A Cognitive Basis for Friend-Foe Misidentification in Combat

It is important for members of any modern military to quickly and reliably discriminate between friendly and enemy vehicles. Otherwise, friendly fire incidences occur, also known as “fratricide. ” During World War II and the Vietnam War, 2 % to 3 % of U.S. casualties were due to fratricide. Forty-five years later, in Operation “Desert Storm, ” the first Iraq war saw rising rates, with overall casualties due to fratricide near 24 % (Koehler, 1992). In fact, fratricide accounted for 77 % of the combat damaged sustained by U.S. armored vehicles during this conflict (Koehler). According to Briggs and Goldberg (1995), the potential for fratricide from inaccurate recognition is immense even under favorable environmental conditions. If inaccurate recognition can lead to higher levels of false alarms (i.e., what fratricide is when placed in a signal detection framework), then the opposite situation, i.e., that of misses, or mistaking an enemy vehicle for a friendly vehicle, should also be a relevant problem. We will refer to both types of errors in target identification throughout this paper under the global term misidentification. Factors Involved in Misidentification Misidentification may be a result of many different factors: inadequate training