Flying the Unfriendly Skies: Defending against the Threat of Shoulder-Fired Missiles

CATO INSTITUTE.ORG ^ | APRIL 19, 2005 | CHARLES V. PENA

[CHARLITE]

Shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, or MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems), have proliferated throughout the world. They can be purchased on the military arms black market for as little as $5,000. More than two dozen terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, are believed to possess such weapons. The FBI estimates that there have been 29 MANPADS attacks against civilian aircraft resulting in 550 deaths. At least 25 of the reported attacks have been attributed to non state actors.

Even though a U.S. airliner has not been attacked by a missile, the question well may be when, not if, such an attack will happen. Therefore, the federal government should act now to provide protection for civilian aircraft instead of waiting to respond to an attack. The need to act beforehand is particularly acute because, although the human death toll would likely be less than on September 11, 2001, the economic consequences of an attack could be enormous. According to one estimate, the total economic loss resulting from an attack could be as high as $70 billion.

After 9/11 the public could eventually be coaxed back into flying by assurances that the government and airlines were taking security precautions to prevent more hijackings. But if even a single airliner is shot down by a missile, public confidence will not be easily restored. The harsh reality is that ground security to defend against MANPADS is nearly impossible.

The U.S. government should take advantage of available technology currently used on military aircraft to protect the U.S. commercial aircraft fleet. The cost to outfit all 6,800 U.S. commercial aircraft with advanced laser-jamming infrared countermeasures against MANPADS is estimated at $11 billion plus $2.1 billion in recurring annual operating costs. In 2004 Citizens Against Government Waste documented a total of $22.9 billion in federal pork-barrel spending—more than twice what’s needed to procure the countermeasures against shoulder-fired missile attacks. Canceling the Air Force’s F-22, the Navy’s F/A-18E/F, the Marine Corps’ V-22, and the Navy’s Virginia-class submarine would yield savings of $170 billion in future program costs. The president’s proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2006 is $2.6 trillion. Certainly, the U.S. government can find needless spending equal to less than one-half of 1 percent of its budget to help fulfill its primary responsibility of providing for the common defense.

Charles V. Peña is director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute

[crab-boy]

OK so we know this is potentially a real threat and quite doable by motivated individuals...So what is the Government doing about it? Anything?

[CHARLITE]

"We know Clinton wanted to avoid dealing with terrorists - too messy and detrimental to his "legacy". Look at WTCI, Kobar, OK City, the Cole.....all on Clintons watch without definitive action to find out who was the instigator of the plan."

BINGO. That's the conclusion alright. Too much happened that was swept under the rug, or treated as a law enforcement matter. Clinton was "worried about his legacy," and as things turned out, he got one hellova "legacy." No matter what he or Killery do now, to try to revise his lame presidency, it's carved in stone........or planted forever on one blue cocktail dress.

As Gail Sheehy said in her book on the Clintons, Bill Clinton just wasn't serious."...and that's the bottom line.

He was really a light weight, biting his lip, talking about "feeling your pain," but he didn't protect this nation. "Derelicion of Duty" says it all.

The problem we're facing now is that Killery IS "serious."

[Spktyr]

If they already have the weapons and are in place with orders to use them, there isn't anything the government *can* do, other than annex, raze, and pave a 40 mile radius around every airport.

Or, we can do what we're doing now, and go hunt down the people who organize, train, and order these attacks. Suppressing the regimes that might sell such things works well too as these things have a limited lifespan.

[garjog]

OK, we are supposed to wait around until they hit us again? What if they have these manpad things around ten of our major airports and hit us all on one day?

Lets use our military and take out our enemy before they destroy our economy (I'm talking NO retirement investments, all gone, nothing) with some WMD?

Iran and Syria should be toast as soon as possible.

[crab-boy]

"If they already have the weapons and are in place with orders to use them, there isn't anything the government *can* do, other than annex, raze, and pave a 40 mile radius around every airport."

That's just a defeatist attitute, if there are MANPADs out there and unaccounted for then we should be searching for them, we should install systems on commercial planes that at least give them a chance of evading the missles, I'd rather some chance than no chance at all.

heck a $11 billion can be misplaced in a typo in our budget and it would be a good lil infusion into American Tech industries, no outsourced China or India company can do that kinda work.

[Spktyr]

MANPADS are not tracked like nuclear warheads. There have been several thousand "lost" over the years, including the Stingers we sent to Afghanistan, the Strelas sent to Soviet client states, and Egypt's handing out of "free" Strela-clones to anyone who says they hate Israel, to name a few. On top of that, there are countries like France that will sell current generation MANPADS systems to anyone with money.

Adding threat-warning recievers to civilian transport aircraft will do nothing but waste money and tell the crew of the plane that they're about to die. They have no altitude or airspeed to evade, and a big lumbering airliner in landing configuration is not agile at all. If you're a landing transport in a current-generation MANPADS' close attack envelope when it launches, you're dead. Period. The solution is to find and capture or kill the people responsible for organizing, supplying, funding, and ordering such attacks and the states that support them. Which we *are* doing, or you would have seen American airliners get hit by MANPADS missiles before now.

Think otherwise? If you're close enough to take the following picture, you're close enough to put a missile into a plane. How exactly, is this plane supposed to evade a missile? Or, for that matter, an unguided RPG, a burst of gunfire into the cockpit, or any of the hundred other ways you can bring down an aircraft?

[crab-boy]

Interesting point.

Do they have any anti-missile systems on Airforce 1? Did they install it because its ineffective or because its a waste of tax payer money?

Just because you found a clever picture doesn't mean an anti-missile system wouldn't work. I suppose you believe the National Missile Defense Agency is a waste of money too?

[Spktyr]

Air Force One has a threat warning receiver, but it is intended for use against air to air missiles, which are usually fired from such a significant distance that evasion is an actual option. In addition, the aircraft is heavily armored and has suppressed-IR engines, as well as having chaff and flare dispensers. Again, most of this is aimed at the defensible air-to-air threat. The Secret Service's worst nightmare is someone with a MANPADS, because there's nothing anyone can do about it.

I'm not saying that anti-missile systems don't work, but right now there is no such thing as a practical active anti-MANPADS missile system mounted on aircraft. As of right now, the "laser countermeasures" are still troublesome, unproven, and unreliable at best. None have been put into production, all are still in development phase. The only working systems we have are automatic chaff/flare dispensers, and those won't fool a modern missile.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/laircm.htm

So, as I said earlier, all that putting a TWR on an airliner is likely to do is tell them that they're about to die.

[coloradan]

Let's see.

1. The nose gear doors and a first-class passenger seat were among the very first things lost from the plane.
2. NTSB agents were caught altering the data about where they were found in the ocean, "otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to explain their location to [NTSB Chair] Hall."
3. More than 100 people saw a "flare" or "streak" rise FROM GROUND LEVEL prior to the mid-air explosion.
4. Radar data was leaked very early in the investigation that shows a mystery object in the air well away from TWA 800, prior to its destruction.
5. Radar data also showed objects leaving the aircraft at Mach 2.2 - the speed of a SAM, not the speed of objects expelled from a fuel-air explosion.
6. The search field the FBI used included a broad swath to the south of the explosion, but not to the north, indicating they expected to find objects there, in contrast to their publically-stated position that there was "no evidence of a missile."
7. They also left a book on one of the shrimp trawlers they hired that showed exactly what they were looking for - the battery pack for a SAM. This too happened when they were telling the public that there was "no evidence" of a missile.
8. The last line of the flight data recorder was deleted from one public hearing, after being showed at the first hearing. The data was consistent with a SAM attack.
9. Pieces of wreckage found to contain traces of explosives were taken away by the FBI and not returned to the NTSB - and some never appeared on the NTSB database of recovered parts.
10. Traces of explosives that were found were explained away as having come from a "dog training exercise" despite the fact that the accident aircraft departed, fully loaded with passengers, fuel and crew some 20 mins after the alleged dog training exercise took place. (Kind of quick for a 747, no?)
11. Traces of explosives were found on exterior aircraft surfaces, far from the passenger compartment where dog training exercises took place.
12. Clinton announced that he would "make a statement" about the disaster, and he later attended memorial for the victims - both extremely unusual, and which didn't occur for other accidents like Swiss Air #110 and the ValuJet crash in Florida.
13. Seats near the front of the plane had a "red residue" that wasn't found elsewhere on the plane.
14. James Sanders was prosecuted for removing two swatches of seat cloth containing this residue and having it tested - under the anti-souvenir law. This despite the fact he took the pieces for testing, and not to obtain a sovenir, and this too in light of the fact that FBI lead man James Kallstrom DID take pieces obtained from the wreckage, and DID give it to another (a victim's family member) as a souvenir.
15. The NTSB lied about the outcome of their tests of this red residueunder oath in a court of law.
16. The FBI removed all traces of red residue-tinged seat material from the wreckage reconstruction soon thereafter.
17. "Virtually all the victims had shrapnel" said the medical examiner. This is not the case in most airplane crashes.
18. There were "fist-sized holes" in some tray tables, and the damage was the worst in the first-class cabin. Again, if the center wing tank exploded first, how does the damage get to the first class without first destroying the main cabin?
19. There was a remarkable lack of interest in eyewitness testimony. Many witnesses weren't contacted within months of the accident, and the statements that they made weren't used by the FBI nor by NTSB to triangulate the apparent origin of whatever it was they saw; this task was first accomplished by independent researchers.
20. Witness testimony wasn't even mentioned at the hearings about the crash.
21. Why did the CIA, which is the foreign intelligence service, make a video about the crash of a domestic airline crash in American waters, for distribution to the general US public on the evening news? It's only purpose was to discredit witness accounts of having seen a missile, and among the few words used to caption the film, "Witnesses did NOT see a missile" was one such caption.
22. The animation claimed an aerodynamically impossible zoom-climb scenario, in which the ascending airliner shot up an additional 3000 feet, and which was mistaken by people on the ground for a missile. Except that many people saw things ascend FROM THE SURFACE. In any case, if a plane loses its nose, it becomes tail-heavy, and rotates in pitch rapidly until a stall occurs, without any gain in altitude. This isn't what the CIA animation represented had occurred.
23. The NTSB produced two animations and the CIA produced a third. All three are inconsitent with one another and with physical law. The NTSB later admitted that no "zoom-climb" was necessary to explain any aspects of its own version of the crash, nevertheless, all three animations went out of their way to posit a zoom-climb in order to make the case that people mistook that event for a missile. So apparently the only purpose of the climb was to discredit the witnesses. Why?
24. The TWA 800 investigation was overseen by Clinton administration officials.
25. Jet A doesn't burn and certainly doesn't explode unless it has been misted.
26. The NTSB admits it can't find any source of energy for the spark that allegedly set off the CWT explosion.
27. The Bruntingthorpe tests used flammable gases (e.g. hydrogen) to "simulate" the explosion ... why not use Jet-A vapor?
28. The results of that test explosion were so different from that seen from TWA 800 that the results were suppressed and continue to be suppressed.
29. A national guard pilot took a piece of wreckage to another airport for transportation to the FBI lab in Washington. It had what looked like bullet holes that went right through the thickest part of the leading edge of the main wing - in and out, and tested positive for explosives. This is inconsistent with the CWT explosion scenario.

There's nearly thirty facts for you. I could probably come up with more if I thought about it at length. If one or two were true, it would be curious. If ten were true, there would be serious questions about the scenario. Instead, I have offered nearly 30. I can't give you links for all of them right now - pick a few which, if you were convinced they were true, would satisfy you that the investigation was a cover-up, and I'll follow those up.

[spinestein]

[pick a few which, if you were convinced they were true, would satisfy you that the investigation was a cover-up, and I'll follow those up.]



I'm not concerned with "cover-ups", I just want to know what verifiable evidence justifies a conclusion of "missile attack". So I'll pick three items from your list and will try to find out as much about them as I can on my own and you can show me what you've found out about them and we can compare evidence and see what conclusion that leads to.




3. More than 100 people saw a "flare" or "streak" rise FROM GROUND LEVEL prior to the mid-air explosion.


4. Radar data was leaked very early in the investigation that shows a mystery object in the air well away from TWA 800, prior to its destruction.

9. Pieces of wreckage found to contain traces of explosives




IF good evidence exists for any of these three allegations then that should justify a conclusion of "missile attack".

[spinestein]

[Do they have any anti-missile systems on Airforce 1? Did they install it because its ineffective or because its a waste of tax payer money?]


"They" spend money extravagently to protect the President from attack because he's the single most powerful person in the world. Whether or not I consider this a waste of taxpayer money is irrelevent because the government spends the money anyway and a majority of voters don't seem to mind.

The President also has superfortified armored cars, a team of the worlds best hi-tech bodyguards, and other very expensive measures used to protect his person. If you want to lobby Congress to pass a bill that will supply every American with the same stuff on the idea that "If it's good for the President, it's good for everybody." then good luck.