WASHINGTON: The US military is investigating what appears to be the first case of American troops killed by a missile fired from a US drone.
The investigation is looking into the deaths of a Marine and a Navy medic apparently mistaken for insurgents in southern Afghanistan last week. The two appear to have been killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone, two senior US defense officials said Tuesday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is pending.
Unmanned aircraft have proven to be powerful weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq and their use has expanded to new areas and missions each year of those conflicts. Some drones are used for surveillance and some, such as the drone in this case, are armed and used for hunting militants and their hideouts.
Officials said this is the first case they know of in which a drone may have been involved in a friendly fire incident in which US troops were killed, and they are trying to determine how it happened.
Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith and Seaman Benjamin D. Rast were hit while moving toward other Marines who were under fire in Helmand province.
Military officials in Afghanistan declined to provide any details, saying only that it was a friendly fire incident. “A formal investigation will determine the circumstances that led to the incident,” the International Security Assistance Force said in a statement last week.
But reports from the field indicate that the Marines who were under attack mistook Smith and Rast for militants heading their way and called in a strike from a US Air Force Predator, one official said.
Currently, Air Force Predators and Reapers, the high-flying hunter-killer drones, are logging 48 of the 24-hour air patrols a day, moving toward a goal of 65 in 2013. The aircraft are prized for their intelligence gathering proficiency and ability to pinpoint targets, reducing the risk to US pilots and other personnel.
Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Air Force has dramatically increased the number of armed and unarmed drones in the war zones over the past three years.
Other military services have their own drones, ranging from the Army’s smaller shoulder-launched Ravens to the sophisticated, high-altitude Global Hawks, which are used for surveillance missions and do not carry weapons.
The military’s use of armed drones in Afghanistan has become a flash point for Afghan anger over civilian deaths in the nearly 10-year-old war.
Drones are an even more contentious weapon in Pakistan, where they are largely operated by the CIA to strike insurgents hiding along the border. Pakistan tacitly allows the drone strikes within limited areas but denies in public that it permits the Americans such leeway.
