Second of a two-part series; General in charge of air defense worries about terrorism from the sky
BILL KACZOR 1/27/2000 AP
The general responsible for protecting the continental United States from air attack says he fears it is not matter of if, but when terrorists or a rogue nation try something. It may be a small plane or even a cruise missile carrying a biological or, perhaps, chemical weapon, said Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the 1st Air Force. "I lay awake worrying," Arnold said. "It is one thing to put a truck inside the twin trade towers and blow it up. It is quite another to be able to fly a weapon across our borders. That is an attack, a direct attack, an unambiguous attack from outside our country." Striking from the sky may be more difficult, but Arnold said the political impact could make it worth the effort in the mind of a terrorist. So far, nothing of the kind has happened, but Arnold's nationwide Air National Guard command scrambles jets about 200 times a year at seven alert sites from Portland, Ore., to South Florida. Most often they intercept drug smugglers and others who fail to file flight plans before entering U.S. airspace. In October, however, Oklahoma and North Dakota Air Guard fighters were called upon to track golfer Payne Stewart's business jet, which failed to respond to radio calls before crashing in South Dakota, killing Stewart and five others aboard. Air defense sectors at Tyndall, Rome, N.Y., and McChord Air Force Base, Wash., monitor ground radar shared with the Federal Aviation Administration throughout their regions. Airborne radar on balloons provides some, but not complete, low-altitude coverage to spot planes flying under the net cast by the ground radar. Air Guard F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-15 Eagles can be airborne in minutes, but they are stretched thin. Arnold, a Texas Guard member, used the example of terrorists taking off from Mexico in a small plane and giving an hour's notice before spraying sarin gas or anthrax over El Paso, Texas. The nearest alert jets are about 600 miles away near Houston and in California. "If we scrambled them immediately, they would not yet be there that one hour later," Arnold said. "I don't want to be an alarmist, but that is a thing you have to think about." Cruise missiles could exploit another chink in the air defense armor. "It is easy to afford and have the knowledge to put together a poor man's cruise missile," said Florida Air Guard Col. Ted Kraemer, commander of the Southeast Air Defense Sector at Tyndall. Whether as simple as a remote controlled ultralight plane or complex as a submarine-launched missile, such small objects are hard to detect. "Unless you're specifically looking, with the equipment that we've got today, it's just not as sensitive as we'd like," Kraemer said. The Cruise Missile Defense Initiative is designed to plug that gap, Arnold said. If funded, truck-mounted electronic gear would correlate data from Air Force, Army and Navy radar to enhance the chances of detecting such weapons and provide links to ships, aircraft and missile batteries that can shoot them down. Russian bombers stopped flying off U.S. coasts when the Cold War ended but remain a potential threat as evidenced by flights last year around Iceland and off Norway, Arnold said. The Florida Straits are a constant worry as Cuban-American groups fly there almost every weekend, looking for rafters trying to reach U.S. shores. Alert jets can be over the straits in a minutes but did not scramble when Cuban MiGs shot down two planes from the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters, killing four men, in 1996. The North American Aerospace Defense Command, based at Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., decided it was not an "air sovereignty event," Arnold said. Florida Air Guard F-15s, however, did scramble Jan. 1 when another light plane returned after dropping anti-Castro leaflets over Cuba. A Cuban MiG also responded but did not attack the interloper nor fly north of the 24th parallel that both countries respect as a boundary for military flights. Lt. Col. Frank Stokes, of the Minnesota Guard, often has scrambled after "unknowns" from Tyndall, Panama before U.S. forces withdrew, and Curacao. "Most of them are on suspected drug guys," Stokes said. "They just want us to get no-kidding, human eyes on that guy and say what's his tail number, what kind of airplane and where he's headed." The information is radioed to law enforcement agencies that try to arrest suspects when they land. "They don't let us shoot them down," Stokes said. Instead, pilots snap photos with handheld cameras for use as evidence. The Minnesota jets also are the only F-16s with high-power spotlights in the nose of each plane for drug surveillance at night. "You put that baby out and then you can light that airplane up," Stokes said. "It's almost like a pull-over."