Rand Study Suggests Rounding Up Weapons May Be Better Bargain

To hear the Rand Corporation tell it, trying to develop an anti-missile system for commercial aircraft should take a back seat to trying to get those ubiquitous missiles off the market altogether.

"The whole question is this: Should we spend sums of money to install countermeasures aboard our airliners right now?" Jim Chow, a Rand engineer and the study's principal author. "And our conclusion is that it wouldn't be prudent to do that, unless we make them more affordable or, as a nation, decide to significantly increase spending on homeland security."

The study, which was released on Tuesday, said perfecting and manufacturing a laser-based guidance system for missile defensive systems would cost billions -- a price tag the ailing airline industry can ill afford. Instead, Chow found that it might be much more effective to initiate measures to take SAMs -- especially the shoulder-fired variety -- off the market. The Los Angeles Times reports those measures could well include a buy-back program sponsored by the US and other nations that have sold SAM technology in the past. The CIA's program to buy back Stinger missiles and their launch systems from the Afghan militants to whom they were sold is a prime example. Another idea: spend more money to make interdicting the import of shoulder-fired missiles a much higher and more effective priority.

"The fact that no known attempts have yet been made against US civil carriers suggests that either the required assets are not in place or that Al Qaeda's leaders are waiting for what they regard as a more propitious time to undertake such attacks," the report said, according to the LA Times.

Obviously, the airline and cargo industries are watching developments along these lines very, very closely.

"The Rand report underscores our belief that missile defense systems being proposed today for commercial aviation consist of unproven technologies that not only would cost tens of billions of dollars to deploy, but could expose the airline industry to other serious threats" by siphoning money away from other security programs, said the Air Transport Association in a statement to ANN.

FMI: www.rand.org/news/press.05/01.25b.html, www.airlines.org