Posted on 04/19/2005 7:53:08 PM PDT by 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
bump
TWA800 was not only attacked, but brought down by a missile. Many Clinton admin people mentioned TWA800 as an example of terrorism immediately after 9-11. So did sKerry, twice.
I've got a better idea:
Why don't we go after the nations that provide support to terrorists? Why don't we be pro-active and destroy those who would threaten us? Why don't we take control of our borders?
Great. Plow that money into UCAVs.
WTF??
"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."
BTTT
I've been told by folks that should know that there are no countermeasures that can stop the newer MANPADS.
Possibly the most breath-takingly stupid idea I've ever seen written down. Frankly, I think chaff/flare dispensers would be useless, too. Dunno what would work, but stopping the F-22/F18-f/Ospry/etc. is just plain foolish.
At low altitudes, which is where MANPADS are used, you are correct. The bloody things are simply too fast and too smart.
Totally different story if you've got 10,000 feet between you and the ground and someone hoses off a MANPADS missile - but then, almost nobody is stupid enough to try that. Stingers have a 10,000 foot ceiling, but their kill percentage drops off notably with targets over about 5,000 feet.
In 2004 Citizens Against Government Waste documented a total of $22.9 billion in federal pork-barrel spending
The Republican Party of Big Stupid Government would, and does, rather have the pork.
Then, when (not if) an airliner is shot down, they'll quickly "craft" legislation to steal even more pork to "fix" the problem over some indeterminate period of time, i.e. as long as they can keep stealing Security Pork.
Why spend the money on this when they can just deny it was a missile that took down the plane?I love the way our fearless leaders step up to the plate when we need them to.
I like your BS flag ....but ....
9-11 drove United into Chapter 11 and if Delta can hold on without their having to declare, well call be a colored orangutang. Which other carrier is also at risk is beyond my purview.
From where I sit, the ability to defend a slow moving aircraft from MANPADS is doable. Expensive yes, but the alternative would certainly drive many if not all air carriers out of business. That is a big chunk of our economy.
Pay me now or pay me later. My advice is to buy Northrop Grumman. This company is installing two different defense systems into "large aircraft". A lot of customers outside of the US of A. I work as a civil servant for the Air Force.
Not if, but when in my estimation.
WD
I've heard that the concern is that these things have been brought across the Mexican border and are in the hands of Mexican and South American gangs. The Islamo-Nazis don't need anything but money to hire the gangsters.
Very scary.
Yup. And there's basically nothing that anyone can do about it other than the impossible of excluding everyone from a 40 mile radius around an airport.
Oh, except go over and kill all the people who order the shooting. And all their devotees in the area. That usually tends to stop such plots.
Um... against a current or current minus one generation man-pack missile like a Stinger, THERE IS NO EFFECTIVE DEFENSE THAT A LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT CAN MOUNT. Even the "Black Hole" IR suppression systems aren't of any use against current generation man-pack missiles. Once they get a skin paint on you, you're toast unless you have enough altitude *and* airspeed to evade, and you have neither in an airliner near an airport.
The only other solution would be to replace all aircraft with full stealth designs, complete with buried baffled engines, and that's not going to happen.
And what happens in 10 or 20 years when we need those systems? Hmm. The airlines could install the IR countermeasures sets with no permission required. Then they could advertise the fact that *their* aircraft are protected. They they could charge a few bucks more per ticket, and they'd still get more business than their "fly naked" competitors.
[TWA800 was not only attacked, but brought down by a missile.]
The evidence does not support this conclusion.
Why don't we go after the nations that provide support to terrorists? Why don't we be pro-active and destroy those who would threaten us?
Don't follow the news much do you.
There's always countermeasures. They may not be cost effective, but it's always possible. For example a powerful laser could just burn out the detector on the sensor of the missile. But it's true that decoying the missile seeker, or even just causing it to break lock, is getting more difficult. The missiles won't go after something that doesn't both "look like" a target and act like a target. It's difficult to get false targets to behave in such a manner. Denial (IE blinding the seeker) is more difficult with a passive seeker, although even an Radar seeker can go into a home on jam mode if it's blinded.
One possibility is a towed decoy, which can be made to both maneuver like and "look like" the targeted aircraft. These work well if there's only a single missile going after the target, but if there is more than one, then you need more than one decoy, since the decoy is likely to be killed.
Especially since *none* of the recovered panels show the distinctive pattern of a MANPADS missile strike.
, THERE IS NO EFFECTIVE DEFENSE THAT A LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT CAN MOUNT
I live next to the Mpls / St Paul airport and I agree.
If you know of evidence that I don't (which is possible) that passes the standards of critical methodology please link to them and I would be eager to read it.
Any aircraft that's optically visible would be a sitting duck.
When a plane is 300 feet up or less and landing?
MANPADS by necessity have very small warheads. They are more likely to go for the engines. That's not as true of the newer ones but still true. Most airlines can execute a return to base upon losing a single engine. In fact there was at least one aircraft, an Airbus A-300 from DHL, that got hit by a MANPAD SAM flying either into Baghdad, and the pilot was able to put the plane back on the runway.
I agree, the older ones do go for the engines, and as such are much less of a threat. Assuming that all they have are Strelas and Redeyes would be stupid - one must assume they have the current generation, or the just prior one, of weapons, and those don't go for engines. They go for fuselages. If they don't get a paint on the fuselage, then they go for the engines, but I'm told that's rare.
Against a slow-flying transport plane on final approach with gear down and flaps deployed, just about any MANPADS will succeed. Even an unguided RPG-7 will take out an airliner. Just ask the poor bastards in Iraq that were on a Brit C-130 with full military countermeasures - they didn't help at ALL.
Agreed, because then you just shoot it with a gun, RPG, or MANPADS in boresight or ballistic mode (if it has one).
I told my neighbor a day before my family was to take its first flight post-911 that these shoulder fired weapons were a big threat. Four days later the plane in Africa leaving the Jewish resort was shot down.
It's just a matter of time before it happens here.
First of all then don't get a skin "paint", since they are passive devices. What they do get is skin lock, however at low airspeeds the skin is not very warm. Airliners, unlike jet fighters, don't go low and fast. That makes lockup harder. That is, at least until the missiles are equipped with imaging seekers, similar to that on the Javelin anti-tank missile. I suspect a decent seeker could be built out of a "webcam" type camera module and something about like a palmtop computer, or better yet the signal processor from a cell phone, to do the image processing. Make it work in IR rather than visible light, spectrum and you'd have something pretty useful. Put a firewire or USB "plug" into the missile and the operator could use the screen from a digital camera or a palmtop to "lock" the missile onto the desired target.
Obviously there are critical points that won't allow recovery. But how long does an aircraft spend down below say 500 feet? Longer than the need to, but still not all that long. The A-300 was landing, not taking off.
Let's not go further on speculating how to make such a device, per the Loose Lips policy. You're right, it is a lock, I was using the wrong term.
That said, a Raytheon Missile Systems (then Hughes Missile Systems) engineer and I were sitting around one night a while back and he told me that an airliner fuselage at landing was, indeed, warm enough to get a lock on with a Stinger. He wouldn't tell me how it was done, nor did I press him.
"The evidence does not support this conclusion."
What I've always wondered about, though, is ....if it WAS a stinger missile (launched from L.I.), wouldn't the terror group that pulled off such a feat have wanted to boast and brag about it afterwards? Why do something spectacular like that, and then remain silent? What's the point? They're all about "big publicity" for their terrorist acts.
Remember how some liberals kept yelling about how it was the Israelis and the Mossad which were really behind 9/11? Then, UBL and Ayman Al-Zawahiri couldn't let people think THAT, so they came out bragging about what a big success the attack was. I would think that they would have done the same thing about TWA 800, if they'd done it.
You will want to read this thread ping.
The evidence that the FBI has been allowed to release does not support a missile-shoot down conclusion.
But the chief FBI investigator, Kahlstrom, was likely "pursuaded" by the Clinton administration to change his original investigation which assumed a missile to assumption of mechanical fault. His overnight change in tacts was stunning.
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.
Bottom line.....there were far too many witnesses to a missile track rising from the water to discredit them. The FBI took the easy way out......coverup, stonewall and call it Boeings fault.....
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?
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."
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.
"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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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