Comment by asdff
8 days ago
I would hope it is. The fact it is even possible for a friendly system to lock onto another friendly system and fire upon it seems like a pretty big damn issue to engineer around. I guess they still haven't though considering kuwait shot down an f15 a couple months ago. You'd think lockheed or raytheon would have figured something clever out to solve this half a century ago.
This is a solved problem, and IFF was invented in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe
It is believed that the Kuwaiti aircraft did not have its IFF transponder turned on (IFF is and has always been standard equipment on the F-18).
Clearly the problem isn't solved if people are still getting friendly fired.