DOD To Terrorists: 'You Won't Reach Target'

[333MP]

Defense Today
June 10, 2005
Pg. 4

DOD To Terrorists: 'You Won't Reach Target'

By Richard Mullen

The Pentagon is prepared to shoot down commercial airliners—and wants terrorists to know it. Making that point was Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, in the course of warning terrorists that the United States is determined to thwart their aims even at a terrible cost.

"We train to do it routinely," he said, referring to the prospect of shooting down a commercial airliner in order to stop a terrorist attack on the United States.

McHale made these remarks following his address to an audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington.

In his present position, one that in 2003 he became the first to hold, McHale supervises all DOD homeland defense activities.

In his address at Heritage, McHale described how, since Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DOD) has realigned itself in order to contribute more directly to the nation's domestic security. Some $30 billion of the Pentagon's budget goes toward activities supporting homeland defense, McHale noted.

Illustrating that realignment was the experience of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the U.S.-Canadian alliance formed in 1958 to protect North American airspace principally against external threats.

On the very day of Sept. 11, 2001, NORAD was conducting a previously planned exercise for intercepting a Soviet-style attack on the United States, McHale said. "But by late that morning, it became clear that in the air domain," U.S. defense needs had changed.

Since that time, DOD has transformed the nation's air defenses, he said. For instance, it now conducts routine daily combat air patrols over U.S. cities, he said.

"We have the capability to engage a hostile platform, controlled by terrorists" in such a way that will "ensure [that] the plane won't reach its target," he said. DOD's purpose, he continued, is "not only to shoot down" a hostile aircraft, "but to communicate" to terrorists that "it's not likely they'll make it to the target."

McHale said, "Yes," when asked by Defense Today whether, in achieving that purpose, DOD is prepared to shoot down a commercial aircraft.

"If the totality of circumstances surrounding the violation of the flight restriction [in question] leads to the conclusion that a commercial airliner has been commandeered by terrorists, we are prepared to shoot down the plane in order to save an [even] greater number of American lives" that otherwise might be lost if the terrorists were to hit their intended target, he told Defense Today following his formal presentation.

"This is a sobering mission," but one for which DOD is preparing, he said.

DOD is applying highly precise procedures and "extremely tight rules of engagement" to ensure that only those with the fullest authority could take such an action, and only under the most serious of circumstances, McHale said, "if shooting down [the] airplane was necessary to achieve a greater good."

He noted that DOD did not find it necessary to take that "ultimate military action" of shooting down a commercial plane when, on May 23, a Cessna aircraft violated the airspace of Washington, D.C.

But, he went on to make clear, if the Pentagon had thought it necessary, it would have done so.

In describing the Pentagon's realignment in response to 9/11, McHale addressed DOD's shift with respect to sea and land defenses, as well as U.S. airspace.

"In the maritime domain, we have the single biggest chance to enhance our domestic defense," he told the Heritage audience. The United States needs a "maritime NORAD" in order to intercept potential terrorist threats while they are still at sea, McHale said.

Transport by sea is "probably" the way terrorists would try to train weapons or "special material" upon U.S. domestic targets, he said.

A "maritime NORAD" could help to provide the "defense in-depth" that the Pentagon wants to achieve, such that it can identify and intercept terrorist threats "on the high seas," McHale said.

"We ... have acquired the capability to better identify [such] threats at a distance" so they can't reach U.S. ports, he said.

In response to a presidential directive of last December, DOD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have drafted a "homeland maritime strategy" that will be ready for top-level Pentagon review this summer, McHale said.

This strategy, he said, "will ensure [our] ability to stop transnational terrorists at sea."

The strategy calls for closer coordination of effort by the Navy and the Coast Guard, he said. "We must achieve complete synchronization of Coast Guard and Navy capabilities. We must fuse [those] capabilities to achieve their maximum effectiveness," he said.

As for an ongoing DOD role in protecting the United States within its borders—that is to say, on land—McHale framed his comments by noting that the armed services' domestic activities are reined tightly by the Constitution.

DOD has an important role to play in contributing to homeland security on the domestic front, but "its role on the landmass is carefully limited," he said. DOD would "supply a component" of the larger homeland security effort that DHS would lead, he said.