Word: battlefield
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...Jazeera," says a Navy officer at the Pentagon. Defense officials say that as the battle for Baghdad is joined in coming weeks, the U.S.'s unusually tight restrictions on target selection may be relaxed. Notes a Pentagon official: "We won't announce it." In the chaos of the battlefield, the old rules of engagement have already been tossed out. Lieut. Colonel Wes Gillman, commander of Task Force 130 of the 3rd Infantry Division, told his men, "If you see an Iraqi in civilian clothes coming toward you--even with a stick--shoot...
Find a clock, and watch five seconds tick by. For allied soldiers driving tanks through the Iraqi desert, that's a generous amount of time in which to do the following: spot a vehicle through the optics system, consult the last available coordinates for all known battlefield combatants, try to identify the vehicle's type, check if it has a special panel that appears as a cold spot through a thermal sight, add it all together and decide whether the image on the screen is friend or foe. If it's the latter, the crew, under pressure to shoot before...
Then there is Blue Force Tracking, a computer system that collects coordinates from transponders on allied vehicles and creates a moving battle map. The good guys are marked in blue; enemy coordinates, called in from the battlefield, are plotted in red. But not all vehicles in each unit have a computer screen to display the information, and the data aren't updated in real time. The Holy Grail of identification systems is an encoded radio signal sent from a vehicle to a target which, if friendly, will automatically reply in milliseconds. Despite years of research and negotiations, it will...
Reconstructing the attack has not been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader...
...Shana's sister Nikki left last week for officers' training school in Virginia. An aunt is a former Air Force nurse. (Two uncles and two cousins are also in the military.) But Shana Johnson's capture has sparked anew the debate over the proper role of women on the battlefield. Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, was in Washington last week to urge a change in the Clinton-era reforms after the war. She argues that women in combat risk rape by their captors. The two other women missing from the 507th may well be POWs...