- For all its successes, the U.S. anti-terror war was conceived
in sin, the sin of U.S. government negligence. As much post-9/11 journalism
has pointed out, there was the foreign-policy error of abandoning post-Soviet
Afghanistan after having infused it with weapons, the CIA's failure to
act more forcefully on tips and intercepts regarding al-Qaida operatives
overseas, and the FBI's and INS's similar failings regarding suspicious
characters already in the United States. And the FAA's (and the airlines',
the airports', and security firms') breakdown on airport security. However,
there has been a good deal less focus on another federal fubar, that perpetrated
by the Air Force's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
The NORAD home page declares its mission to include "the detection,
validation, and warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft,
missiles, or space vehicles." It may seem ungallant to say the obvious,
but since no one else has, I will: At the aircraft part of this mission,
NORAD sucks.
How does NORAD explain its failure to intercept any of the hijacked airliners
on 9/11? Its commander, Gen. Ed Eberhart, pointed out in congressional
testimony that the FAA has the primary responsibility for hijackings in
U.S. airspace, that NORAD can only help respond once the FAA notifies
it, and that on 9/11 the FAA delayed precious minutes before doing so.
Eberhart has also said that while before 9/11, NORAD had practiced responding
to a hijacked plane trying to slam into a target in the United States,
the exercises assumed that the flight had originated overseas, giving
intercepting jet fighters more time. More important, he also said that
even if his aircraft had practiced the domestic scenario, it wouldn't
have mattered. Why? "I really think that, for sure in the first two
instances, and probably in the third, the time and distance would not
have allowed us to get an airplane to the right place at the right time."
It's certainly true that the FAA didn't give the Air Force the speediest
heads up: Newsday reported that the FAA delayed 29 minutes (!) before
telling the military about the third (!) suspicious plane, the one that
ultimately hit the Pentagon. And before 9/11, a domestic-hijacked-airliner-suicide
attack was admittedly not the most probable of worries. But it's simply
wrong to say that therefore, there probably wasn't anything NORAD could
have done to change history.
According to NORAD's official 9/11 time line, the FAA notified NORAD at
8:40 a.m. Eastern time that there was something peculiar going on with
American Flight 11. But NORAD didn't issue an order for fighters to scramble
until 8:46 a.m., the time when American Flight 11 hit the first WTC tower.
Six minutes later, at 8:52 a.m., two F-15 fighters responded to the order
by launching from a base 153 miles from New York City. They still were
not on the scene at 9:02 a.m. when the second airliner, United Flight
175, hit the second WTC tower. They wouldn't get there for another eight
minutes, at 9:10 a.m. A NORAD senior officer, Major Gen. Larry Arnold,
told NBC that when the fighters took off, they were flying straight to
New York City. He also said that they were going "about 1.5 Mach,
which is, you know, somewhereó11- or 1,200 miles an hour."
But note that the F-15 fighters took 18 minutes to cover those 153 miles,
which comes out to more like 510 mph. Yet, according to the Air Force,
the F-15 has a top speed of 1,875 mph. So, you have to wonder, why were
they flying at less than a third of what they're capable of?
According to NORAD, the FAA notified it at 9:24 a.m. that there was something
suspicious with American Flight 77. Two F-16 fighters were immediately
ordered launched, and they got airborne at 9:30 a.m. The New York Times
reports that at first, they were headed to New York at "top speed"
reaching "600 mph within two minutes," before vectoring toward
Washington instead. These planes didn't arrive in the vicinity of the
Pentagon until 9:49 a.m., 12 minutes after American Flight 77 hit it.
(They then stayed in the skies above Washington to protect against the
fourth errant airliner, United Flight 93, with orders to shoot it down
if necessary, a command mooted by an apparent passenger insurrection that
caused that plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.) The F-16s covered
the 130 miles of their journey in 19 minutes, which would be an average
speed of about 410 mph. Now, that's artificially low because these fighters
spent several minutes flying toward New York, but even allowing for this,
you don't come up with anything like what the Air Force (which may know
better than the New York Times) says is the plane's top speed of 1,500
mph. So, again, why didn't NORAD feel the need for speed? It wasn't because
of FAA regulations prohibiting supersonic flight over land in U.S. civil
airspace. A NORAD spokesman told me that fighters violate that speed restriction
"when circumstances warrant."
That is, in both cases where NORAD launched fighters, a closer look suggests
that it's just false that there was nothing they could have done. For
one thing, they could have flown faster.
But the flawed time/distance argument isn't NORAD's only excuse. Gen. Arnold
told NBC that even if U.S. jets had intercepted the airliners, "No
one would have known the intent of the hijackers. And without that, I
don't think anyone would have been able to order them to shoot down thatóthat
aircraft."
That may be true, but it's misleading. Arnold leaves out other tactics
the jet fighters could've tried. According to a Boston Globe article, when
intercepting aircraft, NORAD practices a graduated response. The approaching
fighter doesn't immediately shoot down the bogey: It can first rock its
wingtips to attract attention, or make a pass in front of the plane, or
fire tracer rounds in its path. So even though on 9/11, the NORAD pilots
working the first three airliners didn't have shootdown authority (they
got it only after the Pentagon was hit), they would or should have been
ready to try these other techniques, which might well have spooked or
forced the hijackers into turning, which might have given the fighters
a chance to force them out to sea. And even if the hijackers decided instead
to fly right into a fighter in their way, wouldn't an airburst have killed
fewer people than two collapsed flaming skyscrapers did?
After 9/11, NORAD said it adjusted to the new realities. In October, Gen.
Eberhart told Congress that "now it takes about one minute" from
the time that the FAA senses something is amiss before it notifies NORAD.
And around the same time, a NORAD spokesofficer told the Associated Press
that the military can now scramble fighters "within a matter of minutes
to anywhere in the United States."
But lo and behold, earlier this month when 15-year-old student pilot Charles
Bishop absconded with a Cessna and flew it into a Tampa skyscraper, NORAD
didn't learn of it until it overheard FAA radio calls about the situation,
and it wasn't able to launch its fighter jets until 15 minutes after Bishop
had already crashed into the building. Those fighters didn't arrive on
the scene until 45 minutes after Bishop took off.
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- http://slate.msn.com/?id=2060825
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