Hezbollah missile sea strikes: UAV or ground based?

In last evening’s post, “The War Widens, Hezbollah Strikes Egyptian, Israeli Ships with UAVs,” we reported the Israeli warship and an Egyptian civilian vessel were likely hit with missiles launched from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and not a UAV packed with explosives. The Egyptian vessel was sunk. The latest reporting indicates missiles did indeed strike both ships. “We can confirm that it was hit by an Iranian-made missile launched by Hezbollah. We see this as very profound fingerprint of Iranian involvement in Hezbollah,” Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan of the Israeli Defense Forces told the Associated Press.

Reuters reports “A military source said a C802 radar-guided missile with a range of 60 miles (100 km) had been fired at the ship as it sat off the coast.” The C802 is also known as the “Noor,” according to NTI. The C802 is the Iranian version of the the Chinese Jing YJ-82, and “Following the 1991 Gulf War Iran imported the C-802 antiship cruise missile from China.” Wikipedia claims Iran purchased up to 60 C802 missiles. The C802 antiship missile can be launched from aircraft. In April of 2006, Iran claimed the the C802 (or Noor) can be fired from aircraft:

“Today we have successfully tested a new air-to-sea-and-ground missile capable of being fired from planes and helicopters, which can evade anti-missile missiles,” war games spokesman Rear Admiral Mohammad Ebrahim Dehqani said. “The missile, which is labelled Noor, has a tremendous destructive ability and has an antenna in its warhead which gets activated near the target,” he added. Dehqani said like the other missiles, which have been test-fired during the manoeuvres, it was built by Iranians.

The reports do not indicate whether the missiles were guided from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or were from ground based missile systems. The use of a ground based anti-ship missile system in these attacks, while certainly a possibility, is unlikely as the characteristics of this system would certainly have been detected by the Israeli Defense Forces. There are two basic ways a ground launched missile can locate and hit its target:

1) The missile is ‘dumb’ and is guided by a ground based system.

2) The missile has its own guidance package.

Regardless how the missile is guided (ground radar or its own guidance package) there are certain steps that would occur in order for the anti-ship missile to obtain and hit the target:

1) The missile needs initial coordinates to launch. This is the “designation phase”, where the fire-control radar must be directed to the general location of the target due to the radar’s narrow beamwidth.

2) The coordinates are obtained by firing up a ground based radar, which then searches for the ships.

3) The coordinates are then send to the missile guidance system.

4) The missile is launched, and then directed to the target. This is the “acquisition phase,” where the fire-control radar switches to the acquisition phase of operation once the radar is in the general vicinity of the target. During this phase, the radar system searches in the designated area in a predetermined search pattern until the target is located or redesignated.

5) The missile is guided to vessel either by:

a) the ground radar. This radar remains active to guide the missile to its target.

b) the missile’s own guidance package. The missile will emit its own radar signature.

This is the “track phase,” where the fire-control radar enters into the track phase when the target is located. The radar system locks onto the target during this phase.

The active radar, from either the ground based radar or the missile guidance system, would have been detected by the Israeli electronics surveillance packages. The Israeli Phalcon airborne early warning system would be capable of detecting this ground launch radar as well as the actual launch of the missiles. The Israeli warship, the Saar 5, possesses an Elta EL/M-2218S air search radar that would detect the incoming missiles. There are no reports of the Israelis detecting radar emissions from either the ground or the missiles. Israel is in a state of war, and a ground launch would not be missed by the IDF in a heightened state of alert.

Remember that there were two missiles, not one, launched during the strike, making the likelihood of detecting the radar, ground launch as well as two missile radar signatures.

A UAV launched missile system, on the other hand, would be a more stealthy system. The UAVs are difficult to detect as they can fly in below radar, and can be flown by remote visual methods, thus negating the need to emit a radar beam to obtain the target, and can launch the missiles at the last moment, too late for the warship to react to an attack. The Noor C802 misile is approximately the size of a Hellfire missile, which the U.S. uses on their unmanned Predator UAVs.

Both weapons systems indicate a level of sophistication which Hezbollah likely does not possess, but their Iranian backers do. A guided missile system, either from the ground or from UAVs, further implicates the Iranian government in its involvement in this war. A ground based system requires radar and other sophisticated support systems, which require technical expertise and maintenance support, as well as technical training. For Hezbollah to have succeed in this strike using a ground based anti-ship missile system, it would have needed to deploy and fire these missiles without prior testing of the radar along the Lebanese coast. An anonymous Israeli intelligence official claims “about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranian-made, radar-guided [C-802] at the ship late Friday.”

Updated:

Israel has deployed three PAC-2 Patriot missile batteries near Haifa, “aimed at intercepting missiles launched at the area.” But it is unlikely the PAC-2 can intercept the smaller rockets, such as the Raad, which are being launched against the city. The Patriot systems are designed to shoot down aircraft, and have been modified to shoot down larger, medium range missiles such as SCUDs. “Patriot Advanced Capability-2 (PAC-2) is a surface-to-air guided missile defense system designed to detect, target, and destroy incoming ballistic missiles flying three to five times the speed of sound,” reports MissileThreat.com.

The PAC-2s are being deployed to intercept longer-range missiles (ballistic missiles fired from deeper in Lebanese territory, or perhaps Syria) and to take down UAVs launched from the Lebanese coast.

Media Note:

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Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

Tags: hezbollah, Israel, lebanon