Military gaffes that exact too high a price

By ROGER FRANKLIN

When Prime Minister Helen Clark gets the explanation she has demanded for the accidental bombing death this week of Major John McNutt in Kuwait it will, no doubt, be a document filled with diplomatic remorse and regret.

That is, as they say at the Pentagon, standard operating procedure when something goes wrong - and America's military commanders have had plenty of opportunities to perfect their penitent prose style.

While the world's greatest military power prefers to project an image of polished perfection, recent history paints a rather different picture. With friends like the US military, it can often seem that enemies are beside the point.

Consider what happened more than 20 years ago, for example, when Ronald Reagan decided that the future of the Free World was being threatened by a battalion of Cuban construction workers and their hard-left hosts in Grenada.

A task force was hastily assembled and the troublesome island invaded without warning, or even much of an explanation. Twenty-four hours later, victory was declared and the surviving Cubans shipped home to Havana.

At the White House, the Gipper's spinners let it be known that the 21 Americans who died represented the unfortunate but unavoidable price of wresting the world's fifth-largest producer of nutmeg from the clutches of the international communist conspiracy. But then, in dribs, drabs and unsealed dispatches dragged into the light of day by congressional investigators, the truth emerged.

With only two or three exceptions, all those US casualties were the victims of "friendly fire" or, more often, sheer military incompetence.

As author Edward Luttwak explained in his scathing The Pentagon and the Art of War, some of the Marines who died were shot by fellow grunts in an engagement that saw two squads blazing away for more than an hour through a screen of tropical foliage.

In another incident, a seven-man commando squad jumped from a helicopter only to sink like stones in the offshore waters - dragged down by the sheer weight of the equipment they had been ordered to carry against their better judgment.

But the crowning act of homicidal incompetence was inflicted on the poor unfortunates incarcerated in Grenada's one and only lunatic asylum, an imposing brick building at the end of a narrow canyon.

What the deranged inmates cannot have known as wave after wave of helicopters pounded the building with rockets and mini-gun fire was that the invasion's intelligence officers had mistaken the compound for the island's Parliament.

Four hours after it began, somebody realised the mistake and ordered the helicopters back to their carrier.

The Panama invasion mounted by George Bush the Elder to oust drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega - whose career the US had fostered in the first place - produced similar "civilian collateral damage" when a succession of air attacks levelled one of Panama City's poorest neighbourhoods.

As in Grenada, where the newly installed Government was disinclined to make a fuss with the very people who had put it there, no exact figure was ever put on the number of Panamanian casualties.

Skip forward, and the cavalcade of Pentagon blunders continues: the Iranian airliner shot down in the Persian Gulf. The "friendly fire" deaths that claimed allied lives in the Gulf War. The bombing that reduced the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to rubble.

The 20 skiers who plunged to their deaths when the hot-dogging pilot of a Navy attack Prowler jet sliced the cable of their gondola.The five killed when the USS Saratoga fired on a Turkish destroyer during a Nato exercise. The caretaker who perished only last year in Puerto Rico when Navy jets blasted the wrong part of a bombing range on the offshore island of Vieques.

And finally - if you overlook this week's Kuwait incident, that is - there was the collision between the US submarine Greeneville and the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru, which killed nine people, including three teenagers, when the surface vessel went to the bottom off Hawaii.

Ever since the Japanese ship went down, the US Navy has tied its version of events in the sort of complicated knots for which sailors are famous.

At first, the fact that the sub's control room was crowded with visitors - most of them Republican Party campaign contributors from Texas out for a joy ride - was not mentioned. Then, even as the inquiry began, unnamed Navy sources began leaking all manner of fanciful explanations.

The submarine had not been using its full array of sonar and surface-tracking equipment, the leakers and whisperers insisted, because it did not want to give away its position.

Exactly why there was any need for secrecy was not explained, quite possibly because the fact that the Greeneville was performing an "emergency blow" surfacing procedure when the accident happened makes a mockery of any pretence at stealth.

As one naval analyst commented: "Blowing the ballast tanks lets everyone from Sydney to San Francisco know exactly where you are."

By late this week the tide had turned, with even friends of the Greeneville's captain going on record to say, well, shucks, he was the one who deserved to be keelhauled.

"I love this guy, I tell you he's one of my best friends," Rear Admiral Albert Konetzni, commander of the US Pacific Fleet's submarine forces, told the court of inquiry last week, before blaming the Greeneville's skipper, Commander Scott Waddle, for failing to make a proper periscope search in advance of flinging his craft nose-first into the Ehime Maru's keel at a speed estimated to be more than 20 miles an hour.

"It's not routine," Admiral Konetzni said of the emergency blow. "It's one we take very, very, very seriously. It's a team endeavour. And when the team doesn't work right, bad things happen."

Short, succinct and informed by a candour compelled by the oath he had taken when beginning his evidence, Admiral Konetzni's analysis and admission might serve as a model for the explanation about the Kuwait tragedy that Helen Clark is demanding.

But given the Pentagon's cover-your-ass culture and its reluctance to admit responsibility, perhaps she shouldn't hold her breath.