California Missile: Chinese Cyberwar or DOD ‘Accident’?

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 Pike’s ‘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 didn’t 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 can’t get some major out to belabor the obvious, I don’t know.”

Based on the news reports we’ve 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 doesn’t want the public to know?

In case you’re 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.

‘First of all I do not agree with the assertion, Sean, and your question is we should get a definitive answer, you’re 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, it’s going about 45 degrees away from you that why you’re not seeing a lot of vertical velocity.’

General McInerney: Sean, I’ve watched that film ten times, I’ve 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 was–the DOD sent out an email the object was ‘most likely an aircraft’–at least two of the King’s 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 hadn’t 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 haven’t 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, NPR’s 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, China’s 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 Pentagon’s 5 million computers.

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.

O’HARA: 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.

Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s 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 People’s 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.

China’s ambitions extend to crippling an enemy’s 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 China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.

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.

WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s 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’.

On Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what’s 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.

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 they’ve 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.

“That’s 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.

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 airplane’s 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 didn’t report the incident until September 6th.

What’s 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.

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.

“I don’t 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.

The response from the DOD, an email which didn’t state definitively the object was an aircraft, didn’t state what type of aircraft it was, or the actual flight of the aircraft.

“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 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.

(After fabulous photo that has me giggling): OK. I confess. It was me.

Now, dogone it!!! If you'd just 'fessed up from the start we could have avoided all these missile-vs.-contrail threads!!! ;^)

And I owe you a bit of apology, I suspect, in my snippy response to your comment on another thread, "Surely then, our west coast fleet is steaming there to 'recover' this 'foreign technology'." It could be that it is. The ocean is a vast place and our view of what's going on there from the shore is very short-range. It isn't as if we can tell or see what's going on just by keeping an eye on the water. Standing on the beach, anything floating on the water beyond seven miles or so would be over the horizon and out of view. Heck, an entire fleet of carriers and battleships could be just 15 miles out, and from the shore, no one would know. The higher altitude you get the further you can see, but still, it's not much. Coming over San Marcos Pass, which has a pretty high elevation, you can see miles out, to San Miguel, Santa Cruz, and Santa Rosa islands, and open sea beyond them. But San Nicolas and Santa Catalina are too far off to spot. Even from that high elevation.

I guess sometimes I kind of assume that everybody would know this; but I grew up in a professional seafaring family and often watching boats carrying my loved ones off into the Pacific horizon, praying for their protection and safe return. I am certain there are many properties of the great midwest geography, skyscape, and landscape, where I have never been, that would perplex me and you would kindly laugh at my ignorance. Reminds me of a coastal California native friend of mine who as a young teen visited back east one time after all the leaves had come off the trees; she gazed around and said, "Wow, you guys must have had a really bad fire season." (and she's not even blonde!) I'd have probably come to the same conclusion! [^ ) They made good fun of her for it, and I admit, I do too, sometimes!

Again, thanks for the giggle from your GREAT photo!!!!!! LOVE IT!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.