Iran Tests Naval Cruise Missile During War Games 547
Hugh Pickens writes "Iran says it has successfully test fired a cruise missile during naval exercises near the Strait of Hormuz, and the surface-to-sea missile, known as the Qader, struck its targets with precision and destroyed them. Iran had previously announced that it intended to test a missile during the exercises, raising fears that it might try to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for tougher international sanctions. The Qader missile is said to be capable of striking warships at a range of about 125 miles, a distance that would include some American forces in the Gulf region as Iran is about 140 miles at its nearest point from Bahrain, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based. Analysts say Iran's increasingly strident rhetoric, which has pushed oil prices higher, is aimed at sending a message to the West that it should think twice about the economic cost of putting further pressure on Tehran. 'No order has been given for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz,' Iran's state television quoted navy chief Habibollah Sayyari as saying. 'But we are prepared for various scenarios.'"
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:2, Interesting)
There was no good naval battle on CNN in a while. If it happens, it will be really exciting 1 hour, because that's how long it will take to destroy all Iran's fleet.
You should read about the wargames that someone mentioned in another post.
Supposedly it went so badly for the good guys that the referees stopped the game before it was over.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:5, Interesting)
Nor is Iran technologically in the dark ages, having its own robotics industry and technology from China and Russia.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:5, Interesting)
100+ missile boats can send out a lot of missiles before they're sunk.
Also, IIRC an estimated 900,000 Iranians died resisting Saddam Hussein's grab of a useless strip of land along the border. Anyone who thinks they'll just run away and hide is a fool.
Transiting the Hormuz.. (Score:5, Interesting)
* Caveat: In the last ten years, I have only spent 2 years in the Persian Gulf, transiting the Hormuz approximately 20 times.*
- The strait is approximately 12 miles wide at the "choke-point".
- A Qader has an maximum range of 125 miles.
- Most of the corporations that run tankers through the straits are extremely risk adverse. All it would take is one missile being "tested" in the vicinity of the shipping lanes to cause the number of tankers to plummet.
- There is a huge number of container ships that go from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean via the Suez (and vice versa), and almost the same number of ships that "turn left" instead of "right" there.
- Jet-skis can and do transit the straits. The bigger smugglers use speedboats, but the intelligence agencies use the personal watercraft sized craft and semi-submersible planing hulls to move agents and for surveillance. What airborne surveillance aircraft that Iran does have are slow moving and could probably be best engaged by M-4's and SAWS.
- The US Navy presence in Iraq is rather small compared to the USN presence in Bahrain and the UAE.
- Iran's militarized coast guard regularly harasses ships that transit the strait anyway. Have to love the 'Great Satan Running Dog' rants that comes up on chan 16.
- Iran's air force could be wiped from the skies by a single squadron of F-18F's loaded for dedicated air to air. It is their waterborne forces that are actually a threat.
- Two Global Hawks at high-altitude would be able cover the entire Persian Gulf with real time targeting data.
- Sniper rifles work just as well at sea as they do on land.
And yet more evidence that Iraq was a huge mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
Had he gone after North Korea, the result would have been an unmitigated humanitarian crisis as North Korea would have unleashed a barrage of missiles and artillery fire(possibly with chemical and/or biological weapons) on Seoul, and the North Koreans are so dug in that there would be no way they could be neutralized without significant damage to Seoul and the surrounding areas. Kind of nice for your enemy to put half their population and probably around 2/3 of their economic output well in range of your artillery isn't it?
Now look at Iran, they have the strongest navy in the middle east(Iraq didn't have anything resembling a functioning navy when the US invaded). They also have decent missiles thanks in no small part to the North Koreans, and a relatively formidable ground force. US casualties in Iran would have been huge, and thats assuming Iran DOESNT have any chemical/biological capabilities....
Now look at Iraq. Saddam eventually disarmed and complied with almost all the UN regulations. His army was incredibly weakened by the embargoes and his air force crippled. And now he is dead. Gadaffi gave up WMD, and now he is dead. What message does this send to dictators? If you disarm, we kill you, if you can cause massive amounts of suffering, we negotiate.
Now look at the Iranian regime, there are only 2 things keeping them even remotely popular, and thus probably in power, in Iran.
1. Defending agains the US(Which thanks to the cowboy president many Iranians legitimately think might invade)
2. Oil revenues(which is why oil continued to plummet after the recession started, Ahmadinejad and Chavez, among others made so many promises to their people assuming oil was going to be over $150/barrel. When the price fell they had no choice but to continue to keep supply high in order to keep the money flowing in)
So now what is happening? The regime knows its running out of time, and has to get nukes fast or else risk being wiped out. Stopping Iranian oil exports would essentially cause chaos at home, so Iran is doing everything in it's power, including going to the brink of war, to keep those oil exports going. It wouldn't be nearly this paranoid about getting nukes if the man-child hadn't decided he wanted to play war hero for daddy and take out a guy that while certainly not, to borrow a phrase from Lewis Black, a snuggy bear, was not any worse than most regimes supported by the US(and the EU before Europeans start getting all self-righteous, France went after Libya and thus has a hand in this too, though not as big as the US's obviously). So instead of his fantasy of making the world safe from tyrants, Bush's actions have basically said, "if you want your regime to stay in power, get WMDs" Good one. The Iraq war will go down as the biggest foreign policy blunder in post-war American history. And while the actual Vietnam and Korean Wars were probably more savage, they were relatively self-contained. The Iraq war(and supporting the Libyan rebels) will have implications that will be felt for decades to come.
Re:Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02 (Score:5, Interesting)
You forget that part of the reason why war games are interesting is that many cheat as best as they can without being demoted for it, often they'll find holes in the general plan that might not exist in real life. Small boats are clever, but I'm sure that they never launched a weapon (American or cobbled together) during the entire game. I don't think that I would have needed to be in combat to understand how different it would be from having some guy in a pontoon boat pretend that he has a mounted weapon on it.
UAV suppression of the Iran coast line is a given under a combat order and likely active just off the coast now, so how many missile boats would we let collect in the gulf? More importantly, how long would it take for them to collectively start to fire? I'd bet that we're better at fire control. How many boats would be lost by Iran before they could fire? If they all start to drill at the same time, does Obama rain Hell Fire down on them preemptively? A few boats might take damage or even be sunk, but I'd hardly think that the whole fleet would be in collectively in jeopardy. It's just another sad example that suicide missions force a cost of lives.
Re:Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02 (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly you've never played organized sports. It's not like every practice is a scrimmage; there are times when you set up a scenario where the opposing players run a certain play to see if your play works against it. If you didn't do this you couldn't choose what to practice. How much better would a team get if the guy playing the opposing quarterback quit each time this happened? van Ripen wasn't some no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is leader, he was a whiner and cared more about personal credit than about testing tactics against tactics and improving, which is the whole point of a wargame. And by the way, in what sense is this a media ploy? You get a couple of articles about a given exercise and...that's it. These wargames are quite costly and the lessons we want to learn/theories we want to test are very well defined ahead of time to avoid wasting that money. If this was a media ploy it'd be the equivalent of you buying a giant tv and hiding it in your living room as you step outside and tell people you have a big tv.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:5, Interesting)
The same story was making the rounds in 2002 about war games with Iraq as the defender, with a similar outcome - allied forces couldn't even gain a foothold until Iraqi forces were ordered to withdraw by the moderators.
Pretty sure that story wasn't true, and I'm pretty sure the updated version isn't either.
No oil, no food in the grocery store (Score:5, Interesting)
instead of other people dying for your enjoyment and corporations' profit
That's quite naive, you are more vested in keeping the sea lanes open than you might initially think. When the oil stops then so do the trucks that deliver food to your local grocery store.
Yes it would be great if we got off foreign oil and delivered food using local or renewable energy but that's not what is going to happen in the next two weeks, and IIRC two weeks is about all there is in the local stores and distribution centers on average.
Re:And yet more evidence that Iraq was a huge mist (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to cut down on the revisionist hindsight. Saddam's Iraq was clearly the worst at that time.
Lets see:
Known to be working on nukes: Iraq, Iran & NK.
Pushing Terrorism: Iraq, Iran & NK
Attempted assassination of a former US President: Iraq
Had recently invaded a neighboring country: Iraq.
Had recently invades a second neighboring country: Iraq.
Nukes may indeed be a get out of jail free card for thuggish regimes preserving them from military action but the sanctions, now that just about everyone is agreeing to them and making sure that cheaters are getting punished may yet make the lesson "reneg on your signature of the the Non-proliferation treaty & lose all your international trading partners".
Re:so (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd imagine that it would be a pretty big embarrassment to the US navy if they lost one or more of their Carriers to a country with an air force only twice the size of what you can fit on one of those carriers.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:4, Interesting)
If they piss us off enough, we'll simply wipe the country off the planet.
- yes, why don't USA just do that and set the precedent for wiping out countries from the face of the earth?
How many seconds, minutes, hours, days after that happens that the rest of the world realizes what it's dealing with in face of USA and stops dealing with USA / attacks USA in a fit of self preservation?
It's just basic math - if USA is attacked by Chinese and Russian (and whoever may join in) nuclear weapons, and US strikes back, the only question is how many more Chinese would survive out of the 1.5 Billion compared to US 0.33 Billion?
The US navy is a floating death trap (Score:1, Interesting)
The carriers are last war's weapons. They are only useful if they can keep out of missile range and launch aircraft. The chinese and iran have medium range surface to surface missiles with longer reach than aircraft. The carrier is an obsolete strategy; the missile is the cannon of the 21st century and carrier groups are the castles.
This is therefore all theatre.
The US won't attack because they know the Iranians will wipe out the fleet and the purpose of the US fleet is to look good for the fanboys and keep the puppet states in line. Take a look at the makeup, small missile boats and subs. The iranian fleet is specifically designed to fight capital ships i.e. The US Navy.
The Iranians won't attack because they need to sell oil to China. The US sanctions are irrelevant because the US doesn't import anything from or export anything to Iran anyway. China will continue to ignore US sanctions because they need the oil.
So, all this political posturing is kabuki theatre:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki [wikipedia.org]
I am however already long oil, so bring on the stupidity, the higher the better.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:5, Interesting)
One problem with this is that our fleet is parked right outside their country. We could sink their ships, but the missiles will still be coming from all over their *land*.
I'm annoyed that the US has the policy to anchor a fleet on the doorstep of a country tensions are high with, then blames that country for being confrontational. I could just imagine the propaganda storm that would come if Iran or North Korea had a fleet off the coast of Hawaii and started having random wargames right there. Why is this country such a hypocritical bully all the damn time?
What's Canada like? Is it nice there? -starts packing-
Re:so (Score:5, Interesting)
in a serious shooting match between First World (and here we include the Ruskkies and the Chinese) powers the US would have its ass handed to it on a platter.
Seriously? You need to go and review the US naval force relative to China or Russia. It's not even close. In a nonnuclear fight the US loses battles but will inevitably win the war. If it then goes nuclear, well, we can bounce more rubble than anyone.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem I have with your warhawk nonsense is the idea that it's the United State's who should do something about it. We've already blown over a trillion dollars on two wars, and you want us to blow another trillion on Iran? You conservatives do all this whining about the deficit, but gloss over the fact that it's your precious defense spending that accounts for a third of non-discretionary spending every year and your precious interventionist actions overseas that add hundreds of billions of dollars on top of that. It's funny that Ron Paul would probably be solidly in the #1 spot in Iowa today if it weren't for the fact that Republicans can't accept a man who won't spend trillions for us to enter into another war all by ourselves.
Sure the world would cheer us taking on Iran. China will gladly put us deeper in debt to them to fund the war. NATO will probably join in, the same way they joined in for Libya--as cheerleaders on the sidelines, letting us spend ourselves to death acting as their military while they spend the savings on universal healthcare and higher education for their citizens.
You called the above poster a "Eurotrash liberal drooler," but the European Union is playing us for suckers, just like former Defense Secretary Gates said [wsj.com], and it's Americans like you who make it all possible as you spend us into the ground with your wars and then try to blame the hole you put us in on America's crumbling libraries, roads, and schools.
Re:The US navy is a floating death trap (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, if only it were so. However, it's not. A war with Iran would last roughly one month. The progress would be simple -- we would eliminate its air power in detail within roughly one week, standing the navy well off. We would at the same time eliminate most of Iraq's navy from the air. We would at the same time systematically eliminate its visible ground assets (including both air and surface missiles). There would be much sound, much fury, and Iran's political leadership might well be killed in a decapitation strike early on, and of course its nuclear plant would be completely destroyed. By the second week our navy would be moving back in, at some risk but largely protected by on-ship magic against missiles, and how will Iran be able to target those missiles? We'll have complete control of space, complete control of the air, and will be able to see and target any radar emissions almost instantly. Turn an asset on and lose it. Leave it off and lose it anyway as it is picked out by satellites and surveillance air. We will have all of the battlefield intelligence, all of the command and control, huge technological advantages, and overwhelming military force. Week's three and four will be the ground war, which may not conclude by week four but which will have defeated Iran's army in detail by week four. Mopping up may take another two to four weeks. As long as we don't try to occupy a defeated Iran and fight the war into the hills, we could eliminate their military and get out in no time, and leave their internal political structure in shambles if not destroyed.
Iran knows that, which is why they may not knock the block off of our shoulder in Hormuz. On the other hand -- everybody else wants this war. I mean everybody. Count the number of people who gain advantage -- and I mean $100B and up advantage -- from this war. Pretty big list, right? In the NYT today, there it is, congress seeking to cut a half trillion to a trillion from the pentagon budget over ten years. How long would another war stretch that out? Indefinitely? How much money is that a year? Oooo, a lot. Then there is Israel (really wants the war and may use espionage and subterfuge to provoke it). The apocalyptic Christians (no armageddon without rivers of blood, Jesus can't come back until we start up something big involving Israel). Obama (can he really leave Iran and Korea as unfinished business going into this election? And nobody wants to tackle Korea, as they have real missiles and NUKES). Oil companies. Democrats (want to raise taxes). Republicans (want to protect their military-industrial buddies). CNN. The generals (out of Iraq and Afghanistan, about to be made irrelevant again). Our Sunni allies hate and fear the Shia, especially Shia armed with nukes.
I do appreciate the Kabuki reference, but perhaps this is a different kind of theater. The only three countries in Asia that the US couldn't immediately take are India, China and North Korea, and honestly, we could probably kick NK's butt and take names tactically but the strategic war would cost 25 million lives as NK nuked SK, Japan, and as much of the US as they could reach (maybe Alaska, dunno). India I would hate to take on, not least because India is my second country and they are our friends (and they've got a damn tough, nuclear armed military). China is also both our friend, our biggest trading partner, and a nut too tough to ever want to crack. Iran (and Pakistan, at rough equivalence in terms of actual military power but weakly armed with nukes) we could certainly take down, and take down quickly. India could take down Pakistan in a matter of weeks (which
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:4, Interesting)
While some european countries have prospered greatly with american funds on the post-WWII , the "american dream" is a part of the lie sold to the people. You can be a rich and prosper nation in any market - given you have no competition, and many of the big traditional american companies were built on profit from reconstruction of Europe and defense contracts. No money is for free, not even in America.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:4, Interesting)
"You seem to be assuming that the Iranian's don't have any high tech weapons and ECM, but clearly that isn't true. They managed to steal one of your drones only recently using purely technical means. They have satellites too you know."
They claim that they did. Since the GPS signal that the drone uses is encrypted it is unlikely that they "brought it down" It is far more likely that it malfunctioned.
I do not think you know what ECM is or how it works. You have two types of ECM.
1. Noise jammers.
2. Deception jammers.
Both involve putting out EM. Guess what? The AIM 120 has a home on jammer mode as does the HARM. Jammers without air superiority have a very short life span. You use ECM when you are attacking to cover your own aircraft. It will not be a significant issue for the Western forces.
The US fleet can stand off in the Indian Ocean with out any issues until they degrade the Iranian defenses.
There SAM systems are based on the SA-5, SA-2, and the old US Hawk systems. All of them are 1960s/70s technology. They have had some upgrades but not state of the art. They claim that they have the SA-300 system but Russia says they didn't sell those to Iran. So that is a bit of a question mark. Sure we my take some losses but their SAM system isn't better than what Iraq had during the first gulf war.
As to their subs the only ones that are a real threat are the Kilos. Those are a threat but they have to snorkel to recharge their batteries and are slow. If they try to go in to the Indian Ocean they will be very vulnerable to the Seawolf class subs the US will have forward deployed. If they stay in shallow water they will be vulnerable to P-3s and Seahawks. If they stay in port they will get hit by ATACMS and Tomahawks.
A threat but not an insurmontable one.
Re:Interesting but flawed article (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason why the USA built so many (and such big) carriers in the1930s and 1940s was mainly that it could - it had the huge wealth necessary to build over 100 carriers during WW2 alone, while other nations like Japan built hardly any.
Japan built 25 or so carriers [ww2pacific.com] and it had near equivalent numbers of fleet carriers (that is, carriers intended to operate with a fleet) at the time of Pearl Harbor. And I'm not sure, but it looks like when one looks at fleet carriers, that Japan build somewhere around 23 proper fleet carriers (of varying size) plus a couple of converted battleships during the war compared to somewhere around 38 for the US (counting ships on the above website). It's worth noting that the biggest problem for Japan wasn't the raw numbers of carriers, but the lack of pilots to man planes. Most of their carrier pilots were lost in 1942, meaning carriers still operating after that point usually did so without a full complement of airplanes.
Re:Would love to see some naval battle (Score:2, Interesting)
Your ideas are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.