LONDON, 24 March 2003 — The shooting down of a Royal Air Force (RAF) Tornado jet by a US Patriot missile illustrates how a great many lessons remain to be learned on avoiding so-called “friendly fire” incidents, defense analysts in London said yesterday.

The two-person crew of the Tornado, which the US military confirmed had been accidentally shot down by a Patriot, were missing.

“All you have to ask yourself is what’s exactly the Iraqi aircraft threat to allied forces? There isn’t one,” a defense analyst said.

Any suspect plane would have already been picked up on radar by an AWACS advance warning aircraft before the Patriot battery registered it, “so the first step should not have been to shoot it down,” he said.

Although there had been reports of Iraqi unmanned drone aircraft in the area, these traveled far slower, at only around 80 miles (130 kilometers) an hour, he said.

“It looks like it is an operator error,” he said, laying the blame on a “trigger-happy American”.

Another analyst, Francis Tusa, from the specialist monthly Defense Analysis, said: “Bearing in mind the Iraqi air threat to allied forces is so minimal, someone is going to have to re-examine the air defense rules of engagement.”

During the first Gulf War of 1991, nine British military personnel were killed by Iraqi forces with the same number dying through “friendly fire.”

With joint US and British forces now in their fourth day of operations against Iraq, 14 British personnel have died in accidents.

On Friday, eight British Royal Marines died along with four US airmen after a US helicopter crashed in Kuwait.

A day later six British servicemen and an American were killed when two Royal Navy Sea King helicopters collided over the Gulf.

US and British forces are totally integrated in the region, “probably the most intimate alliance you can imagine”, the commander of British forces in the region, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, said after the Tornado’s loss.