In 1994, two US Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two US Army
Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq. In response the full array of
military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course,
but no culprit emerged. This text tries to make sense of this tragedy.On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down
two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six
peacekeepers on board. In response to this disaster, the complete array of
military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course.
After almost two years of Investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no
culprit emerged and no smoking gun was found. Friendly Fire attempts to make
sense of this tragedy. Lieutenant Colonel Snook, a victim of friendly fire
himself, develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts
of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science
theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. He offers a
dynamic mechanism he calls "practical drift" - the slow, steady uncoupling of
practice from written procedure - to complete his explanation of this tragic
event.
