US and Canadian military commanders are reviewing whether to maintain elaborate air defenses set up after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a spokesman said on Friday.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched the review to examine the threat of a possible terrorist attack from the air and possible changes to the current post-9/11 mission, the command's spokesman said.
"There is an assessment ongoing," Michael Kucharek of NORAD told AFP.
"The threat environment, the intelligence we get — a lot of things change over time," he said. "The fact that we're doing the assessment should not come as a surprise to anyone."
The current mission, launched after the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks using hijacked airliners, involves a fleet of fighter jets, refueling planes and airborne radar and hundreds of US and Canadian service members manning the operation across North America.
The review comes as the stretched US military struggles to keep up with the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with officials looking for ways to use limited resources more efficiently.
Improvements in security measures at airports and intelligence gathering on potential threats may allow for a scaling back of the costly mission, but there was "no predetermined outcome" of NORAD's assessment, Kucharek said.
The review, which is due in 2010, will consider "the number of alert sites, the resources in terms of the aircraft that are tasked to those alert sites, the number of personnel supporting each of those alert sites, the amount of money that's being programmed to fund the current homeland defense posture for NORAD," he said.
The air defense operation has already been reduced compared to the months immediately following the September 11 attacks, when Islamic militants crashed hijacked airliners into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people.
A fourth hijacked plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
NORAD ended regular combat air patrols over cities in 2006, and instead introduced sporadic or "irregular" combat patrols, according to Kucharek.
As the Colorado-based NORAD is a joint command that answers to both Washington and Ottawa, any change to air defenses would have to be agreed by both the US and Canadian governments.
"Both governments need to agree about what the force structure will look like," he said.
The review was first reported earlier Friday by the New York Times.
"The fighter force is extremely expensive, so you always have to ask yourself the question 'How much is enough?'" Major General Pierre Forgues, the Canadian who oversees NORAD, told the Times.
NORAD's budget is about 150 million dollars a year but the cost of the air defense operation was difficult to measure as the US Air National Guard played a major role but received separate funding, Kucharek said.
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