Posted on 07/15/2006 3:20:15 PM PDT by Jeff Head
Here are the first pictures I am aware of of the damaghed IDF Naval vessel, the Saar 5. Fron these pictures, it is clear that the ship was hit at an angle that would have allowed the CIWS to engage if it was active. I am now leaning towards the systems not being engaged at the time of attack.
IMHO, if true, as some reports have indicated today (buit that I did not want to believe), it would be a fatal and inexcusable mistake in the environment the vessel found itself in...defending other IDF gunboats against air attack during shore bombardment.
Please see the following FR thread for much more discussion and assessment:
Initial assessment of C-802 missile engagment against IDF Saar 5
Thanks for the pics!
It looks like it hit from a rear angle (from the soot), but I have no idea how much of an angle it was. It looks more like a round hole than an elongated one, which would be more of a square hit than a stern-angle hit. IMHO, maybe from about 120 degrees off the bow? Major SWAG.
If the flight characteristics are similar to the Exocet, then the CIWS would only have a few seconds to hit it, in the final pop-up phase of its run. That is enough time, if they saw it coming. I agree: I don't think that the CIWS was powered up. Nor do I think that their passive gear was hot. They'd have seen it in enough time to turn the boat if it had have been.
That doesn't look like much of a impact to me from an exploding anti-ship missile, more like a dud that pieced the helo bay and blew up a helo fully gassed.
No expert, certainly.
Thanks. Given the Brit's ship being sunk with the Exocet and now this ship I was wondering about American ships. The captain of this ship may be toast career wise. However, I do not know much about the detection of incoming modern missles. Maybe this hit was just bad luck for captain and crew!
Have you tried to place an order at the 3" Thick Iron Or Steel Decoy Works, LTD?
They are a year backlogged!
Another possibility is that they turned the Phalanx system off because they didn't want it shooting up the Israeli gun/missile boats that it was escorting. The Phalanx system is pretty indiscriminate about what it'll hose down with shells - an incoming missile looks just like a speeding car, a speeding suicide/gunboat or an outgoing missile to it, and it will happily shoot up all of the above unless someone turns it off.
With the man-in-the-loop version, it can (apparently) get very annoying to keep having to tell the Phalanx, "No, do not shoot at the Admiral's car. No, do not shoot at our fellow ship. No, do not shoot down our friendly outbounds." Understandable (if stupid) for someone to just turn the thing off if you "know" there's nothing out there that will need the system. Remember, the Israelis don't have our Aegis systems or our data sharing net to allow the Phalanx to have better cueing and discrimination for targets.
Hmmm-looks like an exhaust port to me....
Pop-up missile. It would have jumped right over it.
Not to mention the fact that the ship can't maneouver while towing a shield of 3" thick steel plates 150' on either side of the ship. And, the plates would have to be longer than the ship, and taller than the ship, and one of the two missiles (the one that barely missed) came straight down, so the plates would have to be over the ship too...
Now Israel needs to use one of it's missile subs to put a few missiles into Tehran.
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.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/c-802.htm
Here's another.
It was a Chinese made Iranian purchased C-802 Silkworm missile
Watched some really sick dudes on a Spruance do a "keep a close eye on that seagull" with a Phalanx once. They microwaved it in mid-air. The really impressive thing is that it tracked the seagull!
CIWIS may not even have been operational; it's an old military tradition to send out broken ships and planes because the mission is soo important....
No boubt adout it.
I heard there's a sale going on at the ACME website.
Wait. Those are only 2" thick and made out of plywood.
You think it was a dud too, don't you?
They're built by Northrop Grumman, at the Pascagoula MS shipyard..... Same place most US, frigates are built
Oh, yeah, the Phalanx is a great system - but it's wholly indiscriminate and bloody near rabid in its fully-automated version. Not a bad thing when you're engaging a Soviet battlegroup. Not so great when you're operating in concert with other ships in littoral warfare...
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