Command and Control Failures KEY FINDINGS • A misalignment of 105-degrees as reported by Iranian authorities should have been obvious to the SAM unit’s immediate command and control (C2). Standard military procedure would dictate that the SAM unit would not operate in isolation but as part of an integrated air defence structure to enhance situational awareness and C2 decision making. Iran’s SAM units were required to engage their C2 as part of distinguishing hostile targets from commercial aircraft and obtaining approval to fire. • Based on Iran’s stated protocols, it is reasonable to conclude there were very likely multiple interactions with C2 as part of identification procedures for flights that departed IKA before Flight PS752. In fact, the totality of available information leads the Forensic Team to conclude that Iran tracked multiple targets but could not differentiate between passenger aircraft and legitimate threats. Iran ultimately fired two missiles, downing an unidentified target which was later confirmed to be Flight PS752. As such, it is very likely that the SAM unit’s immediate C2 missed numerous opportunities to identify this erroneous tracking, correct the SAM operator’s misalignment and, most importantly, take action to remove the operator from theatre until the misalignment could be rectified. • Given the likely misalignment, it is reasonable to conclude that previous departing flights would have also likely appeared to be coming from an inaccurate direction (i.e. the southwest). If the operator followed the same procedure Iran claimed was followed for Flight PS752, the operator would have engaged C2 to assist with their identification as hostile targets or commercial aircraft. • Iran suggests a communications outage between the SAM operator and C2 occurred and contributed to the errors in decision making. Any communications disruptions should have also impacted other SAM operators, not just the one who shot down Flight PS752. Iran has not indicated this to be the case. If these communications were disrupted at any point, there is no evidence that “jamming” or electronic warfare were the cause. • As Iranian military officials have suggested, such a communications outage was potentially attributable to C2 systems being saturated or overloaded. This raises the possibility that there were capacity inadequacies amongst Iranian C2 communication systems. If this was the case, either communications were not coming through due to system overload (e.g. insufficient bandwidth) or the workload was too high for the SAM unit’s immediate C2 to process information as it arrived. • While Iran recognized that risk levels exceeded expectations and planned mitigations were insufficient to prevent the downing of Flight PS752, Iran’s Final Report focused exclusively on the SAM operator when analyzing potential deficiencies in the military sector. Iran has
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