At an altitude of 30,000 feet, there’s little room for error when confronting a hysterical passenger, hijacker or other threat. That’s why the Federal Air Marshal Service is a critical last line of defense, transportation security officials say.
One leading congressional critic, however, argues that the Federal Air Marshal Service is an outdated and inefficient law enforcement program that needs to be grounded.
Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., told The Daily Signal that any security benefits fail to justify the cost, currently about $820 million a year.
“I think the air marshal program is the most needless, wasteful program within the entire government,” Duncan said.
But in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, Roderick Allison, director of the service, argued that air marshals make up “a very rapid, very quick deployable force to combat aviation threats.”
The agents, Allison said, provide a service “that no one else can.”
Relaunched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Federal Air Marshal Service places armed, undercover officers onboard domestic and international flights. Details of the program within the Transportation Security Administration remain classified, although the number of agents ballooned from 33 before 9/11 to more than 4,000 today.
Duncan pointed to other increased security measures—stricter passenger screening and reinforced cockpit doors among them—and concludes the air marshal program “is just one agency you don’t need at all.”
Locked doors are the best onboard security measure, said Duncan, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Despite the 9/11 attacks and thwarted terrorist plots involving airlines, he said, threats to aviation have been overplayed.
“There are so many other more attractive targets for terrorists,” Duncan said. “We need to take this money and spend it [in] ways that could provide more security than the air marshal program is doing.”
Skepticism of the air marshal program has grown. In a comprehensive review of the Department of Homeland Security released before his retirement in January, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., wrote of the Federal Air Marshal Service: “It is unclear to what extent the program is reducing risk to aviation security.”
Air marshals also have caught flak over personal misconduct. In March, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigated allegations of manipulated flight schedules and other ongoing illicit behavior.
Last year, the service’s director, Robert Bray, resigned after allegations surfaced that he used his position to purchase illegal firearms for personal use.
In the interview with The Daily Signal, Allison, his successor, insisted the program is again on the right flight path after a hearing before the oversight committee.
Allison, an Army veteran who joined the air marshals in 1998, said the nation faces “very active threats to aviation security.” Even with improved airport security, air marshals are needed to meet threats that “are more prevalent today than before 9/11,” he said.
Although he declined to say how many arrests air marshals have made since 2011, Allison said his agency employs a “concept of operations” to determine when and where its armed, plainclothes agents fly.
The director invited oversight, saying it’s “a fair question to ask, whether this program is worth it.”
He pointed to a 2006 terrorist plot to destroy airlines as they flew from Great Britain to the U.S. as one example of the need for air marshals.
After the British government thwarted the attack, Duncan said, the agency scrambled marshals to provide security “on a high percentage of aircraft leaving England” that day. He added:
“Do we add value? The answer is unequivocally yes. We want our adversaries to know there are [air marshals] on these aircraft. And we want the public to know, there are [marshals] on these aircraft.”
Asked whether locked cockpit doors would meet security needs, as Duncan and other lawmakers propose, Allison said reinforced doors do provide an additional “layer of defense” against hijackers.
“Is that sufficient? Probably not.”
