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Ground report from the UAE
TLDR; Passing thougths from a UAE resident amidst the Iran war. Nothing groundbreaking, but you all might appreiate the perspective of someone closer to the action.
Where have you been?
I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.
How are you?
In the midst of the fog of war. I am barely sleeping. Not because I am scared, but because the emergency alerts are really loud. And because my girlfriend is scared and I stay with her on video call for support. I am typign this at 7:18AM GST.
Your experience may vary, but seeing missiles fly over my head and interceptors fire from less than a mile away changed me as a person. I am aware it can be much worse but I wasn't ever expecting to experience this!
To the point I could partion my life into 'before and after the missiles'. I was driving from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah at approximately 7PM on the 28th of February when interceptors started firing from less than a mile from me. I sped upto 120 miles/hour to GTFO of there. An overwhelming majority of the drivers did not speed up, they slowed down. Idiots!
From then on; emrgency alerts, booms and thuds and drones are a daily thing. I'm not really worried about me or my closed ones physical safety per se. But there is this background vibe that something is wrong no matter how much I try to ignore it. It's quite mentally draining, and this is despite me not being scared for my safety or livelihoood at all!
How is everyone else?
Seems to be roughly three camps of people broadly.
Business as usual
Unlike the last time something was supposed to last for 2 weeks. The government is encouraging you to carry on as normal, head outside even! For obvious reasons, the UAE's entire selling point is that it's safe, and now "it's safe, even with suice drone flying around". Sucks to see large swathes of people not only buy this shit wholesale but parrot it endlessly.
Social media idiocy is in full swing. The most grating are when someone reports hearing fighter jets in their area, and gets mobbed by the most sanctimonious people on earth "kindly" asking them to not share intel with the enemy. As if a forein adversary is relying on civilian reports from reddit of a jet flying at Mach 2. I can go on all day! To be fair, no one was mentally prepared for this, they are "doing their part", whatever helps them sleep at night.
A sad casuality of said idiocy was the abundance of on the ground footage that was available for the first 2 days. The government sent out warnings against posting said videos backed by heavy fines. Much fewer footage is being posted on social media, but they're circulating widely in whatsapp groups.
So what scares you?
"Things are never so bad they can't get worse"
Cue to the last time something was going to be over in "two weeks". Despite a handful of civilian casualities and a majority of the drones and missiles being intercepted, this is unsustainable. The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!
Oh also, the UAE imports 80% of its food and has vitually no fresh water. The Straight of Hormuz being closed off for long enough and a desalination plant being hit would turn into a nightmare to put it lightly! I would probably regret not evacuating at that point. I give a 20% chance of things getting that bad.
I am also skeptical of the success rate of the interceptions. Iran prety much hit everything they would have hit (This list is not exhaustive):
The government claims these were hit by debrey after interception. Oh wow, debrey just happend to land on 4/4 active airports!
Reported as AAQC.
Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through. The Gulf states are said to have intercepted 521 ballistic missiles out of 538 with an accuracy rate of 97% in the first four days of war; the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate. That's 1042 interceptors burned through on the very generous low end, or 260.5 per day. The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can). In other words, in the first four days they've consumed a year and a half's worth of interceptor production, it's likely the Gulf's stockpiles are running down fast. During the previous 12-day war the US burned through a quarter of its THAAD supply, and that was a relatively short war; interceptors are an extremely scarce resource.
Then again, Iranian missile facilities are also being bombed which limits its ability to wage a war of attrition, so it's going to be interesting to see which side wins the numbers game in the end. You better cross your fingers and hope Iran runs out before you do.
Can anyone explain why we live in a world in which we can scale any electronics but the military ones? Seems like no one including Russia can build missiles at scale any more. I am not specialist, but there is nothing in a rocket - tube, sensors array, cpu, explosive and propellant. Nothing of which is that complicated or with right design should require special labor or equipment.
Because you're literally hitting a bullet with a bullet (PAC-3 and THAAD are both hit-to-kill) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase can move at speeds of Mach 8-16? The extraordinary precision required to achieve interception is a pretty big technical feat that requires a lot of cost and time and stress-testing, including some very powerful avionics and computers that need to be not only small but deal with the conditions of being in a missile flying at Mach 8 and still working.
It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.
I am not sure this will be the case over the medium term. Small laser-guided rockets have already bent the cost curve backwards in certain situations for certain target sets; I think very large lasers might become effective against ballistic missiles as a point-defense weapon over the next decade or so.
The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.
These are, at least in the medium term, mostly point-defense weapons, meaning that if they mature ballistic missiles will likely continue to be effective as terror weapons but their ability to hit specific targets may decrease tremendously if those targets are protected by counter-missile systems.
Now, there are counter-countermeasures - the Oreshnik is probably well-positioned to make it past point-defenses, but there's also certain downsides to using submunitions, and forcing the enemy to rely on missiles that are maneuvering, hardened, or using submunitions will tend to drive the cost per missile up and/or efficiency per missile down compared to a unitary warhead.
This would be significant if HVP was capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at any meaningful rate by itself. But according to your source it travels at Mach 3, limiting what it can be used for (IRBM terminal velocity can be somewhere in the range of Mach 16).
This study is attempting to assess the feasibility of using HVP as an augment to current ship loadouts instead of used on its own, the model in use here combines HVP as part of a larger defence system alongside "analogues for the SM-6, designated in the simulation as “Taller”, the SM-2/SM-2ER (“Lancer”), Enhanced Sea Sparrow (“Robin”), and the Phalanx Close-In-Weapons-System (CIWS) (“Pillbox”). The ships defend against anti-ship missiles consisting of analogues of four types of sub-sonic and super-sonic enemy weapons".
Note also that the other interceptors it's being paired with are not cheap and ship VLS units utilise many of these, with the Ticonderoga Class Cruiser boasting "12 Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), three Standard Missile-2 Extended Range (SM-2ER), 56 Standard Missile-2 Medium Range (SM-2MR), 12 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), 10 Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), 32 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), six Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Missile (VLA), and eight Harpoon missiles". HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.
In addition, they didn't know what the kill rate for HVP was due to the newness of the technology, so they just made assumptions about its probability of intercepting a target. "With the probability of hit and kill for the HVP unknown, simulation runs were created for an HVP probability of hit of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3." And even using these assumptions, using a three round burst the inclusion of HVP increases salvo destroyed by.... 7.8% (this only applies to salvos of 75 missiles and above; it has a negligible effect on salvos sized 50 and below), using a five round burst it has an effect of 12%.
And as for the savings of HVP? It varies depending on salvo size, size of round and assumed kill rate, but for the most part they're not large, featuring savings in expended munitions like a cost of $284.7m being reduced to $279.7m, and other cost reductions in that ballpark (it bears noting that use of HVP increases costs in some contexts, particularly the ones where they carry the highest benefits wrt salvo destruction). The savings aren't nothing, but I'm unconvinced that they meaningfully alter the defence-offence asymmetry, and I'm very unconvinced it does anything when it comes to ballistic missiles capable of achieving super- or hypersonic speeds.
I don't think this is true, certainly not as a general statement - for instance, the Oreshnik is known for a top speed "above Mach 10" and generally speaking the top speed is not in the terminal phase, but rather in the midcourse where the atmosphere is thinner. CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase. This source gives a terminal velocity under Mach 3 for ballistic missiles generally. These lower speeds are particularly likely if the missiles are maneuvering at all. If the missiles are not maneuvering, the higher speed is offset somewhat by the vulnerability to pretty much anything that can react fast enough and shoot at them.
Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.
That's because in the scenario, the HVP was being used as part of a layered defense against extremely large salvo sizes. Ballistic missiles are rarely if ever fired 25 at a time against single-point surface targets. This is much more relevant for ships, but if you are, say, Ukraine, your tactical question isn't to how to stop 25 ballistic missiles from striking an artillery battery, it's how to stop a single ballistic missile from striking it (or how to stop a salvo from hitting a number of different targets). If "guided flak guns" can do the trick, it makes ballistic missiles less cost effective.
And if you can put that on a mobile system, the effects can be pretty large. Supposing hypothetically that you're a country with partial satellite targeting data, looking to hit 100 semi-mobile targets before they move. Your enemy has four batteries (40x) interceptors. You need to fire 140 missiles to hit 100 target fairly reliably (a few targets might escape by luck). But now supposing hypothetically that your enemy has replaced all of those batteries with forty road-mobile point-defense systems that can intercept a single ballistic missile at a time reliably. Now you need to fire 200 missiles to reliably hit ~all 100 targets, because you are not certain where the point-defense systems are and need to double-tap all targets. Basically you put the two-interceptors-per-incoming shoe back on the other foot.
This isn't exactly a realistic scenario, just an illustration, but I think you see my point.
Now, I don't think there's an easy solution to ballistic missiles. I'm just not convinced that they will be as relatively effective as they are now forever, or that missile defense is a losing proposition. I agree that if you cram enough missiles into a salvo against a single target, "the missile will always get through," but if you're forcing your enemy to shoot salvos of ballistic missiles against tactical targets, you're much more likely to be on the correct size of the cost curve.
Speeds can be possibly below Mach 5, yes, it depends on the IRBM in question. If you believe the Ukrainian reports on the Oreshnik, it has a terminal velocity of Mach 11, well within the hypersonic range.
But even if the ballistic missile in question travels at only supersonic speeds in its terminal phase, HVPs still can't hit them. Note that due to the limitations of HVP the study here does not even bother to engage it with weapons that come close to the speed of IRBMs, note in this model the offence is utilising anti-ship missiles that are "subsonic and supersonic", not hypersonic. The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.
Yes, you're potentially capable of saving large percentages when you're looking at small salvo sizes that the HVP can hit. This is not always the situation you are looking at, and you cannot utilise HVP against supersonic missiles, as admitted by the study itself. It may be able to be used instead of a more expensive missile, but if that salvo size of one is travelling at a high enough speed, using HVP to intercept it is not prudent, and you cannot rely on the assumption that the offence will use a missile the HVP can deal with.
Ultimately, the end effect of utilising HVPs like that is that you are capable of making the enemy waste some resources by forcing greater reliance on supersonic missiles in certain specific contexts where it would not otherwise have been used. It's an interesting technology capable of subtly shifting the balance of power in certain contexts, but I don't find myself particularly convinced that it will revolutionise missile defence wholesale or shift the cost balance anywhere near parity.
I don't think missile defence is intractable, but it is very difficult.
The study says, on the very first page, "the HVP is capable of supersonic speeds and mid-air course correction to intercept incoming ballistic missiles as well as engaging other targets as an offensive weapon" and BAE's fact sheet, linked to here, says that ballistic missile defense is in the mission set.
The study states that they only modeled using the HVP to engage subsonic targets "[b]ased on sponsor and stakeholder feedback" and as you point out the study did not model ballistic missile targets at all, focusing on more conventional anti-ship missiles. It's possible this means
Either way, I think you are correct that the capability for the HVP to destroy ballistic missiles is not yet present, and may never be present. But on the flip side, I don't think it's impossible that it is eventually operationalized, or for a similar capability to be developed.
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