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H. Thomas Hayden
recently concluded over 35 years of service,
which included the Agency for International
Development, the Marine Corps, defense industry
and the Pentagon. His specialties are Intelligence,
Counterinsurgency Operations, Counter-terrorism,
and Joint Concepts Development and Experimentation.
His Marine Corps assignments have included
command of two separate battalions; AC/S G-2,
4th MARDIV & AC/S G-2 FMFEurope; Branch Head,
HQMC, Special Operations and Low Intensity
Conflict (SO/LIC); Special Assistant to the
Assistant Secretary of Defense for SO/LIC;
and, Senior Program Analysts at HQMC with
the Joint Staff and DoD at the Pentagon. Overseas
assignments included Vietnam, Japan & Okinawa,
Europe, Central America, Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait, Somalia, Singapore, Philippines, and
Colombia. He has an MBA (Pepperdine) and an
MA in International Relations (University
of Southern California). He has written two
books and is working on a third.
Thomas
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May 12 , 2005
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Overreaction is the only word that explains the evacuation of the nation's capitol buildings last Wednesday, May 11, 2005.
Who made such a wild decision? The only thing that comes to my mind is that we must have a bunch of “cowboys” playing at homeland security and not real professionals who can recognize a real danger from a mistake.
The Cessna 150 airplane forced down by U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets and an “armed helicopter” were later found to be piloted by a licensed pilot and a student pilot who had “strayed” into the restricted Washington, D.C. capitol region. The plane is smaller than a VW, the two pilots have barely enough room for the two of them, and there is NO room for carrying any volume of anything. The plane can fly about 90 miles an hour in a dive.
Even if the Cessna 150 was packed with TNT, the worst damage it could have done, if flown into the Capitol building, was blow out one office space. The back seat of your basic Ford or Chevy has more room.
The USA TODAY called it a “15-minute frenzy in D.C.” My local newspaper called it: “Small plane sets off big reaction in Washington.”
Did you see the people running in the streets, some in panic?
That is what terrorists want to do -- cause panic.
What a lesson for the terrorists. They must now think that all they need is to fly a half-dozen small Cessna 150s or 152s toward Washington, D. C. and the city will panic -- while a real big airplane loaded with high explosives or Nuke/Chem/Bio weapons waits for people in the streets to gather near Capitol Hill.
Some kind of Federal Aviation Administration flight rules, following 9/11, are no doubt necessary. The FAA rules now stand that if an airplane comes within 23 miles of the three major Washington, D.C. airports, it must be identified. No private airplane can come within 15.75 miles of the city's center.
This seems a little ridiculous to me. If a 737 flying at 250-350 miles per hour about to land at Washington National, now Ronald Reagan Airport, decides to turn into the Capitol, it will take less than one minute to hit the building.
You do the math: if a 737 is flying at 450 miles an hour just outside the 23-mile limit for FAA flight restrictions, how long will it take to travel to the White House or the Capitol?
No need to talk about Final Protective Fires, but somebody had better be more concerned at knocking down an airplane over the World War II Memorial than scrambling F-16s for a Cessna 150 that is just within the 23-mile limit.
If this overreaction to the Cessna 150 wasn't bad enough, just the day before this incident we learned that unnamed “White House” officials overruled former Secretary Tom Ridge about raising the alert warnings.
Who among us really knows all the color codes and what we are suppose to do? Is there “brown” in the color code or is that just the color of the pants of Homeland Security officials who have to bow to politics to keep the public in a Chicken Little status.
Some may be to young to remember the comic strip called Little Abner, but Chicken Little was always running around yelling, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.”
There must be over 10,000,000 current or former U.S. military personnel who have been trained in the Alpha codes for alert status. It is ThreatCon Delta through Alpha. This means that at least a significant portion of the population will know what ThreatCon Delta means even if the vast majority of us do not know the differences between Code Orange and Code Red.
Mr. Secretary at Department of Homeland Security, please make the national threat alert system similar to the Department of Defense so some of us will know what in the blazes is going on.
Evacuation of the Capitol, White House and other federal buildings must have been a real belly laugh at the F-16 pilots' squadron ready room.
Hey jet jockey: how many Cessna 150s have you shot down today?
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© 2005 H. Thomas Hayden. All opinions
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