WASHINGTON – The deadliest friendly fire incident of the war in Afghanistan was triggered in December by the simple act of a U.S. Special Forces air controller changing the battery on a Global Positioning System device he was using to target a Taliban outpost north of Kandahar, a senior defense official said Saturday.
Three Special Forces soldiers were killed and 20 were injured when a 2,000-pound, satellite-guided bomb landed, not on the Taliban outpost, but on a battalion commanded post occupied by American Forces and a group of Afghan allies, including Hamid Karzai, now the interim prime minister.
The U.S. Central Command, which runs the Afghan war, has never explained how the coordinates got mixed up or who was responsible for relaying the U.S. position to a B-52 bomber, which fired a Joint Direct Attack Munition at the Americans.
But the senior defense official explained Saturday that the Air Forcecombat controller was using a
Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to the soldiers as a “plugger,” to calculate the Taliban’s coordinates for a B-52 attack. The controller did not realize 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.
Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others, the controller had used the GPS receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban position in minutes and seconds for an airstrike by a Navy F/A-18, the official said.
http://www.gpsnavigatormagazine.com/gps-blamed-in-deadly-fire-event.html