I’ve read explanations from combat pilots on Reddit and found it to be more disturbing than malfunction RWR. Apparently, it is customary to switch off RWR and EW self defense suite when you return to friendly territory because getting illuminated by random sources of radiation makes it really noisy in the cabinet… I sure hope they don’t do this in West PAC…
Dogfight brother and his sidekick discussed this on their latest podcast, my impression of their attitude is that if you're back in friendly territory, maybe already looking to land, you're task saturated with other stuff and paying attention to RWR which in 99,999% of cases picks up random friendly radar is basically considered an unsafe distraction from more important stuff.
But at the same time they talk a lot about friendly fire incidents being very common during exercises, which seems to be a result of multirole demands.
They especially highlighted the F-15E crews as causing friendly fire "half the time" after they finished dropping bombs and were tasked with air-to-air stuff during exercises. They also remarked in the past on how their own service had "phases" of training and readiness, where they would either be good at air-to-ground or be good at air-to-air, but never be good at both, and the experienced, dedicated air-to-air guys who did that for years would be way better at the job in general.
Organisationally there seems to be no trend to fix this, on the opposite, it is getting worse.
It seems US training, equipment and procedures around IFF are very lack luster in general, considering the gettysburg and now this. It seems to me they got used to basically permissive environments culturally. Ironically while training to a higher standard, but being unable to draw lessons from it sufficient to enable the crews to do better.
