THE Ministry of Defence was last night facing searching questions about delays in buying vital new battlefield identification systems after a "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan in which three British soldiers were killed by United States forces.
The accident, which also left two other UK troops hospitalised, is the latest in a string of "blue on blue" incidents involving US aircraft and UK ground forces, and has heightened British troops' anxieties about "gung-ho" American tactics.
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Damagingly for the MoD, the incident came more than five years after MPs first warned that British lives were being put at risk by delays in designing and ordering new battlefield identification systems meant to avert "fratricide" attacks.
Earlier this year, the public accounts committee of MPs again criticised ministers for making slow progress on the Battlefield Target Identification System, a network of compatible radios and signalling devices meant to identify allied forces to one another.
Joint UK-US exercises to help devise the new systems are due to take place next year, and the MoD does not expect to place even provisional contracts with defence firms until next year at the earliest.
The latest incident took place on Thursday evening near the British base at Kajaki, in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan.
More than 7,000 UK troops are in the country as part of the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF), which is fighting an increasingly deadly war against Taleban insurgents who oppose the elected Afghan government.
The deaths happened after about 90 British soldiers were ambushed on several sides by the Taleban as they conducted a fighting patrol to hunt down insurgents.
The forces, from 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment, called for air support from US forces. But when two US F-15 aircraft arrived at the scene, one dropped a bomb directly on to a British position, killing the three soldiers instantly.
Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrats' defence spokesman, said that, while friendly fire incidents could never be eliminated, the tragedy suggested the MoD had not done enough to put precautions in place.
"One can only conclude that they have not tackled the problem at all, if our troops are calling in US air support that then drops bombs on the people it is supposed to be supporting," he said. "Clearly, there is still something fundamentally wrong with the communications systems here."
Ian Davidson, the Labour MP for Glasgow South West and a member of the public accounts committee, said the delay had been partly down to a failure to agree technical standards for communications systems with the US military "A lot of the difficulty seems to be in co-ordinating with the Americans, especially given their more gung-ho style," he said........
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