So let me get something straight. A warship, performing a security detail in a well known warzone, with their purported opposition known to use combat drones. And this warship detects a large drone, not registering as a friendly, with no known friendly missions running at the time.
And they start calling around to check whose drone is it?
The big questions here are why the drone wasn't registered as a friendly, and why is the communication between US and Germany so poor that Germans didn't know that US was flying a drone on this route.
The way I read it, the drone was flying on some mission other than whatever the "allies" are doing. So it seems like the case of USA military just doing what it wants and not feeling like it should inform the vassals. Perhaps this is not the first such case, would explain why they didn't just started blasting immediately. "Oh, must be the yanks again"
That's most likely, you'd still think they'd have friendly transponders or something to signal each other.
Human error most likely, flight and radar controllers are humans too, but they will almost certainly be demoted or punished severely for this mistake. Reasonably so, could you imagine the international PR disaster it would be if this was a manned US plane?
Not that I would mind hehe
I agree, it does show how a lot of things aren't well ironed out in my opinion. I forget who exactly, but I recall one of US ex military people was talking about this a while back. He said that NATO stopped doing serious exercises in the 90s, and those are essential to having smooth operations. That's how you shake out supply chain issues, communication problems, etc.
Depend on missile used, that 2 launches cost between 2 and 3,5 million $
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