The Profound Tragedy of Friendly Fire: Enemy or No

Ross Heintzkill
5 min readJan 10, 2020

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On January 7, 2020, a passenger plane over Iran crashed — all 176 souls were lost. This is tragedy enough. But we don’t know exactly what happened. Was it mechanical? Or something else? Sadly, over the last three days, evidence has come out that shows Iran itself might have shot the plane down with a surface-to-air missile.

The devastating aftermath of the downed Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing 737–800

If this was the case, it was almost certainly an accidental, inadvertent targeting of a domestic flight. And it’s a horrific tragedy for everyone.

No matter how you feel about any other part of the Iran-U.S. relationship, the last few weeks of hostilities, or leadership anywhere, this is a devastating tragedy. Some people I know are wondering how something like this could even happen — I hope I can shed a little bit of light on it.

I have a a small amount of experience: I served 5 1/2 years Active Duty with the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence analyst. For some of that time, I had a job on an operations floor and participated in dozens of missions. Most details are classified, but a part of that job was figuring out what enemy nations “saw” as they monitored their own airspace.

This is a photo of the USAF DCGS weapon system and my old operations floor. It was taken while I was assigned to the unit, and I know two of the individuals pictured.

I did many different jobs in those 5 1/2 years and was a part of missions all over the world. (It’s an amazing technological feat that my unit and I were basically “plug-and-play” analysts for overseas missions which had all sorts of information funnelled to us via satellite nearly instantaneously.) And sometimes Iran was a country we monitored.

Iran has a modern, mature and complex military. Their Air Force, Navy and ground forces are well-trained and decently well-equipped. They train frequently and most of their training is to be prepared against American aggression. However, much of their equipment is several decades old. And radar doesn’t work like movies would tell us.

Pop culture has a funny and subtle way of infiltrating everyone’s consciousness. Obviously, very few people would ever say they think Spy Game or Top Gun are documentaries — or grounded in fact. But often movies and TV shows are the only framework people have to assemble their thoughts about a thing.

So when people try to imagine how radar works, they can’t help but think of a movie or TV show they saw. And if that movie implied that a really accurate, highly detailed map of the surroundings is normal, or it talked about “transponders” or implied it’s very easy to distinguish what certain radar blips are, that seeps into people’s ideas of how radars work.

Unfortunately, it’s not like that.

A declassified photo op of one, very specific kind of radar

There are lots of different types of radars, and they get used for very different things. Some are just to detect that something is somewhere. Some are better at telling how big the something is. Others can aim missiles at targets. The many, many different radar types all have lots of variables like range, accuracy and more.

In a perfect world, all those systems and radars talk to one another perfectly and pass along their data seamlessly. In a perfect world, a crystal-clear map of the entire airspace identifies all aircraft makes & models, countries of origin and destination. But… you know where that perfect world exists? Hollywood.

In the real world, it’s wildly, hellishly complicated. Imagine the hardest time you ever had getting a printer to connect to a network — multiply that by orders of magnitude. Some of the technological problem is machine-machine, some is human-machine and some is human-human — and it’s all complicated.

But there’s another factor to consider. And that’s the context of the last few days in that part of the world. Iran and the U.S. are overtly hostile parties to one another: simply put, we want different things from that part of the world and use our militaries to edge the other away from what we want.

Not intended to trivialize any part of the process, but it sometimes feels like the most obvious comparison.

Plus America has a long, proud tradition of being a thorn in Iran’s side. Leaving aside conversations about provocation or justifiability, it’s a common military tactic — and it’s done by nations all over the world — to violate ever so slightly the airspace boundaries of a foreign power to see how they react.

It’s not hard to dream up examples of what you can learn by doing this. Do they notice when you go a couple hundred miles into their airspace? Are their radars on? Do they respond? How quickly? With what? From where?

On top of all that, everyone — everyone — realizes that if you do it enough, you might lull the foreign power into a false sense of security so that they don’t bother to react when you really do go in.

You might see, then, where this is going.

  • 3 Jan: U.S. airstrike assassinates Qasem (/Qassem) Soleimani
  • Tensions are high, Iran swears retribution
  • 8 Jan: Iran launches retaliatory airstrike at U.S. installations
  • Tensions are even higher
  • 8 Jan: a blip on a radar leads to a missile launch

Between the wildly complex nature of radar monitoring and networking, outdated machinery, past experience with U.S. incursions into their airspace, and very, very high tensions, it seems like a tragic mistake was made.

The point of this, though, is to express deep, sincere condolences to not only the family of all passengers aboard the Iran-Ukraine flight, but to anyone in the Iranian chain-of-command that launched the SAM.

In my personal experience, nothing haunts dreams like friendly fire. I’m personally lucky to have never experienced friendly fire against civilians, but I couldn’t imagine the devastating impact it would have.

I give the Iranian missile defense personnel all the benefit of the doubt, and assume they were on high alert, doing their job, and made a bad call with a devastatingly tragic result. I was once a warrior similar to them, and I understand why they do their job. Nothing could be further from their mission than to incur civilian deaths

My heart breaks for everyone involved with this awful tragedy, but because I have some personal history and connection with them, I feel a particularly poignant agony for the Iranian missile defense services right now.

Due to classification complications, I suspect a full picture of what happened two days ago will never emerge, but I hope this illustrates a small portion of what might have happened.

13 January 2020 UPDATE:

Mere hours after I published this piece, the Iranian government took responsibility for the shoot down, citing human error. That announcement prompted me to write this piece on why Iran taking responsibility for the shoot-down of the Boeing 737–800 Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 is astonishing.

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