Angry Planet - The AC-130 gunship and a tragedy in Afghanistan

Episode Date: June 2, 2016

The United States keeps some very old, very strange-looking planes in its arsenal. But each serves a purpose. The A-10 Warthog provides close-air support to ground troops. The B-52 drops bombs, but is so large and easy to spot that it also sends a message. The AC-130 is also a plane with a specific purpose. It’s propeller-driven and has its guns mounted on only one side. This week on War College, we look at this anachronism and the damage it can still do. Of course, any weapon system is only as good as its guidance.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. They fly in the dead of night with all their lights off and then suddenly, you know, just all hell brakes lose. The United States keeps some very old. very strange-looking planes in the arsenal.

But each serves a purpose. The A-10 Wardhog provides close air support to ground troops. The B-52, which we've talked about on this show, drops bombs, but is so large and easy to spot that it also sends a message. The AC-130 is also a plane with a specific purpose. It's propeller driven and has guns mounted on only one side. This week on War College, we look at this anachronism and the the damage it can still do. Of course, any weapon system is only as good as its guidance.

Matt's taking on the hosting duties this week. So enjoy. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With me today is Joseph Trevethic. Trevithic is a contributor to wars boring and a fellow with global security. He's also a master of the Freedom of Information Act request, that magic journalistic maneuver that allows American citizens to delve into the government's paperwork. As of this recording, Joe has filed 154 FOIA requests in 2016 alone. He's here today to tell us about a piece of American military hardware that's gotten a lot of negative press lately, the AC130 gunship. Joe, thank you, as always, for joining us.

happy to be here. All right, let's start with the basics, Joe. What is the AC130? Well, so the AC130 is imagine basically a large cargo plane, you know, relatively large cargo plane. It's definitely not the largest cargo plane by any stretch of the imagination. But for most people, people, we consider this to be a large plane. And it was designed to haul cargo originally. And eventually the Air Force decided that it was also a very strong. stable platform to mount guns on. And so sticking out of the left side of the AC 130 are a number of weapons and it basically flies in large circles over a target, raining down death and destruction. Okay, so these were originally designed as these were originally cargo, cargo planes. That's, that's the, the plane's basic design is a cargo plane. And that remains, uh, the, the, significant parts of that design are largely unchanged. It's got all these additions for this new mission, and there are still cargo versions of the C-130 flying, but the AC-130 has been turned into a massive attack plane. What kind of weapons are we, is America sticking out of the side?

So the variants have changed. I mean, this is a aircraft that was first put into service during the Vietnam War and has been systematically upgraded and modified and changed. And there have been over the years about at least a half a dozen different versions. The main version that remains in service today is the AC130 U, and that has a 25-millimeter Gatling cannon, a 40-millimeter single-barreled automatic cannon, and a giant 105-millimeter howitzer sticking out of the side. So it's quite a bit of firepower. What exactly are we doing with that?

Like, who's flying these things, and where are they flying them, and why? So this is a, they're exclusively the, the property of the Air Force's special operations Command, the top Commando headquarters for the Air Force, and they are treated as a specialized piece of hardware. But that means that

they end up flying basically all over the world, generally supporting special operations forces in places like Afghanistan or, you know, in the past they've flown in Iraq, and I guess they're actually, they're flying again in Iraq now,

because we're back there fighting again in Iraq, You know, they've flown in places like Somalia and in Panama, you know, over the years. And so it's generally supporting troops on the ground. However, we've gotten, Boris Boring has obtained new information just recently in the last couple of months that show in recent years they've also been used to track down individual terrorists, things we would normally consider to be associated with a drone strike. and they've actually gone after these individual terrorists and killed them. How many, just a quick tangent, how many soldiers are in these planes typically?

How many people are in them when they're flying? So the crews vary from model to model, but the AC130U, for instance, has about 14 people inside of it. And that's the pilots, the co-pilots, the navigators, the people manning the various sensors. you know, there are infrared cameras and other things, and then the people to manage the weapons themselves. Okay, so, you know, the popular conception of what we think of as these targeted strikes are drones, you know, kind of flying through the air controlled by an Air Force pilot back in Nevada, or perhaps somewhere else.

But what you've uncovered using those magic foyer requests is that these AC130s are actually part of the kill chain. They are part of the drone wars. they're doing some of the targeted killing as well. Exactly. And it's not just the targeted killing that's a part of these operations. I remember reading your piece for Wars Boring. You quote Major Jeremy Sparks, who's the squadron commander of the AC130 squadron that you had gotten their operational history or were able to delve into their operational history.

And you quote him as saying, with the sound of having a C-130 gunship overhead in operation, we have established to the enemy that you get to run away. You can run, but you'll die tired. So there's a psychological operation aspect of this, too. Without a doubt, I mean, these weapons are, you know, they come in the night. The AC130's normal operating profile was to fly almost exclusively at night. They're large, they would be otherwise potentially vulnerable to even more basic surface-to-air weapons, such as anti-aircraft cannon and shoulder-fired missiles because they have to fly so low and so slow,

part of what makes them so accurate in attacking the targets that they go after. So, you know, they fly in the dead of night with all their lights off and then suddenly, you know, just all hell breaks loose. And so there is definitely a psychological component to this. And that's been one of the reasons why this really quite unique. platform has remained in service for so long in what is, you know, still a very unique set of missions. Right.

It is very specific. But I mean, that's kind of the way the nature of the wars we're fighting right now, are these very specific niche kind of missions. And this is, this weapon system is really good for that. Yes. Okay. So you delved specifically, as I said, into the 2013 operational history of the 16th special operation squadron.

How did they do in 2013? So during the 2013 calendar year, the 16th Special Operations Squadron, which was flying older H model AC130s at the time, which have now been completely retired. And those aircraft had at this point a single 40-millimeter cannon and the 105-millimeter howitzer, and that was the only two weapons they had at that time. that squadron claimed that they had killed 56 individual terrorists as part of these operations.

And it had actually been referred to in their various operational literature using the terminology of the time. And so, you know, these are jackpots. And on top of that, there had been 35 so-called touchdowns. And this is what is basically refers to when you are tracking the cell phone that you believe is being held by a terrorist. You've gotten this number. You've attached this number to the person. You track the cell phone. The cell phone goes on.

And you home right in on that. And you put a cannon round basically onto the phone. The history of the 27 special operations wing, the commanding unit of the 16th Special Operations Squadron, used an odd way of referring to this by talking about it as enemy, you know, the what was actually targeted in those strikes was enemy equipment. And which is interesting because clearly the target was the person holding the phone. But what they have been homing in on was, was the cell phone itself. And they talk then about how this kill chain creates more intelligence and more cell phone numbers. They specifically use the term cell X, which is cell phone exploitation, or basically digging through captured cell phones to find new numbers and to then figure out if those numbers are associated with terrorists. Wait, so it sounds like they attack the enemy equipment, quote unquote, and then they go and dig through the rubble to find more cell phones.

to target. Yeah, well, the crew of the airplane wouldn't, of course. It would be commando teams on the ground or other troops or something. But yes, you know, someone is then digging through the rubble. Okay. And this kind of transitions nicely into, you know, what the current news story that's going on right now is the, you know, the Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan and Kandu's Afghanistan

was struck in one of these AC-130 missions, correct? Correct. Slightly different parameters, as we now know. I mean, a very long and drawn-out investigation process happened after that tragic strike, which was clearly a mistake. And we're still learning more and more about that as people comb over what documentation the Pentagon did release, which itself is not entirely complete and then begs more and more serious questions about how things are actually being worked, you know, in both targeted killings against individual terrorists, but just generally how airstrikes are flown in, you know, the heat of the moment. All right. Well, you've been, you've been digging into these AC130s for

a while now. You've been researching this specific case and going through what the Pentagon has released. What's your take on it? Was this an intelligence failure? And if so, do we need to shore up here to make sure something like this doesn't happen again? This particular case seems to have been a communications failure combined with potentially some level of mental fatigue and frustration. If you read the transcripts of the radio chatter inside the AC130 that the Pentagon did release, and it's by no means complete, what they chose to release, to release is itself pretty damning. You have members of the crew basically going back and forth

for some amount of time debating about, you know, do you see anybody who looks like a terrorist? Do you see anybody who looks like they're a combatant? Do we know what's going on? Do we even know what the troops on the ground who are calling this in or even talking about? And the general consensus seems to be no. Again and again, people are like, well, we can't tell what's going on and we can't tell what's going on. We don't even know if this is the right building. And it's, you know, there's a technological failure at a certain point where the crew on the gunship itself can see what they're thinking about hitting,

which turns out to be the MSF hospital in Kunduz. But they cannot link that to the Special Forces. team on the ground. There's there's supposed to be a data link that allows you to push the video feed so to speak down to the troops on the ground so they can see what you're seeing and confirm that that's the target they're talking about. And so that wasn't available. That system had broken. But then we also find out that nobody could see the building that they were talking about in question anyways. And there was an immense amount of confusion in a city that was that was consumed by pockets of violence and pockets of complete peace.

I mean, the Taliban had essentially briefly seized government facilities and were roving around the city, but it wasn't clear where they were. It wasn't clearly what portions of the city they controlled. It seems pretty clear that the MSF hospital had been spared from the violence, but probably more a product of happenstance than because of anything else. And so, I mean, it's just an amazingly confused situation that leads to someone eventually saying, fine, let's do this, this looks good enough. And that's the, you know, the military investigators said very clearly that that was a law of armed conflict violation, that they had not figured out who they were attacking and why they were even doing it and whether there was an imminent threat that required the attack in the first place. The law of armed conflict is, of course, a collection of international humanitarian law and other international law.

They did not completely specify very clearly in the portions of the documents that were released. What portion of the law of armed conflict was violated in this case? MSF is on record multiple times suggesting that it is their opinion that they need an independent investigation because they believe that there is significant evidence to suggest that there is a war crime. There is a significant debate among legal scholars, and I am not a lawyer, but there is a significant debate among legal scholars about whether this constituted a war crime. And that is by no means definite. Do we know what MSF says it has, the kind of evidence that it's looking at that says that says that, war crime was committed? Do we know what their what their side of the story is?

Their rationale is, is that it was an unprovoked attack on a so-called protected structure. The Geneva Conventions make it very clear that hospitals, civilian hospitals, and hospitals, just in general, detached from any fighting where the patients are incapacitated and not capable of participating in armed conflict are protected under the laws of war and cannot be attacked. The Pentagon's assertion is that since the crew did not know it was a hospital at the time, which seems pretty clear cut from what was going on, because they did not intentionally attack a civilian hospital, that it's not a war crime. MSF's argument is that intentionality should not be a factor in dismayed,

missing the case of the war crime just because you didn't know, it shouldn't necessarily matter. The exact way the law is phrased, though seems to be pretty clear that intentionality is extremely important because if intentionality was not considered, if you simply said every time that innocent civilians were killed on the battlefield or a medical facility was inadvertently hit in a case of a more, you know, what somebody might consider to be a more legitimate accident, then they would also be guilty of a war crime. And so people are arguing whether, you know, how much of this applies and where, and whether, you know, some people have made the case, and I think this is a very, a very good case, that

there should be a new piece of law drafted that calls for basically a charge of war recklessness, which would codify into the existing law a need to be deliberately careful rather than simply avoid deliberately attacking civilians. And so the hope would be that this would promote people being more cautious and putting a different sort of thought process to whether they go through with an airstrike in a complex environment. You know, I think that, you know, me personally, I think that's a very reasonable suggestion and might actually have the intended effects. I personally do not believe that this attack was a war crime. I think it definitely qualifies as a crime. I am one to debate what the reasoning, you know, I wonder, want more answers on why the

punishments were ultimately administrative rather than criminal because, you know, ignorance of the law is. never a defense, at least in the American understanding of the justice system. And it seems that in this case, whatever they had intended to do, it was a massive screw-up. I mean, everybody seems to agree it was a massive screw-up. No one is debating that. The issue seems to be much more about accountability and about punishment. All right, let's, let me rewind a little bit, because something you said a minute ago struck my interest. So this data link failed. So the AC-130 had problems seeing those on the ground, correct?

Right. Okay. Now, on the drones that America pilot flies, they have cameras that can see the ground. The AC-130 doesn't have any kind of optics that it can see the ground. It does. It has multiple cameras. It basically has the exact same cameras. You know, if not the exact same equipment, then very similar equipment.

And the issue there, of course, is the fidelity. of those cameras. In the report of the investigation, one of the AC130 crewmen was specifically interviewed about how they determined that it probably wasn't civilians on the ground because they could not otherwise determine.

They saw no weapons clearly, and they could not otherwise determine who the individuals in the MSF compound were before they launched their attack. And he said, this unnamed crewman, the name was redacted said that in their experience, the AC130 crews find that because you can hear the gunship, as he put it basically, the terrorists start acting casual and nonchalant, because they know that it's difficult to tell what's going on into the camera.

So if you just basically put your weapon under your coat and start acting normally, it's difficult to basically, for anybody to determine whether you're, you know, being hostile or not. And in my mind, this sort of pointed to an amazing concession of, well, nobody really knows who any of these people are on the ground when you're looking through these cameras. It's amazingly difficult to determine. And this trying to figure out what's going through a person's brain or whether that person is a terrorist from the air is entirely down to this method of what the Pentagon calls creating a pattern of life. you have intelligence analysts who try and figure out what terrorists look like when they're

walking around on the ground. This is why those cell phone strikes are so important, right? Right. In a way that the cell phone strike is more there's more positive identification when you're actually attacking the cell phone because at least you know it's the cell phone.

You don't know who's holding it, but at least you can be assured that it is the cell phone in question or the SIM carding question. I mean, in a lot of these other instances, I mean, people are really trying to figure out whether people are terrorists or not just from whether they're interacting with certain individuals or how they're standing or where they're standing or how they're grouped. I mean, there are, there are so-called interpretation keys when looking at these images. And it's, I mean, you can imagine how difficult it must be if you had all the time in the

world. But if you're flying around in the middle of the night and people are worried about being shot at or actually being about shot at and you have to make a split-second decision, it's like, well, this is a recipe for serious mistakes. You know, it is difficult. Hearing all of that, it's almost surprising that something like Kunduz hasn't happened before. My suggestion would be that it has happened before. And the other suggestion would be that if the building they had hit in Kunduz hadn't been the MSF hospital, it would still have been the wrong building. If they had hit it. if they had hit an identical building in the identical location, but it hadn't been the MSF

hospital, and they still hit it because they were confused about what was going on, I imagine you would never have heard about it. That's, but we don't, we don't know if that has ever happened, right? To be fair, we don't have any evidence to support that. Well, we don't have evidence to support an exact situation, but we do have evidence from the reports of civilian casualty investigations that are coming out of Iraq, where We do know that, you know, war is boring has done an immense amount of digging into civilian casualty allegations and the civilian casualty investigation process.

And, you know, we obtained a spreadsheet of all of the officially lodged allegations of civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria. And one of those that was under investigation was an airstrike on an Islamic State checkpoint near Hotra Rock last year. And that was not investigated until a woman emailed someone, and then that email got forwarded onto Central Command where she asked basically for the money to pay for a new SUV. Her SUV had been blown apart,

and it was an extremely valuable piece of equipment for her. It was probably much of, you know, her net worth, and she wanted some remittance for that. And then as a result, then American commanders started investigating the incident. Then American commanders went back and looked at the tape and scrutinized the tape and came to the conclusion that they had likely attacked two civilian vehicles that just happened. to be at the checkpoint. And again, in that case, those pilots were not disciplined because at the time they had not planned to attack the vehicles. They had radioed back with the presence of the vehicles to the command center. The intelligence analyst of the command center had looked at the video

footage, had determined that because the people in the vehicles were talking to the people at the checkpoint, that they fit the so-called pattern of light. and that those vehicles were not stopped at the checkpoint. We're not being detained at the checkpoint by Islamic State, but were actually part of the checkpoint. And then the message went back to the two A10s, that those targets were legitimate, and the A10s blew up the two SUVs.

So, I mean, we do have examples of this happening. And again, if that woman had never emailed anyone looking, you know, she was not complaining about the civilian casuals. She was looking for a new SUV. And if she had never emailed anyone about it, that would have probably gone unreported. Because it would have just been, it would have been stuff blown up at the checkpoint,

and everybody at the checkpoint, it died. Let me follow that when, with what I feel may be a depressing question. You've been kind of looking specifically at recent history, right? 2013 and on. How long have we been, how long has America been conducting operations this way? using AC130s and drones and A10s. Well, and relying, I mean, you know, I would think that we've been relying very heavily and increasingly heavily on the so-called weapon system video, you know,

from either from the plane or just looking through the camera at the front of the missile. And we've been doing this for more than a decade. And, you know, mistakes have. happen. And I think it's important to point out, especially right now, that the United States does this and makes mistakes and is, and perhaps doesn't admit to mistakes as often as people would like, but the United States admits to mistakes a lot more than than most other countries that engage in concerted, sustained air campaigns around the world. You know, you don't hear about the Russians of the Syrians offering to build MSF a new hospital in Aleppo.

And, you know, the United States government has acknowledged fault and is going to build a new hospital in Kunduz. And, you know, this is in stark contrast even to, like, take the British Royal Air Force, who proudly maintains that they have not killed a single civilian in the course of their airstrikes in Iraq in Syria, despite allegations to the contrary, because there's no confirmed instance. You know, they proudly tout on Twitter and in their news reports that they have not killed a single civilian in their airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. And to quote someone else on this matter, that strains credulity. You know, it is really hard to believe that anyone, you know, I joke about this.

You know, no one's perfect except for my mom. No one's perfect. Mistakes are going to happen. And mistakes are more likely to happen when you're relying on an incomplete picture, when you're relying on intelligence, which by its very nature is spotty. Just on the last, you know, on a previous episode of War College talking about SpyCraft, talking about the need to repeatedly corroborate intelligence and always be skeptical of intelligence in the intelligence community. I mean, intelligence is spotty. You know, it's a business of putting together incomplete pieces. And so, you know, but the United States does admit that it makes mistakes.

And that's a, you know, I do think that they are trying. And I think that's always another important thing. I believe they are trying harder than anyone else. But I also believe that then it is in their best interests to admit mistakes and admit fault and be transparent and be accountable. because it helps reinforce that belief. I mean, it's, you know, for many people, it becomes hard to believe that that's a sincere statement

if they believe that the United States is hiding things. And, you know, I personally don't believe the United States as a concerted campaign to go after civilians and screw things up. But, you know, some people find it more difficult to believe when it looks like everything is so slipshod. A lot of people are blaming a heightened number of civilian casualties on the drone war or on air strikes in general. And, you know, they say, oh, well, air strikes just lend themselves to this.

And I don't think that's true. It's a matter of the policy, not the platform. If you told a guy on the ground with a knife that the guy around the corner was a terrorist, and you had based that on spotty intelligence, it would be. just as problematic as killing him with a missile from the air. You know, it's still, you still have to rely on that intelligence to make sure you have the right people. And so it's, it's a matter of, you know, we, we should be demanding that every effort be taken to make sure we are hitting the right people. Because that's the other thing, it's not indiscriminate.

If you look at the before and after pictures included in the penitimate, The Pentagon's release documents of the damage to the MSF compound in Kunduz. You know, people keep talking about, oh, this was an indiscriminate attack. No, it was amazingly discriminant. If you look at the damage, the damage is right on that building. That building. You know, the AC130 in particular is an amazingly precise weapon system. They hit the wrong target.

The target was wrong. But when you talk about, if you're talking about hitting what you intend to, hit, that precision is amazing. You know, a hellfire missile is amazingly precise. It's about launching it at the right target. You know, that's where, that's where perhaps the precision needs to be improved. But it's not the precision of the weapon per se. It's not, these guys aren't just blindly firing into something. No, they're, they're attacking a specific target. The problem is, is whether that target is actually a terrorist or if it's a wedding party. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of War College, and more thanks than usual to my co-host, Matthew Galt, who flew solo this week. The show was created by myself and Craig Heedick, and is produced this week by Bethel Hapty, whose ears just heard a pin drop somewhere in Asia. Check us out on iTunes and on Twitter. Our handle is at war underscore college.