Crowe: Officer’s First Duty Is ‘Protection of His Own People’

Following is a partial text of the Persian Gulf briefing conducted by Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Pentagon on Sunday:

Question: Admiral, has there been contact with the Iranian government, and if not, is any planned?

Answer: There has not been direct contact, no. I think we will be awaiting the results of the SAR (sea-air rescue) effort and any other indications.

Q: Have any orders been issued to change the mode of our operations in the gulf?

A: No.

Q: Admiral, the Aegis cruiser is supposed to be one of the most sophisticated in the fleet in determining threat. How is it that it apparently misidentified this aircraft?

A: I’m a little confused by your statement. It is one of the most sophisticated ships we have, and certainly the improvements made in (the) Aegis weapons system have greatly amplified our capability. . . . But it has not solved all of our problems, and it does not defy the laws of physics. And one of the most difficult problems is from a radar blip, particularly from a head-on target, to identify the type of aircraft. . . . The people in the command center, and the people operating the radar, had about four minutes from the time they picked this target up until it was declared hostile. That alone is a severe constraint.

Q: But what led them to believe that it was an F-14 echo?

A: Some other electronic information, which is classified, and I’m not willing to discuss.

Q: . . . What was your judgment? Was the skipper acting under the rules of engagement or was he a little bit impetuous here?

A: . . . It is my judgment on the information that is available to us that the commanding officer conducted himself with circumspection. . . . Not only was he following this aircraft, and was concerned about it, he was engaged on the surface with Iranian units at the time. The aircraft was not in the air corridor that it would normally be in. . . .

Q: . . . He didn’t identify himself as a commercial or. . . ?

A: No, he did not.

Q: How come? Did he. . . .

A: Now, I should stress, of course, in that regard, that we warned him on the Civilian Air Distress Net three times in these few minutes, and four times on the Military Air Distress Net.

Q: . . . saying, “We have you. . . ?”

A: Yes. We received no answers. Nor did he vary course, or he did he indicate in his conduct in any way that he had received our communications.

Q: He was squawking something, but not the recognizable “I am an airliner?”

A: Well, it led us to believe that it was a military aircraft.

Q: How come?

Q: . . . Civilian aircraft, to be outside of its normal air corridors in that part of the world?

A: I don’t know that I can answer that question. I don’t understand the responsibility of a country that, while it is attacking other ships, making a war zone out of a certain area of the ocean, and then goes ahead and flies a commercial airliner over that part of the ocean at the time that attacks and hostilities are under way.

Q: Admiral, what did we do to find survivors and . . . to search for the black box?

A: The wreckage--if, in fact, there is wreckage--is inside of Iranian territorial waters. They are conducting a SAR search in there. We are not in there. . . .

Q: You may be implying by the abnormal behavior of this aircraft that it’s not inconceivable that the pilot was trying to draw the fire of these missiles?

A: I did not mean to imply that.

Q: Admiral, the people are going to ask, ‘OK, this happened, the Persian Gulf is a million accidents waiting to happen.’ Have you made any recommendations as to how to minimize the risk of this happening again? And what do we do from here?

A: We are constantly surveying and reviewing, not only the circumstances under which we operate but also the rules of engagement. We do not discuss the rules in detail, but this, obviously, will put increased emphasis on such a review. . . . But I emphasize that, as a matter of course, every single day and every single incident in the gulf is reviewed. And if it suggests that we should do some--our operating patterns should be different, we try and follow that. . . . Let me repeat. The No. 1 obligation of the commanding officer of a ship or of a unit (is) the protection of his own people. We deeply regret the loss of life here, but that commanding officer had a very heavy obligation to protect his ships, his people. We’ve made that clear throughout the Persian Gulf mission, and we have acted on it accordingly, and we believe it is right and proper. . . .

Q: Was it raining or fog? You say poor visibility.

A: No. Just haze.

Q: Admiral, have you determined what started the first incident? Why the helicopter was fired on? How that all started?

A: It’s a little vague, but there were two merchant ships in the area, and probably a total of somewhere . . . 13 to 15 small boats. And our ships were coming back through the strait. . . . But when they closed, some of those small boats--Boghammars--left the area and presumably returned at high speed to Bandar Abbas. Several stayed in the area. We got no requests from the merchant ships. So when we passed, it looked like that our presence was deterring them. Later, to get a better picture, we put a helicopter in the area. And when it went over toward those boats, they fired on it. That’s when the Vincennes turned back toward, to his helicopter. . . .

Q: What did they fire with? Were they missiles or. . . ?

A: No, it was gunfire.

Q: Admiral, did the airliner make any kind of radio communication after the Vincennes fired its missile?

A: No. . . .

Q: Was only one missile fired or were there more?

A: Two were fired. . . .

Q: Was this an accident waiting to happen?

A: You could, in a sense, of course, characterize all combat operations as an accident waiting to happen. We have said from the very outset of our involvement there that when you’re using force, when you’re putting combat operations on to support your policy--and it is a policy that is resisted and not agreed to by another party, who is likewise willing to do things--you’re running risks. We’ve never pretended otherwise. We have been very successful with our--using our strength to keep down these kinds of accidents and incidents. . . . If--we have contacted airliners before. We have had them respond. They have varied course. . . . If a country is going to wage combat operations in a certain area and then send a commercial airline in the area during that, of course it’s an accident waiting to happen. And if airliners do not pay attention to these instructions and guidance that we have put out, and the warnings we put out, then that poses a problem. We do deeply regret the loss of life, though. . . .

Q: Is this the first time an Iranian commercial airliner has acted in this way?

A: I don’t have a specific example of where it has before. We have multination airliners in the gulf. In general, our policy has been respected, responded to. Occasionally we have an airliner that ignores it. But usually they are at very high altitude. The reason that these accidents are avoided mainly is that civilian airliners fly at very high altitudes, and particularly because of that area. This one did not.

Q: Admiral, the ship captain’s responsibility notwithstanding, an F-14 being an American-made plane, shouldn’t it be one of the easier aircraft to identify, especially stacking its information radiated against a four-engine commercial airliner?

A: It depends on, of course, what it does. And it depends on how much information you have on it. It depends on the attitude which it’s flying. It depends on the altitude. It depends on the atmospheric conditions. It depends on how much time you’ve got to process the data. And unfortunately, this has been the--one of the major difficulties in the Persian Gulf from the outset. We’re fighting in a lake. . . .