Although Chinooks used for Special Forces operations are reported to carry anti-missile technology, a U.S. Army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Salon that the National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopter shot down on Sunday was unprotected. The chopper was being used to ferry at least 36 troops from Fort Carson, Colorado’s, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to the main U.S. military base in Baghdad; from there, they were to proceed to Kuwait City, where they would have boarded one of two daily commercial airliners that the Pentagon has hired to bring troops home for a two-week break from the Iraqi war zone.

Sixteen troops died and 20 were seriously injured when the helicopter exploded and crashed in flames near Fallujah, a center of loyalty to fallen dictator Saddam Hussein.

Though the U.S. troops aboard the Chinook were probably thrilled to be taking a leave from the war, their entire route home would have been vulnerable. Like the downed helicopter, the commercial jets that would have flown them out of Kuwait lack expensive anti-missile technology. These airliners have been chartered to transport nearly 500 troops per day to Frankfurt, Germany, and then on to either Baltimore, Atlanta, or Dallas/Fort Worth. Similar commercial craft are used to ferry about 90 percent of the U.S. troops that go into and out of Iraq. Critics inside and outside the U.S. military have warned for months that the big, lumbering jets are obvious targets for Iraqi insurgents who are trying to kill American troops and drive the United States out of Iraq and the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon proposed a $25 million program to begin equipping the commercial airliners used for troop transport with advanced technology to protect them from the shoulder-fired missiles. But when the Bush administration did nothing to win approval of the measure, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives slashed the request to $3 million, far short of the sum needed to expedite wartime protection of the aircraft.

“[Sunday's] tragic events in Iraq are a reminder of the reality of the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told Salon. “These weapons are easy to acquire, easy to use, and have now become a weapon of choice among terrorists. Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld acknowledged as much [Sunday] morning, yet we aren’t doing enough to protect troops transported on civilian aircraft and we aren’t doing anything to protect civilians.”

In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the spread of the missiles has alarmed military brass, airline security experts and some elected officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide; al-Qaida operatives have them, security experts say, and so do other terror organizations. Late last year, suspected Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombasa, Kenya, only narrowly missing the target. Over the past 20 years, over half of all combat aircraft lost in global conflicts have been shot down by shoulder-fired missiles.

The danger from shoulder fired-missiles in the Persian Gulf region is well-known. Last year, terrorists launched an attack just outside a Saudi Arabian air base, and over the summer, Saudi officials captured a large cache of shoulder-fired missiles. From time to time, U.S. military officials have turned up buried caches of missiles in occupied Iraq. Still, despite capturing many shoulder-fired missiles, Saddam acquired so many of the portable missile systems that the Iraqi resistance is still well-armed.

“The resistance has been targeting aircraft at Baghdad Airport for several months,” says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “I have heard of at least 26 SAMs fired at aircraft. The routine for aircraft landing or taking off at the airport has included countermeasures against the SAMs.”

On Sunday, in the aftermath of the Chinook take-down, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the shoulder-fired missile arsenal held by the Iraqi resistance. His reply: “Enormous numbers. Enormous numbers … Oh, have to be more than hundreds. There are weapons caches all over that country. They were using schools, hospitals, mosques to hide weapons. Think of it, in Bosnia, in the last six months, they have found 40 tons of weapons in a country that we’ve occupied for six years.”

Israel, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of a handful of congressional experts on the missile threat who have pressed, without success, for measures to protect military and U.S. civilian aircraft from the global proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles. But he’s baffled that President Bush hasn’t done more to protect the troops. Along with Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Israel sponsored a bill to equip all commercial airliners in the U.S. with anti-missile systems — an effort that could cost up to $15 billion, by some estimates. Due in large part to administration opposition, that bill died on Capitol Hill.

As part of the debate surrounding the president’s request for $87 billion to fund the ongoing military operations and reconstruction in Iraq, Israel and Boxer tried — unsuccessfully — to obtain financing to protect the 300 commercial jets that the Pentagon most often uses to transport our military forces within the United States and overseas.

Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk that shoulder-fired missiles pose to U.S. airliners and, by extension, to the U.S. economy. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.

When the Bush administration this year allowed the much more modest $25 million measure to protect troop-transport craft to wither, some military officials were outraged. Though Bush portrays himself as a firm ally of men and women on the front lines, the critics said, he was leaving them vulnerable. “I am appalled,” one Defense Department official told Salon earlier this year, asking to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”

The outcome shocked many in the Defense Department and, critics said, it clearly could leave troops vulnerable. “I am appalled,” said one Defense Department official who asked to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”

The $25 million measure was approved by the U.S. Senate, but slashed to $3 million in the powerful House Appropriations Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, a Florida Republican. The lower sum, part of the proposed $400 billion defense budget for 2004, was approved in negotiations between the two chambers and is all but certain to be in the budget sent for approval to the president.

No president in recent memory has been a fiercer ally of men and women in uniform. “We will not cut corners when it comes to the defense of our great land,” Bush said last year. Even Ronald Reagan, one of the most forceful proponents of a strong military ever to inhabit the White House, never donned a flight suit and flew onto the deck of an aircraft carrier aboard a Navy plane. But this week, officials said, the Bush administration offered no support to protect the troop-transport planes.

“The administration never made the case for why it needed the money,” said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. “It was never clear what they were going to do with the money.” An aide to a Republican senator, who asked to remain anonymous, said the full funding would have been approved if Bush had pressed for it. “If the president says that something is important, he will get the funding from this Congress,” the aide said. “All he has to do is ask.”

In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles has alarmed airline security officials and many congressional officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide, and they are known to be in the hands of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. Late last year, suspected al-Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombassa, Kenya, but the missile narrowly missed its target. Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk, and some have suggested it would cost around $15 billion to equip 5,000 U.S. jetliners with anti-missile technology. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.

Contrary to the images portrayed in movies, most combat troops and other military personnel do not cram into the back of military transport planes when deploying around the world. Like the rest of us, they usually fly in commercial jets both within the United States and abroad.

Through the Civilian Reserve Aviation Fleet program, the Defense Department contracts with commercial airlines to provide jets and air crews during times of crisis. In return for participating in the program, airlines are guaranteed peacetime business with the Defense Department. The reserve aviation fleet “forms the majority of the DoD’s passenger airlift capability,” according to Navy Capt. Stephen Honda, spokesman for the Pentagon unit responsible for airlifting military personnel and equipment. By some estimates, over 90 percent of the military personnel moved by the Defense Department are transported on aircraft operated by CRAF carriers. And like every other commercial airliner in this country, these airliners are completely unprotected from the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.

But military craft flying in and out of Baghdad have been targeted at least three times since May by anti-U.S. forces with shoulder-launched missiles. All of those aircraft likely had sophisticated anti-missile countermeasures, and all of the shots missed their targets. Still, the threat of shoulder-fired missiles remains so great in Iraq that the Baghdad airport has remained closed to all but essential military and aid aircraft. That is the risk facing the planes that would ferry up to 20,000 reserves and National Guard troops to the Iraqi capital if Rumsfeld goes ahead with the call-up.

Pentagon documents show that shoulder-fired missiles are the single greatest killer of military aircraft, accounting for well over 50 percent of all combat losses in recent decades. Additionally, Pentagon documents show that these missiles have successfully hit 41 civilian aircraft and destroyed at least 30 of these. In the process, about 1,000 passengers and crew have been lost. Air Force Gen. John W. Handy, head of the U.S. Transportation Command, recently said that the danger posed by shoulder-fired missiles “is perhaps the greatest threat that we face anywhere in the world, and the proliferation of MANPADS is well documented.”

Some in Congress are deeply concerned about the elimination of funding to begin protecting the troop-transport aircraft. U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and outspoken proponent of federal spending to protect commercial jetliners, blasted the Bush administration in an interview this week for failing to take care of troop-transport planes. “Out of a $400 billion defense budget, $3 million is completely inadequate, particularly against thousands of shoulder-fired missiles in the hands of terrorists including al-Qaida,” Israel said. “We have simply got to stop shortchanging this glaring threat to American airplanes.”

According to Pentagon budget documents obtained by Salon, the missile defense program for aircraft in the military reserve program would have leapfrogged the lethargic anti-missile efforts currently gearing up at the Department of Homeland Security. In its first year, the Defense Department program would have measured the “heat signatures” of the commercial airliners used to transport troops, and then begun devising anti-missile measures to protect those planes. Measuring the heat signatures is a critical step, since shoulder-fired missiles are “heat seekers” and home in on the infrared radiation given off by aircraft. Currently, the DHS has no plans to conduct similar measurement efforts.

With $3 million, defense officials will be able to record those heat signatures, but little work on missile-jamming equipment will be possible unless money can be found elsewhere in the Pentagon budget.

Should terrorists begin targeting the troop-transport aircraft, there likely will be widespread political and economic effects. “The ability to rapidly deploy military force across the globe is a key element of American power and influence in the world and helps to create the stability and security that is the basis for investment and trade on which the prosperity of the U.S. and others depend,” says James Bodner, former undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration.

A research study currently underway at the RAND Institute estimates that the direct cost of one plane’s being shot down – for the loss of life and the cost of the aircraft — would be $1 billion. The ripple effect of such a loss would likely be enormous, as people reassess the wisdom of traveling by air.

The military has taken a multi-pronged approach to protecting its combat jets and the Air Force’s large transport aircraft. It uses intelligence to uncover threats, conducts missions to capture shoulder-fired missiles from terrorists and other groups, and has installed sophisticated systems on its aircraft to jam attacking missiles and direct them away from the targeted aircraft. As a backup, since no electronic countermeasures system is 100 percent effective, the military also designs its aircraft to be able to withstand the detonation of a shoulder-fired missile warhead.

Shortly after the failed missile attack in Kenya last year, the administration formed an interagency task force to seek solutions to the shoulder-fired missile threat. Soon, however, that effort was being criticized for focusing on window-dressing solutions that cost little — and provide little protection. Confronted by congressional pressure, the administration pledged to put together a plan for combating terrorist missile attacks.

In March, Transportation Security Administration head Adm. James Loy seemed to call for an expedited push to address the threat. Speaking to CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” he said, “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come but with weeks of study to come.” Still, the administration failed to act. During congressional deliberations leading up to the vote to fund ongoing operations in Iraq, Congress ordered the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a plan to counter the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.

The department delivered a report in May that proposed spending $2 million this year to set up an administrative office to coordinate the anti-missile activities and up to $60 million next year. The White House, however, failed to seek any funding to implement the plan. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security began a much-hyped program that was supposed to have identified one or two promising technologies before the end of this month. Instead, the program petered out. In recent days a department official told Salon that the program “was never going to solve the problem [because] it lacked the necessary funding.” Still, despite the department’s dismal track record on this issue, the official insisted that a new Homeland Security program — funded in the first year with $60 million that the Congress appropriated after the White House failed to request any funding at all to address the threat — will begin the process of finding a solution. In early October, the Homeland Security officials will brief defense contractors on its goals and requirements for a missile countermeasures system for use on commercial airliners. But the program won’t yield significant progress before 2006.

“We’re heading out on a long, slow jog, when a faster pace is warranted,” says Israel. “I am convinced that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles to our commercial airplanes is serious enough to merit significantly more energy and resources.”

In the meantime, U.S. troops are being transported around the globe on aircraft that are unable to ward off a missile attack and have not been designed to take a missile hit. For the families of the troops about to be called up and sent to Iraq, this must be a chilling proposition.

“The fact that we’re able to sting this guy,” the president said, “is a pretty good example of what we’re doing in order to protect the American people.”

Within days, however, a more critical view began to emerge among top national-security experts: The arrest of Lakhani and two alleged accomplices was welcome, yes, but its significance was being dramatically overstated by an administration on the defensive over its failure to capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the critics’ line of reasoning, the administration was exaggerating the significance of the Lakhani arrest just as it had the arrests last year of alleged “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla and the Lackawanna Six “sleeper cell” in New York. While officials were tipping off reporters in advance of the bust, they complained, the administration was continuing to resist substantive — and expensive — measures to protect commercial jets.

A terrorist who wants a shoulder-fired missile is not going to go to someone like Lakhani to buy one, says Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “This was not a terrorist incident,” he told Salon. “It did not involve the penetration of a plot or terrorist cell.” He added: “This was a truly ludicrous situation … hyped in advance by a Justice Department anxious to show success.”

“This is not a huge victory in the War on Terror,” agrees Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “This just shows that we can sting a guy, not a bad thing, but it does not make it harder for al-Qaida or other terrorists to get these weapons.”

Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council director for European affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offers a blunt assessment of the arrest: “All hype.” Daalder praises the Bush administration’s success in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and killing or arresting numerous top al-Qaida leaders overseas, but he sees the administration’s domestic approach as flawed.

“The administration has made homeland security a political issue. The president consistently uses terror for political gain,” he says. “[U.S. Attorney General] John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is all about hype and not reality.”

Reports from the Department of Defense and other government agencies show that shoulder-fired missiles have hit at least 43 civil aircraft since the 1970s. Of these, 30 aircraft — 69 percent of the total — were shot down, leaving more than 900 air travelers dead. In an investigative report last year, Salon found that dozens of countries have produced hundreds of thousands of the shoulder-launched missiles, and that many of them have found their way to the black market. Jane’s Intelligence Review reported in 2001 that the missiles are already in the hands of up to 27 terrorist groups.

And it seems certain that al-Qaida is among them. A Pentagon spokesman told Salon last year that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had captured 5,592 shoulder-fired missiles during operations to destroy al-Qaida. The terrorist group is widely believed responsible for a missile attack on an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya last November — a case in which the missiles narrowly missed their target.

Lakhani, born in India but now a British citizen, was arrested last week at a hotel in Newark, N.J., and charged with offering to sell a sophisticated Russian SA-18 Igla missile to a man posing as a liaison to terrorists. Reports said that the suspect had first come onto intelligence radars last year when he began inquiring about the purchase of weapons on the Russian black market. Russian, British and American undercover agents then staged an elaborate setup, first selling an inoperative missile launcher and then busting him in Newark when he tried to sell it to a government informant posing a middleman for a Somalian terror group with ties to al-Qaida.

“Make one explosion … to shake the economy,” Lakhani allegedly told the buyer.

Obviously, analysts said, such an arrest may have saved lives, and it was a justified law enforcement effort to take a potentially dangerous group of arms traders out of commission. “”The president has made clear we are in an ongoing war against terrorism,” said Christopher Christie, U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, said after the arrest. “Today the good guys won a battle in that war.”

Ashcroft was even more effusive. “This investigation,” he said, “shows that all agencies of the federal government and our international allies will work together tirelessly to keep innocent people safe.”

In the 24 hours after Lakhani’s arrest, experts on terrorism and politicians from both sides of the aisle pointed out the serious threat from these deadly accurate and easily transported weapons that the military calls MANPADS, for man-portable air defense systems. But, in America, a week can be an eternity. Between the blackout of 2003 and the continuing circus surrounding the California recall election, serious discussions about how to address this long-standing and growing threat quickly fell out of sight.

But, critics say, Bush administration officials who were describing Lakhani as a major arms dealer and suggesting that he had ties to terror groups appear to have been exaggerating. And they said flatly that the arrest did little to protect the U.S. commercial aviation industry and its passengers.

For many experts and members of Congress, the Bush administration’s efforts in combating the shoulder-fired missile threat have been too little and too late; and in recent months, aviation security experts — including some military and government officials — have begun to question Bush’s commitment to solving the problem.

Among the strongest advocates of the need to move quickly to protect the nation’s airliners is U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y. “After the attacks on Sept. 11, we cracked down on security at airports, searched every bag, put military police at airports, and shut down vulnerable airports until we knew they could be protected,” he says. “We’ve protected our airports quickly, but when it comes to protecting our aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles, it is just taking too long.” Israel and a number of other members of Congress have been pressing the administration to protect America’s airliners since al-Qaida attacked an Israeli airliner just after takeoff from Mombasa, Kenya, using Russian-designed SA-7 missiles.

Shortly after the Mombasa attack, Israel joined Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in calling for $10 billion to equip commercial airliners with a new and highly effective laser system that the Air Force is beginning to install on its large, slow transport planes, the ones most similar to commercial jets. Administration opposition killed that proposal, as well as a much smaller effort initially proposed by Florida Republican John Mica, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee. Mica’s proposal would have provided the administration with $30 million to study ways of adapting military countermeasures into less expensive models for commercial aircraft.

But leaks from the administration’s Interagency Task Force showed a preference for low-cost solutions, such as training people who live or work near airports to recognize a missile attack, regardless of whether those solutions offer any real level of protection. When pushed by Congress to take more concrete actions, the administration took two inconsistent approaches: The Department of Homeland Security decided that the solution to this threat lay in sophisticated countermeasures and the Defense Department rejected the need for countermeasures on civilian aircraft.

An aide to a key Republican House member says the administration’s failure was a function of the budget cycle, noting that the process of preparing next year’s budget began well before November’s al-Qaida attack on the Israeli airliner in Kenya. But Leon Panetta, former chief of the Office of Management and Budget and later President Clinton’s chief of staff, rejected that excuse: “That’s bull!” If addressing the shoulder-fired missile issue were truly a priority for the administration, he suggested, the White House would have sent Congress an emergency supplemental budget request — as it did to fund the war in Iraq.

“We use emergency supplementals to fund unforeseen emergencies such as wars, disasters and fighting fires,” Panetta notes. “If the administration considered [defending against shoulder-fired missiles] critical to the security of our citizens no one in Congress would question an emergency supplemental.”

Despite inattention on the part of the administration, Mica and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., recently secured a congressional commitment for $60 million for research aimed at defeating the shoulder-fired missiles. Though the budget is not yet official, and $60 million pales in the face of the estimated $10 billion to $18 billion needed address the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles, both men see this initial funding as secure. While a welcome development, Byrd laments the delay in moving forward to protect the nation’s travelers.

“With such agreement, I expect that the work finally will get underway,” Byrd told Salon last week. “Unfortunately, because of White House obstinance earlier this year, the work is several months behind where it should be.” Mica, the only member of Congress to hold hearings on the shoulder-fired-missile threat, told Salon that he is confident that he can move Department of Homeland Security to act “sooner rather than later.” But he stresses that he wants to make sure that “we don’t spend money on systems that won’t work.”

Adm. James Loy, chief of Bush’s Transportation Security Administration, seemed to tell CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in March that the effort to address the threat should be expedited. “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come, but with weeks of study to come.” Now, however, it looks like the first fruits of the DHS’s work will not emerge before 2006.

Until the administration’s program gets up and running, and several years of research and development yield a sufficiently inexpensive solution to the portable-missile threat, the American public must rely upon the efforts of law enforcement to protect the nation’s airliners. But even after the arrest of Lakhani, Byrd and others remain uneasy. “We cannot rely solely on law enforcement stings to protect air passengers from missile attack,” Byrd says. “We must invest in defenses to help save lives now.”

The administration recently blocked two congressional measures to address the threat, including a comprehensive $9 billion plan to begin outfitting passenger jets with sophisticated anti-missile equipment. Instead, a new report by Bush’s Department of Homeland Security says the administration is proposing a timetable in which the study and planning would not be completed until 2005, and the first widespread installation of anti-missile technology would be years away, at best. Only $2 million would be spent in the next few months to assemble staff and data on the risk posed by portable missiles; up to $60 million would be allocated next year to continue the study.

But the threat posed by the lightweight portable missiles — formally known as “man-portable air defense systems” — has already been demonstrated in a decade of government research. Today, the administration’s less-than-urgent approach to airline security is provoking angry attacks in Congress.

In a letter sent Thursday to Tom Ridge, Bush’s secretary of homeland security, Sen. Robert Byrd ripped the administration for its seeming nonchalance. And the West Virginia Democrat reiterated his concerns in an interview with Salon. “When it comes to fighting in distant lands, the administration’s attitude is, Spare no expense,” he said. “But when it comes to fighting the war on American soil, the administration prefers to shop in bargain basements.”

Even within the Defense Department, officials privately acknowledge that further study is not the solution to the problem. “We know what we need to do to solve the  problem in commercial aircraft,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “All we need is the funding to make it happen.”

Airline security experts estimate it will cost $9 billion to $18 billion to equip the nation’s passenger fleet with “directed infrared countermeasures systems” that can deflect a missile from its course. The Department of Homeland Security report to Congress called the anti-missile systems “the most promising” technology for protecting airliners. The systems use pulses of light to jam the missiles’ guidance systems, a technology effective against the early-generation portable missiles that are most likely to be in the hands of terrorists. The most sophisticated anti-missile systems use lasers to confuse attacking missiles and are just beginning to enter service on military transport aircraft.

The cost is steep — too steep, analysts say, to be borne by U.S. airlines that are already struggling with nearly $100 billion in debt. But the cost of not making the investment could be even greater. If terrorists shot down even one commercial airliner, they could potentially paralyze traffic in the $300-billion-per-year airline industry, with shockwaves spreading throughout the U.S. economy.

In an investigative report last year, Salon detailed how the commercial jets in the United States — and the millions of passengers who fly on them — are at risk from the small, light and easily hidden missile systems. They are relatively easy to fire, and when operated properly, they can bring down a jet at altitudes as high as 10,000 feet. More advanced versions can reach aircraft traveling at over 15,000 feet.

To be sure, there are skeptics who believe that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles is overblown. Steven Brill, the former publisher of Brill’s Content and author of the new book “After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era,” derides recent congressional moves to protect airlines from them. “It’s a stupid policy initiative,” Brill told Salon on Monday. A terrorist missile attack on an airliner “could happen tomorrow,” he said, “but it is still a stupid initiative.” In Brill’s opinion, terrorists are more likely to strike at “mass transit, rail, air cargo, and office building ventilation systems.” Those, he says, are the places where the government should be spending money to avoid terrorist attacks.

But that is a minority position. Those most familiar with the danger, regardless of political stripe, agree that the missiles pose a significant, immediate threat. Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican who chairs the House aviation subcommittee, has called the risk “sobering,” and at a Washington news conference in March, he said: “We can’t afford to not act.” A Boeing official privately described the shoulder-launched missiles as “the greatest current threat to the U.S. air transport system.” Over the past year, intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about the likelihood that al-Qaida has smuggled the launchers into the United States. The FBI in May 2002 issued a remarkable bulletin to local and state law enforcement agencies warning that al-Qaida possessed such missiles and would likely attempt an attack inside the United States.

On Election Day last November, the Transportation Security Administration convened a secret meeting in a secure conference room in Washington to inform a group of airline CEOs of the growing threat posed by the missiles. And just days ago, the Group of Eight industrial powers meeting in Evian, France, issued a sobering message: “We reiterate our deep concern about the threat posed to civil aviation by [the portable missiles], especially in the hands of terrorists or states that harbor them.”

Although officials often cite the SA-7, the most widely proliferated and among the least capable shoulder-fired missiles, as the one terrorists are most likely to unleash against U.S. airliners, recent reports out of the Middle East indicate that Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group with an annual budget the CIA says exceeds $200 million, has recently acquired SA-18 missiles from Syria. These super-sophisticated Russian-made missiles are far more accurate — and potentially far more lethal — than the SA-7 missiles used in the Mombasa attack last year. Should al-Qaida obtain these new-generation missiles from Hezbollah, Syria, or another willing broker, it will significantly enhance its ability to blast American airliners out of the sky.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security declined repeated requests for comment on the Bush administration’s airline security plan. The Air Transport Association, an industry group representing many of the commercial carriers, said yesterday that the federal government, and not the industry, should be responsible for such an overarching security concern.

“Defending against the threat of terrorist attacks has always been a fundamental government responsibility,” said association spokeswoman Diana Cronan. “The airline industry, having been made aware by appropriate government authorities of concerns with the potential use of shoulder-fired missiles, is doing everything within its power to assist the government in its decision making as to the proper response to these and all terrorist threats.”

In Congress, numerous U.S. officials have expressed alarm at the risk and have pressed for a commitment by the Bush administration to address it — but so far without success. In the weeks leading up to the vote on funding the Iraq war, a measure sponsored by Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proposed spending $9 billion to install anti-missile systems on commercial airliners; the measure failed, due largely to White House hostility. Then, the administration blocked a bipartisan plan, pushed by Mica, chair of the House aviation subcommittee, to spend $30 million in the current fiscal year to begin the process of adapting military technology to commercial airliners.

Instead, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, the Bush administration has committed to spend just $2 million in the current fiscal year, which ends September 31, mostly for creating a “special government staff office to manage the effort.” For the 2004 budget year, the administration says, “project costs are not to exceed $60 million.” But that $60 million is not actually in the budget plan provided to the Congress, and the Homeland Security report states that the administration will “not seek additional or supplemental funding for this effort.” That prompted a pointed question in Byrd’s letter last week to Ridge. “If the Administration does not plan to request additional funding for the [research],” he asked, “how will the activities in the program plan … be funded?”

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the administration has made no efforts to seek to have money shifted from one line item to another within the budget; nor has it sought new monies for anti-missile defense research. With Washington approaching the summer months, when little of substance gets done, and with the new fiscal year beginning shortly after the Congress returns to work in September, there is little evidence that the administration has firm spending plans for 2004.

And even if the $60 million does materialize, it’s not enough, critics say. “Anything under $100 million is chump change,” said one Capitol Hill source who asked to remain anonymous.

The net effect, Israel says, is that the White House is putting lives at risk. “The more we know about the threat of [portable missiles],” he said in an interview, “the more we know we need to defend against it. We were given a warning shot last year when shoulder-fired missiles missed an Israeli jet in Kenya, but we cannot count on their missing next time. I am happy that the administration has now acknowledged the threat, but they must follow through with real action … We’ve debated it. We’ve held hearings on it. We’ve researched it. We’ve studied it. We’ve analyzed it. Now it’s time to act on it.”

Boxer sounded a similar theme in an interview Friday. “We have known for a long time that there is a credible threat of attack against our commercial aircraft,” she said. “Although there is progress being made by the administration, this progress is too slow.”

Byrd and others describe the White House budget plans as a window onto Bush’s priorities. By this measure, the need to protect airliners from missile attack seems to be a back-burner issue.

Administration officials, of course, disagree. In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has been trumpeting its efforts at surveying the areas around airports to identify the locations from which terrorists are most likely to launch a portable-missile attack. And in a letter last month to House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II seemed to back that plan in outlining his opposition to the Israel-Boxer bill. “The Department of Defense recommends exploration of other potentially effective measures such as counter-proliferation, airfield security, and improved border control,” Haynes wrote.

But experts in thwarting missile attacks, both inside and outside the government, say that approach simply won’t work. “Most of the current proposals for securing the airspace around airports are either unworkable or useless,” says Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the nonpartisan Lexington Institute who served on Bush’s Department of Defense transition team.

One reason is that aircraft are vulnerable to even the oldest shoulder-launched missiles just before they land if they are within a long, roughly triangular swath of territory, about 4 to 6 miles wide, that extends 50 miles or more from the airport. An Air Force official recently noted that airport security measures are doomed to failure because the area around an airfield that needs to be secured in order to protect airliners ranges from 900 to 1,800 cubic miles of airspace.

“All a terrorist has to do is hide in the back of a pickup truck, under a tarp,” said one intelligence official who asked not to be named. “When the driver of the truck spots a target aircraft and stops, all the shooter needs to do is throw off the tarp, stand and fire. It will only take a matter of seconds, and there is no way to stop that kind of attack.”

Other signals reinforce the sense that the White House does not view the situation with urgency.

After reviewing the technology available for protecting passenger jets from missile attack, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Homeland Security Council concluded that only two companies are involved in developing directional infrared countermeasures systems: Northrop Grumman, an American company that builds the Air Force’s new large aircraft laser system, and BAE, a U.K. firm working on a laser system for the Navy’s tactical aircraft. But the review failed to identify a third alternative: Israeli defense contractor Rafael also builds a laser anti-missile system, and unlike the Northrop Grumman and BAE systems, Rafael’s system has actually been tested on a commercial jet against live missiles — something the Bush administration’s plan does not envision doing until around 2005.

Rafael’s test occurred from March 9 to 13 at Israel’s southern Uvda Air Force Base and involved the very Boeing 757 that was attacked in Kenya. Using a variety of missiles, fired from several angles and distances, Rafael’s system successfully jammed every missile fired at the jet. Despite these impressive results, and the lower cost of Rafael’s system, it does not appear that this system is in the running to protect U.S. passengers.

Regardless of which system or systems might eventually receive approval from the Department of Homeland Security, none will be allowed onto airliners without the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration. Here again, the Bush administration is taking a go-slow approach. Current plans do not call for any action on FAA certification to begin until the autumn of 2004, and then the certification process is expected to take a year or more.

When asked whether the FAA could accelerate its assessment of whether anti-missile systems adversely affect such critical issues as aircraft electrical and hydraulic systems, weight balance, and flight response, an FAA spokeswoman said the agency “can do anything on an expedited basis if [it] has enough people.” But extra people means extra money, and that does not appear to be forthcoming.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, security officials were able to restore passenger confidence by federalizing security personnel and implementing more rigorous passenger- and baggage-screening procedures. But if a U.S. passenger jet is shot out of the sky with a shoulder-launched missile, there are few confidence-building security improvements that could be implemented quickly to restore confidence in the security of the civil aviation system.

Even if anti-missile systems were installed aboard every airliner, that would still only be a part of the overall solution. Jets equipped with anti-missile defense systems can be hit by what the military calls “leakers” — missiles that get through an aircraft’s defensive systems. Because of this, the U.S. military conducts “live fire” testing, in which missiles are fired at aircraft and aircraft components to obtain data on how to build aircraft able to withstand missile hits. Robert E. Ball, widely recognized as an expert in the field of aircraft survivability and the author of the world’s only textbook on the subject, notes that live-fire testing “costs very little compared to the cost of the aircraft and the value of the lives saved.”

James O’Bryon, a retired Pentagon official who for years headed up the Defense Department’s live-fire testing program, says that live-fire testing typically adds a fraction of 1 percent to the cost of aircraft, about the same as the expense that crash-testing adds to a new automobile. As an added benefit to this approach, the design modifications that allow an aircraft to survive a missile hit also provide a degree of protection against threats such as rocket-propelled grenades, high-caliber machine guns, and sniper rifles.

But this is another area where the Bush administration has been unwilling to spend money. “Until we can test commercial aircraft through live-fire testing,” one Defense Department official told Salon, “we will remain in the dark as to how the aircraft respond to a [shoulder-launched missile] attack.” It may be that for certain aircraft, relatively minor engineering modifications, such as moving or armoring hydraulic lines, will result in making airliners far less likely to be lost if hit by a missile.

Many experts inside and outside government believe that it is almost inevitable that al-Qaida or another group will try to take down a U.S. airliner with a shoulder-launched missile. Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counter-terrorism operations for the CIA, says that al-Qaida has a history of learning from its failures; neither the government nor the public should assume that the next group of al-Qaida operatives sent to bring down a jet will duplicate the mistakes made in Mombasa, he says.

“Time and again,” Byrd told Salon, “the Bush administration pays lip service to the nation’s great homeland security needs, yet when push comes to shove, they steadily refuse to put forth the necessary resources. Words and promises need to be backed up with the money to make those words a reality.”

“I think we should have been worried about this years ago,” says Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. “We’re protecting against things that are unlikely to happen again, and what you’re going to get are the new threats, such as Stinger [missiles].”

There are a multitude of methods for reducing both the susceptibility of an airliner to being hit by a shoulder-launched missile and the damage it will suffer if hit. Some of these methods are passive: They include modifying the structure of the aircraft itself by keeping flight control hydraulics and fuel systems away from locations likely to be hit; using self-sealing fuel-feed lines; hardening or shielding critical components around infrared sources such as navigation lights, air conditioner exhausts, and engines; and dispersing redundant critical components around the aircraft. Others are active: They include changes to air operations (flight approaches, altitudes, angles of descent, and so on) and the installation of active countermeasures systems to ward off an attacking missile. Air forces around the globe have used combinations of these approaches to protect their aircraft from missile attack.

In contrast to every American airline, when the portable missile threat emerged in the 1970s, Israel’s El-Al airline decided that it was worth the expense of installing infrared countermeasures, or IRCM. An ICRM system includes a missile launch detector of some type, a warning system to alert the pilot to the threat, and some method of directing the missile away from the aircraft — whether by dropping flares, or by emitting pulsing infrared sources like flashlamps or lasers, or towing an infrared decoy. Countermeasures are not 100 percent effective; advanced systems like the U.S.-made Stinger are more effective against them than older ones. (Fortunately, Stingers are far less available on the black market than older systems like the Russian-made SA-7 and SA-14.) But like a car with airbags vs. one without, one is better off with them. And El-Al remains the only airline capable of protecting its passengers from these widely distributed and easy to smuggle weapons. (The number of portable missiles not in the hands of regular armies is unknown, but is thought to be in the thousands: Hundreds of thousands have been manufactured.)

According to noted aviation security expert John Currie, American carriers failed to equip their planes with defensive devices because of the cost: “Money was the reason for inaction.” The new LAIRCM system, for example, costs about $3 million, which would add 1.5 percent to the cost of a $200 million Boeing 747-400, or 5 percent to the cost of a $60 million Boeing 737. The cost of maintaining this system is also high. For cash-strapped airlines hard hit by 9/11, such costs, multiplied by the number of planes in their fleet, are significant. On the other hand, Defense Department officials say that with a larger production run the cost would come down to $1 million each, and the maintenance costs could also be reduced with additional research funding — which has not been forthcoming. Now, in Currie’s words, airlines face “the biggest nightmare we could have ever imagined.” And the airlines’ nightmare is also the government’s: If a single commercial jetliner were shot down by a portable missile, the result could be the virtual collapse of the airline industry and a nationwide recession. For the government to pick up the tab for, say, the approximately 5,000 jetliners used would cost around $15 billion.

Just one week before the attack in Kenya, Salon reported that the government had convened a secret meeting on Nov. 5 to brief a group of airline executives on the growing threat from shoulder-launched missiles. Then came Mombasa. Days after the attack, members of Congress — after years of silence — were sounding the alarm and suddenly calling for action. In a letter to Bush administration officials, Sen. Hillary Clinton downplayed the idea of equipping aircraft with countermeasures systems and suggested that National Guard troops be stationed around airports.

Some experts in the field of aviation security endorse at least some limited version of her call for on-ground security forces. But all of them emphatically state that the best defense against the portable missile threat is installing infrared countermeasures on aircraft.

Wayne Black, an aviation safety consultant and former aide to Attorney General Janet Reno, acknowledges that implementing armed patrols in the area immediately surrounding airport runways is a prudent step, but insists, “The most effective method of countering the threat is installing countermeasures equipment aboard aircraft. We always recommend IRCM to our clients.” Black’s corporate clients have taken his advice to heart; 97 percent of them have had their aircraft equipped with infrared-countermeasures systems.

Richard Charles, an aviation expert at Georgia State University, estimates that if left to their own devices, it “would take four to five years before the airlines could install electronic countermeasures,” if they could even afford them in their current shaky financial condition. Still, Charles tells Salon, “I would not want to trade money for lives.”

As for armed security patrols, even if implemented only as a stopgap measure until all aircraft are protected by infrared countermeasures systems, the logistics are staggering. There are over 450 airports with commercial service in the United States; even conservative estimates indicate that it would take nearly 300,000 soldiers to provide even a basic level of protection for these airports. When asked about the prospects of implementing Clinton’s perimeter patrol proposal, former FBI agent and current director of the New York State Office of Public Security James Kallstrom said, “There wouldn’t be enough National Guard.” The reason so many troops would be needed is that the “perimeter” is a huge area, not just the area immediately surrounding the airport. Aircraft are vulnerable along their approach and departure routes while they are as far as 50 miles from the runway and one and a half miles on either side of that route.

And some experts say that even if such vast numbers of troops were available — which they are not as the nation prepares for a possible war in Iraq — perimeter patrols would not stop a determined terrorist. Maj. Gen. George Harrison, USAF (Ret.) says, “Ground defense is a crazy idea … people are groping desperately to find something that sounds productive.”

“As a former U.S. Air Force Commander for Air Base Ground Defense Forces Overseas,” John Curie told Salon, “I can tell you that patrols outside of the base/airport perimeter work about as well as the Border Patrol in Arizona. It is not going to work.” Like many of the other experts contacted by Salon, Currie advocates putting additional resources into intelligence to help thwart attacks before they happen. Like the others, he agrees that intelligence operations are not sufficient.

Currie believes that our vulnerability to shoulder-launched missiles will only be solved when “Congress sells the American people on the cost of infrared countermeasures. The money needs to come from the government,” he says, because the costs of such systems are high. He points out that “the airlines could not even pay baggage screeners adequately,” forcing the Transportation Security Administration to take over that job.

In the days since the unsuccessful Mombasa attack, a number of commentators have attempted to downplay the effectiveness of the Russian-designed missiles. This is a mistake. Despite the fact that the attack in Mombasa failed, of the 18 prior shoulder-fired missile attacks that have been definitively attributed to SA-7′s, 13 of these resulted in shoot-downs of the target aircraft, and the deaths of hundreds of passengers. While certainly not as technologically advanced as the American-made Stinger, the SA-7 can be deadly.

A more likely explanation for the failure at Mombasa is operator error. Although even older-generation shoulder-fired missiles are sophisticated weapons, there is a certain level of skill necessary to use one proficiently. Defense Department documents obtained by Salon detail the process for operating shoulder-launched missiles and point to any number of errors — such as failing to take into account the position of the sun or the presence of objects absorbing or reflecting the sun’s energy — that could lead even a sophisticated Stinger missile astray.

Al-Qaida has a demonstrated history of learning from its failures. Consequently, neither the government, nor the traveling public should assume that the next group of al-Qaida operatives sent to bring down a Western jet will duplicate the errors of the minions sent to attack the Arkia aircraft. When the terrorists either improve their technique or purchase more advanced missiles on the black market, the next attack may be far more costly, both in terms of lost lives and damage to the economy, than anyone dare contemplate.