Persian Gulf & Middle East Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

D

Deleted member 13312

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Allegedly they found cruise missile parts in the Saudi desert and US are saying it was cruise missiles.

What you wrote about boats from the Persian Gulf to evade AD doesn't make sense because all those ADs positioned there are facing Iran specifically for that purpose.

Houthis have the Qods 1 cruise missile.

Amazing precision and lethality of this strike. The most impressive thing is how heavily defended by AD that area is and how still KSA (despite their ENORMOUS military spending on US junk weapons) and USA still have no idea what attacked them or where it came from!
And yet on the same note Israel while using similar US weapons are able to conduct successful strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq which are guarded by SAM system which are just as good as the ones KSA are using if not better (SA-22 and S-300s) and how the US also manages to conduct successful cruise missile strikes against Syria in the face of the same SAM systems.

It is all about the end user of the products, what is more impressive is the spectacular lack of competence the KSA forces have.
 
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Khalij e Fars

Junior Member
Registered Member
And yet on the same note Israel while using similar US weapons are able to conduct successful strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq which are guarded by SAM system which are just as good as the ones KSA are using if not better (SA-22 and S-300s) and how the US also manages to conduct successful cruise missile strikes against Syria in the face of the same SAM systems.

It is all about the end user of the products, what is more impressive is the spectacular lack of competence the KSA forces have.
You are comparing the Houthis with Israel?

And Saudi Arabia (with the third largest military budget in the world) with tiny poor Syria?

Are you trolling?
 
D

Deleted member 13312

Guest
You are comparing the Houthis with Israel?

And Saudi Arabia (with the third largest military budget in the world) with tiny poor Syria?

Are you trolling?
Why not. The Houthis are one of the most resourceful factions I have seen so far in the Yemen civil war, equal to that of Israel in its previous conflicts.
And we keep say how money can't buy competence and skills. So why do we expect Saudi Arabia, a country run by a monarchy whose armed forces owns its allegiance to a tiny group of people and whose leadership had endured purges and an impromptu coup in recent times and has never conducted realistic exercises like Top Gun or Opfors to perform just by how much money it spends ?
 
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Bhurki

Junior Member
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Quite accurate drones to be honest.
Edit- Didn't check out the last page..apologies for redundancy.
 

styx

Junior Member
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Did U.S. Missile Defenses Fail During Saudi Oil Attack?

One thing is clear: The attack revealed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly sophisticated air-defense system. Riyadh in recent years has spent billions of dollars building up six battalions of U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles and associated radars. The Patriots didn’t stop the recent attack.

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The
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that badly damaged a key Saudi oil facility on Sept. 14, 2019 largely remain a mystery to the public.

Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have been at war with a Saudi-Emirati coalition since 2015, claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks on two Saudi Aramco facilities, but it’s unclear that the Houthis alone possess the capacity for long-range, precision-guided strikes.


It’s possible the attacks involved far-flying drones firing small, guided munitions. The Aramco sites are around 800 miles from the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guard Corps in the past has supplied the Houthis with weaponry including drones and components for ballistic missiles.

But one thing is clear. The attack revealed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly sophisticated air-defense system. Riyadh in recent years has spent billions of dollars building up six battalions of U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles and associated radars. The Patriots didn’t stop the recent attack.

And it wasn’t the first time Saudi Arabia’s Patriots have failed. At least five Patriots apparently missed, malfunctioned or otherwise failed when Saudi forces tried to intercept a barrage of rockets targeting Riyadh on March 25, 2018.

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Houthi forces fired at least seven rockets at Saudi Arabia that night. The Saudi military
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Patriot Advanced Capability-2 missiles in an attempt to destroy the Houthi rockets in mid-air. The Saudis claimed seven of the Patriots struck their targets.

One man reportedly died after being struck by metal fragments. It's unclear whether the fragments came from a malfunctioning Patriot, a successful intercept or a Houthi rockets striking the ground.


But amateur
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that appeared online in the aftermath of the missile skirmish indicate that many of the Patriots exploded in mid-air or veered off course. The errant missiles invoked memories of similar failures involving American-operated Patriots during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"It's nothing but an unbroken trail of disasters with this weapon system,"
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Theodore Postol, an MIT physicist and prominent critic of U.S. missile defenses.


Riyadh seems to realize it needs better missile defenses. “Saudi Arabia has been in talks to acquire the same S-400 advanced air-defense system that Turkey recently bought from Russia,” Marc Champion
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for Bloomberg.

The Russian weapon, though little tested in combat, has technical advantages over U.S. Patriots. It has a range of 400 kilometers (250 miles), versus the Patriot's 160 kilometers, can destroy targets moving twice as fast and can be mounted for action in five minutes, compared with an hour for a Patriot battery. ...


Russia pairs its S-400s with the smaller Pantsir-S1 system, to handle low flying and short range missiles that would slip past the larger ballistic missile defense system. Though Russia has deployed S-400s in northwestern Syria, it has used the Pantsir system to counter drone strikes.

"Ideally, the Saudis need layered defenses, including short-range point defense systems like the German Skyshield or Russian Pantsir to allow rapid engagements of small threats with cheaper systems than the massively expensive Patriot," Justin Bronk, research fellow for air power and technology at the U.K.'s Royal United Services Institute, told Champion.


But all kinds of traditional air-defenses could struggle to keep up with small, inexpensive drones firing even smaller, cheaper precision munitions.

“Here's a cold hard reality that most people just don't understand, including many defense-sector pundits—air defense systems, no matter how advanced and deeply integrated, aren't magic,” Tyler Rogoway
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at The War Zone. “They have major limitations, especially considering most primarily rely on ground-based sensors.”


We live in an age where everyone has access to high-resolution satellite imagery of nearly any point on the globe. This is something that was unthinkable even following the end of the Cold War. A single individual now has the capabilities that entire government intelligence agencies were built to produce, all on their smartphone or laptop computer. And it's entirely free!

GPS is even more of a revolutionary capability. It's incredible pinpoint accuracy really has become more concerning since the hobby drone industry exploded and now components to control drones via GPS are somewhat off-the-shelf in nature and are supplied from manufacturers around the globe. With these two things combined, a bad actor has both the targeting intelligence and the precision targeting capabilities available for a minuscule fraction of what they cost in the past and without any major barriers of entry.


These types of strikes don't have to originate beyond a border, they can even originate from anywhere, including right here in the U.S. against U.S. targets. We must change our way of thinking when it comes to precision munitions and drones, and especially the imaginary line that still seems to separate them. In addition, confronting this issue just won't be about fielding near and very costly military gear, it will also be about implementing, regulations, working with the global community and a lot of intelligence gathering. The best and cheapest way to stop any attack is to do so before they start.
 

Tirdent

Junior Member
Registered Member
Can one have its Patriot missile battery on 24/7 at all times?

Sure - it's expensive though, and I expect that's the crux of the problem. This refinery is located quite far from the border with Yemen, so it is likely that the Saudis were simply complacent and did not anticipate a realistic threat to the facility. The explanation for the failure to repel the attack may well be that no Patriot battery in the vicinity was even online at the time of the attack, perhaps a silver lining in this event.
 

Biscuits

Major
Registered Member
I think the above article from David Axe is wildly exaggerating.

For once, the chances of it happening to America using weapons fired from American soil is 0.

The weapon used (Quds-1) is not something MS-13 or KKK can cook up in their garage. It’s a cruise missile with advanced electronics in it.

The attack also doesn’t discredit US air defenses.

Even with a highly accurate system like the HQ-9B and S-400, the practice is to fire 2 interceptors after locking on in case a freak accident happens.

Using patriot, it’s likely that more than 2 missiles would have to be fired to guarantee a hit.

However, Saudi Arabia said they shot 7 Patriot missiles at 7 quds, all of whom missed their mark. The Saudis did not fire enough missiles, and might not have locked on properly before firing either.

If the patriots were operated by the well trained US army, they would have fired more missiles and made sure the conditions were right. In such a case, the events might have unfolded very differently.
 

vincent

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
Sure - it's expensive though, and I expect that's the crux of the problem. This refinery is located quite far from the border with Yemen, so it is likely that the Saudis were simply complacent and did not anticipate a realistic threat to the facility. The explanation for the failure to repel the attack may well be that no Patriot battery in the vicinity was even online at the time of the attack, perhaps a silver lining in this event.

I assume like any electronic system, the radar of the Patriot system will have enough elements fail after certain amount of usage. Maintenance and components replacements are gonna cost an arm and a leg. Would it make more sense to have some kind of IR-based or slot-array type radar system plus some anti-air gun system instead?
 

styx

Junior Member
Registered Member
if iran can inflict such heavy damages to a close us ally nearly unpunished, think about what china can do with taiwan (bring them back to stone age without electricity or gasoline at the pumps even without firing a single missile with many cyberattacks)
 
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