On The WCK Airstrike
Howdy,
I’m doing a little audible today. I’m bringing on a retired SNCO to delve into the recent tragic airstrike that killed seven aid workers.
James and I served in Afghanistan together. He’s the real deal, people. Multiple combat deployments. Has seen the drone war from every angle. He participated in hundreds of strikes totaling over 2400 Enemy KIA. He sat in the out briefs/lessons learned of dozens of civilian casualty (CIVCAS) investigations.
Before we jump into his thoughts, I want to open up my Substack to any veteran or active duty servicemember to potentially publish on (Travis, I want you to write on this Substack). I cannot compensate you, but I will publish you to my audience. Please be patient, as I am a one-man army. But I’m interested in learning more from those who’ve served, so if you see something about operations that the media or Americans don’t understand, hit me up.
Here’s James:
What does a “clearly marked aid truck” look like at night on an infrared (IR) camera? The daylight of the post-strike morning reveals a clearly marked aid truck, especially to the Monday morning quarterback. But what does it look like at night?
Let’s be clear. The US has some of the best IR camera tech in the world. I’m less knowledgeable about the Israeli kit. Even with the US’s top-tier IR cameras, such as those equipped on the MQ-9 (MTS-B/D), a truck at night appears as a white box with a black heat source near the engine compartment, contrasting with the warmer or cooler ground and vegetation in the background. IR only observes temperature contrasts. It does not observe the reflection of visible light like an Electro-Optical (EO) camera would. EO cameras capture the picture from the next morning. The logos of the aid truck are clearly visible. But they were invisible to the IR camera of the Israeli drone. Chances are that they would have been indiscernible to a pilot or JTAC on Night Vision Goggles (NVGs).
I would offer, though, that despite the misidentification, an “accidental strike” would be akin to an “accidental discharge” of a firearm; it’s a myth. It was a myth in Kunduz when the US mistakenly struck the Doctors Without Borders Hospital, and it’s a myth in Gaza. It was negligence, not to imply that the fault was solely or directly on the aircrew who deployed the ordinance. It could be elsewhere in the targeting cycle.
The truth is that we target signatures. Most of the time, those signatures are adversaries; rarely but not zero, they’re not. They are closer to zero today for the US than ten years ago when we began deploying some of the first High-Definition IR cameras on US drones. We refined our TTPs and training due to the mistaken identifications that resulted in a “negligent strike.” I could rattle a dozen or more of the things that I observed and then witnessed the updated TTPs/training that resulted. However, the point is that something in the targeting process was the source of negligence; addressing that negligence is a form of accountability. It won’t cure the bloodlust of those outraged by the killing of the aid workers in Gaza, but it’s likely the accountability that we should see. And it will make the IDF more lethal in their mission to destroy Hamas, not less. And that just might be what those suffering from that bloodlust really fear the most.
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James - I believe your assessment is spot on. I would go a little further. I served with the Asymmetric Warfare Group for a couple of years and had a chance to take a security team to Israel and interact with the IDF and ISS. I was concerned at the time with how they were implementing what I will call predictive profiling schemes for targeting in various circumstances. They had little concern with how errors could be introduced and propagate through their algorithms and processes. They had no interest in understanding false positive rates or false negative rates or how to iteratively improve their approach. I wound up in a fairly sharp argument with the then director of security for the Knesset on this issue.
Having said this, I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for all of the IDF and ISS personnel we met on the trip. They have a very difficult and challenging job to perform. I want them to succeed in destroying Hamas and the rest of the proxies involved in hostilities. Doing some real time lessons learned (which it appears they are doing) should significantly decrease the chances of another mistake.
Will - I enjoyed your Shield of the Republic podcast yesterday and wish you all success going forward. I also became a subscriber to your blog as well.
James did a good job covering most of what I’ve wrote about elsewhere regarding sensors and signatures, so I won’t delve too much into the thermal vs EO camera stuff already covered. What I will mention are two other points of observation, one regarding standing Rules of Engagement and the other relating to battle space management.
With respect to ROEs, a tactical ops center managing active persistent overhead assets like drones have a rulebook to follow once they see suspected pattern-of-life signatures related to targets of opportunity on the ground. Based on what little I can gather from open source info, it seems to me that “signature strikes” were likely authorized at the ops center level via standing ROEs when the officer in charge manning that watch floor determined that what he saw on that drone-mounted thermal camera met sufficient criteria to initiate a strike—and multiple follow ups, or “double taps” as they’re sometimes called. This means that things like military-aged males loading boxes onto vehicles were assumed to be Hamas fighters loading cached munitions onto vehicles for an imminent strike against IDF ground troops rather than aid workers loading food onto trucks that were already cleared for transport via other ops centers (more on that in a minute). So the accidental killings here to me is partially a downstream result of how standing ROEs were set up in very similar ways to how some of the US military and intel community strikes met the same accidental outcomes in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
On the battle space management side, you had WCK calling their movements into the IDF ahead of scheduled departures, so the IDF had the appropriate info in hand, but one hand was not talking to another and so deconfliction between networked centers did not prevent the accidental killings that it could have. This is what happens when there’s not a “shared battle space picture” via different operations centers with different missions. The concept of “Network Centric Warfare” is supposed to establish a shared battle space picture between different ops centers with differing mission roles, but what it looks like here is that the IDF did not have a shared battle space picture in place via the principles of NCW, which admittedly are really tricky unless you’ve had months-to-years to work that sort of thing out either via pre-conflict training that envisions these kinds of scenarios or through actual operations where mistakes are made and lessons are learned (the IDF are learning those lessons in real time as we speak).
Nothing more to add on this front other than it’s kind of crazy to watch another country go through so many of the same bad experiences and lessons the US just learned throughout 20+ years of counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency operations across 2 different continents. It’s always better to learn from the mistakes of others rather than learning from your own mistakes, and those who don’t set themselves up for hard lessons. The IDF had our 20-year history to learn a bit from, but it looks like they’re learning things the hard way themselves at this point. Urban conflict is a cruel teacher.