What I'm driving at.

I really shouldn't be blogging about this.

The latest news that rocked the entire naval-warfighters' world surely would have been the news that the Iranian's Made in China land based C-802 hitting on a very well-regarded corvette sized IDF ship, the SAAR 5. It's the Yingji (or eagle strike) missile. Based very much on the French Exocet (MM40).

SAAR 5 doesn't have an A-gun. It's got a CIWS (close in weapon system) where it's A-gun should be. The rest of IDF ships which were doing shore bombardment using their A-guns were doing it rather close to shore. So the SAAR 5 was only about 10nm away from shore. That should have given the SAAR 5 less than a minute to react. Well, if one can remember the Falklands in 1982, HMS Sheffield was close to shore too. It was sunk by an Exocet. It was operating too close to shore (land smear problem) and the ESM (electronic warfaren support measures) was switched off in order to use the satellite transmission. The two systems had mutual interference.

The SAAR 5 has a 32 Barak Anti-missile missiles. In a typical anti-missile missile mode, it should be able to deploy a salvo of two missiles against incoming missile threats. But as it was protecting the rest of the IDF ships conducting bombardment, it was perhaps a little too close to shore.

There are lessons to be learnt here. Fighting near coast, deployment of capital ships, range of guns to be used for shore-bombardment, integration of systems. Naval warfare, as with warfare of all dimensions, is dependent on tactics, strategies, equipments suitability and systems integration. Then we can look at strategies like coastline bombardment from the air prior to deployment of capital assets near coast, longer-ranged naval gunfire support, datalinking in-theatre assets....



I think the sinking of the SAAR 5 will be a case study before the year is out.