Iran Tests Naval Cruise Missile During War Games

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.'"

Comments

Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02

[AHuxley]

Read about small boats and aircraft did during US war games under Gen. Paul van Ripen.
U Sank My Carrier! By Gary Brecher
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779
"send everything at once"

Re:Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02

[Hadlock]

Hanging off of your post a little bit, there's been some rumblings in the news about the Chinese DF-21, which is basically a straight up, straight down mortar shell designed to sink aircraft carriers (and other local battleships) within an 1100 mile radius (that includes singapore, japan, and both koreas). Sort of the same functionality as an ICBM, but with more conventional explosives attached. The big problem is that they come down at mach 2 or faster, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
 
Forbes alluded to this saying "its surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to Chinese attack"
 
While I doubt we'd unwrap the ICBMs, there's no reason to think this non-nuclear-ized technology exists. We've already retired battleships from the navy, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Carriers are on their way out too.
 
More reading:
  http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/
  http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

Re:Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02

[oodaloop]

That's not at all what happened. JFCOM wanted to show how its new tool, Operational Net Assessment (ONA), was awesome. They lost, badly. So they reran the exercise is such a way that they won, then congratulated themselves. Publicly. The exercise was touted as a success, despite the embarrassing defeat. And the tactics that van Ripen used, such as small boats swarming our ships, were ignored.

Go ahead and blockade the region, Iran

[MikeRT]

Blockades are defined by international law as an act of war. The moment you try to enforce this blockade, you'll have effectively declared war on every Persian Gulf state and anyone trading with them.

Re:Would love to see some naval battle

[Marcika]

Read the 'pedia page and its sources about the Millennium Challenge 2002 and LtGen. Van Riper.

Re:And yet more evidence that Iraq was a huge mist

[chrb]

The stories of nukes in Iraq were lies at best, and a huge failure of US intelligence at worst.

Presented to U.S. officials by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group pushing for an American attack on Iraq, the defector says Saddam is close to finishing a long-range ballistic missile that could hit Cairo; Ankara; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Nicosia, Cyprus, or Tehran. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/658542/posts

That was what we were told in 2002. A decade on, we now know that those "intelligence" reports of WMDs from the INC were actually supplied by a double agent working for Iranian intelligence.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/25/usa.iraq10

Oops. And what about those mobile bioweapon labs? It turned out that intelligence came from another unreliable source:

Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.[1][4] On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity.[5] Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

The whole story was made up by one guy who wanted his immigration card, and yet - without any verification - it was used by the Bush administration to justify a war.

And since you brought it up, alll of the intelligence that linked Iraq to 911 was lies as well.... There was no Iraq Islamist link (well, at least until the coalition invaded and plunged the country into a bloody sectarian civil war)

Re:Would love to see some naval battle

[Sponge Bath]

...you dumb Eurotrash liberal droolers would get pissed, go ahead, have another sit in protest in a park ya whanker.

Does this add anything to your argument? I agree with what you said before, but that bit left me with the impression that you are unstable with an uninformed view of people who disagree with you.

Re:Would love to see some naval battle

[rgbatduke]

With respect, I think that this will prove almost untrue. In a war like this there would be no particular hurry. Consider:

• * As always, the war will be fought initially not at sea, but in the air. Since World War II, naval warfare has been air warfare first and foremost. That is even more true today. We could take out Iran's entire navy without using any actual ships, if we are patient, and with stealth aircraft, radar-sniffing missiles, and ECM protecting our planes, we will.
• * We will know exactly where all of their naval surface assets are as the war begins. We have satellites, they don't. Boats can't hide. Their submarines, not their corvettes and frigates, are the "problem", but they don't have that many of them.
• * I personally doubt that they can hide their submarines. I would guess that at this point the entire gulf and strait is one big acoustic array. We also have a moderate list of exotic new technologies for submarine detection, featuring blue/green lasers and massive computing, that can detect e.g. a submarine's underwater wake. Once detected, killing them is routine. They have exactly three submarines that could be a "problem" (Russian built Kilo submarines, quiet and fairly modern). I would bet that they are being actively tracked by the navy as I type this and that they will all three be gone within hours if not minutes of the initiation of any hostilities. That might be time for them to get an attack off, if they are in a position to do so, hence my bet-hedging.
• * The question then is: how successful is such an attack likely to be? Iran does have "modern" missiles in their arsenal. OTOH, I rather suspect that all of our military assets at risk in the area have considerable defenses against modern missiles, in particular e.g. cruise missiles of all flavors. I could see one, or even two attacks succeeding, and possibly even sinking the targeted ship. Our own smaller attack (e.g. patrol) vessels will be at the greatest risk -- if anything gets up close and personal with Iran's navy, it will be these guys as they go after the "leftovers" of Iran's submarine fleet (their various minisubs, which will be the most difficult things to discover, track, and eliminate).
• * Again, this is a war of technologies -- we have price-is-no-object ultramodern stuff; most of Iran's navy is 50+ years old (post-WWII vintage) and cannot possibly be as well protected or as well armed as ours is, assuming that it can actually get within range of our navy before our air power takes it out. Most of that navy will be eliminated before it can get off a shot, especially if we do the smart thing and actively retreat, pulling most of our naval assets back to where they can hit Iran but Iran cannot hit back and waiting for our air force to strategically eliminate Iran's air force (no longer than it took to eliminate Saddam's, a matter of a few days tops), most of its tactically deployed SAM sites (if it turns its radar on, it's dead; if it doesn't, it's useless and eventually dead anyway as satellites and surveillance aircraft and ground forces flag them for missions).

So, if we are patient, the rate limiting feature of the war will be the speed with which we can deliver advanced munitions to the battlefield as we use them, highly efficiently, to eliminate Iran's assets one by one and defeat them in detail with minimal risk. There is little chance that we will win completely untouched, but if Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Iraq are any measure -- and I think that they are -- it will be yet another case of our absolutely overwhelming military technology systematically and ruthlessly destroying a large but ill-equipped armed force. In the air we will be -- briefly -- challenged by our own F14 tomcat, plus a mish-mosh of soviet jets left over from the cold war.

The "left over" bit will be the main point of interest. The technology represented in their air force is somewhat aged. They have around 108 air superiority jets, all d