Urban Training Aims to Stop ‘Friendly Fire’

Moussa Hussain Mohammed Shemari will never forget the day in 1991 when a cluster bomb dropped by friendly forces exploded over his home.

The house shook violently, walls collapsed, cars outside exploded, and palm trees on the property burst into flames. His 9-year-old daughter was killed, and his 17-year-old son was severely injured.

“The people who were trying to save us hit my house by mistake,” said Shemari, now 61 and retired from the Kuwait Oil Co. He is convinced that he was spared because he was praying. “It was God’s will that it happened.”

About 25% of the 148 American battle deaths in the Persian Gulf War were attributed to “friendly fire.” Kuwait says up to 100 civilians were killed by friendly fire.

In a move to reduce such casualties, both military and civilian, the U.S. has significantly increased training.

Technology and training for forward air controllers, who select targets for airstrikes like the one that hit Shemari’s house, have been improved. Both the Army and Marine Corps have also built “combat towns” to train troops in what some military analysts call the most dangerous kind of warfare: house-to-house fighting amid civilian populations.

For the Marine Corps, urban combat runs counter to its image of storming enemy beaches in World War II. But the Marines have not made a contested amphibious assault since the daring landing of Army and Marine troops at Inchon, South Korea, in 1950.

Much of the Marines’ push for more realistic urban warfare training came from Gen. Charles Krulak, the Vietnam combat veteran who served as commandant from 1995 to 1999.

Krulak was convinced that Marines would be called to fight in “three-block wars” in which split-second decisions by the youngest of infantry troops could have lasting repercussions, particularly if Marines fired on civilians by mistake.

So the Marine Corps built combat towns -- formal name: Military Operation in Urban Terrain facilities -- at Camp Pendleton and at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Under Krulak’s successor, Gen. James L. Jones, a similar facility was built on Guam for troops based in Okinawa.

Retired Col. Randolph Gangle, who helped design the urban combat program, believes the training has increased the survivability rate of Marines engaged in city fighting and lessened the chances for civilian casualties.

Gangle said he wishes Marines received more urban training, particularly in the complex task of coordinating airpower, artillery and ground troops. But he discounts Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s threats that many Americans will die if fighting spreads to Iraq’s cities.

“The rhetoric I hear emanating from Baghdad about defending in the cities is just that, rhetoric,” said Gangle, who commanded the 5th Marine Regiment during the Gulf War. “They still can’t fight worth a damn.”

Charles Pena, a military analyst with the Washington-based libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said he believes that the U.S. will prevail in any urban fighting but that the price could be high, both in civilian and American casualties.

“Civilian collateral damage is highly likely if we have to bomb a high number of targets, despite precision weaponry,” Pena said. “In urban combat, many of the advantages lie with the defender.”

At their centers, Marines are taught how to avoid ambushes and booby traps and how to instantly decide whether a civilian poses a threat. Marines dressed in civilian clothes play the role of hostile crowds taunting the Marines, hoping for an overreaction. The Army has a similar program at Ft. Knox, Ky.

In some exercises, the Marines and the “civilians” are armed with weapons that fire paintballs to test the troops’ “fire-no fire” reflexes.

Tactics have been changed. Marines are no longer trained to hurl a grenade into a building before entering.

“More risky for our guys,” Gangle said, “but more humane and certainly more compliant with the spirit and letter of the law of land warfare.”

After the Gulf War, the United Nations set up a commission to investigate claims from Kuwaiti civilians whose homes and businesses were damaged or whose relatives were killed or injured by friendly fire.

The Shemari family was awarded $450,000 -- to be paid by the Kuwaiti government -- for the damage to their home, the death of their daughter and family injuries. The process is heavy on bureaucracy, and 12 years after the end of the war, the family has still not received a check.

Shemari says he holds no malice toward the U.S. Instead, he blames Hussein and hopes the U.S. will topple him.

“If it wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened to my family,” he said.