On Sunday, December 22, a US Navy guided-missile cruiser, the USS Gettysburg, mistakenly shot down an American fighter jet over the Red Sea. This was not the first incident of friendly fire by the U.S. Navy, nor the most tragic.
On Sunday morning, July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser in the Persian Gulf, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR 655. Captain Will Rogers III and his crew had mistaken the ascending passenger jet with 290 people on board for a descending Iranian F-14, a fighter plane.
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Stuff happens. Mistakes are made. Although not eager to share the truth, the U.S. Navy eventually had to fess up under media pressure. Four years after the Vincennes incident, in July 1992, Newsweek teamed up with ABC News’s “Nightline” to produce an exhaustive exposé on the accidental shootdown and its subsequent cover-up. They called it “Sea of Lies.”
Newsweek’s John Barry and Roger Charles reported that the $400 million Aegis system was capable of tracking every aircraft within three hundred miles and shooting them down. The weakness of the system was its complexity, especially when managed by people with little experience in high-pressure situations.
“Some experts,” observed the reporters, “question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them.”
All that the media learned about the Vincennes incident, they chose to forget on July 17, 1996. This was the day TWA Flight 800, a 747 bound for Paris out of New York’s JFK airport was blown out of the sky ten miles south of the Hamptons on Long Island.
According to the FBI, three submarines — the USS Wyoming, the USS Trepang, and the USS Albuquerque — were in the “immediate vicinity of the crash site.” So too, said the FBI, were an Aegis cruiser and a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion.
The P-3, in fact, just happened to be flying about seven thousand feet above TWA 800 when the plane was destroyed, killing all 230 people on board. Were there a drone or target missile in the mix — witnesses said there was — the U.S. Navy would have had all the “combatants” needed for a Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) missile test.
In 1996, the Navy was in the process of introducing this enormously complex system. The CEC was created to integrate the information coming from each of the combatant’s sensors — range, bearing, elevation, Doppler updates etc.—and feed the integrated picture back to the individual combatants.
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In the CEC live-fire tests, which began as early as 1994 in Puerto Rico, drones played the role of “unknown assumed enemy.” The P-3’s role was to relay data among the various units involved. In July 1996, this information was not classified. If curious, the FBI — or the media — could have reviewed a comprehensive article in the November 1995 John Hopkins APL Technical Digest titled simply, “The Cooperative Engagement Capability.”
One color illustration captured an actual test off the Virginia coast in 1994 when the various ships in the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower battlegroup successfully cued and tracked a tactical ballistic missile. In the middle of the illustration, relaying information among the vessels, was the P-3. The P-3 should have given the game away.
The authorities could explain away the hundreds of missile sightings on July 17, the radar track of a missile, the photo of a drone, the photo of a smoke trail, the missile sightings on July 12 and July 7, even the location of ships and submarines. There was no denying, however, that right in the middle of the mix, exactly where one would expect to find a surveillance aircraft in a missile test, was the P-3.
