(no subject)

[ewx]

Improvising a Homeland Defense. Interesting.

Comments

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Care to summarise it for the *ahem* differently arsed?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Local FAA and NORAD staff reacted about as well as possible to 9/11 as it happened, but nobody at all was prepared or trained for anything like it.

United 93 would probably have reached Washington before anyone in the air knew they were authorized to shoot it down; although in the event, by the time NORAD knew it was hijacked, it had already crashed in Pennsylvania.

Tracking the planes by radar was extremely difficult (the hijackers disabled the transponders that would normally be used), and was made harder by the software in use.

High-level coordination doesn't seem to have been particularly great initially. However to my reading it doesn't seem from the timings that even much faster high-level reaction could have prevented American 77 from hitting the Pentagon.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

There seemed to be some ambiguity about the chains of command; although Bush -> Rumsfeld -> military was the 'correct' route, the order to shoot down seems to have initially gone via Cheney. The fact that Rumsfeld went to help at the crash site at the Pentagon rather than dealing with the national situation seems like a clear failing on his part, to me.

[gerald_duck]

Had someone told him there was a national situation, though?

(I read the document some hours ago, and don't feel inclined to read it again just yet. (-8 )

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think this happened *after* Cheney contacted him to say that he'd given shootdown orders. I would also be amazed if he didn't know about the WTC by this time (10:30 or so).

[gerald_duck]

Here's an attempt at a very high-level summary:

• It takes 35 minutes to hijack a plane, divert it, and hit a target
  
• It takes 145 minutes from the first tentative indications of a hijack before fighters are airborne who:
  • Have been told a specific area to protect
    
  • Have been told that they are protecting it against the actions of hijacked passenger jets
    
  • Have been given authority to shoot passenger jets down, if necessary
• Even that timescale was only achieved by secret service agents and military allowing common sense to dictate that they exceed their authority.

Conclusions (i.e. personal opinions) I've drawn from the document:

• The FAA (Federal Aviation Authority), NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) didn't communicate effectively with one another, or other parts of government or the military.
  
• People wasted time confirming orders that had to be executed instantly, or failed entirely to pass information up the chain of command and orders back down it.
  
• The Chairman, Vice-Chairman and Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the US President and Defense Secretary, were all hard to contact on a timescale of tens of minutes. Nobody knew how to derive authority to do anything about an emergency in their respective absences.

[aldabra]

Does this suggest the Pennsylvania one was a genuine crash rather than a shooting down?

[gerald_duck]

The document makes that very clear in consistent detail. When the plane disappeared from radar, some people who had given orders for it to be shot down presumed those orders had been carried out. However, the plane disappeared before the orders were conveyed to pilots in the air, the pilots were in entirely the wrong place, and a cargo plane saw pretty-much the entire thing from the air.

In order to disbelieve that the Pennsylvania crash was genuine, one would in effect have to believe the entire document. It is written in a manner I find highly credible, though I've seen little independent corroboration of it.