entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 68 ] The Present
6. Even though the USS Sides had correctly identified Flight 655 as
a nonthreatening commercial airliner, her captain did not argue with the
Vincennes' labeling of the target as an F-14. Here is a quote from Rear
Adm. William Fogarty on why this was so: "His ship was not being
threatened, which it was not, and that the Vincennes, being a very
capable AAW ship, if they call an F-14, then they are probably right" (p.
21). During this time there was "growing excitement and yelling" of
"com air" in the combat information center of the Sides, which indicates
to me that at least some of her crew realized that the Vincennes had made
a mistaken identification and was about to shoot down a civilian airliner
(p. 45).
7. Because of the data analysis Aegis performs automatically there was
no way for the operators on the Vincennes to evaluate the radar blip directly,
which might have allowed an experienced radar operator to deduce that it
was not an F-14 (Friedman, 1989, p. 78; Congress of the United States,
1989).
8. Because of their need for enough distance to allow for full acceleration,
the Standard missiles had to be used or the Vincennes would have had
to rely on the one Phalanx automatic machine gun that was working. The
other one was apparently out of commission (Friedman, 1989, p. 74). The
Phalanx is a weapon that many in the U.S. Navy apparently don't trust on
automatic. It also failed to spot the missiles that hit the Stark. That two of
the Vincennes' close-in weapons, both automatic systems, were not working
during combat is something that has not been remarked on in many of the
reports. Add in the StarWs experience, and it is not a good showing for
automatic gun subsystems.
Clearly, many scientists, military officers, politicians, and bureaucrats
believed the Aegis would be effective in combat. However, some critics had
warned that such highly automated defense systems would be far more
trouble-prone than their proponents anticipated. One important distinction
must be stressed—Aegis is a man-machine weapon system. That the human
parts of this system committed most of the crucial errors is interesting but
not an argument that the system didn't fail.
All of the failures of the Aegis system so far in combat were predicted
by computer scientists. They also represent a case study of the various dangers
of deploying so-called intelligent computer systems in military contexts.
Moreover, there was the total inability of training and/or modeling simulations
to predict the combination of decisions that led to the downing of Flight
655. That the crew had gamed threatening scenarios again and again for nine
months, but not the harmless passage of a civilian airliner, undoubtedly
contributed to their misperceptions.
As one analyst put it: