Iran likely to attack critical US radars in Gulf states with Russian help
Hans Stecke
Published March 9
A THAAD battery in Israel (March 4, 2019).
Photo by Corey Payne/AFP
Iran has attacked several critical US air defense radars in the Gulf states and Jordan, according to satellite images from Planet Labs published by CNN and others.
Iran may have had Russian help in this and similar attacks, according to the Washington Post.
A radar system at the Mawfaq al-Sulti military base in Jordan, designed to detect ballistic missiles, was “completely destroyed” a day or two after the fighting began on February 28, the news outlet reported. US fighter jets are based at the base.
According to the defense website War Zone, the radar is a mobile radar system for target acquisition and fire control for a THAAD battery, one of the most advanced US ballistic missile defense systems. The battery had been deployed at the base since mid-February. The radar is the core of the battery, without which it is practically blind. Experts say it is a very expensive piece of equipment that cannot be easily replaced.
American radars in THAAD anti-aircraft batteries in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were also hit and were at least severely damaged.
Satellite images of the Jordanian base showed charred debris and a series of craters. All of the trucks associated with the radar system appeared to be “destroyed or severely damaged,” CNN reported. Damage also appeared to have occurred at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, where the US previously deployed a THAAD radar.
A stationary advanced early warning radar station in Qatar was also damaged. CNN says at least some of these attacks have been carried out by drones; there appears to be a connection between a sharp decline in the number of ballistic missile interceptors fired and a sharp increase in drone attacks reported in the UAE.
“It is ironic that cheaper, longer-range kamikaze drones may pose the greatest threat to highly sophisticated radars [against] targets moving at supersonic speeds, sometimes even in space,” writes The War Zone. “The loss of the radars […] should ultimately be a serious wake-up call about the vulnerability of these vital but largely static systems.”
Iran has confirmed that Russia is helping to defend it, without providing details. However, according to the Washington Post, the issue is the transmission of the precise location of US units in the region. Iran itself has limited resources for this purpose, further depleted by US and Israeli attacks.
Analysts have linked Russian intelligence transfers to Iranian attacks on command centers, radars, and even recently built facilities. An attack on the U.S. embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, “destroyed” the CIA’s intelligence post inside the building.
“Iran’s ability to pinpoint [such targets] with only a handful of satellites makes Russia’s satellite imagery and the coordination of its carefully orchestrated strikes in Ukraine all the more valuable,” Dara Massikot, a Russian armed forces expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Washington Post.
Even before the U.S. and Israeli strikes began, Tehran “deliberately chose to escalate tensions in the region, targeting primarily Gulf Arab states and disrupting the global economy,” in the hope of outlasting President Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported today.
The strategy involves what the newspaper calls a “mosaic defense,” “a decentralized approach that gives individual commanders the autonomy to continue fighting if they lose contact with their superiors.”