Silent Knights: a review

Silent Knights is an eye-opening account about safety (or a lack thereof) in the U.S. military. The author, Alan Diehl, was the former head of Air Force safety and accident investigation during the 1990s. He wrote this book about 5 years ago, after resigning in frustration because the Air Force wouldn't let him conduct full investigations into a series of fatal accidents in the late 1990s.

Essentially, he says that the U.S. military takes a pretty cavalier attitude about safety, because theirs is an inherently dangerous profession, and many high-ranking military officers get promoted precisely because they are willing to takes tremendous risks in order to accomplish a prescribed mission. In addition, budget cuts during the 1990s (and warfighting priorities since 9/11) have required the military to do more with less money, and safety ends up going by the wayside.

The really sad thing about this is that it leads to a military culture where accidents are blamed on dead pilots or low-ranking enlisted men, instead of practices, institutions, equipment, or commanding officers who should be held at least equally culpable. Dead pilots tell no tales, and if a crash is just pilot error, then the military can just write it off as an anomaly, and keep doing what they've been doing.

Diehl specifically goes into situations he dealt with which boggle the mind:

- The Navy's T-2 Buckeye trainers are equipped with old ejection seats that cannot save a pilot's life if the plane is flying slowly or at low altitude. The military has lost dozens of flight instructors and trainees because of this, but didn't install new "zero/zero" (zero altitude, zero speed) ejection seats in the planes because "they were going to retired in a few years, anyway."

- The F-117 stealth fighter's cockpit has cockpit instruments that were designed separately by different companies, and because of secrecy rules, these companies couldn't coordinate to create an ergonomic, efficient cockpit. This meant for instance, that enemy targets on one screen in the cockpit are represented with the same color and symbol as friendly aircraft on a different screen in the cockpit. In the heat of battle, it would be easy to mix these up.

- If a C-130 cargo plane loses engine power over water, the Air Force has standing orders that require its crew to ditch the plane in the sea, and then try to get out of the plane, even though every C-130 water "landing" since 1960 has resulted in multiple fatalities because the plane tends to disintegrate when it hits the water, and the plane is equipped with parachutes (but the crewmen are not supposed to use them).

The really sad thing is that dead soldiers' and pilots' families are being told that their loved ones basically screwed up, and that it's their own fault they died, while the military takes no responsibility for factors that contribute to the accident. This happens even when an accident is primarily the fault of a foolhardy order or a bad piece of equipment, or both (like the real-life account of a rescue helicopter pilot who was ordered to fly into a thunderstorm at 50 feet above the ground in the middle of the night, and then given defective night-vision goggles--when the helicopter crashed, killing all on board, the military blamed it on "pilot error").

What Diehl wants is an independent accident oversight board that doesn't answer to the military's chain of command, and thus won't be pressured to whitewash accidents to avoid making the military (and specifically, its high-ranking officers) look bad.

I found the book very interesting. Dr. Diehl obviously knows what he's talking about. Admittedly, he has an axe to grind, so if you read it, keep his bias in mind, but still, the record speaks for itself. As dangerous as military service is in wartime, it shouldn't have to be deadly in peacetime.