Report on Vincennes Prompts Navy to Consider Changes in Procedure

Navy officials, responding to the investigative report on the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, said Friday they are considering changing shipboard electronic systems, the process for identifying aircraft and the screening of ships’ crew members to prevent such a disaster from occurring again.

The investigation of the incident, conducted by Rear Adm. William M. Fogarty, showed that the Navy’s hardware and methods may not be as well adapted as possible to missions in tightly confined, civilian-populated areas such the Persian Gulf, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci said in releasing the report.

Several new measures will be taken and others studied to correct shortcomings in the systems and the personnel the Navy uses in sensitive combat deployments, he said.

Redesigned Visual Displays

Foremost, officials said, the Navy will redesign the visual displays in the command centers of ships equipped with the Aegis computer defense system. The new displays will present crucial factors, such as the altitude and range of an approaching aircraft, more clearly so that crew members can better determine whether the plane is friendly or hostile.

Faulty analysis of this data contributed to the decision of the cruiser Vincennes, which is equipped with the Aegis system, to fire on the commercial airliner July 3 after misidentifying it as a fighter jet, investigators determined.

“Indeed,” said Carlucci, describing a personal examination of the system recently, “I myself, when I looked at the large screen and then wanted to determine the range or altitude of an object on the screen, found that I had to look down at the computer readout . . . and had to use my finger to track it. . . . You are distracted, looking down.”

Stress Studies Planned

Carlucci also endorsed a recommendation by Fogarty that the Navy study the effect of stress on crew members assigned to high-technology ships sent into potential combat situations. Psychological profiles may be developed for sailors and officers to determine who would be best suited for decision-making positions and least likely to become jittery and confused, as some Vincennes crew members allegedly were.

In their report, Fogarty’s investigators said that “stress, task fixation and unconscious distortion of data may have played a major role in the incident.” The team concluded that the Navy should “establish . . . a psychological profile for personnel who must function in this environment.” More backup checks also may be necessary in the Navy’s system of identifying aircraft, said Carlucci and Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

More factors and sources of information may be available than are now being used in making such determinations, they said.

Train to the Environment

“If we must operate in a low-intensity conflict and in the presence of Com(mercial) Air(craft), we must train to that environment, real or simulated,” Fogarty wrote in his report.

The cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, which began at 8 p.m. PDT Friday, may render much of the Pentagon’s new measures largely irrelevant in that conflict, officials said. The cease-fire calls upon the participants to stop their attacks on shipping in the gulf--the impetus that had prompted the Reagan Administration to send the Vincennes and other warships to the region to provide protective escorts.

Nevertheless, Carlucci said the improvements will be useful for the ships that must remain there until any chance of a threat ends and also for possible future low-intensity conflicts.

“We’re just as anxious as the other person to get them out of there,” Carlucci said, but “we don’t want to put our people in jeopardy by beginning to withdraw our forces too soon.”

Can’t Avoid Human Errors

Pentagon officials stressed that no new measures or training can prevent the possibility of disaster in situations in which human decisions must be made and human errors are possible.

But improvements can, they said, make less likely what the Fogarty commission called “scenario fulfillment syndrome” in the Vincennes incident--the assumption that an approaching aircraft is what you initially believe it to be, even in the presence of contradictory evidence.

In addition to the changes in the display panel, sailor screening and aircraft identification process being considered, officials said, a number of other options are being studied as well.

They include increasing air patrols in the gulf while the beefed-up U.S. force remains there. Currently, largely because of cost, air surveillance missions are being flown only while the Navy is actually escorting a tanker through the gulf, officials said. But some experts say that more overflights could give ships such as the Vincennes better reports on aircraft taking off and arriving at airfields in the area.

Advice From Father

“It’s like my father used to tell me when we went hunting,” said Jeffrey Record of the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “Don’t ever shoot anything you can’t see.”

However, increasing Navy patrols likely would require the addition of an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean--a decision most consider unlikely in light of the prospects for a permanent Iran-Iraq cease-fire. But the U.S. and Saudi air forces, which have flown AWACS radar surveillance missions over the gulf, could be pressed into service for more flights, officials say.

Another method of increasing air surveillance would involve locating amphibious ships in the gulf that could serve as landing platforms for Harrier jump jets, which can take off and land virtually on a dime.

But some experts believe that Navy officials fear such a move would fuel questions about the effectiveness of their aircraft carriers, in which the service has invested heavily.

‘Paranoid Fear’

“There’s an almost paranoid fear within the Navy that if you show you can operate from a small deck, the cost-cutters will come in and make you give up your big decks,” said a civilian Navy official. “But these ‘lake’ operations are just what we bought the Harriers for.”

Officials say that safety and accuracy of aircraft identifications might also be improved if ships kept better track of civilian air traffic channels in their area, but they said that U.S. warships currently do not have either the manpower or equipment to monitor them continuously.

In the densely used commercial routes of the gulf, where there are three major air traffic control centers, Navy ships would have to monitor 15 different channels. Navy officials are considering the equipment and personnel investment that would be necessary to step up their tracking effort, which now involves constant monitoring only of the international emergency frequency.

Experts also believe that ships’ crews should learn more quickly what commercial airline flights are scheduled in their areas. Finding such information often involves looking through bulky directories, said officials, who plan to explore whether the data could be programmed into ship computers for easier reference.

IRANIAN AIRBUS ANSWERS COMPARED

The Pentagon investigation on the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, headed by Rear Adm. William M. Fogarty, shows that the information initially released by Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. on the incident was critically inaccurate on several major points:

Those points include

The speed of the A-300 Airbus.

Crowe: The plane was tracked at more than 500 m.p.h., a speed characteristic of a warplane.

Fogarty: The speed was between 400 m.p.h. and 475 m.p.h.

Altitude and bearing.

Crowe: The plane was flying at between 7,000 and 9,000 feet and diving when the missiles were fired.

Fogarty: The plane was at 10,000 feet and climbing.

Flight path.

Crowe: The aircraft was “not in the air corridor that it would normally be in.”

Fogarty: The plane “remained within the . . . air corridor.”

-Transponder signals.

Crowe: “Electronic indications” signaled that the plane was an F-14 fighter jet.

Fogarty: No evidence of transponder signals for a military aircraft.