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Banned
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Originally Posted by Seaver
I think we handled ourselves amazingly well. Contrary to Host's insistence that Bush wants another war, we've ran into similar situation before.
The Navy taught us on multiple occasions there is a balance (especially with Iran) in self defense and caution in confusion. Last time a similar incident happened ended in many wounded and a heavily damaged ship (USS Cole).
The time before is a little less known. The US fleet had an incoming aircraft with is IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) turned off, which in itself is considered a hostile act.....
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Seaver, the Iranian airliner shot down by the US Navy's Vincennes in the Persian Gulf in 1988, was not observed with it's IFF "turned off". Signals returned to the Vincennes were "confusing", dual signals, one civilian, one from an Iranian F-14, as it there were two transponders on board the airliner. There was even speculation that this was because the airliner ferried Iranian troops to military airfields and was equipped with a second, military transponder to obtain landing clearances fron military control towers, but that speculation was not embraced in the investigation....
Quote:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.74.html
Aegis, Vincennes, and the Iranian Airbus (report on a Matt Jaffe talk)
Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Fri, 26 May 1989 13:44:01 PDT
In a keynote talk for the 5th International Workshop on Software
Specification and Design in Pittsburgh, 20-21 May 1989, I cited the case of
the Aegis' role in the Vincennes' shootdown of an Iranian Airbus as an
example of a system in which the design of the user interface was critical.
Matt Jaffe (Jaffe@ics.uci.edu) responded with some comments on the Aegis user
interface -- in whose design he had played a part while at RCA -- after which
he was invited to gave an impromptu talk on his experience to the workshop.
As you may recall, the Iranian Airbus was shot down by the Vincennes, although
it was on schedule, on course, and apparently flying completely normally.
There was confusion between the commercial plane being tracked and an observed
IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) squawk from a fighter plane. The altitude
information (Z) was not displayed on the main screens, but only in one of
various subtables that had to be called up on a smaller screen. There was no
indication of rate of change of altitude (Z', or "Z-dot"), not even a ternary
choice among ascending, cruising, or descending. Matt took the view that the
user interface could not have done much differently, because of intrinsic
limitations on
1. the reliability and/or accuracy of the underlying data,
2. the physical and logical characteristics of the display devices
(alphanumeric raster-scan screens with limited space)
3. and the ability of human operators to interpret marginal
data in the high volume and high stress environment.
This is an attempt to summarize Matt's main points:
Mode II codes (military use only) cannot be conclusive in determining friend
or foe because they can be spoofed by a non-friendly aircraft, as can the
civilian use Modes I and III. In this particular case, the military
aircraft supplied by the US to Iran almost certainly included Mode II
transponders. Note some subtle points here. IFF is to determine the
identity of friendly aircraft, not the military capability of a non-friend.
In this tragedy, the problem was not in discriminating between friends and
all others but between an Iranian F-14 and an Iranian airliner. The
identification as Iranian was correct (and presumably not based on IFF but on
point of origin). A classification of a Mode II code as belonging to an
Iranian military aircraft would seem reasonable given that the airfield from
which the aircraft departed was a joint use airport (both civilian and
military). What may have happened was that the airliner taxied near enough
to an F-14 on the ground as to preclude the system from recognizing that
there were in fact TWO aircraft. (ANY sensor has some resolution limits.)
Once the airliner was airborne, its lack of further mode II activity would
not preclude the display of the old Mode II code. Aircraft may fail to
respond to an IFF interrogation (of any code) for a variety of reasons and
yet operators (both civil and military) want to have the last recieved code
remain displayed.
Thus the entire mechanism contains potential ambiguities. <h3>Providing a
recency field for Mode II squawks would probably have been a good idea,
display space and operator cognitive limits permitting. (At that time and
to date, Matt indicated that he knew of no system that provided the age of
last squawk; nor did the Navy mention the possibility. Scary?)</h3>
The altitude readings are generally unreliable. Thus, the Z' calculations --
irrespective of how they were done -- would be suspect, and subject to
possible misinterpretation. Nevertheless, some crude up-down-same field
might have been useful.
Uncertain or unreliable information will always be a major problem in any
safety-critical system.
From the Navy's point of view, the Captain of the Vincennes did the right
thing -- based on what he knew.
No standard Navy shipborad systems could have done the discrimination
automatically. No equipment necessary for the Vincennes mission could have
prevented a manual decision from being difficult, nerve-wracking, and
error-prone.
The situation was basically untenable in the first place, with hostile
aircraft and commercial airliners closely interwoven within an area of great
unrest.
[The Stark Captain had said earlier that they had not realized the
limitations of the combat system in that kind of an environment. PGN]
Matt made the appropriate disclaimers -- that his knowledge is not current,
that his opinions were his own, etc. And his audience was generally impressed
with the care with which he had thought out the issues. All in all, this case
is of great importance, and bears close consideration. There are many lessons
to be learned, some technological and some nontechnological -- many of the
latter relating to the intrinsic limitations of trusting the technology,
especially under adverse circumstances. PGN
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Seaver, your understanding of the "off" status of the IFF transponder signal of the Iranian airliner is wrong:
Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...es+transponder
November 18, 1988
Witness to Iran Flight 655
By LES ASPIN; LES ASPIN, DEMOCRAT OF WISCONSIN, IS CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE.
LEAD: The lengthy discussion of the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the Navy cruiser Vincennes has missed one fascinating development: for the first time, we have an electronic recording of a naval clash. The computerized Aegis defensive system -whatever its military merits - has revolutionized our ability to piece together what has happened.
The lengthy discussion of the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the Navy cruiser Vincennes has missed one fascinating development: for the first time, we have an electronic recording of a naval clash. The computerized Aegis defensive system -whatever its military merits - has revolutionized our ability to piece together what has happened. Without it, the Navy's investigation of the tragic incident might well have reached radically different conclusions.
With data tapes from the Vincennes, investigators are able to recreate the digital displays the crew saw that day. Like Sunday afternoon football, the action can be played back in real time or slow motion. You can see every move made at every one of the 17 consoles in the command information center. You know precisely what happened and the order in which events occurred.
Reporters, detectives, criminal lawyers and others who have tried to recreate a moment of trauma by interviewing witnesses know how unreliable such accounts can be. The Vincennes tapes, however, bring this fact of life into vivid focus. For some of the facts, the memory of every witness was corrected.
The report of the Navy investigation summarizes the testimony of the crew and inserts the data obtained from the tapes in italics. Here is one part of the report:
'' [ One crewman ] observed TN 4131 (the Iranian airliner) at 445 knots at an altitude of 7,800 feet and descending during engagement. He recalled it being a minute from [ missile ] launch. USS Vincennes's system information showed TN 4131 at an altitude of 12,000 feet, ascending and at 380 knots.''
The interviews show that a few crewmen on the U.S.S. Sides, operating several miles away, recalled that the Iranian plane was ascending. But several crewmen from the Vincennes told investigators they either saw on the computer or heard another crewman state that the plane was descending. Given that more people recalled the plane descending, that the crew on the Sides was not as intently focused on the plane as was the Vincennes's crew, and that the Sides was equipped with a less sophisticated radar, the logical conclusion from the interviews would have been that the plane was descending.
The same is true of another factual issue in the investigation: Was the Iranian airliner's radio transponder ''squawking'' on Mode II, used only by military aircraft, and giving a code that was previously used by Iranian F-14 fighters? The Sides's crew had no memory of a Mode II transmission, but numerous crewmen on the Vincennes recalled it differrently.
We know from the tapes that nine of the consoles in the command information center were monitoring the airliner. Every one showed a Mode III - used by both military and civilian aircraft - coming from the aproaching plane. <h3>No consoles showed a Mode II squawk. But that's not what the crew recalls.</h3>
Again, without the Aegis tapes, the investigation probably would have concluded that the plane was military, since many Vincennes consoles were monitoring the flight and the crew remembered a Mode II squawk.
Whether the aircraft was ascending and what it was squawking were not the only facts at issue. But they received a great deal of attention and were crucial to public understanding.
There's an irony here. Critics of the Aegis system say the Vincennes was the wrong ship for a mission in the Persian Gulf. They blame the system for causing the captain to think he was threatened and therefore enticing him into shooting.
Yet, Aegis provides records demonstrating that its electronics never said the airplane was descending toward the Vincennes or squawking a military signal. Without Aegis, we would undoubtedly be reading for years to come articles about the great Iranian kamikaze plot.
This may also have an impact on the public attitude toward payments to the survivors of the people who were killed on the flight...
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jorgelito
Looks like the Iranian boats were provocative and reckless. Excellent discipline on the US Navy's part though.
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If you have experience with CB channel 19, during the late '70's CB radio fad, and, if you read the Jan. 11, Washington Post reporting below, about initial US Navy reaction the "white boxes" dropped in the water during "the incident", and the excerpt of the NY Times, Jan. 15 AP report at the bottom of this post, you may have some idea why I believe it is appropriate to demand that President Bush and Defense Secretary Gate resign from their offices.
How many more Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman "stories", and pentagon Rendon and Lincoln Group disinformation "Op's, and right wing, DOD "Bloggers Roundtables", must be documented in posts in this forum, before the rest of you "get it", and resent it enough to join me in calling for these resignations.
Is it a waste of tax payer funds to employ someone at the Inteligence "Czar's" office to provide PDB's to Bush, since he has "his own way" of making intelligence "estimates" contradicting the real fucking ones?
Most troubling, what happened this month, is nothing new:
How many more must die, lose limbs, suffer PTSD, and how much deeper must we sink our US treasury in debt, before you stop believing, reacting to, and advocating for more aggression, based on the accumulated, and still ongoing deliverance of heaps of fresh and stale bullshit coming from this president and his appointees? Enough, already:
Quote:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp
January 10, 2008, 9:40 am
Degrees of Confidence on U.S.-Iran Naval Incident
By Mike Nizza
Tags: foreign affairs, iran, military, united states
....Update, 5:48 p.m. At a news conference this afternoon, a reporter asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates about his level of “confidence in the U.S. military version” of the incident. He was unequivocal:
I have no question whatsoever about the report on this incident from the captains of the ships and also from the video itself.
***
Earlier on Wednesday, a reader posted a comment on The Lede claiming to be a former Navy officer with experience in the Strait of Hormuz <a href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/tapes-to-answer-doubts-on-confrontation-with-iran/#comment-281887">and offering an explanation</a> for how easily a mistake could have been made by Navy personnel trying to sift through radio transmissions filled with chatter:
All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.
But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)
On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.
The commenter, who signed his posting “SWO officer,” went on to say, “I hope everybody exercises great caution here and doesn’t jump to conclusions.”
President Bush was criticized today for doing the opposite. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010903254.html?hpid=topnews">According to The Washington Post</a>, “some diplomatic and military officials in Washington” said that Mr. Bush’s statements on arriving in Israel Wednesday “inflated the significance of the brief incident” in the strait.
In his remarks, Mr. Bush warned Iran that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”
Meanwhile, the video images that were released by the Pentagon came in for some more contradiction from Iran, which has contended that the United States was exaggerating a workaday encounter between two naval powers in the Persian Gulf: A competing video purporting to show Sunday’s incident from the Iranian side was broadcast today on Iranian television.
Here is how the semiofficial <a href="http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8610200332">Fars News Agency described it</a>:
The four-minute video showed an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the U.S. vessels and state their purpose.
“Coalition warship number 73 this is an Iranian patrol,” the Iranian commander is heard to say in good English.
“This is coalition warship number 73. I am operating in international waters,” comes the reply.
That would seem to be a much less aggressive interaction between the American and Iranian forces, of course. But the timing of the recording could not be confirmed, and as Iran itself has said, these types of exchanges happen all the time.
Agence France-Presse noted one way that Iran’s video seemed to match up with the United States account of the encounter: <a href="http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gL5kSNevHghneEm7ryLLGsFDMnfA">all three U.S. vessels</a> involved in the incident are seen in the video.
But The Associated Press was <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hiAbsRG9E-8-NncKn6AqbyYZd09QD8U30PHO1">skeptical</a>, saying that “the short clip likely did not show Sunday’s entire encounter.”
Update, 11:37 a.m. The Iranian video is now online.
A reader using the name Hamid Pasha sent The Lede a link to an English-language Iranian web site, <a href="http://www.presstv.com/aboutus.aspx">PressTV.com</a>, that has <a href="http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=38190§ionid=351020101">posted the Iranian video</a>.
The clip is a bit over 5 minutes long. The first few minutes are views of coalition warships shot from smaller boats (if you thought the motorboats seemed to be moving fast in the American video, wait until you see the bow waves on the warships). In the latter portion, we see an Iranian on the boat using a microphone handset to hail “coalition warship 73″ by radio, in fairly clear but accented English, and we hear responses in an American voice.
The video clearly covers only part of an encounter — perhaps the encounter, though there’s no obvious way a layman would be able to know — and it cuts off abruptly after the American voice is heard answering several inquiries from the Iranian by saying simply that the coalition ship is operating in international waters. We don’t see or hear what happened next.
Patrick J. Lyons contributed to this post.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...103730_pf.html
Objects From Iranian Boats Posed No Threat, Navy Says
By Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 12, 2008; A11
The small, boxlike objects dropped in the water by Iranian boats as they approached U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday posed no threat to the American vessels, U.S. officials said yesterday, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the incident reflects Iran's new tactics of asymmetric warfare.
<h3>After passing the white objects, commanders on the USS Port Royal and its accompanying destroyer and frigate decided there was so little danger from the objects that they did not bother to radio other ships to warn them, the officials said.</h3>
"The concern was that there was a boat in front of them putting these objects in the path of our ships. When they passed, the ships saw that they were floating and light, that they were not heavy or something that would have caused damage," such as a mine, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, a spokeswoman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Gulf.
But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, said the incident reflects Iran's shift to small craft that can aggressively menace larger naval vessels. "It's clearly strategically where the Iranian military has gone," Mullen said. The United States has "been concerned for years about the threat of mining those straits."
Although Mullen described last weekend's incident, in which five small Iranian speedboats approached three U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz, as the most "provocative and dramatic" encounter he could recall in the area, the Navy announced a few hours later that two other incidents occurred last month in which its ships had close calls with Iranian speedboats. On Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island fired warning shots when a single Iranian boat came within 500 yards of it in the strait. On Dec. 22, the USS Carr emitted warning blasts as three Iranian vessels sped close by in the same area, a Navy official said.
Despite five days of questions about the pattern of encounters in the Gulf, this is the first time the Pentagon has mentioned the December events. At a briefing Monday, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff said U.S. and Revolutionary Guard naval units come across each other "regularly."
"For the most part, those interactions are correct. We are familiar with their presence; they're familiar with ours. So, I think in the time I've been here, I've seen things that are a concern, and then there's periods of time -- long periods of time -- where there's not as much going on," Cosgriff told reporters.
Since the incident on Sunday, the United States has emphasized its concern about a new level of Iranian military sophistication. "The incident ought to remind us all just how real is the threat posed by Iran and just how ready we are to meet that threat if it comes to it," Mullen told reporters yesterday.
The Pentagon released the full 36-minute video of the encounter yesterday. Additional close-ups on the footage show the Iranian speedboats zipping around the U.S. warships provocatively. None of the boats appears to have more than a four-man crew, each wearing an orange lifesaving vest. None of the boats appears to have any mounted weapons.
The USS Port Royal, an Aegis cruiser, has a crew of about 360 and carries missile launchers, torpedoes and artillery. The USS Hopper, a guided-missile destroyer, has a crew of about 350 and is armed with anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes and artillery. The USS Ingraham, a frigate, has a crew of about 215 and carries torpedoes, artillery and two helicopters. The video shows a U.S. helicopter flying over the Iranian boats.
The Navy is sensitive about small boats because of the 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen, which resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors.
Questions remain about the verbal threat picked up on a common maritime radio channel. Pentagon officials acknowledged that they will probably not be able to determine the origin of the voice that threatened to "explode" an unspecified target, although a forensic examination has begun to try to determine the accent of the speaker and other details....
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Quote:
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/0..._radio_080111/
‘Filipino Monkey’ behind threats?
By Andrew Scutro and David Brown - Staff writers
Posted : Sunday Jan 13, 2008 15:38:29 EST
....Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.
“We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It could have been a shore station.”
While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.
See the Pentagon’s version of the video
<a href="http://www.militarytimes.com/multimedia/video/080108_iran_ships">A link to the Iranian version (click the camera icon)</a>
“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.
Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. <h3>He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted.</h3>
Further, there’s none of the background noise in the audio released by the U.S. that would have been picked up by a radio handset in an open boat.
So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.
Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment....
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/worl...es&oref=slogin
WGulf Prankster at Issue in Iran Dispute
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 15, 2008
....The questions raised in the Navy Times on Sunday also come at a sensitive time for Washington as President Bush visits Gulf nations and presses for greater unity against Iran's attempt to expand its influence in the region.
Seagoing exchanges between U.S. and Iranian vessels are not uncommon in the crowded Gulf shipping lanes, especially near the Strait of Hormuz where Iran's coastline is within miles of international waters.
Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said there had been two or three similar incidents over the past year, but ''maybe not quite as dramatic'' as the Jan. 6 confrontation. <h3>None had been publicized until the eve of Bush's trip to the region, even though in one, in December, a U.S. ship actually fired warning shots toward an Iranian boat......</h3>
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Last edited by host; 01-15-2008 at 12:16 AM..
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