Friendly fire

This article is about unintentional incidents. For institutionalised, intentional instances of fratricide, see barrier troops.
For other uses, see Friendly Fire (disambiguation).

An American B-17 Flying Fortress "Miss Donna Mae II" is damaged by bombs after drifting under the American bomber flying above it during the bombing of Berlin in 1944. The damage to the horizontal stabilizer caused the plane to go into an uncontrollable spin and crash, killing all 11 crew members.

In military terminology, friendly fire or fratricide[a] is an attack by belligerent or neutral forces on friendly troops while attempting to attack enemy or hostile targets. Examples include misidentifying the target as hostile, cross-fire while engaging an enemy, long range ranging errors or inaccuracy. Accidental fire not intended to attack enemy or hostile targets, and deliberate firing on one's own troops for disciplinary reasons is not called friendly fire,[1] and neither is unintentional harm to civilian or neutral targets, which is sometimes referred to as collateral damage.[2] Training accidents and bloodless incidents also do not qualify as friendly fire in terms of casualty reporting.[3]

Use of the term friendly in a military context for allied personnel started during the First World War, often when shells fell short of the targeted enemy.[4] The term friendly fire was originally adopted by the United States military; S.L.A. Marshall used the term in Men Against Fire in 1947.[5] Many North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) militaries refer to these incidents as blue on blue, which derives from military exercises where NATO forces were identified by blue pennants and units representing Warsaw Pact forces by red pennants. In classical forms of warfare where hand-to-hand combat dominated, death from a "friendly" was rare, but in industrialized warfare, deaths from friendly fire are more common.[6]

Friendly fire should not be confused with fragging, which is the uncondoned intentional (or attempted) killing of servicemen by fellow personnel serving on the same side.


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  1. ^ Regan, Geoffrey (2002) Backfire: a history of friendly fire from ancient warfare to the present day, Robson Books
  2. ^ Rasmussen, Robert E. "The Wrong Target – The Problem of Mistargeting Resulting in Fratricide and Civilian Casualties" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 31 October 2012. Retrieved 4 January 2011.
  3. ^ Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 20 November 2010 (As amended through 31 January 2011)" (PDF). p. 149. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 October 2016. Retrieved 18 August 2016.
  4. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. cites a 1925 reference to a term used in trenches during the war
  5. ^ Marshall, S.L.A. (1947). Men Against Fire. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 193.
  6. ^ Shrader 1982, vii