The Little Egg Harbor Incident

Dueling with hand grenades in a telephone booth

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/03/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/eggharbor.htm

Back about a month ago, there was an incident in New Jersey where a National Guard F-16 jet on a training mission had one of its guns accidentally fire, squirting off 27 rounds in slightly under half a second. Some of the bullets perforated the roof of an elementary school, some four miles away.

Fortunately, this happened at night, and so there were no injuries, the bullets were of a non-explosive variety, and the damage was comparatively minor, being limited to holes in the roof, a few ceiling tiles destroyed, and the demise of one child’s desk that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody was hurt, unless you count the fact that the whole thing probably gave the school’s night custodian a good case of the jitters. Getting shot at by invisible jets definitely isn’t a part of the job description.

Nor is there any reason to conclude that the incident was anything other than an unfortunate accident. While it’s not clear what caused the gun to fire in the first place, the pilot responded almost instantly (the cannon, a M61-A1 Vulcan, fires about 100 rounds a second) and promptly reported the incident. And of course, he was over four miles away and well over a mile up, and it was at night, so the possibility that he meant to hit the school isn’t even a consideration.

But people were, understandably, upset and concerned. Anything that might cause an elementary classroom to get raked with bullets is going to cause comment, and various people demanded that the National Guard and the community work to find out exactly what happened and strive to make sure it never happened again.

One local politician proposed that training flights be suspended while an investigation was performed, and the far right, always nuts and now in the wake of the election both arrogant and nuts, blew its collective mind. Think of a mouse sneezing.

They began yammering that criticizing, or even discussing the incident "during a time of war" was unpatriotic, and should be banned.

Even the military reacted to that with a "You’ve got to be kidding."

Well, the right is nuts and generally quite stupid. On the bright side, their children make great cannon fodder. Although I’m willing to bet that none of the right wingers questioning the patriotism of anyone who might be perturbed that their kids’ school just got shot up actually had any of their own whelps at that particular school. Right wing morality is nothing if not situational.

Part of the problem, in a nutshell, is that training bases which used to be in remote areas have been encroached upon. The military doesn’t get to dictate what can be done with land that they don’t have title to, and local city councils and county boards of supes tend to consist of real estate agents, realtors, or their lackeys. What had been farmland or swamp gets subdivided and built upon, and what was once unoccupied land becomes a part of the great suburban sprawl. Here in California we used to joke in the sixties that Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego would all be just one big suburban sprawl eventually. That’s ancient history now; Los Long Diego and San Oak Jose are growing tendrils toward one another now, both along 101 and I-5. And enveloping Vandenberg, Hueneme, and other military areas as they do so. Stucco jungles are popping up around Palmdale/Lancaster and Twentynine Palms. It’s a scene replicated all around the county, the on-going sprawl that gobbles farmland and forestland at a rate farmers and loggers never dreamed of.

So part of the problem is that these ranges which used to be remote are now surrounded by bungalows, shopping centers, churches . . . and schools.

The other part of the problem is that the weaponry the military has is so powerful and so quick to react that the people operating it (or, far too often, the computers operating it) lose control. People don’t have the reaction times and computers don’t have the common sense.

The civilian population got their first inkling of how this worked back on the fourth of July in 1988, when an untested anti-aircraft system computer on a US destroyer decided a plane in the same time zone was an F-14, and it was hostile. Turned out the "F-14" was actually an Airbus 300, with some 250 people on board. And in one of those silly little mistakes that anyone can make, the computer decided the plane was descending in order to attack, when in fact it was actually climbing and moving away from the USS Vincennes.

Turned out the anti-aircraft missile part of the Aegis system worked just fine. It blew that passenger jet and 250 plus people all to shit.

Oops.

It used to be that when you heard the term "friendly fire" it referred to a situation where a soldier wasn’t careful enough in checking who or what he was shooting at, or his gun accidently discharged.

Granted, when a soldier "eats his gun," something that happens a lot in war, THAT’S considered "friendly fire."

But these days, quite often the problem isn’t that the human operating the equipment screwed up, but that the equipment reacted to something through faulty programming or a screw-up in production and it was so powerful and so fast that the operator couldn’t prevent it, and can only watch horror-struck as the fast and powerful weapon makes fast and powerful hamburger out of some of his own people.

As a result, any exercise, either actual war or just training, that involves live ammo has skyrocketing occurrences of friendly fire and collateral damage – military terms for, "Oops, I wasn’t supposed to shoot that one."

These days, weapons are so fast, and have such extraordinary range, that any situation where the two sides can actually see one another produces a battle situation analogous to dueling with hand grenades in a telephone booth.

So when the air force puts on a live ammo exercise, anything within a couple of dozen miles is at risk of becoming "collateral damage."

And market forces make developing housing tracts around military bases an attractive proposition for the investors.

Which means you have big bullets and other stuff shooting off all over the place, and thanks to the illogic of land values, said bullets have other things they can hit besides rocks and the occasional unlucky gopher.

Which is why the rabid reaction from the rabid hyper patriots. Behind the bluster is the realization that between the ambitions of weapons-systems developers and those of land developers, the military is rapidly heading for an impasse where they can’t test their weapons.

Perhaps while Putsch was in Ottawa, he should have sounded out Prime Minister Martin about maybe selling Baffin Island to the military. Roughly the size of California, with 25,000 people, all on the coast.

That might suit the military’s weapons-test needs until they can set up an artillery range on Neptune.