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

While I was looking for something else, I found this paper Iwrote a while ago (like, say, 25 years ago) and I thought y’allmight be interested. I’m not sure I’d necessarily come to the sameconclusions today, but I think many of the questions are stillvalid.

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a cruiser of the Aegisclass, shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf andkilled 290 civilian passengers. After all of the requisite Navyinquiries and the journalistic investigations into the tragedy,only one thing was clear: 290 people were dead and no on was surewhy. Could the officers and crew of the USS Vincennes have beencharged 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 theirJuly 13, 1992 issue, entitled “Sea of Lies.” Though considered tobe the definitive piece of journalism on the issue, it wasthoroughly refuted by many of the navy personnel involved in theirsubsequent letters to Newsweek. Early in the morning on July 3,according to Newsweek, the Vincennes was coming to the aid of thefrigate USS Montgomery. The Montgomery was escorting tankersthrough the Strait of Hormuz, the 32-mile wide entrance to thePersian Gulf, and reported that several Iranian gunboats werespeeding out to harass the tankers. At 0650, the Montgomery hadspotted 13 gunboats, and after twenty minutes, called in explosionsin the vicinity of the Liberian tanker Stoval. Rear Admiral Less,the commander of the Joint Force — Middle East, ordered theVincennes north toward the action in order to send out itshelicopter to investigate the scene, but told the Vincennes to stayfurther south, out of the action. Captain Rogers sent outLieutenant Mark Collier’s SH-60B to investigate before following inthe water. The helicopter found the gunboats now circling a Germanmerchantman, using a common harassment tactic.

Around 0840, Rear Admiral Less returned to his command centerand found the Vincennes far further north than he’d ever intendedit to go, and ordered it to return to its original position furthersouth. The admiral wasn’t the only one who wanted the Vincennes tomove; the Omani coast guard was on the radio asking the Vincennesto 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 fireto blow away empty air, Collier called in that he’d taken fire andwas executing evasive action. Captain Rogers needed no more, heordered the Vincennes back to the helicopter at full power. Hisintention was apparently to engage the gunboats, and under the USrules of engagement for the gulf that had been revised after theUSS Stark incident, he had every right to open fire on the gunboatsto defend his helicopter. Finally, at about 0940, two hours afterthe situation had opened up, the Vincennes crossed into Iranianterritorial waters. As several other naval vessels in the areawatched incredulously, Rogers had the Vincennes engage the gunboatswith the ship’s five-inch gun.

About 55 miles north, Iran Air flight 655 was preparing to takeoff, oblivious of the sea battle going on directly under thecommercial air corridor. The airport of departure was Bandar Abbas,an airstrip used by both military and civilian air traffic. Whenthe Vincennes picked up the plane on radar, it was automaticallyidentified as an aircraft ‘assumed hostile’ and tracked by theAegis computer system on the cruiser. The crew sent out repeatedIFF queries to the aircraft, but never received a definitiveresponse until 0951, when the operator got a response to the IFFsignal that was military. He designated the incoming aircraft as apossible F-14, and began to track it as a hostile aircraft. Theflight 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 ofseven warnings were sent, four on military bands, and an additionalthree on civilian ones. A nearby warship, the USS Sides, sent anadditional five, but never once were any of the twelve warningsheeded. Just before 1000, two SM-2 missiles shot down the plane,just 10 miles away from the Vincennes. On the bridge of theMontgomery, 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 onwhat little information the Navy had at that point. The version ofthe story that Crowe told was that the airliner was at 7000 feetand descending toward the Vincennes, that it had failed to respondto repeated radio warnings, that the Vincennes was outside ofIran’s territorial waters, and that the plane had been outside thecommercial air corridor. The Iranians tried to present the case asidentical to the Soviet downing of KAL 007 in 1983, and tried torally world support against the US. The United Nations would not gofor the story, however, and proceeded with considerably lessoutrage than would have been expected at the deaths of 290non-combatants. What went wrong?

ANAYLSIS

Several different things combined to make this tragedy, notsimply an overeager captain on a high-tech ship or non-chalance onthe part of the pilot of the Iran Air 655. The first glaring errorof the scenario was stationing the Vincennes in the Persian Gulf.The Aegis system is designed to keep missiles and aircraft awayfrom an entire carrier battle group, some 20 ships spread over 50miles. The radar on the Aegis system picks up targets 200 miles outand tracks up to 300 at a time. Designed for wide-open warfare onthe North Atlantic, the Aegis system was clearly out of place inthe cramped Persian Gulf, where aircraft and missiles could appearinside of 200 miles at any second. The Aegis system is designed togive the commander time to make decisions by tracking incomingtargets so far out. It was this lack of time that might have savedthe Iran Air flight.

The IFF radar on the Vincennes has a range of 200 miles. On July3, the radar picked up flight 655 and tracked it as a potentiallyhostile aircraft. After repeated failures to identify it as eithera friend or foe, the radar operator finally got a signal thatidentified an aircraft as military, and he tagged the incomingairliner as a fighter. However, there is still a dispute about thesignal. Did it come from the airliner? Or did the radar operatorforget to change the range setting on the IFF radar to a closerrange? Bandar Abbas was only 55 miles north of the Vincennes, andthe Aegis radar tracks to 200 miles. A fighter on the runway atBandar Abbas could have easily sent the military signal to theVincennes IFF radar by mistake. In the cramped Persian Gulf, one ofthe Aegis system’s strengths became a glaring weakness.

Even with the positive IFF signal, the need for the entirescenario could have been eliminated if the Navy had bothered totrack the commercial flights over the Persian Gulf. Now, in thewake of the tragedy, all commercial air traffic over the gulf ismonitored by the Navy. Before another shoot-down could happen, Navyair traffic controllers could identify the civilian traffic andseparate it from the combat aircraft.

Another problem that was easily recognized was the pilot’srefusal to answer any of the incoming calls from the Vincennes orthe Sides. 12 warnings were sent, and none were heeded. Expertshave said that civilian pilots routinely ignore Americantransmissions in the gulf, apparently because the Americans sendwarnings to everybody, whether they are actually interfering withNavy operations or not. The pilots of the airliner had no way ofknowing that this call was real, and that they were flying into ashootout, because the civilian tower in Bandar Abbas was notmonitoring the military one, and had no way of knowing that thegunboats 55 miles south were involved in a losing shootout with theUS Navy.

Captain Rogers had sufficient information to decide that theincoming aircraft was not hostile, true. But there was an equallycompelling case for an Iranian jet entering the fray to supportIranian gunboats that had come under fire in Iranian territorialwaters. The luxury of analyzing every bit of data and coming to theconclusion that Captain Rogers should have come to is a luxuryafforded by hindsight and the time available to analyze the data.Rogers had just under seven minutes to extract himself from agunboat battle and then identify an incoming aircraft that refusedto 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 shootdown a civilian airliner was certainly not there, and theparticipants were merely acting on the best information they had atthe present.

DISCUSSION

This would be the key to the defense in any trial of eitherCaptain Rogers or his crew. They acted on the best information theyhad available to them under the circumstances. Captain Rogersbelieved he was entering the fray to extract his helicopter, whichwas coming under fire. Under the US rules of engagement for thePersian Gulf, the Vincennes was every bit within their bounds tosteam into Iranian territorial waters and rescue theirhelicopter.

In his article for The Nation, Philip Green ponders the question“Is it all right that 290 civilians were killed by Americanmilitary forces?” While it is not all right, where does theresponsibility lay? The idea that a commander is responsible foreverything that happens in that command was eroded in Beirut in1983, when the Marine commander was not held responsible for thefailed security measures that allowed the suicide bomber to killover 250 Marines. This tenant was further tested when the USS Starkwas hit by two Exocet missiles because the captain followed the USrules of engagement, which, at the time, were incrediblyrestrictive. Can Captain Rogers be held accountable for everythingthat happened in the command center of the Vincennes? The glaringdifference between Rogers and the other cases is that they werefound free of responsibility based on actions they did not take.Rogers sought and received an authorization to shoot, and gave theorder to fire. He took positive action rather than accepting apassive role and allowing the action to happen to him. In light ofthe Beirut and USS Stark incidents, can he be blamed for takingaggressive action? Might he and his crew not be dead if theincoming aircraft had been an F-14 with a hot-wired anti-shipmissile attached?

The issue at stake in the case of the USS Vincennes is not somuch whether or not Captain Rogers and his crew should face warcrimes trials, but how technology affects our decision-making andthe responsibility for those decisions. After World War II, manyNazi concentration camp guards tried to use the statement “I wasjust following orders” to defend themselves at their war crimes’trials. This defense was ruled unusable, and from the Nürnbergtrials, we have in our UCMJ the provision that a militaryservicemember is not only required to ignore an illegal order, butto report it as well. This issue came to the forefront in theproceedings 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 atall?

In today’s high-technology war, such creations as the Aegiscruiser are possible. Named for the legendary shield of the Greekgoddess Athena, the Aegis system was designed to protect an entirecarrier battle group in the midst of an all-out shooting war withthe Soviet Union in the North Atlantic. The system is so massiveand complex that it is easy to understand how the overload ofinformation could have caused members of the Vincennes’ crew tooverlook some vital pieces of data. Newsweek described to possibleuse of the system in the North Atlantic by simply saying “…thecaptain and crew would have little choice but to switch the systemto automatic — and duck.” Does switching the system to automaticand ducking absolve the operator of blame if a civiliannon-combatant is shot down in the mayhem. The operator is acceptinga passive role in handing control of the battle over to a computer,the same passive role that the Beirut commander accepted afterplacing his security personnel, and the same passive role that thecaptain of the USS Stark took on in trusting his shipboardcomputers and defenses to protect him from the imminent attack.Does a passive intention absolve the operator from blame? This isnot the case for the Vincennes, but it is clearly the issueraised.

The accompanying issue that must also be raised is that oftraining. If the system is so massive and complex that it iscapable of acting on its own, if not carefully monitored by humanoperators, then whose responsibility is it to ensure that thoseoperators are competent. If the Vincennes incident had been due topoor or incorrect training on the part of the Navy, where does theresponsibility lie? Can Rogers be held accountable for not havinghis crew trained up to standard? What if the standard to which theyare trained is still not good enough? Is the designer of the systemaccountable, or are the trainers? Is the Navy as a whole culpablefor implementing a program for which it cannot properly train itspersonnel? These issues cross over into the other services as well;the Navy does not have a monopoly on high-tech equipment that couldeasily be misused or improperly fielded.

Who has the responsibility to ensure that technology is properlyused and that the operators are properly trained to use it? Whodecides which systems to employ and where? If a commander decidesto deploy an inappropriate system, does that make him responsiblefor its misuse? Who is responsible if the Aegis system goes haywireand sinks three merchant cargo ships before the crew can engage amanual override system? Technology has opened a new frontier inmilitary justice, and it is a frontier we must carefully explorebefore we set precedents that remove human responsibility foraction from the decision-making process of combat. Without thehuman input into the battle situation, war becomes a video-gamewith many deadly consequences and no one to take responsibility forthem. That is not the principle that command is built on in theUnited States Armed Forces.