Joanna _________________________
CNN interviewed a retired U.S. general this morning on the subject of the Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan by "friendly fire" (apparently a 500 pound bomb from an F-16 warplane). The interviewer naturally wanted to know how this sort of thing could happen.
The general gave an example from his own experience, where "spotters" on the ground locate an enemy target and enter the coordinates of the target in a device that relays the coordinates to a plane overhead.
It seems that if the spotter enters invalid coordinates, the device defaults to its own current coordinates and relays those to the plane. I suppose that's a way to keep the spotters on their toes, so to speak, but surely a simple error message would have been enough.