Posted on 03/24/2002 2:05:00 PM PST by Musket
Personally, I love sitting at the park at the end of the runway watching the planes come in; A cherry blossomed DC to my right and Pentagon to my left,and memorials in between. Strategically, I would be going ape sh!t if I worked at the Pentagon or for the Secret Service. You have basically ceded that any aircraft on approach to Reagan National has clearance to crash into anything within a large radius. No reason to quake in, but I lock my front door at night, do you?
Grounded or not isn't really the issue. In the US we haven't had too many aircraft on alert since the cold war ended. During the cold war we had many patrols in Alaska and on the west coast becasue this is where Soviet Bear bombers would come from.
This is how it works. When a plane is on alert it is sitting on the ramp preflighted, fueled up, loaded with live ammo and the crews are on standby in an alert facility nearby.
To maintain this posture is almost impossible with our current forces becasue the crews have to keep training, need crew rest, rotate on deployments and routine maintenance has to be performed on the planes. This also adds an enourmous amount of support troops to the mix as well, i.e., planes loaded with live ammo require security forces to guard them, transporting the ammo to and from ammo storage areas require excorts, and in the US the aircraft that are live are parked outside in the elements which isn't good in the long run.
The bottom line is we didn't expect this type of attack so we didn't plan for it?
I am challenging those who hold this belief to prove their own superior intelligence by figuring out the location of the next surprise attack so it can be foiled. Also known as put up or shut up.
If you think the attack on 9/11 was so easily foreseeable, you should have no difficulty seeing the next one coming.
Yup. But don't tell Alex Jones that. You'll ruin his whole show.
Thanks All!
That is a damn short time to get to altitude, to locate the right aircraft and to get clearance from someone to fire on the plane.
This assumes that anyone was authorized to make that call at that point; ie: 9:25-9:37AM.
Should the military figured it out on their own at 9:02 when the second WTC plane hit. Yes, maybe - but at that point the FAA still hadn't made the call on where Flt. 77 was headed. When they did - the Virginia F-16 scrambled immediately.
The question should be - should we have second guessed the terrorists and figured out ahead of time what they were going to do....sure would have been nice but its expecting a bit more clairvoyance than government usually has!
Second guessing what happened now and pointing fingers is counterproductive in my book. Learning where we were weak in the past and plugging those weaknesses is productive; and I think we are working the problem - not as fast as any of us would like, but probably as fast as a bloated Government has ever moved.
That progress I credit to a hell of a leader - President George Bush. And no credit to the Senior Senator from North Dakota!!
You're a real weasel.
Now, if you were talking about readiness rates, sortie rates, aircraft availability, munitions availability, and the like, then you might have a point. The fact that a base is home to a squadron is hardly classified. If that were the case, then Nellis would have to take down their "Home of the Thunderbirds" sign.
I've lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a while. After careful observation for years,I THINK there might be a wing or two of C-5As based at Dover Air Force Base. I've been reluctant to post on this fact so as not to give info to our enemies :-)
There are a billion websites listing the home base of every fighter and ANG squadron in the country, every division and brigade, and the homeport of every ship in the Navy. Most bases have signs on the fences or at the gates proudly mentioning what forces are based there.
The key thing is, most things military are far more complicated and difficult, and expensive, than people think it is. Keeping planes armed with live weapons and instantly ready to take off is a lot more difficult and expensive than people imagine. And Monday Morning quarterbacking is also getting tiresome. I'm dubious anything other than already-airborne CAP would have prevented either attack.
And I don't recall any posts from August or before on here where people are complaining there wasn't armed fighter CAP over DC and NYC 24/7.
It's not exactly true that no one had thought of this scenario. NORAD had run an exercise in which a passenger plane was hijacked and crashed into a prominent facility. The only difference was that it was an overseas flight, not domestic -- but in fact, because these were domestic, they had more notice than in an overseas flight. There are major holes in both our air-defense and our air-traffic control systems, and, in my opinion, somebody knew how to take advantage of them.
You're a real weasel.
Geeze. I try to be nice to everyone for straightening me out and you call me a weasel. Thanks pal!
That, or you could just realize that all that information is already in the public domain and relax.
No, trying to "be nice" would have entailed asking a question like "does anybody know the timeline of the events on 9-11? I'm trying to piece together exactly how the AF responded."
Instead, you make a hysterical post with utterly false assertions which you run screaming away from when you get called on them.
Now THAT is a weasel.
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