No Room for Error in Navy’s Mission : Confines of Persian Gulf ‘Lake’ Leave Crews With Little Time for Decisions

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ruefully admitted last week that the Navy’s mission in the Persian Gulf was “an accident waiting to happen.”

Operating in what the Navy considers a cramped lake that is crammed shore-to-shore with high-speed weaponry and crisscrossed by ships and aircraft from dozens of nations, U.S. commanders are forced to make split-second decisions based on ambiguous information that can mean life or death for their crews and innocent civilians.

One of those commanders, Capt. Will C. Rogers III of the cruiser Vincennes, last Sunday had seven minutes to make one of those decisions. He made the wrong choice and 290 passengers and crew aboard Iran Air Flight 655 died. While defending his action as justifiable self-defense, he called the downing of the Airbus “a burden I’ll carry the rest of my life.”

A year ago in May, another Navy skipper, Capt. Glenn R. Brindel of the frigate Stark, also made the wrong choice and, when he failed to defend his ship against what turned out to be an Iraqi missile attack, 37 American sailors died. A board of inquiry found his inaction unacceptable, and he was drummed out of the Navy.

The Iran Air disaster and the attack on the Stark dramatize what military experts, even those who support the U.S. presence in the gulf, say is the predictable result of introducing massive military force into a climate that is neither war nor peace and a region full of nations that are neither friend nor foe.

Rogers and Brindel were operating in a region where Iran and Iraq, at war since 1980, have been regularly shooting at each other--and sometimes at Americans.

In this uncertain situation, Rogers had seven minutes from the moment his ship’s radar noticed a plane that turned out to be the Airbus to the moment he had to decide whether to shoot it down. In the Stark’s case, nine minutes elapsed from the time it spotted an Iraqi Mirage jet bearing down on it until the jet fired an Exocet missile that slammed into the ship two minutes later.

Military commanders take great pains during combat to avoid what is known in the trade as “collateral damage”--such as blowing up hospitals and blasting airliners out of the sky.

But in the Persian Gulf, where 1,000-foot supertankers sail alongside dhows, where Airbuses share the skies with supersonic jet fighters, where seamen and aviators communicate in a dozen languages on scores of radio frequencies and where relentless heat and humidity play havoc with touchy electronic gear, deadly accidents appear to be inevitable.

“The U.S. government emphasized from the outset that committing military units to the Persian Gulf mission would involve risks and uncertainties,” a grim Crowe said last Sunday in announcing the downing of the Iranian jetliner. Crowe, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, said later in the briefing: “Unfortunately this has been one of the major difficulties in the Persian Gulf from the outset--we’re fighting in a lake.”

Error is a factor in all combat, said R. James Woolsey, who was undersecretary of the Navy during the Carter Administration. But the probability of deadly miscalculation is particularly great in the gulf, he said, because American warships such as the state-of-the-art Aegis-class cruiser Vincennes are designed to operate in “blue water”--open ocean--without a lot of noncombatants close at hand to confuse men and computers.

The gulf mission is “the naval equivalent of a street fight,” Woolsey said. “I think it’s surprising that something like this, or firing on friendly forces, hasn’t happened before.”

Retired Rear Adm. Eugene J. Carroll Jr. of the Center for Defense Information, a frequent critic of Administration military policy, said that Vincennes’ Aegis radar and target tracking system is nearly useless in the constrained environment of the gulf. He suggested that the technology may have contributed to the airliner disaster by lulling commanders into believing that it is foolproof.

“The Aegis system, this wonderfully oversold technological marvel, can do things in blue water that no other ship can do. . . . ,” he said. “But technology is no guarantee against errors in warfare. There will be errors in warfare wherever and whenever we fight.

“When you take a ship that is designed, equipped and trained for open seas and stuff it into a lake, you make most of its special qualifications irrelevant,” said Carroll, a former commander of an aircraft carrier battle group.

The gulf war has taken on aspects of a high-speed, high-tech video game. Every day in the gulf, Navy officials say, unidentified boats and aircraft, rapidly moving blips on a radar screen, are challenged by U.S. warships. Most respond, state their intentions and are allowed to proceed without incident.

The United States last September issued a general “notice to airmen” announcing that American warships “were taking additional precautions” and demanding that all aircraft identify themselves upon request. All pilots, civilian and military were warned that failure to respond to requests for identification “could place the aircraft at risk by U.S. defensive measures.”

Yet last Sunday, when an aircraft lifted off from Iran’s joint civilian-military airfield at Bandar Abbas as the Vincennes and another Navy warship were involved in a skirmish with Iranian gunboats, the plane failed to respond to 12 radio calls to identify itself and change course, U.S. officials said. At that, the Vincennes fired two missiles, at least one of which hit its target.

Much remains to be learned about the incident. Numerous details provided by the Pentagon last week only served to compound the mystery of how a sophisticated warship equipped with the latest radar could confuse a relatively slow, wide-bodied Airbus with a Mach 2.3 F-14 Tomcat barely a third its size.

A Navy officer intimately familiar with the Vincennes’ radar system said that “the Aegis system is all automatic with one exception--identification and recognition” of aircraft. He said that deciding whether an approaching plane is friendly or hostile “ultimately is a human decision. And it’s made by commanding officers.”

Rogers acknowledged in a message to his superiors the day after he shot down the airliner that “I and I alone am fully responsible for any actions taken by the Vincennes.” But he said he believed that the incoming jet was a “definite threat” to his men and his ship and that he was justified, given the information available at the time, to launch the missiles to protect them.

That is one of the questions being studied by a Pentagon investigative team that arrived aboard the Vincennes last Tuesday. The panel, headed by Rear Adm. William M. Fogarty, is attempting to clear up discrepancies in accounts of the plane’s altitude and speed, the signals sent by the Airbus’ transponders that led Rogers to believe it was an F-14 and the accuracy of the ship’s radar tracking system.

But inside the Pentagon, particularly in the Navy, officials are praying that Rogers will be found blameless, even if the data he acted upon proves faulty.

“If you’re going to come down on people, you come down on them for the Stark, not for this,” said a senior Defense Department official. “Their job is to fight and to defend their ships. If we’re going to start cashiering people for acting in good faith and on their best information . . . we’re just snipping off our toes, one by one. It’s a risky business out there.”

Senate Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said that the debate about the affair is bogging down in details about the plane’s course and altitude and the time the Vincennes’ captain had to order launching of missiles.

“We’re missing the point,” Byrd said last week. “We must determine if (American gulf policy) is being conducted properly. What is needed is a new evaluation of the mission. . . . We are operating in a lake. We have a $1-billion Aegis cruiser chasing fast-traveling Boghammar (Iranian patrol) boats. . . . Our poor captains have to make life-or-death decisions on fast-paced data coming in within minutes or seconds.”

Military men say that all battlefield commanders must make crucial decisions quickly and on partial information; that is what they are trained and paid to do. What makes the Persian Gulf such a difficult environment is the ubiquitous civilian air and sea traffic.

“The real dilemma is not so much the geographical limitations and compressed decision time,” said retired Rear Adm. James A. Winnefeld, who was a task force commander in the Mediterranean before retiring in 1980. “It’s the fact that superimposed on this little war you’ve got . . . commerce as usual. . . . It’s almost a surrealistic environment out there, and one that we don’t have any control over.”

Carroll, of the Center for Defense Information, said that the destruction of the Iranian jetliner was an accident, but an inevitable one and one certain to be repeated.

“You cannot float around in a hot war as a target and not have another encounter,” he said. “Depending on the rules and how the captain behaves, next time it may be Americans again (who are killed). And the result will be more needless destruction.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.