An online NBC report by Robert Windrem published on Friday goes into explicit technical detail about the military hardware that will be brought to bear in an Israeli attack on Iran:
Israel has both medium and intermediate range Jerichos. The medium-range Jericho I would not have the range to reach many Iranian targets but the intermediate-range Jericho II’s, capable of hitting targets 1,500 miles away, would have no problem. The Jerichos would be equipped with high explosives, not nuclear warheads. Asked if the Jericho would have the accuracy and the explosive power to take out a hardened bunker of the sort believed to be protecting Iran’s most-sensitive underground nuclear facilities, one official replied, “You would be surprised at their accuracy” and that the high explosives involved is a special mix of chemical explosives that could conceivably penetrate the Iranian fortifications.Missile attacks would be coordinated with fighter-bomber attacks (presumably the Israelis’ extended-range F-15I Strike Eaglet) as well as drone strikes. The fighter bombers would use what one official described as “high-low, low-high” flight paths — high first to increase fuel efficiency, then low for most of the trip to evade radar, then climbing high again as the weapons are released in what is known as a “flip toss” on the target. The Israelis would be prepared to lose aircraft if necessary, the officials said.
Windrem amalgamates and synthesizes the views of various unidentified “US and Israeli officials” about a more than likely Israeli attack on Iran in the next several months into a tidy and digestible question-and-answer format. One question he neither asks nor answers is whether Israel is actually capable of successfully carrying out a winner-take-all high tech attack on Iran that could destroy or (more likely) delay the development of Iran’s budding nuclear program, at minimal costs–financial, environmental or in casualties–to itself and anyone else except Iran.
Whether it’s due to technical glitches or human error, military hardware doesn’t always function the way it’s supposed to. A mysterious Yasour helicopter crash on July 26, 2010, during a training exercise in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania was, according to Jerusalem Post military analyst, Yaakov Katz:
…a blow to the IAF’s image and raises two serious questions – first, whether the transport helicopter, which has been in IAF service for over 40 years, is still a reliable and sturdy aircraft, and second, if this is what happens during a regular training exercise in Romania, what will happen in a future IAF long-range operation.
Katz went on to ask and answer the obvious question:
One might wonder why an Israeli helicopter was in Romania in the first place. The answer is that every long-range IAF operation today, wherever it may take place in the world including in Israel, takes into consideration ‘third-sphere threats’ like Iran, which are far from Israel.
On Nov. 10, 2010, two Israeli pilots were killed in the Negev Desert when their F15-I crashed. Last Sunday (Jan. 29) a state of the art Israeli Heron TP unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also known as the Eitan, crashed in central Israel. No further reports have emerged to date regarding the cause of the disintegration of “the drone that can reach Iran,” believed to be the first such Israeli UAV crash of its kind.
The huge drone–the size of a Boeing 737, with a wingspan of 86 feet, and capable of carrying a one ton payload and reportedly capable of staying aloft for as long as 45 hours–went down near the Tel Nof Air Force Base not far from the town of Gedera in central Israel, about 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. According to the Associated Press, the Heron TP is “the largest unmanned aircraft in Israel’s military arsenal” and would “be featured prominently in any potential Israeli operation against Iran and its expanding nuclear program.” It can be aloft for as long as 45 hours, “making it capable of conducting a wide variety of missions.” Last September, Katz had reported that the Israeli Air Force’s claim that the deployment of the Heron TP by the end of 2011 would “boost its intelligence-gathering capabilities” and that “foreign reports” said the drone also had the ability to launch missiles.”
Early press reports about the downing of the UAV were inconsistent as to whether the UAV test flight was “routine” or “experimental.” A “flagship product” of Israeli Aircraft Industries, the Israeli business daily Globes assessed the cost of the downed UAV at $10 million. Y-Net cited the figure as $5 million, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at $35 million. Israel is currently trying to market the drone to other countries and France recently decided to purchase Israeli Heron TPs instead of US Predator drones for use in NATO operations.
There hasn’t been much coverage of the investigation regarding the cause of the drone crash since it occurred. Initial reports stated that the cause was attributed to either human error or technical malfunction or some combination of the two. One possibility raised was that the one ton weight-bearing capability of the drone had been exceeded. (A GBU-28 “bunker buster” bomb weighs between 4500-5000 lbs.) Katz cited an explanation from military sources that the aircraft was flying with a new navigation component that might have disrupted the drone’s automatic flight systems. Yoav Zitun of Y-Net reported that a highly-advanced device on the wing was being tested during the drone’s flight.
Drones seem to offer the potential–and very real possibility–of wreaking enormous damage on an enemy from far away, with no military casualties to the country and with no loss of life to the military forces of the state launching the attack. On the other hand, UAVs don’t always reach their intended targets. Their “precision,” like that of a video game, depends upon the human hands on the controllers, and the choices made. These, in turn, are guided by the intelligence data they have available to them, at least some of which is gathered by UAVs.
The implications of last week’s crash of the Heron TP is a reminder that UAV technology, despite its increasing use, is far from perfect–a point that has received no discussion in the Israeli or global media. Presumably the fact that it is flawed is implicit. Nonetheless, the ramifications (and potential unintended consequences) of its deployment are staggering.
Iran (in case you were wondering) has its own UAV program, the domestically produced Kerrar. With an estimated range of 620 miles, a payload of 500 lbs. and a maximum speed of over 600 mph, the Kerrar is not (yet) capable of reaching Israel. This is good news for Israel for two reasons. The first–that Israel is out of reach–is a no-brainer. But there is another one too. An Israeli drone en route to Iran but shot down or otherwise crashing in Iraq or Bahrain might be declared to be Iranian, and be used as a pretext for war under international law.
What if, in the next test, an Israeli drone were to go further from its base but fall short of its target, causing widespread loss of life and property damage in Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, or within Israel itself? If a malfunctioning Israeli drone en route to Iran were to crash and cause a disaster, would Israel accept responsibility, or would it point the finger at Iran, raising the specter and stakes of international retaliation? It might take days, weeks or months, possibly even years, for the truth to become known–long after a retaliatory strike had taken place.
Blogger Richard Silverstein has already suggested that last week’s crash was not that of a Heron TP but a Hezbollah drone targeting Israel. While Silverstein’s claim isn’t being taken seriously by anyone but himself and some of his readers (see Dimi Reider’s rejoinder on +972), it’s certainly within the range of possibility that a similar incident and accusation, coming from the lunatic right instead of the left, might be taken at face value, and drag the US into yet another war before the facts were even known.
Could the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran that didn’t succeed be almost as bad–or even worse–than one that did?
]]>Iran’s Zahedan airport is located on a road named for Allama Iqbal (also known as Sir Muhammad Iqbal), the great Indian philosopher whom Pakistan adopted after partition as its national poet. The shaheen, or eagle, features prominently in Iqbal’s poetry, as a symbol of vigour, dignity and daring. It is contrasted against the [...]]]>
Iran’s Zahedan airport is located on a road named for Allama Iqbal (also known as Sir Muhammad Iqbal), the great Indian philosopher whom Pakistan adopted after partition as its national poet. The shaheen, or eagle, features prominently in Iqbal’s poetry, as a symbol of vigour, dignity and daring. It is contrasted against the figure of the kargas, or vulture, which represents cunning, cowardice and ignobility. It is the latter appellation that the region frequently applies to the CIA drones which today dot the skies from Waziristan, Kandahar to Zahedan. But shaheen or kargas, they are both ferocious; and it is considered a feat to capture either. Small wonder then, that some in Iran see cause for celebration in the capture of CIA’s RQ-170 sentinel drone, a stealth surveillance craft manufactured by Lockheed Martin.
This is not the first time the CIA has delivered one of its most advanced aircraft for inevitable reverse engineering to its putative enemy. On April 9, 1960, people at the Zahedan airport watched anxiously as an aircraft with unusually wide wings approached from the north-east. The Lockheed U-2C was on a top-secret spying mission for the CIA, but its target was not Iran. Indeed, it was coming in to land after being chased by several fighter planes. Over the previous 8 hours, the plane had photographed four strategic Soviet military sites from an altitude of 70,000 feet, well out of the reach of the Russian MiGs and Sukhois. It embarked on its mission from the Badaber air force base 10 miles to the south of Peshawar.
Three weeks later, on May 1, 1960, another aircraft lifted off from Badaber. It was the U-2′s 23rd mission behind the Iron Curtain, an ambitious mission deep into the heart of the Soviet Union. Flying well over the reach of Soviet fighters, the CIA figured the U-2 could proceed with impunity. But where MiGs feared to tread, a SAM rushed in; a Russian SA-2 surface-to-air missile exploding near the high-flying jet sheered off one of its giant wings and its pilot, Gary Francis Powers, bailed out in time to provide the Soviets with living proof of the intrusion. The incident soon turned into an international scandal, putting an end to the ongoing Four Powers Paris Summit; it also soured relations with Pakistan where few had known about the nature of a mission which now left them vulnerable to the possibility of Soviet retaliation.
But another consequence of the U-2 incident is more germane to recent events. After Powers’s capture, the CIA determined that it will have to invest in new technology in order to avoid similar scandals in the future. One option was a faster plane like the CIA’s A-12, a Mach-3.35 reconnaissance plane developed by Lockheed which would later morph into the better known SR-71. Another option was to invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. In October 1962 development began on the D-21, a drone went into service in 1969 but was cancelled in 1971, after just 4 flights over China. The UAV program remained in limbo until advances in GPS revolutionalized the technology and, with the advent of the global war on terror (GWOT), the drones were finally weaponized. The rest is an all-too-sanguine history. And Badaber and Iran have both continued to feature in it.
Having briefly shed its obscurity in April 1985, when the Pakistani Army and its Afghan allies massacred 52 Soviet and Afghan prisoners of war during a prison uprising there, Badaber once again made headlines when it was discovered that the Pakistani military had leased its local base to the CIA to launch drone attacks in the neighboring tribal regions. The news predictably endangered the whole city of Peshawar, which became a frequent target of retaliating militants. Meanwhile, the new impunity accorded by the unmanned aircraft encouraged the US to push farther into the region, sending reconnaissance aircraft first into Pakistan itself (as during the killing of Bin Laden) and later Iran (as we have just discovered).
However, things have changed since the Cold War. Whereas in the past development of new technology like the D-21 required major industrial investment, today it can be done on the cheap, using pilfered R&D. Israelis have long used this strategy to develop their own variants of US and French technology. China, Russia and Pakistan, among others, have long engaged in industrial espionage to acquire advanced military technology which allows them to stay abreast of modern military technology without having to make the kind of massive investments that only rich countries like the US can afford. All resent (or envy) the impunity that the drones have accorded the US and would like to develop their own without reinventing the wheel. There was already news that Pakistani gave China access to the stealth technology that the US used during its raid to kill Bin Laden. It would therefore have come as nothing less than a blessing for the US to land its most advanced stealth drone virtually intact into Iran’s hands for possible delivery to China and Russia. It is not hard to imagine the glee with which the CIA’s gift will be received in Moscow or Beijing. It will save both years of R&D and plenty of dollars.
More alarming however is the prospect that this development could lead the CIA to move toward the development of more autonomous unmanned crafts in order to avoid interception or hijacking. Research along these lines is already under way. One such project, the Ethical Governor, inspired the following animation from the genius Glaswegian animator John Butler:
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist and a columnist for Al Jazeera English.
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