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Bull shit. Some of you people are so stupid. CEC had nothing to do with 800. Get over it. The ship named by Salinger and others did not have CEC and was incapable of supporting CEC. Wrong baseline. The people pushing this lame theory do not even know the purpose of CEC. Give it a rest. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Salinger never named a ship. The only 'other' person that ever named a ship was a Brit fedbuttkisser, as you seem to be, who mentioned a Japanese based destroyer, the USS O'Brien, an impossibility, of course, if the O'Brien were at it's home base at the time.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz All Salinger ever mentioned was a sailor's father calling him to tell him that his son told him that their ship shot down twa800. Salinger claims he didn't think to ask for a name for the sailor. I believe Salinger's claim. The rest of your claims are equally nonsensical. Except that some of you people are so stupid. That's true. The CEC test program the summer of '96 was real. The test underway when twa800 was shot down by a navy accident was to test the data link between the Normandy and the forward shooters, like destroyers, frigates and even barges. The navy does not test missiles in crowded airspaces. That part is stupid.cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc Perhaps you could give us an explanation of the purpose of CEC. LOL Here's what I have from the people that claim to have shot twa800 down: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You've heard of CEC, Cooperative Engagement Capability? We _were_ testing it. A lot of the stuff written about it, as far as Flight 800 goes, is pretty bogus (I can't believe anyone took the submarine launched missile theory seriously, someone was smoking crack when they made that up) but the essentials are correct. Ships like 'us' have a lot of magazine capacity we don't usually use, and so we can carry a couple of dozen SAMs. We get a data stream from the controlling ship, usually an AEGIS destroyer (most of the Tico's don't have the datalink bandwidth yet, they're getting it as part of an upgrade program though) and program it into the missile, then fire it on command. The AEGIS ship then takes over the weapon exactly as if she'd launched it herself, keeps kicking the autopilot to fly into the basket, then lights up the target with a SPG-62 for terminal homing. The idea was originally to get more arrows out into the Fleet to deal with Soviet attacks, which would try to saturate us with missiles and decoys so we'd run out of SAMs before we killed all the threats. Now, though, it's even more useful because you can still have a Standard-armed shooter even if you don't have enough AEGIS ships to be everywhere, or you can put some weapons further out along the threat axis without exposing an AEGIS ship. We Sprucan types like it because we're likely to be on the gun line or trolling for Kilos out there anyway, and this gave us more reach and more protection against air or missile threats. Anyway, a big chunk of the system development was to offload the AEGIS as much as possible and give us some autonomy. CEC engagements all being run from the AAW controller is fine for stopping Ivan tagging the birdfarm, when one ship wants to control and coordinate all the SAM shots for the BG. It sucks, though, when you've got threat inbound and the AAWC isn't prioritising you or can't see them and so you're on your own. So, the CEC system was being updated to give the carrier ship more say in the engagement. We still couldn't illuminate for the Standards, but the Raytheon guys were datalinking target data from the Mark 23 TAS out to the AEGIS so they could see our tactical picture and set up the engagement based on that. All fine and dandy so far. Only some genius at NSWC pointed out that the limiting factor now was still illuminators, so if we had a seaskimmer and the AEGIS is too far away or off-axis it's down in the multipath and the AEGIS can't designate the target. Since the Really Big Threat these days is high-speed seaskimming missiles lobbed off mobile launchers or from FACs, that sucks. So, they figured, why not give the weapon autonomous terminal homing? Gee, we've got this really nice Hughes I2R module that's getting stuffed into missiles all over the place (it's going in AIM-9X, the Brits use it in ASRAAM, think the Krauts put it in IRIS-T) and is a non-development item and just needs a new nose section, and hey presto you've got the biggest heatseeker in the world. Multipath? Stealth? Radar jamming? Who cares? It's hot, go kill it. Sic'em, boy! Now _everyone's_ happy because this expands everyone's options. Isn't just us Sprucans who can use it, of course, this is getting bandied about as a Stealth-killer for anyone with a Mark 41 (Stealth planes might be hard to track on radar, but they're hot compared to the sky, the Brits keep bragging how they 'killed' a B-2 with the IR tracker on a Rapier 2000 at Farnborough '94). But the big deal is, it offloads the AEGIS illuminators, shortens engagement times, and ups the Pk against puckermakers like Sunburn to something acceptable. Or at least that's the Big Picture that happy July. We were going to go see how it worked.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Willyone, do you know any of the terms above? I'm retired from Dahlgren, the accused, and I had to look several of the navy terms up. The story is solid. Sadly, the sailors can't speak up. Just like on the Tonkin Gulf fraud that cost us 58,000 lives and the 'gooks' 1.3 million lives. Remember Vietnam? Not one sailor spoke up to expose the fraud even though there were three destroyers loaded with sailors (about a thousand) involved. We have four ships right under the twa800 crashsite. There goes the bullshit argument that the navy didn't shoot down twa800 because someone would have spoken up. Your post is reckless. And makes about as much sense as Asmodus'.