WASHINGTON -- The attack last week on an Israeli charter plane in Kenya underscores the vulnerability of commercial jets to terrorists wielding shoulder-held missiles, which are relatively cheap, portable and widely available on the international black market, U.S. and Israeli officials and private analysts said.
Israeli officials said Friday that the Arkia Charter Co. jet carrying 271 people that was fired on twice by ground-to-air missiles Thursday was apparently spared by bad aim from an old, inaccurate weapon. But civilian aircraft owned by Israel's flagship carrier, El Al, have been equipped with heat flares that act as decoys for the heat-seeking weapons.
"This is going to cause an enormous shudder throughout the [U.S.] government," said Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, in Washington.
Security analysts have been warning for years about the potential threat posed by terrorists toting shoulder-held missiles. Al-Qaida is believed to have fired them at planes in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the Tamil Tiger rebels used them to down a passenger aircraft in Sri Lanka in 1998.
"The airlines have always refused to consider putting aboard the defense measures that are necessary for reasons of cost," Benjamin said. "It's hard for me to see how they're going to avoid a big, big battle over this."
However, another CSIS terrorism expert, Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment at the Pentagon, said installing systems on commercial airlines to defend against attack by shoulder-held missiles is not likely to be either feasible or effective.
A spokesman for Boeing Commercial Airlines, Craig Martin, agreed that putting missile-defense technology aboard commercial aircraft would be neither cheap nor easy. Instead, he suggested that authorities focus on the underlying causes of the attacks, and on making such attacks unacceptable.
A U.S. General Accounting Office report released two days before the Kenya attack warned that the systems developed by the Pentagon to protect military aircraft from surface-to-air missiles also are unreliable.
"The services have already identified serious reliability problems with current self-protection systems on U.S. combat aircraft, including jammers, radar warning receivers and countermeasures dispensers," the GAO wrote in the report released this week. "Most of the current systems use older technology and have logistics support problems due to obsolescence."
The report also found significant problems with aircraft designed to jam the radar systems of air defenses, and with other craft that fire anti-radiation missiles to destroy air defenses.
"Over the past several years, the quantity and quality of the services' suppression equipment have declined while enemy air defense tactics and equipment have improved," the GAO warned.
The missiles that were believed to have been fired at the Israeli plane were the Soviet-made SA-7, also known by the Russian name Strela-2M. They are older and less accurate versions of the U.S.-made "Stinger" missiles, which the CIA supplied to the mujahedeen warriors fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The SA-7s were introduced in 1967, and first used by the Soviet-backed Egyptian forces against Israel. When U.S. relations with Egypt later improved, some of the missiles were sent to Germany, where U.S. troops trained with them.
"There are just thousands all over the world,'' said retired Army Major General Edward Akeson, a senior fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare. "Everybody's got them. They're cheap, and it takes only about a day to train a guy on the thing."
The SA-7s are heat-seeking weapons that lock on to a jet's exhaust heat. Defense systems on U.S. fighter planes use sensors to detect the missile's heat, then activate flares designed to confuse the missile's guidance system by sending out waves of heat over a wide area.
But because commercial passenger airplanes ascend and descend so slowly, sending out heat from their engines all the while, they are vulnerable to targeting by such missiles for far longer than speeding jet fighters, Cordesman said. This makes it relatively impractical to use heat-based defenses on commercial craft.
Companies are exploring other technologies -- a Russian firm claims to have a "missile death ray," essentially a laser beam that blows up a missile before it reaches the aircraft -- but U.S. sources said the products are unproven and may be too large for anything but military applications.
Most shoulder-held missiles believed to have fallen into terrorist hands are versions of the Strela and are old enough to be highly unreliable, Cordesman said. Systems that protect against them are not effective against more modern missile guidance systems that, instead of locking onto a craft's exhaust heat, home in on its radar profile or flight trajectory.
"Everything in technology is a duel," Cordesman said. "Do you put these defense systems on airliners to deal with Strelas? If so, will it work against the newer missiles? Can terrorists get the newer missiles? The answer to that, like everything else about terrorism, is uncertain."
Another uncertainty is how many of the more modern and accurate U.S.-made Stinger missiles may have fallen into terrorist hands. According to a comprehensive 1999 study by Alan Kuperman, now at the School for Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, some of the estimated 900 to 1,200 Stingers delivered to Afghanistan in the 1980s were skimmed off en route through Pakistan, with some reportedly ending up on the black market. The CIA has reportedly spent $65 million on three buy-back programs to get the remaining missiles out of Afghanistan and off the black market. An agency spokesman Friday would not comment.
Israeli officials said Friday that the Arkia Charter Co. jet carrying 271 people that was fired on twice by ground-to-air missiles Thursday was apparently spared by bad aim from an old, inaccurate weapon. But civilian aircraft owned by Israel's flagship carrier, El Al, have been equipped with heat flares that act as decoys for the heat-seeking weapons.
"This is going to cause an enormous shudder throughout the [U.S.] government," said Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, in Washington.
Security analysts have been warning for years about the potential threat posed by terrorists toting shoulder-held missiles. Al-Qaida is believed to have fired them at planes in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the Tamil Tiger rebels used them to down a passenger aircraft in Sri Lanka in 1998.
"The airlines have always refused to consider putting aboard the defense measures that are necessary for reasons of cost," Benjamin said. "It's hard for me to see how they're going to avoid a big, big battle over this."
However, another CSIS terrorism expert, Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment at the Pentagon, said installing systems on commercial airlines to defend against attack by shoulder-held missiles is not likely to be either feasible or effective.
A spokesman for Boeing Commercial Airlines, Craig Martin, agreed that putting missile-defense technology aboard commercial aircraft would be neither cheap nor easy. Instead, he suggested that authorities focus on the underlying causes of the attacks, and on making such attacks unacceptable.
A U.S. General Accounting Office report released two days before the Kenya attack warned that the systems developed by the Pentagon to protect military aircraft from surface-to-air missiles also are unreliable.
"The services have already identified serious reliability problems with current self-protection systems on U.S. combat aircraft, including jammers, radar warning receivers and countermeasures dispensers," the GAO wrote in the report released this week. "Most of the current systems use older technology and have logistics support problems due to obsolescence."
The report also found significant problems with aircraft designed to jam the radar systems of air defenses, and with other craft that fire anti-radiation missiles to destroy air defenses.
"Over the past several years, the quantity and quality of the services' suppression equipment have declined while enemy air defense tactics and equipment have improved," the GAO warned.
The missiles that were believed to have been fired at the Israeli plane were the Soviet-made SA-7, also known by the Russian name Strela-2M. They are older and less accurate versions of the U.S.-made "Stinger" missiles, which the CIA supplied to the mujahedeen warriors fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The SA-7s were introduced in 1967, and first used by the Soviet-backed Egyptian forces against Israel. When U.S. relations with Egypt later improved, some of the missiles were sent to Germany, where U.S. troops trained with them.
"There are just thousands all over the world,'' said retired Army Major General Edward Akeson, a senior fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare. "Everybody's got them. They're cheap, and it takes only about a day to train a guy on the thing."
The SA-7s are heat-seeking weapons that lock on to a jet's exhaust heat. Defense systems on U.S. fighter planes use sensors to detect the missile's heat, then activate flares designed to confuse the missile's guidance system by sending out waves of heat over a wide area.
But because commercial passenger airplanes ascend and descend so slowly, sending out heat from their engines all the while, they are vulnerable to targeting by such missiles for far longer than speeding jet fighters, Cordesman said. This makes it relatively impractical to use heat-based defenses on commercial craft.
Companies are exploring other technologies -- a Russian firm claims to have a "missile death ray," essentially a laser beam that blows up a missile before it reaches the aircraft -- but U.S. sources said the products are unproven and may be too large for anything but military applications.
Most shoulder-held missiles believed to have fallen into terrorist hands are versions of the Strela and are old enough to be highly unreliable, Cordesman said. Systems that protect against them are not effective against more modern missile guidance systems that, instead of locking onto a craft's exhaust heat, home in on its radar profile or flight trajectory.
"Everything in technology is a duel," Cordesman said. "Do you put these defense systems on airliners to deal with Strelas? If so, will it work against the newer missiles? Can terrorists get the newer missiles? The answer to that, like everything else about terrorism, is uncertain."
Another uncertainty is how many of the more modern and accurate U.S.-made Stinger missiles may have fallen into terrorist hands. According to a comprehensive 1999 study by Alan Kuperman, now at the School for Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, some of the estimated 900 to 1,200 Stingers delivered to Afghanistan in the 1980s were skimmed off en route through Pakistan, with some reportedly ending up on the black market. The CIA has reportedly spent $65 million on three buy-back programs to get the remaining missiles out of Afghanistan and off the black market. An agency spokesman Friday would not comment.