Last week, we told you an Iranian news agency claimed that Tehran had obtained four S-300 surface-to-air missiles from Belarus and at least one other supplier. Now, the Belarusian government is telling the world it did no such thing. Further, the Belarusian state run military-industrial consortium says it has never even talked to Iran about a potential sale.
The rumored sale was supposedly for two “surplus” trailer-mounted S-300 systems that had been deployed near Minsk and Belarus, with a price tag, which included spares, maintenance and training, of $140 million.
Still hanging out there is the open contract between Russia and Iran, inked in 2005, for the sale of at least five S-300 systems, which have yet to be delivered.
Iran’s Fars news agency, which is described as a semiofficial new agency (I guess that means they speak for the Iranian government, except when they don’t), says Iran has obtained four S-300 surface-to-air missiles from Belarus and some other unidentified supplier. I’m assuming the report means four S-300 systems, and not just missiles; the system includes the launcher and tracking and targeting radars.
Israel has long suggested that Iran’s acquisition of the S-300 would constitute a red-line that would compel Israel to launch an air attack. Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a brief back in November that S-300 deliveries to Iran would almost guarantee Israeli air strikes.
As Simon and other analysts note, Iran’s current air defense system is so weak and the S-300 is considered so good that if the system became operational it would greatly raise the costs of any Israeli strike. Most of Iran’s SAM systems are leftovers from the Shah days, such as their large inventory of U.S. built Improved Hawk, a medium range, mobile SAM system, that was delivered in the late 1970s.
What’s missing from Iranian air defenses is a modern, long-range SAM. That’s where the S-300 comes in. Iran announced in December 2007 that it had contracted to buy an unspecified number of the systems from Russia. The high-altitude, long-range S-300 is considered by some accounts to be comparable to the U.S. built Patriot air defense missile.
With considerable fanfare unusual for the highly secretive Israeli military, Israel’s Defense Ministry announced on Monday that the “Iron Dome” counter-rocket artillery mortar system was ready for operational deployment. Iron Dome combines detection and tracking radars with vertically launched guided interceptor missiles to blow out of the air incoming Katyusha rockets, which Hezbollah rained down on northern Israel in summer 2006, as well as smaller mortar rounds, launched with some frequency from Gaza into nearby Israeli towns.
The first two Iron Dome batteries will be deployed in November, the ministry said. Iron Dome has been in development for years, but was fast-tracked after the 2006 Lebanon War and the Gaza Strip war against Hamas 18 months ago. It is supposed to form the lowest level of a multi-tiered defensive system, targeting rockets, mortars and artillery rounds out to 70 kilometers; the Arrow anti-ballistic missile would form the top tier and tackle Scuds and the like.
An article in Israel’s Haaretz quotes an anonymous defense official gushing over the system’s performance in the recent tests:
Iron Dome, he said, when “faced with a volley of Grad-type Katyushas, fires a counter-volley and the interceptors are required to select and intercept specific Grads in this flying pack. It looked impossible, but they did the impossible,” he said. “Every missile picked the specific Grad it was asked to select and destroyed it. There’s no doubt this is historic.”
A couple of months ago we brought you a marketing video from Russian company Kontsern Morinformsistema-Agat showing off its Club-K cruise missile which can be hidden inside a shipping container.
A Russian news agency report now claims the 3M-54E anti-ship version of the export oriented Club-K missile family is hypersonic, low-observable has a range of 300 kilometers and is far more lethal than the Harpoon or Exocet. The animation shows the missile sinking what appears to be a Ticonderoga class cruiser.
While there has been much discussion in recent weeks over whether or not Hezbollah actually received Scud short range ballistic missiles from Syria, its Hezbollah’s growing stocks of Syrian made M-600 battlefield short range missiles that may prove more threatening.
The M-600 is an improvement on the Iranian Fatah-110 missile, carrying a thousand pound warhead to ranges in excess of 300 kilometers. What makes these missiles a military, versus terror, threat is that they are fitted with GPS-aided inertial navigation. While the Scud is liquid fueled, which means it’s vulnerable to air strikes while fueling before launch, the M-600 is solid fuel and can be fired without preparation.
Most of the rockets Hezbollah rained down on Israel in the 2006 war were unguided; good for spreading terror, not so good at taking out point targets. A precise short-range ballistic missile would enable Hezbollah to target Israeli military installations, air bases and troop concentrations. Reports of Fatah-110 deliveries to Hezbollah first appeared in the Israeli press in 2007.
“With that threat in mind, the Israeli air force recently concluded a decade-long effort of redeploying most of its assets in southern bases, positioning them as far as possible from the Lebanese border for maximum protection. Fighter squadrons, which remain in northern and central Israel, are constantly training in emergency deployment to southern bases, should their home bases come under missile and rocket attacks.”
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s David Schenker says the much debated Scud deliveries to Hezbollah are “a tempest in a teapot.” He points out the logistical headaches of establishing the infrastructure for “the nearly 40 feet tall weapon and its challenging liquid fuel rocket.” The M-600, of which Hezbollah is reported to have around 200, is a much more dangerous weapon, he contends, with its 300 kilometer range, quoting a Hezbollah statement: “is the distance required for precise strikes in all the land of occupied Palestine”
IISS says that while Iran’s missile program has made impressive progress in recent years, it remains heavily dependent on foreign support and supply of key materials, equipment and components. Certain key technologies it can’t build: “There exists no evidence to date to suggest that Iran can, on its own, develop or produce the individual components of a strap-down navigation and guidance system for ballistic missiles.”
Tehran is still four or five years away from rigging some combination of liquid or solid fuel engines to build a longer range missile capable of ranging Western Europe, according to a IISS press release. As for a notional ICBM that could reach 9,000 kilometers and hit America’s east coast, Iran is still a decade away.
One of the more intriguing new technologies spotted at this week’s Navy League Sea-Air-Space Expo was General Atomics’ electromagnetic rail cannon. The company has been working for a number of years with the Office of Naval Research on a 200 nautical mile gun system. In a parallel effort, they’ve been developing a smaller, pulse-power technology demonstrator, called the “Blitzer,” for ship defense against anti-ship cruise missiles and small boat swarms.
Two million amps launch a guided projectile at twice the speed of a conventional gun, but at much lower cost than the usual surface-to-air missile systems outfitting most naval ships. General Atomics is working on a cannon that can launch an airburst round at a rate of one per second. Each round dispenses sub-projectiles, so its equivalent to firing 14,000 rounds a minute, which is a higher rate of fire than the Phalanx close-in weapons system, says Tom Hurn, General Atomics director of advanced weapons systems.
The Army is looking to cancel its costly and poorly performing “missiles in a box,” the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). As we’ve noted, NLOS-LS was also intended to outfit the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), providing the vessel much needed long range, precision guided fires.
We asked the Navy if the Army’s cancellation of the NLOS-LS would have any impact on the LCS being declared combat capable, as the vessel needs some kind of long range fires to fulfill its surface warfare mission. Today, a Navy spokesman emailed over the following statement:
“The Navy is assessing options to fulfill the NLOS role in the surface warfare mission package. An inherent advantage of the modular designs for LCS and its mission packages is that a delay in one part of the overall program does not impact our ability to move forward in other areas and deliver combat capable assets to the fleet.”
By Colin Clark Defense Tech Chief Pentagon Correspondent
Cruise missiles are highly accurate but they have to be fired from a distance and they take a fair amount of time to get where they are going. So they are great for fixed targets, but their limitations have left the Pentagon scratching its head for half a decade trying to find something that can be launched and hit its target anywhere in the world within an hour or so.
One of the key drivers behind this effort has been to develop a weapon that could kill a terrorist like Osama bin Laden anywhere in the world without having to send in special operators or deploy a big ship. The concept, pushed hard by vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Hoss Cartwright, is called Prompt Global Strike and the budget contains $240 million for development programs.
But one of the more promising efforts, DARPA’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), made it part way through a test and then vanished. A review board has been formed to find out just what went wrong. No word yet on when their findings might be available.
DARPA said the launch vehicle, known as the Minotaur Lite, got the HTV-2 up. “The launch vehicle executed first of its kind energy management maneuvers, clamshell payload fairing release and HTV-2 deployment. Approximately nine minutes into the mission, telemetry assets experienced a loss of signal from the HTV-2. An engineering team is reviewing available data to understand this event.”
Updated:Rats, looks like the Russian firm deleted the video from YouTube. Hopefully it will resurface at some point. Here’s a screen capture of the vid. And it reappears. (Thanks GF!)
Continuing with the anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) theme, this marketing video has been making the rounds. It comes from Kontsern-Morinformsistema-Agat, a Russian company that claims to be building a new cruise missile system, the Club-K, that can be hidden inside a standard 40-foot shipping container.
According to this Reuters news story, the missiles at least are the real deal, coming from Russian builder Novator. The article contains some breathless quotes from a writer for Jane’s Defense Weekly; including the claim that the shipping container missile is a “carrier killer.” This is getting to be like the tech world where every new mobile gadget is labeled a potential “iPhone killer.”
They’ve definitely put together an impressive looking marketing vid (that bizarrely starts off with the theme from “Born Free” and finishes up with “Gladiator”) showing the containerized missiles innocuously moved about on a semi, a railcar and a merchant vessel, only to unleash its payload on an unsuspecting enemy. Oddly, the targeted enemy appears to be outfitted with American tanks, helicopters and aircraft, minus any identifying markings of course.
