| 26 August 2006 Kilos I am on vacation, which is to say that I do not have my media suite arrayed to properly pump the alarming news of the world direct into my cerebral cortex, of oblongata or whatever they call the place where the bad news goes for short-term retention. It doesn't stay long, that is for sure. There is too much of it and it quickly overflows the buffer. I am certainly glad I am not on the Gulf Coast and worried about Tropical Storm Eduardo, which alarmingly is curling over Hispaniola and Cuba and headed for places that are even now just confronting the damage of last year. So I stacked that up, wondering if there was going to be an effect on commercial air transportation just when I needed it this weeks when opened the e-mail through the miracle of my broadband wireless card on the laptop. It works like crap out here in the heartland, but it is a wonder that it works at all. I can check my e-mail driving down the road, if necessary, and provides yet another distraction from careful driving. The Iranians announced that they had fired a long-range stealth missile from one of its submarines in the Persian Gulf. The event was part of the month-long military exercise that was supposed to include the end of life as we know it. Maybe it did, and I missed it. But this particular news was calculated to evoke the power that the Russians, Americans, British, French and Chinese have in their inventories of mobile mass destruction. The Anglo-Americans deploy the Trident ballistic missile submarines that can fire nuclear missiles to just about any place on the globe. The French and the Russians have their own peculiar lines of submarines and missiles. The former militantly patrol the Bay of Biscay, while the latter maintain the vestiges of a mighty force that prowled the Arctic waters of the Bering Sea and North Pacific. Where the Chinese go is open to some question, since they only have one or two platforms. But I'm sure they are busy on the matter and will be fielding many more in the future, to patrol the waters adjacent to the Middle Kingdom while brandishing the nuclear spear at Honolulu and Los Angeles. Their range will improve, I'm sure, and that will give them additional flexibility. What the Iranians have is open to some question. They do not have anything like what the rest of the nuclear club has. The last time I had any reason to know anything about it, the Islamic Republic was purchasing export models of a Soviet-era diesel submarine whose NATO code-name was “Kilo.” We named the Soviet submarine fleet by class as we were able to identify them from low orbit, part of a cat-and-mouse game at their building yards where we sought to analyze components as they were stacked to enter the covered assembly halls and compare them with what had gone before. Once they were laid down, under cover, we would not see the finished product until they were launched and ready to join the fleet. Alpha through Juliet they came, mostly assorted nuke boats of varying characteristics, some attack boats and some ballistic missile-carrying boomers. The Kilo was a new design in non-nuclear technology, an improvement on the venerable Foxtrot submarine, which had once formed the bulk of the Soviet attack fleet. It was, in turn, adapted from the very best of the last Nazi submarines that were carted off by the Russians after the triumph in 1945, along with the rocket motors of the V-2 terror rockets. Hitler's science is one of those gifts that keeps on giving, two full generations later. The Soviets intended for some of their Kilo production run to go to the export market, and it was the Soviets that made the deal with the Ayatollah. We were never quite sure what the Iranians were up to with their little fleet of submarines. The plan, as I recall, had been to acquire four of them, and use them as a force-in-being to encourage the notion that the Islamic Republic could shut the gates to the Persian Gulf and turn off the oil spigot at will. That was plan, anyway, but they never got all four, and the submarines began to disintegrate in the warm salty water of the Gulf almost immediately, displaying the sad reality that a navy, modern or not, is composed of elaborately-formed pieces of high-grade steel successfully turning back into iron oxide. I would never be one to gainsay the ingenuity of the Iranians. The Americans sold a few dozen of the famed F-14 Tomcat fighter to the Shah in the mid-seventies. The aircraft passed into the hands of the Ayatollah's air force after the overthrow. Despite an embargo and much bluster on the part of the Americans, the Iranians managed to keep their fighters flying through the long bloody war with Iraq. I talked to one of their pilots when it was over. I had a lot of admiration for him, flying in airplanes in conditions we would never ask our people to set foot in.. I'm sure we would have vanquished them quickly, if they had tried to fight us, since we had the parts to keep ours running. But they were certainly adequate to the task of fighting Iraq. So I have no doubt that given enough desire, the Iranians could put one of the aging Kilos out to sea and fire a rocket from it. Iranian state television was the megaphone that announced the launch of a missile from a submarine. That leaves the situation a little foggy, which is what they intended, I'm sure. Rockets have been fired for years from submarines, and not just the ballistic sort. Torpedo-tube launched versions have been in the inventory for years, mostly with an anti-shipping mission. Some of the latest which are appearing on the market are high-speed sea-skimmers, which I imagine were what were tested. The Iranian television announcer called the missile they fired a “Sagheb,” which in Farsi is supposed to mean “piercing.” The news services are saying that the only weapon of that name in the inventory is an air defense missile, which of course it could be. Anyone can fire a shoulder-fired missile from the bridge of a submarine in such poor condition that it could not submerge. But let's give the Iranian Navy some credit. One of the admirals boasted that it was long-range and powerful, and designed and built right in the Islamic Republic. That is just short of preposterous. The name to me suggests to me that it is probably an anti-ship missile cruise missile similar to the SS-N-22 SUNBURN, which is a weapons calculated to ruin the day of any fleet sailor, coming in at mach speed just feet above the wavetops. The SUNBURN is just one of the family of advanced weapons the Iranian military has purchased with the profits from their oil sales in recent years, re-marking the crates and calling them the product of advanced Iranian weapon design. Of course it is all ridiculous, but even a leaking submarine with a brand new torpedo-tube launched missile can ruin the day of an unsuspecting warship, and certainly that of a fat oil tanker. The military exercises are a statement to the effect that Iran can hold the Straits of Hormuz open or closed at their will. It is a powerful statement, but given the right circumstance, they could be back to basics in short order. The key for them is to walk the line just short of where Saddam thought it was. If they are left alone long enough, they might become what they say they are now. Iran has become the regional power we always wanted, back in the days of the Shah. It is too bad that it worked out that it is the regional power of our worst nightmare. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |