Tragedy Without Blame

The official report on the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes on July 3 concludes that while the ship’s crew made many mistakes, it cannot be held accountable either individually or collectively for the tragedy that occurred. The incident is instead seen as largely the product of forces beyond the control of the Americans involved. Particular emphasis is put on the stress and confusion of the moment created by the surface battle in which the ship was engaged at the time that it fired two of its missiles at the airliner. Iran is also blamed for sending a civilian plane into a combat zone. The report thus echoes the initial conclusions of Adm. William J. Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, given just hours after the incident took place: The high-tech $1-billion cruiser and its crew both performed properly.

Others seem less persuaded that every decision made and every action taken aboard the Vincennes that day was prudent and indeed inevitable given the sequence of events. Seeing questions still needing to be satisfactorily answered, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says that it will hold its own investigation. Meanwhile, the Navy is likely soon to start a study on the effects of stress on crews handling highly sophisticated equipment--tacit acknowledgement that things didn’t go as they should have gone aboard the Vincennes, and implicit recognition that in some instances military technology may now be overwhelming the ability of humans to manage it.

The stress of combat as a major contributing factor to the destruction of the airliner is a reasonable point to raise. At the time its radar picked up an unidentified plane that proved to be Iran Air Flight 655, the Vincennes was exchanging fire with a number of small Iranian gunboats while maneuvering at high speed. Men on the Vincennes said that they could hear bullets or shrapnel from the gunboats striking the hull. Information from many sources was rushing in, orders were being given. It was, as so often happens in combat, a time of anxiety, excitement and uncertainty.

Within this environment it’s clear that breakdowns in observation and judgment occurred that are central to what followed and that are yet to be adequately explained. Certainly the most notable is the repeated misinterpretation of crucial data concerning the speed, angle and altitude of the approaching Iranian airliner. After-battle examination of recorded information showed unmistakably that the plane was flying within the air corridor specified for civilian planes, that it was flying at a speed typical of an airliner but well below that of an attacking military plane, and that it was steadily ascending --just the opposite of what it would have been doing if, as some on the Vincennes thought, it were an F-14 preparing to attack.

This information was clearly shown on the Vincennes’ computer screens. At least one other U.S. ship nearby had the same information and correctly interpreted it. Yet, according to the official report, officers in the Vincennes’ control room inexplicably and repeatedly misread the data and forwarded their erroneous conclusions up the chain of command, setting the stage for the order to fire that brought down the airliner and killed all 290 people aboard. In sum, some men on the Vincennes saw what they expected to see, not what their display screens were in fact showing.

An official investigation in a case like this has two main purposes: to fix responsibility and to learn how to avoid making the same mistakes again. In this case no American is held at fault for what happened. Instead, the accusatory finger is pointed at Iran because one of its regularly scheduled airliners flew within an internationally recognized air corridor over an area where a minor naval engagement was briefly in progress. Iran, it is suggested, should have kept its airliner away. What that seems to assume is that Iran possesses a centralized command and control system, binding together its puny naval forces and its civilian airline and capable of passing information with extraordinary speed. No evidence to support that assumption has been presented.

Whatever the extent of Iran’s responsibility for the tragedy of July 3, the fact remains that 290 people died because of the mistaken conclusion aboard the Vincennes that an airliner was an attacking military plane. The sequence of errors leading to that conclusion is ascribed to “stress, task fixation and unconscious distortion of data.” The worrying putative cause there is “unconscious distortion of data.” If that’s what can be expected even from well-trained crewmen in a high-tech, high-stress environment, then a lot of remedial work is called for before the system can really be said to be effective.