On November 25, General John F. Campbell, the commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, announced the findings of an initial investigation into the air strike by an Air Force AC-130 gunship that hit a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3. The strike—in which the AC-130 attacked using its onboard cannon, killing 30 patients and members of the MSF hospital staff and injuring another 34—lasted nearly a half-hour.

Campbell called the strike "a tragic, but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error." But among the secondary factors cited in the report, he noted, there were several contributing technical failures, including a networking failure that could have provided information that would have prevented the mistaken targeting of the hospital. Furthermore, information systems available to the command responsible for the aircraft failed to alert those on duty in the operations center that the target selected by the aircraft was on a no-strike list.

Spooky action at a distance









The aircraft responsible for the errant attack on the hospital was an AC-130U "Spooky" gunship, a 20-year-old aircraft that carries a five-barreled 25 millimeter Gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. The airplane is a veritable flying artillery battery that "orbits" its targets while firing upon them with high-explosive rounds. (The Air Force has also deployed the AC-130W "Stinger," a modified version of the special operations transport the MC-130W "Dragon Spear," to Afghanistan. These aircraft carry a 30mm automatic cannon and launch tubes for Griffin and Hellfire missiles and laser-guided glide bombs.)

The aircraft's onboard command post, known as its "Battle Management Center" (BMC), is manned by two sensor operators, a navigator, a fire control officer, and an electronic warfare officer. The BMC crew is responsible for steering the aircraft to targets, identifying them, and shooting them; the aircraft's battery is slaved to the sensor suite for targeting. At night, the primary sensors used for targeting are infrared cameras, though the aircraft also carries a targeting radar—an enhanced version of the system used on the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter/bomber—to detect and track ground targets.

On the night of the attack, the AC-130U was launched more than an hour ahead of its original mission time because of an urgent request from troops on the ground for close air support. As a result, the air crew didn't get the usual mission brief on things like where off-limits targets were. It was then diverted from its original mission to Kunduz to support Afghan and US special operations forces attempting to clear the Taliban from the city.

Campbell said that "the electronic systems on board the aircraft malfunctioned, preventing the operation of an essential command and control capability and eliminating the ability of aircraft to transmit video, send and receive e-mail or send and receive electronic messages." The failure of the communications link prevented the sharing of data to and from the command center that would have made it possible to make up for the lack of a mission briefing—and for commanders back at Bagram Air Base to see the target before the AC-130 fired upon it.

Then, as the AC-130 crew was preparing to engage the intended target—a building that had been the offices of the Afghani National Directorate of Security—the crew "believed [the aircraft] was targeted by a missile," Campbell said. This forced them to take a much wider orbit around the target area, putting them about eight miles away. The greater distance meant that the fire control sensors had a much less clear picture of the target area, and the precision of the targeting system was degraded.

Bad aim

A US special operations team on the ground, given coordinates of the Afghani NDS building by the Afghan forces they were working with, passed them to the AC-130. But when the AC-130 crew punched the grid coordinates into their targeting system, it aimed at an open field 300 meters away from the actual target. Working from a rough description of the building provided from the ground, the sensor operators found a building close to the field that they believed was the target. Tragically, it was actually the hospital.

Since it was night, and the aircrew was working from infrared video, they were unable to see the markings on the building identifying it as a hospital. But the mistake persisted even after the aircraft moved back in closer and the coordinates they were given re-aligned with the actual target. They had already found their target, and they believed it was the right one—since no one on the ground was telling them otherwise.

Meanwhile the targeting data for the hospital was sent back to Bagram Air Base's operations center. Commanders there had received information on the location of the hospital from the MSF, and it was part of a list of off-limits targets. However, no one in the operations center was alerted to the overlap of the targeting information with the list.

For the next half-hour, the aircraft would shell the hospital. And while MSF called Bagram to tell them of the attack, it took 17 minutes for that information to reach the operations center—by which time the AC-130 had completed its fire mission on the wrong target.

Command and out-of-control

While there were a host of other procedural errors, including flagrant violations of rules of engagement by the aircrew and the US Special Operations Force commander on the ground, the lack of a "common operating picture," as they call it in the military, was a fundamental contributor to the destruction of the hospital. This is a problem the military has struggled with perpetually, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Defense Department has pumped billions of dollars into programs intended to correct the problem, such as the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) and other intelligence and information sharing tools.

Unfortunately, these tools are hardly "common" across the military, and they're difficult to use under the best of circumstances. The Air Force's version of DCGS is used in operations centers only and relies on analysts using tools like e-mail and instant messages to alert mission commanders rather than intelligent sharing of data. And all the data in the world doesn't do anyone any good when the network is down or nobody bothers to look at it.