| Concerns about the threat of surface-to-air missiles to aircraft were originally limited to military applications, but the asymmetrical nature of some conflicts (e.g., non-state actors at war with nation states) in the post-Cold War era has introduced this threat to commercial aviation. The relatively wide availability of MANPADS in the global arms market also contributes to the threat. Unfortunately, due to the differences between military and civilian environments, the strategies used to manage this threat in a military environment are not easily applicable to commercial aviation. Thus, assessing the risk of MANPADS to commercial aviation requires a fresh look at an old problem.;At the heart of this problem is estimating the probability that a missile launched from a MANPADS in the vicinity of an airport will hit an airplane taking off or landing at the airport. The model we developed to address this question incorporates parameters reflecting the size and effectiveness of the secure region around the airport, the effectiveness of the MANPADS, the trajectory of the aircraft, the attacker-location strategy, and the effectiveness of the MANPADS countermeasures installed on the aircraft (if any).;We then formalized the contest between the attacker and the defender as a two-person dynamic game and our analysis identified three quantities affecting the resulting subgame-perfect equilibrium: (1) the ratio of the cost of countermeasures to the expected loss from a successful MANPADS attack (cost-loss ratio); (2) the protective benefit gained from the countermeasures investment (as measured by the reduction in hit probability); and (3) the hit probability that could be achieved by the attacker using weapons other than IR MANPADS.;The results indicate that investment in countermeasures is not predicted if the cost is too high. Investment in countermeasures is predicted if the cost is sufficiently small, as long as other weapons are not sufficiently effective to cause the attacker to switch strategies. In between these two extremes, the model also allows for mixed solutions, with countermeasures being implemented on only a fraction of the aircraft fleet, and the attacker choosing at random between MANPADS and other weapons when they are equally effective. |
