On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot
down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing
all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the
complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial
procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation
with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy
showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make
sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at
all.
With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational
behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A
victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group,
organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a
rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for
critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate
pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the
author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a
grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism
he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from
written procedure--to complete his explanation.
His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps
in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to
behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal
accident in a highly reliable organization.
