Terrorists now have ballistic missiles

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies say the question of a massive terrorist attack on America is not if it will happen, but when it will happen. That grave prediction has become even more chilling now that advanced ballistic missiles are in the hands of terrorists.

Last month, Britain’s 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review confirmed that terrorists acquired ballistic missile technology when Iran gave Hezbollah, a global terrorist organization with cells in Latin America, hundreds of Fateh-110 ballistic missiles. Using inertial guidance and GPS, the Fateh-110 delivers a 1,000 pound high explosive, chemical, or biological warhead over a range of 220 miles.

{mosads}Using the Fateh-110, Hezbollah terrorists can now put disguised missile launchers on the decks of small cargo ships and attack American coastal cities from positions far out at sea. Fortunately, the Pentagon has developed defenses against ground and airborne threats, including ballistic missiles, and the least expensive, most transportable, most persistent and most cost-effective of those systems use aerostats — blimps tethered to the ground.

Unglamorous and relatively unknown except by soldiers and border patrol officers until recently, aerostats lift radar, surveillance, and communications equipment high above the ground, extending detection and communication ranges beyond the horizon. Having saved lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, aerostats now interdict countless drug smugglers.

Aerostats come in all sizes and configurations, and the largest aerostats now fly as high as 15,000 feet. On the small end of the spectrum, the U.S. Army’s Rapidly Elevated Aerospace Platform (REAP) is only 30 feet long. Tethered to a Humvee, it takes video cameras up to 300 feet. The Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment (RAID) system is 53 feet long. The larger Persistent Threat Detection System (PTDS) followed the RAID system, and carried sensors and radios up to 5,000 feet. All these systems carry ground surveillance cameras, sensors, and communications equipment. Aerostats carrying heavy radar systems for airspace surveillance are much larger.

Each more than 200 feet long, the blimps of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) fly at 10,000 feet over eight sites along our southern border, looking out 200 miles. This interlocking system of radars, managed by the Customs and Border Protection agency, detects and tracks low-flying drug smuggling aircraft and even small boats. But the largest aerostats in the world belong to the Joint Land Attack Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS).

The aerostats of JLENS are more that 240 feet long, can fly at 15,000 feet, and carry radars designed to detect and help defeat airborne and surface threats 340 miles distant. Conceived in the 1990s, JLENS was not front-page news until late October, when one of its aerostats broke from its tether at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Despite successful tests of JLENS against a multitude of challenges at White Sands Missile Range and the Utah Test and Training Range — including cruise missiles — the accident ignited a firestorm of criticism and ridicule by media pundits.

Having worked with aerostats at White Sands Missile Range, I understand systems will underperform during tests. Accidents happen. But that should not be a reason to kill an important capability. Test, correct, improve: that’s the point of exercises at proving grounds like Aberdeen. And we do not know, even yet, what went wrong.

JLENS was a target for opportunists who did not do basic research before making politically charged statements. But even as fringe politicians tried to elevate the aerostat system as a symbol of waste, a bipartisan majority in Congress recognized JLENS as a key to America’s homeland defense.

In fact, all 35 congressional lawmakers on the House and Senate defense appropriations committees voted to continue development of JLENS. In these times of austere defense budgets, their decision makes good fiscal sense because it saves a $2.7 billion investment in a needed system that has already passed many rigorous trials.

Their decision also makes technical sense, because airborne radar offers better over-the-horizon detection and tracking range than land or sea-based systems. And since keeping radar aircraft flying every day is prohibitively expensive, a JLENS aerostat system is the logical alternative. The principles embodied in JLENS have been proven in combat against insurgents, against drug smugglers, and against many threats on test ranges.

Now that terrorists have modern ballistic missiles, more than ever Congress must keep the Pentagon focused on quickly building a comprehensive JLENS missile defense of the homeland.

Flaesch is a former U.S. Marine captain and is now an executive at Computer Sciences Corporation; he participated in communication aerostat trials at White Sands Missile Range in 2011 under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss.