Why Italians Are So Angry

During the Cold War, U.S. forces in Europe had to be kept at a very high state of readiness to guarantee an immediate response to a Soviet attack. That called for constant training in realistic conditions. For the ground forces, unit training requires armored maneuvers in depth, with hundreds of heavy tracked vehicles blocking traffic and tearing up the countryside. For air forces, air-defense training requires supersonic intercepts with the resulting sonic booms, while attack training requires low altitude flights, often at night, often just a few hundred feet off the ground in flat areas.

In crowded Western Europe, there was no possibility for U.S.-style training bases, vast fenced-off areas of hundreds of square miles with no civilian settlements or activities. But U.S. training needs were accommodated all the same, with some palliative measures. Liaison officers followed U.S. armored columns to compensate farmers on the spot for the damage done to their crops. Altitude restrictions were imposed on training flights, especially at night. Mostly, however, European governments determined to uphold the North Atlantic alliance, accepted the need to keep U.S. forces ready for combat and therefore tolerated all the resulting inconveniences from enormous traffic jams to sonic booms.

Local authorities were, of course, less concerned with strategic priorities, but in decentralized countries like Germany they had a large say in what kind of training was allowed, while in highly centralized countries like Italy the complaints of local authorities were simply ignored.

What made this cohabitation all the more difficult was and is the ingrained habit of U.S. forces to operate at a very high tempo, with much more training, shooting, driving, seagoing and flying than any other NATO force. Whether it is truly needed for combat readiness, a high rate of activity verging on the frenetic is part of the U.S. military culture. Very high operating costs are one result, lots of accidents are another. Worldwide, air crashes by all the U.S. flying services--Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force--average close to one per day.

But the one priority that was never supposed to be compromised was the safety of civilians. The U.S. Navy, for example, supplies munitions to its warships at sea rather than in congested European ports where any explosion could be disastrous. The Army had to do without live-munition exercises outside carefully controlled firing ranges, while strict speed, altitude and air-traffic control limits were imposed on the aviators of all services.

Without strict safety norms, Europeans would not have tolerated the highly intrusive presence of hard-charging U.S. military forces, even at the height of the Cold War. Now that the Soviet threat has passed, it is natural that the tolerance of European governments and public opinion for all manner of military inconveniences, including U.S. training practices, is much reduced.

That is no problem in Germany, where U.S. forces have been drastically reduced across the board. But it was a problem in Italy, where the end of the Cold War paradoxically resulted in a large increase in the U.S./NATO military presence, with many more aircraft stationed and much more flying by day and by night, because of the Yugoslav civil war. The Italian government was part of the NATO effort, of course, and moderated the resulting political irritations, while ignoring local complaints as usual.

But that was before 20 tourists were killed by a U.S. Marine EA-6B aircraft that cut the wire of the Mt. Cernis ski gondola. There was an explosion of outrage from the prime minister on down that was moderated by hopeful expectation a U.S. military court would uncover and punish misconduct by the crew. Italians were impressed when the prosecution demanded a 206-year sentence for the pilot, Capt. Richard Ashby, on 20 counts of involuntary homicide.

Instead, eight Marine officers sitting as a jury have chosen to overlook the uncontested fact that Ashby cut the wire of the gondola at 370 feet off the ground when he was supposed to stay above 2,000 feet (or at least 1,000 feet, according to the erroneous instructions he received), and that he was flying at 621 miles per hour when the speed limit was 517 mph--the EA-6B is an unwieldy 4-seat subsonic aircraft, grossly unsuitable for acrobatic high-speed flying anywhere, let alone among Alpine peaks.

The eight Marine officers may have wanted to reaffirm the famed solidarity of the Corps through their verdict. They are even now being acclaimed by their fellow Marines. But they may become much more famous than they would wish, as the architects of an entirely new set of rules for U.S. forces in Europe. It remains to be seen what specific limitations Italy’s government will impose on training flights in its airspace, but they certainly will be severe. As far as the U.S. military presence in Italy is concerned, the post-Cold War era has just started.