inflicted serious casualties on friendly units and has significantly disrupted or otherwise caused the failure of specific, local operations.

Beyond the immediate loss of life and materiel, with its direct degradation of combat power, such incidents often have a devastating effect on troop morale and the confidence of ground combat forces in their supporting air, artillery, and armored forces. Friendly fire incidents often disrupt the close and continuous combined arms cooperation so essential to success in modern combat, especially when that combat is conducted against a well-armed, well-trained, and numerically superior opponent.

This study, by presenting selected examples in their historical settings, is intended only to explain a few of the most obvious types of friendly fire incidents and some of the causative factors associated with them. By directing the attention of commanders and staff officers responsible for the development, training, and employment of combat forces to the hitherto little explored problem of friendly fire incidents, I hope this study will generate interest in and solutions for the problems outlined.

The methodology of this study is primarily historical, narrative, and highly selective. in the analysis of the available data, time and resource constraints precluded the use of proven mathematical techniques and forward-looking war-gaming methods, both of which may be legitimately and fruitfully applied to this problem. [1]

Time and resources have also limited the scope of this study to incidents involving US forces in World War II and Vietnam, although some evidence available from other conflicts in the twentieth century has also been considered. In sum, this study can claim to be no more than a narrative exposition of selected examples. Although its conclusions must be considered highly speculative and tentative in nature, this study can be of substantial value to an understanding of the problem of friendly fire in modern war.

The first problem in a study of this sort is to define in clear and concise terms the topic under consideration. The phrase "friendly casualties due to friendly fire," although accurately describing the type of events we wish to investigate, is both clumsy and subject to misinterpretation. Another term, commonly used to describe the type of incidents with which we are concerned, is fratricide. Although common and handy, the word fratricide has a well-known technical usage with respect to artillery projectiles and has connotations of intent and civil conflict inappropriate for the types of incidents we shall undertake to investigate. In the interest of clarity, brevity, and convenience of usage, the resort to a neologism seems desirable.

The noun amicicide, derived by the legitimate combination of the Latin noun amicus, -us (friend) with the common latinate suffix for killing (-cide), provides a single word that adequately describes without distracting connotation the incidence of human casualties (both dead and wounded) incurred by military forces in active combat operations as a result of being fired upon unintentionally by the weapons of their own or allied forces.

Instances of amicicide may be conveniently divided for the purpose of our study into several descriptive categories, each of which may be further subdivided.

One category, artillery amicicide, includes all incidents in which friendly ground forces are subjected to the fire of friendly artillery weapons, mortars, and rockets, as well as guns and howitzers, employed in either direct or indirect fire. Also included in this category are instances in which friendly ground forces are struck by spent projectiles or fragments from friendly weapons directed at aircraft.

A second category, air amicicide, includes all incidents in which friendly ground forces are bombed, strafed, or rocketed by friendly aircraft, either fixed or rotary-wing, of whatever service. A third category, antiaircraft amicicide, incorporates those incidents in which friendly aircraft are taken under fire by friendly surface forces (both ground and naval) employing either small arms, automatic weapons, missiles, or anti-aircraft artillery.

The final category that we shall consider here is ground amicicide, incidents in which friendly ground troops and variously armed armored vehicles fire upon other friendly ground forces or armored vehicles. Such incidents may be further divided into those involving infantry against infantry, infantry against tanks and vice versa, antitank weapons against tanks and vice versa, and tanks against tanks.

There are, of course, several other obvious categories of amicicide that are excluded from this study. These involve air-to-air engagements, air-to-naval vessel incidents, and incidents involving the engagement of one friendly naval vessel by another. In a few cases we shall discuss incidents involving friendly air and ground fire attacks on friendly boats (as opposed to ships). Naval gun fire incidents are included here under the category of artillery amicicide. A few bizarre instances involving aircraft will also be considered.

There are also a number of other types of incidents in which friendly casualties may be inflicted by friendly weapons. Most of these are excluded from our definition of amicicide. Cases of homicide (both intentional and unintentional), suicide, and self-inflicted wounds (whether intentional or not) are excluded, as are what may be termed pure accidents, for example, the explosion of a gun due to faulty ammunition or unintentionally walking in front of a gun being fired.

We shall also exclude from our definition of amicicide so-called disciplinary actions and the intentional calling-in of fire on one's own position in extremis. The former category includes legally prescribed executions, the shooting of recalcitrant troops in battle by their officers, and the rare, but not unknown, practice of firing upon friendly troops as punishment for failure to advance or for some other infraction of military discipline such as mutiny or riot.

There appear to be no thorough, systematic studies of the general problem of amicicide either in official or unofficial literature. A few limited studies of certain types of amicicide incidents, such as those involving Allied air strikes on friendly positions during Operation COBRA (the St. LO breakout, 1944) and the Allied bombing of Switzerland in World War II, are available. [2]

The literature of ground combat, however, is devoid of even such limited studies. Despite a reasonably thorough bibliographical search using a variety of appropriate key words, only two works dealing specifically with the problem of amicicide come to hand. A post-World War I polemic by the French General Alexandre Percin, Le Massacre de notre Infanterie, 1914-1918, is directed against the French high command and the doctrine of heavy artillery employment followed in World War 1. [3]

General Percin alleges that some 75,000 French soldiers lost their lives to friendly artillery fire in World War 1. [4]

Although Percin cites numerous specific cases of artillery amicicide, his book and his conclusions are somewhat suspect because of their obviously polemical purpose.

The other work takes the form of historical reportage in which a single case of artillery amicicide during the Vietnam conflict provides the occasion for a study of the reaction of one American family to the loss of their son in Vietnam. Although based on fact and containing a detailed reconstruction of an amicicide incident involving members of Company C, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry, 198th Light Infantry Brigade (Americal Division), on 18 February 1970, C. D. B. Bryan's Friendly Fire focuses on the subsequent radicalization of Cpl. Michael E. Mullen's family, their involvement in the antiwar movement, and their inability to accept the fact of their son's death due to a friendly artillery round. [5]

Useful as an indication of the effect of amicicide on a victim's family, Bryan's book offers little in the way of general analysis of the problem of amicicide.

Given the dearth of literature on the topic, the researcher must collect and analyze the scattered, often cryptic, references to amicicide found in general operational military histories or in the available official documents of combat units. Such a search is fraught with misleading, usually incomplete, and often erroneous data, already preselected by another historian or by accident of preservation, and scattered across the full range of multitudinous operational histories, both official and private, and thousands of linear feet of official records.

The disarray of source materials for the study of amicicide is understandable. The conditions of active combat in which cases of amicicide occur are scarcely conducive to thorough, accurate reporting of what at the time may seem relatively minor incidents. Furthermore, commanders at various levels may be reluctant to report instances of casualties due to friendly fire either because they are afraid of damaging unit or personal reputations, because they have a misplaced concern for the morale of surviving troops or the benefits and honors due the dead and wounded, or simply because of a desire to avoid unprofitable conflicts with the personnel of supporting or adjacent units.

In many cases, of course, the victim's commander may never know that a particular casualty was due to friendly fire. Moreover, the commanders and soldiers of units responsible for inflicting friendly casualties are seldom in a position to evaluate their handiwork, even if they wished to do so.

In most cases recognizable incidents of amicicide do require some sort of formal investigation and report if the circumstances permit. In the past, special investigations and reports were common only when the incident resulted in a high number of casualties or was remarkable in some way. The surviving reports of such investigations provide fertile ground for the historian's plow. official casualty reports, on the other hand, while seemingly comprehensive in their identification of all casualties, are singularly sterile for use in the study of amicicide.

In most cases it is all but impossible to decipher official casualty statistics without the direct assistance of the person responsible for categorizing the data in the first place. No casualty reporting system used by the US Army has made adequate provision for the clear, separate identification of casualties due to friendly fire. The current Army casualty reporting regulation, AR 600-10 with change 1, does provide for identification of the inflicting force as enemy, US forces, allied, or other on line 47 of the standard casualty reporting format, but does not highlight such information or provide any guidance regarding special reporting procedures applicable to instances of amicicide. [6]

While it is possible to discern cases of amicicide in individual casualty reports, the composite statistics for World War II, Korea, and Vietnam are of little use for the study of the problem of amicicide without a knowledge of how cases of amicicide were categorized in each conflict. [7]

Even then it is likely that the criteria varied from statistician to statistician at the various reporting levels. This brief study has not produced a magic key. A major investigation of casualty reporting methods would be required to do so.

An extremely detailed historical study of the casualty reporting system in use during the Korean War, for example, does not allude to casualties caused by friendly fire. [8]

A statistical study of Korean War casualties, which presents detailed breakouts of both KIA and WIA by causative agent and type of ground operation, offers only the cryptic entry, "Accidents in the Use of Own Weapons," to tantalize the historian. What types of accidents were or were not included? [9]

Casualties due to accidents in the use of own weapons-- a category which may include cases of amicicide--in the Korean War included 112 killed and 1,377 wounded out of a total of 18,498 KIA and 72,343 WIA (.61 percent and 1.9 percent respectively). [10]

Whether these in fact represent the Korean War figures for amicicide remains for the moment a matter of pure conjecture.

The official casualty statistics for US forces in Southeast Asia between January 1961 and March 1975 are only slightly less mysterious. [11] Causative agent rather than identification of the inflicting force (despite separation of hostile and nonhostile casualties) appears to be the primary basis of categories. Accidental self-destruction, suicide, homicide, and accidental homicide, however, are listed separately. The great tantalizer in these reports is the category "Misadventure" under the heading "Hostile." Of a total of 46,397 hostile deaths in Southeast Asia during the reporting period, 1,326 (2.85 percent) are attributed to misadventure. [12]

Curiously, two vagrant clues are available. General Percin alleged that 75,000 of the 4,945,470 French casualties in World War I were due to amicicide. [13]

If his figures are correct, amicicide thus accounted for about 1.5 percent of total French casualties in the war. Secondly, a survey of the first one hundred men wounded in the Korean War reports two casualties (2 percent) due to friendly fire. [14]

The percentage is (coincidentally?) close to that just mentioned for casualties in the Korean War "Accidents in the Use of Own Weapons" category (1.6 percent) and the Southeast Asian "Hostile-Misadventure" category (2.85 percent). Inasmuch as speculation on such slim and slippery data is likely to be misleading, it is perhaps better to turn our attention to the less finite, but more satisfying, narrative description of specific instances of amicicide. The study of specific cases can provide some definite information as to the causes of amicicide incidents and thus suggest to today's commanders and staff officers ways in which such occurrences may be prevented in the future.