President gives generals power to shoot down jets

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 27, 2001

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN, Colo. -- President Bush has authorized two mid level Air Force generals to order commercial airliners that threaten American cities shot down without checking first with him, a senior military officer said Wednesday.

The senior officer, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart of the Air Force, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said that such life-or-death decisions would be made by the generals only as a last resort when an attack was seconds away and there was not enough time for consultations with Eberhart, a four-star officer, or the president.

Vice President Dick Cheney revealed that in the hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush had ordered the downing of any passenger jets that imperiled Washington. But days after the Sept. 11 hijackings, Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved new rules of engagement that reflected the heightened concern over terrorist strikes and how to address them as swiftly as possible.

Before the attacks there were no formal rules on how the military should deal with an airliner hijacked over the United States, flown by what in essence are suicide bombers.

"If there's time, we'd go all the way to the president," said Eberhart, who also leads the U.S. Space Command. "Otherwise, the standing orders have been pushed down to the regional level."

Maj. Gen. Larry K. Arnold, a two-star officer at Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Fla., would have that authority for the continental United States. Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, a three-star officer at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, would have authority for Alaska. Hawaii is covered by the U.S. Pacific Command, headed by Adm. Dennis Blair.

Citing security concerns, Eberhart declined to sketch a course of events that would result in the decision to down a civilian airliner being made by someone other than the president.

The change in the rules of engagement regarding shooting down civilian aircraft is part of the rethinking of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as Norad, which was born in the Cold War and has always been oriented toward external threats. For more than 40 years in a bunker deep inside this granite peak, elite Norad specialists with early-warning radars have peered out over America's borders to alert the nation to an incoming enemy air strike.

But on Sept. 11, that vaunted defense turned out to be a modern Maginot line, blind to terrorist attacks originating in the United States.

"If somebody had called us and said we have a hijacking 100 miles out coming from Europe or South America, there are terrorists on board and they've taken over the airplane, that's a scenario we've practiced," said Eberhart, a Vietnam veteran. "We did not practice -- and I wish to God we had -- a scenario where this takes off out of Boston, and minutes later crashes into New York City. This is a whole new ballgame."

Since the attacks, commanders at Norad's nerve center in Cheyenne Mountain, have quickly turned their sights to new threats inside the country.

More than 100 fighter jets at 26 bases nationwide stand ready to take off on 10 minutes notice, up from 14 planes on comparable alert at seven bases the day of the attacks. F-15s and F-16s fly round-the-clock over Washington and New York, and randomly over dozens of other cities. Last Sunday, fighters flew over several National Football League games.

Since Sept. 11, there has been no such thing here as a routine in-flight problem. Any commercial airliner with a radio failure or a silent transponder is immediately suspect, and fighters have been scrambled several times in the last two weeks to investigate what turned out to be false alarms.

"Everyone is very twitchy right now," said Brig. Gen. J.D. Hunter, a Canadian Air Force officer who is vice commander of the mountain's operations center.

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