years ago China was selling them to FRANCE, who was selling them to IRAN, who was popping them off at US flagged Kuaiti oil tankers in the RocketRun of the PersianGulf...
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.
I think this article is BS. No way they could hide that thing in Lebanon. Debka is on crack. The drone story is infinitely more plausable since we know they have them.
Actually reviewing the article, the problem is DUMBKA is too stupid to know that the C-802 missle has nothing to do with a Silkworm...they claim it's in the "Silkworm" family when that is totally false. The C-802 is an Exocet/Harpoon knockoff.
You make excellent points. I would suggest that WWIII started in September 2001 (if not earlier), but that this would mark the opening of combat in a major new theater: Israel.
And no, the American public is NOT psychologically prepared.
The ONLY time DUMBKA reports accurate information is when they get it from a public news conference in Israel, or they steal it off the feed of a 24 hour cable news network or the BBC.
If you carefully look at the timing of reports, DUMBKA never actually BREAKS a story with accurate information, ever. People just stupidly see something on DUMBKA first because that's where they looked first and assume that DUMBKA broke the story.
While it's good to take any new story with a grain of salt, DEBKA is as good as some MSM news sites (I guess thats not saying much)I am willing to bet that many will eat crow on this story, and that silkworms were fired at the warship.
As noted, the worthless morons at DUMBKA incorrectly proclaimed the C-802 is in the "Silkworm" family possibly because that's the only ASM they've ever heard of. That's akin to proclaiming that the F-16 is in the "B-52 Stratofortress" family.
Perhaps a by-product of the increased standard of living, and a general numbness to important world events due to the proliferation of 24-hour news services.
It's more than possible that if world events led to gas going to $4-5/gal, some folks would not be able to cope with this. Even more so with a series of coordinated attacks by terrorists on US soil. Some folks could work through such events - some could not.
Having said that, I am still waiting to see pics of the stricken vessel.
Israel official: Iran helping Hezbollah
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060715/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_attacked_ship;_ylt=AvJlyjISpFiFvr41Y3nX24tvaA8F;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-
A missile fired by Hezbollah, not an unmanned drone laden with explosives, damaged an Israeli warship off Lebanon, the army said Saturday. Iranian troops helped fire the missile, a senior intelligence official said. ..........The intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, said about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranian-made, radar-guided C-102 at the ship late Friday. ..........the army's investigation showed that Hezbollah had fired an Iranian-made missile at the vessel from the shores of Lebanon, said Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan. ................"We can confirm that it was hit by an Iranian-made missile launched by Hezbollah.
After doing a little digging, I tend to agree with you. It seems the CIWS (and I'm not sure this ship had that system) has never actually prevented a missile strike in a military conflict.
The Phalanx (or any similar weapons) isn't nearly as effective as it's been made out to be.
Brig.Gen.Ido Nehushtan seems to think it was a missile.
Yep. That's what I've been learning.
years ago China was selling them to FRANCE, who was selling them to IRAN, who was popping them off at US flagged Kuaiti oil tankers in the RocketRun of the PersianGulf...
Sorry was a SACCADE not SILKWORM.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/c-802.htm
C-802 / YJ-2 / Ying Ji-802 / CSS-C-8 / SACCADE / C-8xx / YJ-22
The Ying-Ji-802 land attack and anti-ship cruise missile [Western designation SACCADE], is an improved version of the C-801 which employs a small turbojet engine in place of the original solid rocket engine. The weight of the subsonic (0.9 Mach) Yingji-802 is reduced from 815 kilograms to 715 kilograms, but its range is increased from 42 kilometers to 120 kilometers. The 165 kg. (363 lb.) warhead is just as powerful as the earlier version. Since the missile has a small radar reflectivity and is only about five to seven meters above the sea surface when it attacks the target, and since its guidance equipment has strong anti-jamming capability, target ships have a very low success rate in intercepting the missile. The hit probability of the Yingji-802 is estimated to be as high as 98 percent. The Yingji-802 can be launched from airplanes, ships, submarines and land-based vehicles, and is considered along with the US "Harpoon" as among the best anti-ship missiles of the present-day world.
Following the 1991 Gulf War Iran imported the C-802 antiship cruise missile from China. China suspended exports in 1996 in response to comlaints by the the United States. In December 1996 Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashivili, warned Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian that arms exports would increase destabilizing factors in the region. No international agreement bans transfers of anti-ship missiles, and the C-802 is not covered by the MTCR, which controls exports of ballistic and cruise missiles that can deliver 500 kg. warheads to 300 km. Iran expected to purchase 150 C-802 missiles from China but only received a half of them because of the arms suspension. By mid-1997 Iran reportedly possessed some 60 of the missiles deployed in coastal batteries on Qeshm Island, a strategic point on the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula. In 1997, General J.H. Binford Peay, Central Command commander, said that China transferred 20 patrol boats with 15 equipped with C-802 missiles (Washington Times, January 29, 1997). [Some reports claim that China may have transferred hundreds of C-802s, although these claims are not widely attested].
In early 2000 it was reported that North Korea and Iran were jointly developing an advanced version of the C-802 cruise missile. These missiles initially acquired by Iran were not equipped with advanced systems, and the missiles acquired by Iran were rather outdated. Iran turned to North Korea for missile system technology, and the two countries are jointly developing an upgraded version with improved accuracy. ["N. Korea, Iran Jointly Develop Missile: Report" Korea Times February 17, 2000]
The army said two C802 missiles were fired at the vessel; the first missed the ship and struck an Egyptian boat some 60 kilometers (37 miles) off the Lebanon coast.
It also represents a huge coup for Hezbollah and Iran. The Saar 5 was designed and has the systems to defend precisely against this sort of attack. And yet, of two missiles fired, one got through and mission killed the vessel.
This engagement will be analyzed by both sides...one to prevent, and one to exploit and represents a serious threat to our own shipping in the GUlf from Iran. It is ytet to be seen how AEGIS will handle this threat, which is even more sophisticated than the IDF defense.
But, before yesterday, most would have laid odds that a single Sarr 5 could defeat several C-802s launched at it.
If a C-802 was fired (or two of them) than, IMHO, that points almost directly and surely to Iranian involvement and represents a huge escalation.
Yep! This could get out of control very quickly.
It could just be a matter of human error in terms of the Israeli response. It must have taken them by surprise and they were not ready to respond with the Sarr 5 for that reason.
We shall just have to wait for more info. Either explanation is a huge story. My guess is that there are componenets of both...more capable missile, and some degree of feeling that the threat environment was light.
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