Question

Imagine a situation that the USS Vincennes was engaged in combat during the war. On the radar screen a blip appeared that signified an incoming aircraft. After repeatedly asking the aircraft to identify itself with no success, it appeared that the aircraft might be a hostile F-14 attacking the Vincennes. Captain Will Rogers had little time to make his decision. Should he issue the command to launch a missile and destroy the plane? Or should he wait for positive identification? If he waited too long and the plane was indeed hostile, then it might be impossible to avert the attack and danger to his crew.

Captain Rogers issued the command, and the aircraft was destroyed. It was reported to be an Airbus airliner carrying 290 people. There were no survivors.

What are Captain Rogers’s fundamental objectives? What risks does he face? Draw a decision tree representing his decision.

Answer 1

The USS Vincennes and the Issue of Responsibility for the Actions of Automated Weapons Systems

While I was looking for something else, I found this paper I wrote a while ago (like, say, 25 years ago) and I thought y’all might be interested. I’m not sure I’d necessarily come to the same conclusions today, but I think many of the questions are still valid.

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a cruiser of the Aegis class, shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf and killed 290 civilian passengers. After all of the requisite Navy inquiries and the journalistic investigations into the tragedy, only one thing was clear: 290 people were dead and no on was sure why. Could the officers and crew of the USS Vincennes have been charged with violations of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice? Did they violate international law? Should Captain Will Rogers III, the skipper of the USS Vincennes, stand trial?

BACKGROUND

Newsweek printed a compelling story about the tragedy in their July 13, 1992 issue, entitled “Sea of Lies.” Though considered to be the definitive piece of journalism on the issue, it was thoroughly refuted by many of the navy personnel involved in their subsequent letters to Newsweek. Early in the morning on July 3, according to Newsweek, the Vincennes was coming to the aid of the frigate USS Montgomery. The Montgomery was escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, the 32-mile wide entrance to the Persian Gulf, and reported that several Iranian gunboats were speeding out to harass the tankers. At 0650, the Montgomery had spotted 13 gunboats, and after twenty minutes, called in explosions in the vicinity of the Liberian tanker Stoval. Rear Admiral Less, the commander of the Joint Force — Middle East, ordered the Vincennes north toward the action in order to send out its helicopter to investigate the scene, but told the Vincennes to stay further south, out of the action. Captain Rogers sent out Lieutenant Mark Collier’s SH-60B to investigate before following in the water. The helicopter found the gunboats now circling a German merchantman, using a common harassment tactic.

Around 0840, Rear Admiral Less returned to his command center and found the Vincennes far further north than he’d ever intended it to go, and ordered it to return to its original position further south. The admiral wasn’t the only one who wanted the Vincennes to move; the Omani coast guard was on the radio asking the Vincennes to leave, but was soundly ignored. Finally, Rogers turned south, but left Collier in the helicopter to investigate. Moments later, the chopper came under anti-aircraft fire.

Instead of simply coming home and leaving the anti-aircraft fire to blow away empty air, Collier called in that he’d taken fire and was executing evasive action. Captain Rogers needed no more, he ordered the Vincennes back to the helicopter at full power. His intention was apparently to engage the gunboats, and under the US rules of engagement for the gulf that had been revised after the USS Stark incident, he had every right to open fire on the gunboats to defend his helicopter. Finally, at about 0940, two hours after the situation had opened up, the Vincennes crossed into Iranian territorial waters. As several other naval vessels in the area watched incredulously, Rogers had the Vincennes engage the gunboats with the ship’s five-inch gun.

About 55 miles north, Iran Air flight 655 was preparing to take off, oblivious of the sea battle going on directly under the commercial air corridor. The airport of departure was Bandar Abbas, an airstrip used by both military and civilian air traffic. When the Vincennes picked up the plane on radar, it was automatically identified as an aircraft ‘assumed hostile’ and tracked by the Aegis computer system on the cruiser. The crew sent out repeated IFF queries to the aircraft, but never received a definitive response until 0951, when the operator got a response to the IFF signal that was military. He designated the incoming aircraft as a possible F-14, and began to track it as a hostile aircraft. The flight was now about 32 miles from the Vincennes.

The Vincennes started broadcasting warnings to the plane, demanding that it turn aside and avoid the US warship. A total of seven warnings were sent, four on military bands, and an additional three on civilian ones. A nearby warship, the USS Sides, sent an additional five, but never once were any of the twelve warnings heeded. Just before 1000, two SM-2 missiles shot down the plane, just 10 miles away from the Vincennes. On the bridge of the Montgomery, the crew saw the wreckage splash down. The USS Sides, 19 miles away, had been tracking the jet as commercial air traffic, and was certain that Rogers had shot down a civilian airliner. Rogers headed south.

That afternoon in Washington, Admiral Crowe briefed the press on what little information the Navy had at that point. The version of the story that Crowe told was that the airliner was at 7000 feet and descending toward the Vincennes, that it had failed to respond to repeated radio warnings, that the Vincennes was outside of Iran’s territorial waters, and that the plane had been outside the commercial air corridor. The Iranians tried to present the case as identical to the Soviet downing of KAL 007 in 1983, and tried to rally world support against the US. The United Nations would not go for the story, however, and proceeded with considerably less outrage than would have been expected at the deaths of 290 non-combatants. What went wrong?

ANAYLSIS

Several different things combined to make this tragedy, not simply an overeager captain on a high-tech ship or non-chalance on the part of the pilot of the Iran Air 655. The first glaring error of the scenario was stationing the Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. The Aegis system is designed to keep missiles and aircraft away from an entire carrier battle group, some 20 ships spread over 50 miles. The radar on the Aegis system picks up targets 200 miles out and tracks up to 300 at a time. Designed for wide-open warfare on the North Atlantic, the Aegis system was clearly out of place in the cramped Persian Gulf, where aircraft and missiles could appear inside of 200 miles at any second. The Aegis system is designed to give the commander time to make decisions by tracking incoming targets so far out. It was this lack of time that might have saved the Iran Air flight.

The IFF radar on the Vincennes has a range of 200 miles. On July 3, the radar picked up flight 655 and tracked it as a potentially hostile aircraft. After repeated failures to identify it as either a friend or foe, the radar operator finally got a signal that identified an aircraft as military, and he tagged the incoming airliner as a fighter. However, there is still a dispute about the signal. Did it come from the airliner? Or did the radar operator forget to change the range setting on the IFF radar to a closer range? Bandar Abbas was only 55 miles north of the Vincennes, and the Aegis radar tracks to 200 miles. A fighter on the runway at Bandar Abbas could have easily sent the military signal to the Vincennes IFF radar by mistake. In the cramped Persian Gulf, one of the Aegis system’s strengths became a glaring weakness.

Even with the positive IFF signal, the need for the entire scenario could have been eliminated if the Navy had bothered to track the commercial flights over the Persian Gulf. Now, in the wake of the tragedy, all commercial air traffic over the gulf is monitored by the Navy. Before another shoot-down could happen, Navy air traffic controllers could identify the civilian traffic and separate it from the combat aircraft.

Another problem that was easily recognized was the pilot’s refusal to answer any of the incoming calls from the Vincennes or the Sides. 12 warnings were sent, and none were heeded. Experts have said that civilian pilots routinely ignore American transmissions in the gulf, apparently because the Americans send warnings to everybody, whether they are actually interfering with Navy operations or not. The pilots of the airliner had no way of knowing that this call was real, and that they were flying into a shootout, because the civilian tower in Bandar Abbas was not monitoring the military one, and had no way of knowing that the gunboats 55 miles south were involved in a losing shootout with the US Navy.

Captain Rogers had sufficient information to decide that the incoming aircraft was not hostile, true. But there was an equally compelling case for an Iranian jet entering the fray to support Iranian gunboats that had come under fire in Iranian territorial waters. The luxury of analyzing every bit of data and coming to the conclusion that Captain Rogers should have come to is a luxury afforded by hindsight and the time available to analyze the data. Rogers had just under seven minutes to extract himself from a gunboat battle and then identify an incoming aircraft that refused to respond to warnings to turn aside.

Although the print media accused the Navy with ‘covering- up’ the Vincennes debacle, there is, in fact, very little to cover up. No one broke any laws or rules of engagement. The intent to shoot down a civilian airliner was certainly not there, and the participants were merely acting on the best information they had at the present.

DISCUSSION

This would be the key to the defense in any trial of either Captain Rogers or his crew. They acted on the best information they had available to them under the circumstances. Captain Rogers believed he was entering the fray to extract his helicopter, which was coming under fire. Under the US rules of engagement for the Persian Gulf, the Vincennes was every bit within their bounds to steam into Iranian territorial waters and rescue their helicopter.

In his article for The Nation, Philip Green ponders the question “Is it all right that 290 civilians were killed by American military forces?” While it is not all right, where does the responsibility lay? The idea that a commander is responsible for everything that happens in that command was eroded in Beirut in 1983, when the Marine commander was not held responsible for the failed security measures that allowed the suicide bomber to kill over 250 Marines. This tenant was further tested when the USS Stark was hit by two Exocet missiles because the captain followed the US rules of engagement, which, at the time, were incredibly restrictive. Can Captain Rogers be held accountable for everything that happened in the command center of the Vincennes? The glaring difference between Rogers and the other cases is that they were found free of responsibility based on actions they did not take. Rogers sought and received an authorization to shoot, and gave the order to fire. He took positive action rather than accepting a passive role and allowing the action to happen to him. In light of the Beirut and USS Stark incidents, can he be blamed for taking aggressive action? Might he and his crew not be dead if the incoming aircraft had been an F-14 with a hot-wired anti-ship missile attached?

The issue at stake in the case of the USS Vincennes is not so much whether or not Captain Rogers and his crew should face war crimes trials, but how technology affects our decision-making and the responsibility for those decisions. After World War II, many Nazi concentration camp guards tried to use the statement “I was just following orders” to defend themselves at their war crimes’ trials. This defense was ruled unusable, and from the Nürnberg trials, we have in our UCMJ the provision that a military servicemember is not only required to ignore an illegal order, but to report it as well. This issue came to the forefront in the proceedings following the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. However, where does the defense “I was doing what the computer told me to” or “I just let the computer run things” become acceptable, if at all?

In today’s high-technology war, such creations as the Aegis cruiser are possible. Named for the legendary shield of the Greek goddess Athena, the Aegis system was designed to protect an entire carrier battle group in the midst of an all-out shooting war with the Soviet Union in the North Atlantic. The system is so massive and complex that it is easy to understand how the overload of information could have caused members of the Vincennes’ crew to overlook some vital pieces of data. Newsweek described to possible use of the system in the North Atlantic by simply saying “…the captain and crew would have little choice but to switch the system to automatic — and duck.” Does switching the system to automatic and ducking absolve the operator of blame if a civilian non-combatant is shot down in the mayhem. The operator is accepting a passive role in handing control of the battle over to a computer, the same passive role that the Beirut commander accepted after placing his security personnel, and the same passive role that the captain of the USS Stark took on in trusting his shipboard computers and defenses to protect him from the imminent attack. Does a passive intention absolve the operator from blame? This is not the case for the Vincennes, but it is clearly the issue raised.

The accompanying issue that must also be raised is that of training. If the system is so massive and complex that it is capable of acting on its own, if not carefully monitored by human operators, then whose responsibility is it to ensure that those operators are competent. If the Vincennes incident had been due to poor or incorrect training on the part of the Navy, where does the responsibility lie? Can Rogers be held accountable for not having his crew trained up to standard? What if the standard to which they are trained is still not good enough? Is the designer of the system accountable, or are the trainers? Is the Navy as a whole culpable for implementing a program for which it cannot properly train its personnel? These issues cross over into the other services as well; the Navy does not have a monopoly on high-tech equipment that could easily be misused or improperly fielded.

Who has the responsibility to ensure that technology is properly used and that the operators are properly trained to use it? Who decides which systems to employ and where? If a commander decides to deploy an inappropriate system, does that make him responsible for its misuse? Who is responsible if the Aegis system goes haywire and sinks three merchant cargo ships before the crew can engage a manual override system? Technology has opened a new frontier in military justice, and it is a frontier we must carefully explore before we set precedents that remove human responsibility for action from the decision-making process of combat. Without the human input into the battle situation, war becomes a video-game with many deadly consequences and no one to take responsibility for them. That is not the principle that command is built on in the United States Armed Forces.