I got this emaild to me…

Can anyone confirm this?

Dud battery blamed for friendly fire
Vernon Loeb
March 25 2002

The deadliest “friendly fire” incident of the war in Afghanistan was
triggered in December by the simple act of a US Special Forces air
controller changing the battery on a Global Positioning System device
he was
using, a senior defence official said on Saturday.
The controller, who was using the device to target a Taliban outpost
north
of Kandahar, did not realise that after he changed the device’s
battery, the
machine was programmed to automatically come back on displaying
coordinates
for its own location, the official said.
Three special forces soldiers and five Afghan soldiers were killed and
38
were injured when a satellite-guided bomb landed not on the Taliban
outpost
but on a battalion command post occupied by US forces and a group of
Afghan
allies, including Hamid Karzai, now the interim Prime Minister.
The US Central Command, which runs the Afghan war, has never explained
how
the coordinates got mixed up or who was responsible for relaying the US
position to a B-52 bomber, which fired a joint direct attack munition
(JDAM)
at the Americans.
But the senior defence official explained on Saturday that the air
force
combat controller was using a precision lightweight GPS receiver, known
to
soldiers as a “plugger”, to calculate the Taliban’s coordinates for a
B-52
attack.

Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, the controller had used the GPS
receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban
position in
minutes and seconds for an air strike by a navy F-18, the official
said.
Then, with the B-52 approaching the target, the air controller did a
second
calculation in “degree decimals” required by the bomber crew. The
controller
had performed the calculation and recorded the position, the official
said,
when the receiver battery died.
Without realising the machine was programmed to come back on showing
the
coordinates of its own location, the controller mistakenly called in
the US
position to the B-52. The JDAM landed with devastating precision.
The official said he did not know how the US Air Force would treat the
incident and whether disciplinary action would be taken.
But the official, a combat veteran, said he considered the incident “an
understandable mistake under the stress of operations”.
“I don’t think they’ve made any judgments yet, but the way I would
react to
something like that is it is not a flagrant error, a violation of a
procedure,” the official said.
Nonetheless, the official said the incident shows that the US armed
forces
have a serious training problem that needs to be corrected. “We need to
know
how our equipment works; when the battery is changed, it defaults to
his own
location,” the official said.
Navy Commander Ernest Duplessis, a spokesman for the US Central
Command,
declined to comment on the friendly fire incident.
-Washington Post

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