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Hezbollah Successfully Employs UAV
By John
**Update- Looks like I was wrong on my patrol boat theory....
Several hours after the vessel was hit, an Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman said the damage was worse than originally thought. She added that the ship, still burning, was being towed back to Israel. There were some 80 people on board the ship when it was hit.Emphasis mine. Goodbye 9 man Super Dvora, hello 74 man Eilat Sa'ar 5 Corvette.
That means the Hez bird beat the Israeli's Neptune radar and human lookouts...**
IDF Confirms Warship Hit by Explosive-Laden UAV
A Hizbullah strike on an IDF warship off the Lebanese coast damaged the ship severely, The IDF confirmed to The Jerusalem Post late Friday.Earlier reports disagreed regarding the extent of the damage, with the IDF initially reporting that the ship was largely unharmed. According to security officials, the ship was struck by an unmanned aerial vehicle packed with explosives, a new tactic for Hizbullah.
The use of low-tech UAVs is a logical strategy, considering Hezbollah's ability to project force has long been constrained by a tightly sealed Israeli border.
However I am surprised by Hezbollah's successfully employment of a "explosive-laden UAV" (read: flying bomb) against an Israeli naval vessel. To illustrate, think of how hard it would be to fly a Cessna into one of our destroyers. And not a peace-postured warship that is fueling in a friendly port, like the USS Cole, but a fighting vessel that on full-alert, executing combat operations a few miles from a hostile shore.
I think this narrows down the type of vessel that was hit. The Israeli navy operates 4 basic classifications of fighting ships: diesel subs, corvettes, missile craft, and patrol boats. Of their three types of surface ships, two are equipped with anti-missile defenses, such as the bogey-shredding Phalanax Close-In Weapons System.
That leaves Israel's robust fleet of patrol craft, either a Super Dvora or Dabur class. Crewed by 6-9 sailors and armed with machine guns and rockets, Israeli patrol boats are designed to intercept low level, sea-borne terrorist infilitrations of their coast. They have no real defenses against an air-to-sea threat.
If this is the case, perhaps Israel will start stocking their patrol fleet with shoulder-fired surface to air missiles?
Picture of the Super Dvora below the fold:
Photo Courtesy of Global Security
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Comments
yeah, I'll buy that AJS.
Although, equipped with the proper radar -like on other Israeli surfaces ships- this thing *should* be an easy spot, easy kill.
That's why I think it was one of Israel's patrol boats that got hit.
If the Hezzies were using a fairly standard RC aircraft, there is so much plastic and wood in it's construction that it's unlikely it would show up on radar.
It would be very interesting to know how large this "UAV" was.
Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't whatever package that was used to transport the payload have enough metal in it for -at minimum- the object to register as say, a small bird?
Not that it matters, these patrols boats don't have sophisticated enough radar on them for that type of detection work.
It may simply be that the UAV was moving slowly enough that it was below the speed gate for the radar and was screened out by the software.
Yeah this was a nasty surprise,
There are a lot of variables at work here: (1) Size/composition of the UAV, (2) Proximity to shore of the IDF ship - many radars tuned to detect threats at sea perform poorly in the sea/shore interface area - too much clutter/noise, (3) Alertness of the crew.
I doubt the crew was expecting an airborne threat - the Kasaams are not accurate enough to target a vessel and the IAF has shut down the enemies air assets. They were probably focused on sea-borne threats.
The UAV was most likely the Misrad-1 which various sources report has penetrated Israeli air defenses at least twice since April. www.defenseindustrydaily.com reports "Current air defenses are not designed to detect and recognize small, low-flying, slow-moving objects like small UAVs, whose flight profile on radar and even through electro-optical and other sensors is obscured by ground clutter, glare and other environmental conditions. "It's like catching a mosquito with a net," said Brig. Gen. Ruth Yaron, the IDF's chief spokeswoman."
If indeed a Saar 5, then per GS specs it has a Phalanx, a fire control radar (capabilities?), and an ECM suite. So technical incapabilities to deal with this threat if warned are minimizied.
Radar speed gate sounds possible, but more likely is an underestimation of enemy capabilities and the resulting paralysis of credibility in the last 20-30 seconds. Just as the RN during the Falklands. "They couldn't do that...."
Lot's of if's in this event and we will probably never know publicly the details - OPSEC and also possible embarrasment. Basic truth - in war - S*** happens.
Given the ship was hit on or near its helicopter pad, there is still the possibility it was an Aliyah (Sa'ar 4.5) rather than an Eilat (Sa'ar V).
The crew size mentioned (80) seems high for an Eilat. Combat Fleets 2005-2006 gives a crew of 62 for an Eilat and 53 for an Aliyah. Perhaps the ship was also carrying commandos.
Per DEBKAfile:
'Four crewmen missing after Israeli missile ship was struck by anti-air rockets from the shore while bombarding Beirut airport Friday
July 14, 2006, 11:52 PM (GMT+02:00)
Air and sea rescue teams are hunting for the men under heavy fire from the Tyre shore. The Saar-5 corvette was hit as Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened in a recorded telephone interview over television to set fire to the Israeli missile ships shelling Beirut. Two rockets were fired, one missed, the second hit the vessel’s helicopter landing pad. The ship carries a crew of 61 plus 10 helicopter personnel.'
A stripped down RC airplane of sufficient size would carry enough C4 or similiar explosive to do quite a bit of damage. There are a lot of large 'toy' airplanes available and could be used with very little modification. Skim them along the top or the water and they'll be hard to detect. Israel will figure it out and blast the launch site the next time around.
Now Israel is calling it a C-801, Iranian supplied Chinese knockoff of Exocet.
What will be interesting is the damage assessment on the other ship, rumored to be an Egyptian cruise ship.
According to an article on Drudge, the missile was a C-802 which is a shore launched anti-ship missile made by China and bought by Iran. It is a sea-skimming missile like our Harpoon with a large (350lb+) warhead. Against a small patrol craft the result would be devastating, with sinking of the vessel likely. A second C-802 missed the Israeli patrol craft and hit a fishing boat, according to the report.
This makes much more sense, as a UAV would be hard-pressed to hit a defended target 10 miles out to sea.
Obviously, this is a substantial escalation and involves Iran much more closely in the conflict.
Use of a Silkworm definitely escalates the conflict. This isn't "terrorist" level arms, this is a state-state conflict and the Iranians are losing plausible deniability very quickly.
I'm surprised the Israelis intel didn't warn them of this threat. I wonder how long Hez has had the missiles? This also shows how complicit the Lebanese government is in this war. This missile and launcher would be hard to smuggle in and use w/o the government's knowledge.
Hezbollah seems to lack the capability to target the missiles such that they avoid background shipping. Had they been able to do that they likely would have finished off the IDF vessel - a major coup and symbolic victory. As it is the image of a burning IDF vessel visible from the city already hands the terrorists a lot of credibility w/the people.
I have a hard time believing a store-bought rc can be easily modified to deliver a deadly payload 10 miles out to sea. Their are big RC models available but there's the problem of controlling them over a large distance. The plane has to tell you where it is so you can figure out which way to move it towards the target. I may be mistaken, but I don't think that's an easily solved problem.
To my eyes, the more likely scenario is they were provided with the weapon from a hostile state. If that's the case, they were smart to use it against a ship where the evidence would sink. It's the state's bad luck that the ship didn't sink because there's bound to be some fragments left over.
Noted on another blog that Saar 5 may be 76mm OR Phalanx. If Silkworm, a tricky, if not impossible, snap shot for a 76mm.
Q. How did Israeli EW miss the emissions? Does the Silkwork have a pure optical mode? Thought there was an associated acquisition radar.(is their C&C as convoluted as ours and the warning could not be quickly passed thru their systems - cross-service communications weak?)
See my earlier post about, "They CAN'T do THAT...."
Rip -
My understanding from news reports is that the vessel hit was visible from the city. If you can see it, you don't necessarily need targeting radars. The silkworm is guided inertially until the final homing phase, so I suspect that they did a point and shoot w/the missile arming itself shortly after launch and homing on the first target detected. If the range was 10 miles and the missile travelling at advertised speeds of roughly Mach .9 (don't know how long it would take to get to that speed) the Israeli crew only had seconds to respond.
guys, good discussion.
Anyone have any thought on the failure of the CIWS (R2D2)?
CIWS would have had to have been in auto mode and the missile would have had to have been visible for CIWS to engage. From what I know of the Sa'ar-5 it's CIWS is mounted on the fo'csle. If the missile struck the flight deck (stern), it's possible that it never entered the CIWS' engagement window.
Assuming they even detected the homing radar on the missile, the Tactical Action Officer onboard the ship probably never had time to maneuver for the engagement given the speed of the missile and the short flight time.
AJS
Thanks for the excellent data points. I guess it makes a case for mutual support to CK 6. But this is very complex (and expensive) to do....
Agree with the likely near zero warning time. Given the Silkworm guidance scheme and the short range, only I&W may be from a staring IR sensor catching the launch booster when fired. Then you gotta quickly tell the target, "INCOMING!" All kinds of goegraphic/physical coverage issues here. Ops guys will need to look at shipbased launched active decoy (flares & chaff) and maybe add rapid blooming smoke (if one can bloom sufficiently quickly) to handle optical stuff. Also, if the ECM was on, when the missile went active, it should have been on it's ass????
I think lessons are to be learned here for LCS, the standing-up Navy River Rats II, and the USCG as they venture abroad.
Information from other news articles seems to explain why CIWS wasn't effective. Not sure is any of these are true, but I think they did come from Israeli media:
1) It wasn't "turned on", which I take to mean not on Air-Auto
2) The two silkworms were programmed to fly two different profiles: one a sea-skimming waterline terminal phase and one a pop-up dive terminal phase. This would be a very effective method of increasing the chance of at least one hit. It also shows that the launch crew was trained in both operations AND tactics.
3) The ECM was not "turned on". I don't know enough about the Israeli's ECM equipment to comment on this. Could mean that the chaff launchers were not on auto.
In the end, there is only so much you can do to defend yourself when you are less than 10 miles from an ASM launcher.
UPDATE
Saar 5 systems. A recent entry in wikipedia suggests the automated AD systems on the boat were turned off deliberately to avoid fatricide (friendly fire) in the combat arena. Obviously there are a large number of Israeli aircraft & helos continuously active in the area. Probably a good idea up to the time the Silkworm showed up. If the Saar started firing Barak AD missles like a automated vending machine (64 in magazines) at unknowns it could do a lot of sky-sweeping.
In looking over the web photos I have been able to find, it appears the three Saar 5 class vessels main gun armament is very different. One has the 76mm gun, one the Phalanx, and one - nothing? The one struck (Hanit ? - Jerusalam Post) may be the one without a main gun. Unless there was retrofitting?
Somebody have a paid subscription to Jane's? That's probably the best place to check....maybe I'll swing by the library this afternoon....
Rip
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I doubt the Israeli ship was on the alert for an airborne threat of that nature. Low, slow, fliers are very tough to ID at times, particularly close to shore against background lighting or scenery. Score one for the terrorists. I doubt they will be as successful in the future. A modern navy should be capable of jamming the freqs used to control such UAVs, or at least detecting them. Any way, the Israelis (and the U.S. have been served notice and will be better prepared next time. .