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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (55064)	10/27/2002 11:31:06 PM
From: mistermj	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Ramming 9/11 hijackers with fighters considered washtimes.com ASSOCIATED PRESS In the moments after the September 11 attacks, a U.S. commander considered sending unarmed Air Force fighter jets on suicide missions to stop any additional hijacked airliners by ramming them, officials said yesterday. Air Force Col. Robert K. Marr Jr. said that as commander of the Northeast Air Defense Sector he would have had to obtain authority from superiors to order such missions. He said he never made a decision to seek the go-ahead because it was not necessary. "In the heat of the moment, all suggestions were considered but no decision was made to employ unarmed fighters," Col. Marr said in a statement provided by his spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Kacey Blaney. Col. Marr first disclosed the fact that he had considered this last-ditch tactic in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., which is preparing a documentary on the events of September 11. In his statement yesterday, Col. Marr said it was his responsibility to consider even the most extreme measures. "An airman asked to make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of his country is no more or less than the soldier asked to storm the beaches at Normandy," he said. Col. Blaney said Col. Marr told her the suicide missions were no more than "a thought that went through his mind" as he and others considered how to deal with the unprecedented situation facing the nation that day. There were only four armed fighter jets on alert in Col. Marr's area of responsibility — stretching from Minnesota to Maine to Virginia — at the time the first hijacked airliner struck the World Trade Center, Col. Blaney said. Unsure how many more attacks might be unfolding, Col. Marr diverted unarmed Michigan Air National Guard fighter jets that happened to be flying a training mission in northern Michigan at the time of the first attack, but they were released after the fourth hijacked plane went down in Pennsylvania. "There was a push to get everything available in the air," to defend the skies after the attacks began, said Maj. Barry Venable, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the parent unit of Col. Marr's command. Col. Blaney said Col. Marr and others who huddled in his command center in Rome, N.Y., that morning searched for ideas, realizing that unarmed fighter jets could be used in a variety of roles — as extra "eyes and ears," or possibly as battering rams. "All of this was considered: How can we possibly use them?" Col. Blaney said. "All good commanders are called on to think outside the box, and this probably would have been outside the box."

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (55064)	10/28/2002 3:38:08 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I've already posted to Just_Observing why there was no fighter response fast enough for the conspiratorial. Only two bases in the Northeast were on "strip alert" - in Mass. and Virginia. The fighters weren't scrambled because NORAD doesn't monitor domestic flights, and relies upon notification by the FAA of a domestic threat. During the height of the Cold War, "strip alert" bases were prepped to have planes in the air responding to a threat within 15 minutes. It is not surprising that in a non-wartime situation of low readiness, strip alert jets would have a significant delay in responding, even after alert. I don't know how long it takes to get an F-16 prepped, fueled, and armed, and in the air, perhaps someone else on the board can enlighten me. But if it takes within 15 minutes for an F-16 sitting on the runway fueled and armed and the crew waiting to scramble, it must take a helluva long time, relatively. Now, I've found this rundown of events from a website that can hardly be considered to be sympathetic: communitycurrency.org If that timing is true, then NORAD gave the order to get jets in the air within 6 minutes of notification of the FAA. As this site shows, the bottleneck was the FAA. In the case of Flight 11, Boston ATC took twenty-three minutes to notify NORAD, after the plane had begun going dramatically off-course, then after radio, transponder contact was lost, and some ten minutes after the plane was hijack-confirmed. When NORAD was notified, it took six minutes for the call for jets to scramble to go through; and the order was sent to a base which was two hundred miles away, when numerous other "battle-ready" fighter squadrons in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Hartford were far closer. (The question of whether any of those planes were on "strip alert" or not we shall look at shortly). This galling, unprecedented delay, coupled with NORAD’s inept judgement, also doomed Flight 175 to its ignoble destruction, sixteen minutes later. Flight 77 was clearly in trouble before Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center at 8:46. ATC officials watching Flight 77 were aware that Flight 11 had been hijacked before it crashed; yet it took the FAA until 9:25, over thirty-five minutes later, to inform NORAD that Flight 77 may have been hijacked. NORAD again responded by ordering planes to scramble from a base (Langley) which was 130 miles away from where Flight 77 was, (just outside Washington) when active fighters were stationed at Andrews AFB, just ten to fifteen miles away. Flight 93 was hijack-confirmed at 9:16, fifty minutes before it crashed in rural Pennsylvania –with not a single fighter being close enough to intercept it, (or so we are told). So, the FAA, a civilian agency, failed to "timely respond" to the hijackings and notify NORAD. NORAD failed to scramble jets from "close" airbases with "combat-ready" fighters. But that fails to consider that: 1. The FAA is a cumbersome bureaucracy slow to act, and this was an absolutely unprecedented event. The idea that the FAA "took to long" fails to take into consideration the resistance of flight controllers, quite naturally, to assume a flight off course was a hijacking, given the extreme rarity of a domestic flight hijacking. Also, even after determiing it was a hijacking, flight controllers would have to convince their superiors and go through the chain of notification. That takes time. How many people could have been expected to suspect that these flights were hijacked and would be used as missiles? None. 2. NORAD didn't scramble F-16s "closer" to the action because, as I've mentioned, there were only two "strip alert" bases on the East Coast. Assuming Andrews should have been used makes the false assumption that Andrews had F-16s that were prepped and armed and could have been scrambled in time to intercept. This conspiracy theory is a load of crap. If any of these people would have been in those flight control centers, they would have been shitting themselves not knowing what to do. Considering the unprecedented situation, I think everyone did as well as could have been expected. Derek