Posted on 11/14/2010 12:18:43 PM PST by roses of sharon
When KCBS aired the news helicopter footage of a mystery missile launch last Monday off the coast of southern California the expert most quoted by the press, GlobalSecurities.org Director John Pike. It was Pikes optical illusion which got the most press. Another quote from Pike which got far less press, this statement from Pike during the 36 hour time period the DOD took to come up with the most likely an aircraft explanation:
Pike said he didnt understand why the military had not recognized the contrail of an aircraft. The Air Force must understand how contrails are formed, he said. Why they cant get some major out to belabor the obvious, I dont know.
The militarys response, 36 hours after the event, an illusion?
Based on the news reports weve read related to the Pentagon and Chinese hackers, the questions of,
If Chinese hackers were responsible for the missile launch, would it have been construed by the DOD as an act of cyberwar by China? A cyberwar act which occurred while the President of the United States was overseas in the Far East?
If Chinese hackers were responsible for a U.S. submarine accidentally firing a missile, would the DOD admit it to the press, the American public, and, the Chinese government? Our military admitting Chinese military hackers had successfully hacked into the U.S. Dept. of Defense computer and fired one of our missiles?
If the missile was accidentally fired by the U.S. military, could be there reasons the military doesnt want the public to know?
In case youre still debating whether the object videotaped off the coast of California last Monday was a missile or an aircraft the news a Three Star General, retired General Tom McInerney, is absolutely certain that was not an aircraft. The report from the Dept. of Defense the missile was most likely an aircraft. Most likely, not a definitive answer from the DOD.
General McInerney, guest commentator on Sean Hannitys FOX News show:
First of all I do not agree with the assertion, Sean, and your question is we should get a definitive answer, youre absolutely correct. Look, this is not an airplane because of the plume and the way you see that plume, airplanes do not con (contrail) at sea level or at 5000 like that. I spent 35 years flying fighters and I have never seen an airplane con like that. That is a missile, it was launched from a submarine and you can see it go through a correction course and then it gets a very smooth trajectory, meaning that the guidance system is now kicked in, its going about 45 degrees away from you that why youre not seeing a lot of vertical velocity.
Sean Hannity: General, are you a 100% certain?
General McInerney: Sean, Ive watched that film ten times, Ive watched 15 other Trident films, SM-3′s, standard missile 3′s, and T-Lan launchers, I am absolutely certain that that is not a an aircraft.
While none of the Kings horses and men from the Dept. of Defense showed up to explain what the object wasthe DOD sent out an email the object was most likely an aircraftat least two of the Kings former horses and men showed up to claim the object was a missile, retired General McInerney and former Deputy of Defense Robert Ellsworth. An MIT professor of science, technology and international security, Theodore Postel, sent an email to the press stating the DOD hadnt come up with a plausible explanation and convincing analysis of the observed event.
But Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not yet convinced. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail, has provided no detailed information to support the aircraft claim. One of their jobs is to provide air surveillance for the country, and they should be able to provide a convincing analysis supported by data for their conclusion, said Postol, who furnished photographs of the mystery contrail along with remarkably similar pictures of solid-propellant missile launches. I do not know what to think at this point, he said, but one thing is for sure, the Pentagon has not provided a plausible explanation of the observed event.
In case you havent heard, three weeks ago the report from the Wall Street Journal the Air Force lost communication for 45 minutes with 50 nuclear missiles. The March 2008 report from the LA Times, Chinese hacking worries Pentagon, NPRs 2005 report, Pentagon Faces Computer Security Problems, the April 2009, Wall Street Journal report, Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project, and, the September 2007, Times Online report, Chinas cyber army is preparing to march on America, says Pentagon.
Five years ago NPR reported Chinese hackers had made 80,000 attempts to hack the Pentagons 5 million computers.
NPR:
Mr. ALLEN PALLER (SANS Institute): In one evening, at about 10:23 at night Pacific time, they found vulnerabilities in the US Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. Three hours later, they found the same hole in computers at the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington. A little more than two hours later, they hit the Naval Ocean Systems Center(ph), a Defense Department installation in San Diego. And an hour and a half later, they hit the United States Army Space & Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville.
OHARA: Cyberanalysts who followed the investigation of Tighten Reign say that among the massive amounts of data that the hackers penetrated were detailed specifications on the Mars lander as well as information about satellite and missile technology and about US troop deployments. One of the original investigators of Tighten Reign, who asked not to be identified to preserve his job, confirms that account. Allen Paller of the SANS Institute says the damage was serious.
September 8, 2007, The Times Online:
Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable Americas aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.
The blueprint for such an assault, drawn up by two hackers working for the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), is part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve electronic dominance over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the US, Britain, Russia and South Korea.
Chinas ambitions extend to crippling an enemys financial, military and communications capabilities early in a conflict, according to military documents and generals speeches that are being analysed by US intelligence officials. Describing what is in effect a new arms race, a Pentagon assessment states that Chinas military regards offensive computer operations as critical to seize the initiative in the first stage of a war.
March 4, 2008, LA Times, Chinese hacking worries Pentagon:
WASHINGTON China in the last year has developed ways to infiltrate and manipulate computer networks around the world in what U.S. defense officials conclude is a new and potentially dangerous military capability, according to a Pentagon report issued Monday.
Computer network intrusions at the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, think tanks and government contractors last year appeared to originate in China, according to the report.
April 2009, Wall Street Journal, Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project:
WASHINGTON Computer spies have broken into the Pentagons $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project the Defense Departments costliest weapons program ever according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.
Similar incidents have also breached the Air Forces air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.
The next report, an incident which occurred three weeks ago, the 45 minutes nuclear warheads, 50 Minutemen III Intercontinental ballistic missiles , went offline.
The Atlantic:
On Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into whats known as LF Down status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. In LF Down status, the missiles are still technically launch-able, but they can only be controlled by an airborne command and control platform like the Boeing E-6 NAOC Kneecap aircraft, E-4B NAOC aircraft or perhaps the TACAMO fleet, which is primarily used to communicate with nuclear submarines. Had the country been placed on a higher state of nuclear alert, those platforms would be operating automatically because the frequencies used to transmit nuclear codes would be interfacing with separate systems, according to officials.
On October 27th, the report of No Foul Play.
The Indy Channel:
CHEYENNE, Wyo. Work has begun to try to replicate an electronics glitch and determine what disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and a launch control center at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, a U.S. Air Force official said Wednesday.
Teams from F.E. Warren and Hill Air Force Base in Utah think theyve isolated the faulty part where the problem occurred, said Lt. Col. John Thomas, spokesman for the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.
It could be the part, it could be the way that it was installed, it could be the way that it was queried, Thomas said.
And,
The suspected problem part is small enough to hold in your hand, Thomas said.
Thats where our primary weight of effort is. But we are also not ruling anything out and we are looking at anything that may have contributed to it, he said.
One wonders if part of the investigation involved ruling out Chinese hackers?
California Missile Launch, Act of Chinese Cyberwar or DOD Accident?
September 6, 3007, Washington Post, In Error, B-52 Flew Over U.S. With Nuclear-Armed Missiles:
An Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the central United States last week with six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads that were mistakenly attached to the airplanes wing, defense officials said yesterday.
The Stratofortress bomber, based at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, was transporting a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30. But crews inadvertently loaded half of them with nuclear warheads attached.
Air Force officials said the warheads were not activated and at no time posed a threat to the public. But a timeline of the episode supplied by the Air Force yesterday to House and Senate lawmakers indicated that the missiles in question sat on a runway in Louisiana for nearly 10 hours before workers noticed that the nuclear warheads were inside.
The incident occurred August 30, 2007. The press didnt report the incident until September 6th.
Whats important to note about the California missile incident is the both the initial response from the DOD and the non-definitive explanation after a 36-hour investigation, the most likely an aircraft account.
CNN:
Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said later Tuesday that while there is no evidence that the contrail was left by a missile the department is still investigating.
No Defense Department units reported launches at the time. The North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Northern Command did not report any foreign missile launches off the California coast, Lapan added. Regardless, there was no threat to the United States, he said.
Lapan said that various agencies are trying to find out what happened.
I dont know specifically what they are all doing. I just know they have been pinged and that we are talking to the FAA, we are talking to other parts of the U.S. government. We are trying to do everything we can to figure out if anybody has any knowledge of what this event may have been, Lapan said in off-camera comments to journalists.
So far we have come up empty, he added.
The response from the DOD, an email which didnt state definitively the object was an aircraft, didnt state what type of aircraft it was, or the actual flight of the aircraft.
FOX News:
With all the information that we have gathered over the last day and a half about this condensation trail off the coast of southern California on Monday night, both within the DoD and other U.S. government agencies, we have no information to suggest this was anything other than a contrail caused by an aircraft, said Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
As stated yesterday, NORAD and USNORTHCOM determined that there was no threat to the U.S. homeland.
Lapan said that in the mind of the DoD this case is closed.
Lapan said the government looked at lots of data sources other than the CBS news tape. He would not get into the details of what those data sources were, but said that evidence helped determine this was most likely an aircraft. But most importantly, it was the response from all other government agencies saying they did not launch anything that convinced them this was likely an aircraft.
But an interesting history of news reports of past Chinese hacking.
bkmk
I’m not sure I’m ready to buy the Chinese hacker story but there are sure a bunch of coincidences here.
The Minuteman missile outage is really puzzling to me, as I used to live near FE Warren AFB where this happened. I’ve toured the launch control facility and they told us there were multiple REDUNDANT lines of communication, in other words, cutting a single cable could not cause such an outage. The AF hasn’t given a detailed explanation but saying that they could not access 5 flights of 10 missiles each just doesn’t square with what I understood about how redundant these installations are.
How many years ago would we have been at DEFCON 4 with SAC bombers in the air over less than this? Today we worry about gays rights...
If you want to parse it in “Clintonese” you might want to note that technically speaking, anything that moves through the air is an aircraft, so if the DoD and Obama-types want to claim a missile counts as an aircraft, they would be right.
I don’t know enough about airplanes or missiles to judge, but I trust an Air Force Lt.Gen. to know what he is talking about.
ping
Have it on good background that the US Navy has stepped-up patrols off the Cali coast. That might discount the hacker theory.
I think of the scene from the Bedford Incident when weapons officer James MacArthur, overstressed from 24 hours at GQ hears Captain Richard Widmark say the phrase fire one in while speaking to former U Boat skipper Eric Portman, and understands the phrase as orders to "Fire One" and launches an ASROC at a nuclear armed Soviet sub.
I can’t believe this was a sub launched missile from a foreign navy. If it was, stock up on canned food and ammo and head for the hills.
If it wasn’t a Chinese missile, or a Russian missile, or a Korean missile, it has to have temped all of them to see what they can get away with. My guess is that we are far more vulnerable to all sorts of attacks than Washington wants us to know. All that tax money, all the wars, all the aggravation at airports, and an enemy can hit us anytime they want, a nuke from a sub, in a packing container at one of our ports, or smuggled across the Mexican border in a bale of marijuana. Meanwhile, Obamao is out there apologizing to all of our enemies. All the damage they can do to us, and none of it is equal to what the enemy within is doing.
If this was a missile, where did it go?
Where did the boosters, which should separate and drop away go?
In the video, is the missile going up or down?
How comes there’s no burning exhaust plume?
What’s hard to believe is that we can land men on the moon and develop the technology to land spacecraft on Mars but we can’t find out what the he!! this thing was in our sky? Either the Government doesn’t want panic or they made a big mistake.
Could discredit the 'airplane contrail' theory...
If it was an aircraft, why isn’t this contrail or plume replicated everyday around the same time this past week? The helicopter news reporter saw an anamoly, and that is what he took footage of. If it is to show off some new capability of the military, do you think our government would be speaking publicly about it (pictures are worth a thousand words). Or maybe the timing was to allow some foreign governments to witness this.
bookmark
If a US SLBM was launched, where did the nuc tip missile go????? Same with a nuc tip sub cruise missile. It takes off and lands somewhere with a mushroom cloud. Every earthquake monitor along the west coast would be kicking live. So far no indications of explosion. Furthermore major universities have ocean sonar networks for ocean and marine studies. Any water missile launch will also be recorded and detected. If it was a missile, a possible jihadist demo of a manportable SAM shot from a merchant ship???? I think that is more plausible then huge missiles fired from Chicom or US subs.
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