SUNDAY JANUARY 22
cheniere.orgWhen U.S. warplanes. were ordered to, strike Libya in 1986, they ran into an electronic blizzard that Pentagon officials now suspect might have caused one of the fighters to crash and others to miss their targets.
The disruption came not from the Libyans, but from high-powered U.S. military transmitters that filled the night sky with electronic signals designed not only to enable the fighters to communicate but to jam Libya's antiaircraft defenses, hunt targets, and guide weapons.
The Pentagon is so alarmed by the problem it has launched a $35 million effort to identify the interference and keep it from happening again, according to Air Force Col. Charles Quisenberry, who is leading the probe. The study is expected to take three years.
During the Libyan strike, U.S. weapons "were interfering with each other and they [U.S. commanders] came back out of that and they said: 'Look, we've got some problems here, and we want to know if we're doing it to ourselves, or if the bad guys did. it to us,'" Quisenberry said in an interview. "The end result was we found out we did it to ourselves."
President Ronald Reagan ordered the April 1986 strike after U.S. intelligence linked Libya to the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin nightclub' in which a U.S. serviceman was killed.
During the attack, 18 Air Force and 15 Navy planes attempted. to strike five targets after U.S. planes and ships saturated the air with powerful electronic transmissions.
Quisenberry said radio-wave interference might have led to the downing of an F111 jet fighter, whose two crew members were the only U.S. fatalities in the attack.
Numerous U.S. weapons, some of which were electronically guided, went astray during the attack, damaging three foreign embassies and diplomatic residences, including those of France and Japan. And
Original Page: http://www.cheniere.org/misc/mixedsignals.htm
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