When Military Technologies Don’t Work as Planned

July 21, 2014

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July 21, 2014 – The horror of 298 lives snuffed out by a missile is reverberating around the planet this week after last Thursday’s downing of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777. How could missile technology meant to shoot down warplanes get used to destroy a civilian aircraft?

The weapon in question is a surface-to-air missile developed at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s. It’s the Buk or the SA-11. Originally it was a tactical field weapon designed to support troops against air attacks. It was, therefore, not a weapon for an air defense network. And there lies the problem.

Air defense systems are tied together so that an attack from the air can be repulsed in a coordinated fashion. But when a Buk missile is used in a standalone configuration it has no network access and limited intelligence comes from its internal radar tracking system which resides in its launch vehicle. It doesn’t have the intelligence to distinguish an attack aircraft from a civilian airliner. Only if it were networked into a national civil defense and air traffic control system would it be able to tell the difference.

And for those who argue that the weapon is too sophisticated to have been fired by novices such as the soldiers serving the so-called Donets Republic of Eastern Ukraine, experts who are familiar with the technology state that is not the case. Apparently the user interface is pretty simple to figure out, typical of Soviet-era weapon systems.

For those operating civilian aircraft this may be a watershed moment. It may be the appropriate time for civilian aircraft operators to consider installing countermeasure technology to confuse antiaircraft missiles that get fired by irregular troops hyped up on testosterone and too ignorant to know better.

It won’t bring the lives lost. But I can imagine with all the brushfire conflicts around the planet today and those anticipated in the future here in the 21st century, that airlines have a job to do to ensure passenger safety so they can keep on flying to destinations even in times of war.