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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Although officials often cite the SA-7, the most widely proliferated and among the least capable shoulder-fired missiles, as the one terrorists are most likely to unleash against U.S. airliners, recent reports out of the Middle East indicate that Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group with an annual budget the CIA says exceeds $200 million, has recently acquired SA-18 missiles from Syria. These super-sophisticated Russian-made missiles are far more accurate -- and potentially far more lethal -- than the SA-7 missiles used in the Mombasa attack last year. Should al-Qaida obtain these new-generation missiles from Hezbollah, Syria, or another willing broker, it will significantly enhance its ability to blast American airliners out of the sky.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security declined repeated requests for comment on the Bush administration's airline security plan. The Air Transport Association, an industry group representing many of the commercial carriers, said yesterday that the federal government, and not the industry, should be responsible for such an overarching security concern.
"Defending against the threat of terrorist attacks has always been a fundamental government responsibility," said association spokeswoman Diana Cronan. "The airline industry, having been made aware by appropriate government authorities of concerns with the potential use of shoulder-fired missiles, is doing everything within its power to assist the government in its decision making as to the proper response to these and all terrorist threats."
In Congress, numerous U.S. officials have expressed alarm at the risk and have pressed for a commitment by the Bush administration to address it -- but so far without success. In the weeks leading up to the vote on funding the Iraq war, a measure sponsored by Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proposed spending $9 billion to install anti-missile systems on commercial airliners; the measure failed, due largely to White House hostility. Then, the administration blocked a bipartisan plan, pushed by Mica, chair of the House aviation subcommittee, to spend $30 million in the current fiscal year to begin the process of adapting military technology to commercial airliners.
Instead, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, the Bush administration has committed to spend just $2 million in the current fiscal year, which ends September 31, mostly for creating a "special government staff office to manage the effort." For the 2004 budget year, the administration says, "project costs are not to exceed $60 million." But that $60 million is not actually in the budget plan provided to the Congress, and the Homeland Security report states that the administration will "not seek additional or supplemental funding for this effort." That prompted a pointed question in Byrd's letter last week to Ridge. "If the Administration does not plan to request additional funding for the [research]," he asked, "how will the activities in the program plan ... be funded?"
According to the Office of Management and Budget, the administration has made no efforts to seek to have money shifted from one line item to another within the budget; nor has it sought new monies for anti-missile defense research. With Washington approaching the summer months, when little of substance gets done, and with the new fiscal year beginning shortly after the Congress returns to work in September, there is little evidence that the administration has firm spending plans for 2004.
And even if the $60 million does materialize, it's not enough, critics say. "Anything under $100 million is chump change," said one Capitol Hill source who asked to remain anonymous.
The net effect, Israel says, is that the White House is putting lives at risk. "The more we know about the threat of [portable missiles]," he said in an interview, "the more we know we need to defend against it. We were given a warning shot last year when shoulder-fired missiles missed an Israeli jet in Kenya, but we cannot count on their missing next time. I am happy that the administration has now acknowledged the threat, but they must follow through with real action ... We've debated it. We've held hearings on it. We've researched it. We've studied it. We've analyzed it. Now it's time to act on it."
Boxer sounded a similar theme in an interview Friday. "We have known for a long time that there is a credible threat of attack against our commercial aircraft," she said. "Although there is progress being made by the administration, this progress is too slow."
Byrd and others describe the White House budget plans as a window onto Bush's priorities. By this measure, the need to protect airliners from missile attack seems to be a back-burner issue.
Administration officials, of course, disagree. In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has been trumpeting its efforts at surveying the areas around airports to identify the locations from which terrorists are most likely to launch a portable-missile attack. And in a letter last month to House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II seemed to back that plan in outlining his opposition to the Israel-Boxer bill. "The Department of Defense recommends exploration of other potentially effective measures such as counter-proliferation, airfield security, and improved border control," Haynes wrote.
But experts in thwarting missile attacks, both inside and outside the government, say that approach simply won't work. "Most of the current proposals for securing the airspace around airports are either unworkable or useless," says Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the nonpartisan Lexington Institute who served on Bush's Department of Defense transition team.
One reason is that aircraft are vulnerable to even the oldest shoulder-launched missiles just before they land if they are within a long, roughly triangular swath of territory, about 4 to 6 miles wide, that extends 50 miles or more from the airport. An Air Force official recently noted that airport security measures are doomed to failure because the area around an airfield that needs to be secured in order to protect airliners ranges from 900 to 1,800 cubic miles of airspace.
"All a terrorist has to do is hide in the back of a pickup truck, under a tarp," said one intelligence official who asked not to be named. "When the driver of the truck spots a target aircraft and stops, all the shooter needs to do is throw off the tarp, stand and fire. It will only take a matter of seconds, and there is no way to stop that kind of attack."
