Posted on 07/15/2006 4:21:36 AM PDT by Oeconomicus
Hizballah Brings out Iranian Silkworm to Hit Israel Navy Corvette
DEBKAfile Exclusive Military Analysis
July 15, 2006, 1:37 PM (GMT+02:00)
The disaster that overtook one of the Israeli Navy’s state of the art warships, Ahi-Hanit, was thoroughly planned in advance by an enemy which managed to take Israel’s military commanders by surprise. It has shocked Israel’s military to a degree comparable to the profound effect on US forces of al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden. The Saar-5 class corvette, with a crew of 61 seamen and a 10-man helicopter crew, was hit Friday, July 17 at 20:15 hours, while shelling Beirut international airport. Four crewmen were reported missing. One was found dead Saturday aboard the crippled ship. Three are still sought by rescue teams.
DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that the warship was struck from Beirut by an Iran-made C-802 shore-to-sea missile of the Silkworm family. Weighing 715 kilos, with a range of 120km, the missile is armed with a strong anti-jamming capability, which lends it a 98% success rate in escaping interception.
The Israeli ship is armed with an advanced Barak anti-missile system, which may have missed the incoming missile. Israeli military planners must now look at the vulnerability of the navy following the appearance of the first Iranian C-802 missiles The Israeli chief of staff, Lt.Gen. Dan Halutz, started his news conference Friday night just 15 minutes earlier at 20:00. The campaign was then 60 hours old from the moment Hizballah raiders captured two Israel soldiers in an ambush inside Israel. He was poised, assured and clear, until a reporter asked if the military goals of the Lebanese offensive matched the objectives set out in government decisions. His answer was: “Don’t start looking for cracks.”
But Hizballah found the cracks 15 minutes later. Its secretary general Hassan Nasrallah put in a telephone appearance on Al Manar TV straight after General Halutz to inform his listeners across the Middle East that one of Israel’s warships was ablaze at that very moment. He said the ship had been crippled while it was bombing Beirut and was sinking. Hizballah, he added, had prepared a number of surprises for Israel and its armed forces Despite several Israeli air raids, the station is still broadcasting.
In Israel, the Hizballah chief’s words were taken at first as an implausible threat for the future – until the order of events began to unfold. DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal:
Shortly before 20:00 hours Friday, Hizballah launched a pair of land-to-sea C-802 missiles against the Israeli ship from the coast of Beirut. The trajectory of the first was adjusted to a landing amidships from above. It missed and exploded in the water. The second was rigged to skim the water like a cruise missile. It achieved a direct hit of the Ahi Hanit’s helicopter deck, starting a fire. The ship began to sink, as Nasrallah said, and would have been lost were it not for the speed and bravery of crewmen who jumped into the flames and doused them before the ship exploded and sank.
It is not known whether the men dead and missing paid with their lives for saving the ship.
This was the second time in 48 hours that the Israeli high command was taken by unawares.
July 12, the day that Hizballah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, was also the deadline for Iran to deliver its answer to the six-power package of incentives for giving up its nuclear enrichment program. Tehran let the day go by without an answer. Someone should have kept an eye on Iran’s Lebanese surrogate and made the connection with a fresh virulent threat against Israel from Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, the high alert declared earlier this month for Israeli units on the Lebanese border was not restored.
The Hizballah guerrillas took advantage of this lack of vigilance to infiltrate Israel near Zarit, penetrate to a distance of 200 meters, fire RPGs and roadside bombs at two Israeli Hammer jeeps on patrol, and make off with Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Eight Israeli soldiers lost their lives as a result of this attack.
The IDF ground pursuit for the two men was cut short when an Israeli tank was blown up by a massive 300-kilo bomb in south Lebanon, killing the four-man crew and a fifth soldier who tried to rescue his comrades. The attack on the Ahi-Hanit was the third surprise.
When General Halutz was asked if Israel does not fear Syrian and Iranian intervention in the hostilities, he replied firmly in the negative. But Iran has been involved from the very first moment.
This localized perception of the Just Reward campaign in Lebanon is hampering its effectiveness. The war embarked on Wednesday night, July 12, is no local conflict. It is therefore not enough to limit the operation to a duel with Nasrallah, when his strings are pulled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad from Tehran and the Syrian president Bashar Assad, who opened up Damascus military airport for the delivery of Iranian missiles to his militia.
Saturday morning, Hizballah TV broadcast a videotape showed a blurred object looking like a small unmanned aircraft purportedly packed with explosives exploding in the water. This was an attempt to muddy the trail leading to Tehran and present the fatal attack as an extraordinary feat of arms by Hizballah. It was also another move in and intense psychological war to undermine Israeli morale. The inference they are trying to get across is that if the Shiite terrorists have a weapon that can hit a moving target at sea, the will not find it hard to reach any part of Israel including Tel Aviv.
Travis and several others (including myself) have been wanring about these possibilities for years. I pray we can avoid them...but they are very real, and very imminent.
Phalanx, anyone?
The missile was giuded in, probably passively, from the stern. Probably came in low and fast, menaing there was a very short window of opportunity to engage, unless data linked sources caught the threat wwell in advance. Apparantly they didn;t and the vessel had no time to bring its systems, including the Phalanx, to bear.
I can't think of one place on this planet where these bastards are bleeding. But they love seeing us bleed in Iraq and they love seeing us distracted by North Korea, Iran and Hugo Chavez. We have military all over this world. The ChiComs do a lot with a little. They don't send armies. Instead they send weapons trainers/advisors to Iran. ChiComs also send diplomats to negotiate long term oil contacts with Iran, Venezuela, some African countries and others. Thankfully the Chinese have near zero ability to refine heavy Venezuelan crude... so far
To me, the first ten seconds of the video show the
ship firing its main gun, not a missile strike.
You can see the smoke coming from the muzzle. Also
a warhead detonation would create more flash.
I think this video is labeled in error.
We don't need battleships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
...and it mission killed it.
Everyone will be interested in this, the USN, our allies, the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese who developed the missile.
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Is there any military reason for allowing the Hiz-TV to still be broadcasting?
US carriers will be targeted by long range missiles.
I think this video is labeled in error.
The video is kind of strange, though. I'd expect a missile impact to cause a much larger cloud of smoke. There are definitely two bursts of smoke and two reports, however, closer together than I'd expect that gun to be able to fire. And first reports said that the damage was light, the more serious damage to the steering only being discovered later. So I still don't know what to think.
If AWACS wasn;t already there, someone will pay. If the systems were not properly data linked, someone will pay, if the system was not properly deployed, someone will pay. Then the IDF, the USN, and all of our allies will learn from the experience. Trouble is, so are our enemies.
I agree that the Chinese would not "think twice" about the consequences of having the US fall.... However, culturally, there is no more 'conservative' society in the world. Chinese DO NOT like sudden change. They DO NOT like sudden economic disruptions, even if it were to eventually put them on top.
They like the status quo in Taiwan and North Korea. If it's gaining in their favor over decades, they're cool with that.
If you think our economy will be jolted by a Persian Gulf jolt, you can't imagine how precarious the Chinese economy is with a major disruption in oil supply right now.
The CCP cannot survive 1/2 a billion angry chinese middle classers in gas lines right now. (/my humble opinion)
I hope so. This has been going on long enough. Time for Israel to end it before these terrorist nuts get a nuke.
The sooner the better, IMO.
I realize that the guidance and payload (conventional/nuke) are not tubes like in the old Regulus.....but all this "advanced" weaponry of the China/Iran/etc set sure as hell looks like a 1960's Regulus II cruise missile to me!!!!
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Phalanx probably was used, but its a last ditch weapon, has approx. 3-5 second response time before impact.
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