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The Lebanon War
and the Democratization of Missile Technology
The
Missiles of August
By MARK WILLIAMS
The events of September 2001 disproved
the assumption that only a state could make war on another state.
Now Hezbollah's confrontation with Israel has provided further
education about how the world is changing. Hezbollah's campaign
is a clear sign of how the democratization of missile technology
-- cruise missile technology, in particular -- is reshaping global
realities.
Assumptions about the Israeli Defense Force's military superiority
have enjoyed axiomatic status, especially among laypeople. In
fact, the IDF were -- and perhaps still are -- a good citizen-soldier
militia, with a small number of units of excellent professional
soldiers, and a highly capable general staff. According to a
famous, and probably apocryphal story, when asked the secret
of Israel's military successes, an Israeli commander succinctly
summarized the IDF's method: "Always fight Arab armies."
However, as Hezbollah's leader,
Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah, has explained: "We are not a regular
army and we do not use the way of a regular army." Hezbollah
has displayed a combination of a guerrilla force's decentralized
flexibility and a national military's sophistication, fielding
weapons like the C-802 Noor radar-guided anti-ship missile (an
Iranian-made knockoff of the Chinese "Silkworm" C-802)
that struck an Israeli warship on July 14. In sum, Hezbullah's
arsenal includes the following missiles:
122mm Katyushas: range 13 miles, warhead 6 kg,:
122mm improved Katyushas: range 19 miles, warhead, 6 kg;
220mm Syrian rockets: range 43 miles, warhead 40 kg;
240mm rockets: range 6 miles, warhead 18kg;
240mm Iranian Fajr 3: range 26 miles, warhead 50 kg;
333mm Iranian Fajr 5: range 46 miles, warhead 90 kg;
302mm Iranian Khaibar-1: range 100 miles, warhead 100 kg;
610mm Iranian ZelZal-2: range 130 miles, warhead 400 kg.
Significantly, according to
claims by both Hezbollah and Israel, Hezbollah has held in reserve
all of its 200-odd Zelzal-2 missiles, which have a range of up
to 200 kilometers -- capable of reaching Tel Aviv. The Zelzal
missiles are road-mobile, solid-propellant systems, about which
little is known. They are most likely unguided or use a rudimentary
inertial system; when properly launched, such rockets would be
accurate to within several kilometers of their target, enough
to hit a city like Tel Aviv.
Given all that, it's a reasonable
supposition that Sheikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah were ordered
by their Iranian backers to keep in reserve the Zelzals, as well
as a significant number of the Iranian Fajr-5 missiles (of which
the Khaibar-1 is believed by many analysts to be a modified variant).
Hezbollah's Katyushas are the
furthest thing from the latest designs. Predating venerable weapon
systems such as the AK-47 assault rifle and B-52 bomber, these
generic short-range rockets were given their name by the Soviet
troops who first fired them at German forces during World War
II.
For all the Katyusha's vintage
provenance, however, it has defeated futuristic attempts at missile
defense like the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL), a U.S.-Israeli
attempt to create a high-energy chemical laser that could detonate
the missiles in midflight. In fact, it's indicative of the difficulties
of short-range missile defense that the THEL prototype was approximately
the size of six city buses; according to Subrata Ghoshroy, a
military analyst at MIT who studied the project in 1996, not
only would the system have been "a sitting duck" on
a battlefield, but also any fractures of its fuel tanks would
have released potentially deadly gas over its crew and bystanders.
Although in 2000 the THEL was able to shoot down two Katyushas
simultaneously during tests when no cloud cover impeded it, Katyusha
rockets were designed to be fired from truck-mounted launchers
in barrages of up to 50. Given the THEL's general impracticality,
the U.S. Army ceased funding it in late 2004.
What are the possibilities
for missile defense against the longer-range, Iranian-built rockets,
such as the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, with which Hezbollah hit Israel's
third-largest city, Haifa, and as far south as Hadera in central
Israel?
Since the 1950s, when Time
magazine printed artists' depictions of the majestic umbrella-shaped
shields that would be created by the Pentagon's anti-missile
missiles as they intercepted Soviet ICBMs over American cities,
the U.S. military has kept promising that whatever ABM (anti-ballistic
missile) system was then under development, was just a step or
two from being perfected. Simultaneously, it has allowed fudged
tests in order to get favorable results, and ignored the fact
that, even if the technology worked perfectly when deployed,
such systems would be vulnerable to countermeasures that would
be cheap and easy for attackers to employ.
In 2006, the best hope for
tactical missile defense remains the latest iterations of the
Patriot interceptor. First deployed in the first Gulf War, the
U.S. military initially claimed that this surface-to-air missile
had shot down more than 40 of Saddam Hussein's Scuds. In 1992,
however, the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. House
of Representatives concluded that the Army had no proof that
any Patriot had shot down any Scuds. The latest
Patriot versions seem to be more effective, with at least eight
independently confirmed tactical missile hits in the 2003 Iraq
War.
Israel, with the United States,
has spent billions on a two-tier ABM system that combines Patriots
with Arrow rockets, a homegrown Israeli system. Nevertheless,
although Patriot batteries have been set up around Haifa, Israel
launched none in the recent conflict with Hezbollah. That's because
Patriots cost $1 to $3 million, the Arrow interceptors are similarly
expensive, and the supply of both, whether or not they hit incoming
Hezbollah rockets, would soon run out -- as with the THEL system,
both economics and physics favor the attacker's rockets.
On the ground, Hezbollah has
been able to move its rocket launchers rapidly. Indeed, Hezbollah's
battlefield agility and flexibility is one of the most striking
features of the recent conflict. Objections that Hezbollah has
accomplished a "victory" only in that its obdurate
resistance has vast propaganda value within the Arab world miss
the point that a militia of some 3,000 fighters impeded the advance
of what was supposedly one of the world's best armies beyond
a few kilometers inside Lebanon. In the process, more than 20
Israeli Merkava tanks -- again, reputedly the world's best --
were damaged by anti-tank weapons, including the Russian-made
RPG-29, which have a tandem warhead so that the first explosion
blows away a tank's protective shield and the second penetrates
it.
Overall, Hezbollah's decentralized,
flexible network of small units exhibited the essential aspects
of a warfighting style that some military thinkers have predicted
would predominate in 21st-century warfare, and which has been
described as netwar or fourth-generation warfare. It's a style
of warfare that armies of nation-states, with their massive levels
of force, are ill-equipped to fight.
One proponent of this school
of thought, John Arquilla, a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School, has argued: "What happens if you take your large
hammer to a ball of quicksilver? That's what these networks are."
He continues: "We are trying to wage war as if it still
mattered that our forces are comprised of 'the few and the large'
-- a few large heavy divisions, a few large aircraft carrier
battle groups -- when in fact war is migrating into the hands
of the many and the small -- little distributed units. We live
in an era when technology has expanded the destructive power
of a small group and the individual beyond our imaginations."
These lessons of combat --
now exemplified by Hezbollah's resistance to the IDF -- are not
being lost elsewhere in the Arab world. According to a UPI story,
"Anti-tank Rockets Menace Israelis," appearing on August
14, the day of the cease-fire, a reporter from the Israeli paper
Ha'aretz recently interviewed a member of Fatah's al-Aksa
brigades in Bethlehem, who said: "The brothers...are no
longer interested in games with Kalashnikov rifles; they want
anti-tank rockets....When this technology arrives, how difficult
would it be for one of the fighters to sit on the Palestinian
side of the wall at Abu Dis and fire a rocket at the King David
Hotel? With less effort than a suicide bombing or shooting one
can fire a missile and get the same results."
But not only this level of
missile technology is being democratized. As the instance of
the Iranian-made, radar-guided, anti-ship missile that hit the
Israeli corvette illustrates, more sophisticated missile technology
is also spreading. Pakistan, China, North Korea, and Iran, among
others, now possess cruise missiles. The United States and its
allies are now urging a U.N. resolution that will call for international
sanctions against Iran.
To enforce such sanctions would
require control of Iran's offshore waters and particularly of
the Straits of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil
moves and where Iran can potentially destroy all shipping. It's
not inconceivable to many analysts that Iran, with the missile
technology it now possesses, could 'take down' that foremost
example of U.S. military power, the aircraft carrier battle group.
In a world of proliferating cruise-missile technology, one Pentagon
consultant told me: "We have a navy full of ships that will
burn to the waterline when hit."
This article originally
appeared in Technology Review.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
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Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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