Belgrade – Baghdad Military Ties May Be
Paying Off in Air Defense
2315 GMT, 000512
Gen. Shahin Yassin
Mohammed,
commander of Iraq’s
air defense forces,
announced May 11
that Iraq had
successfully
developed and
deployed a means of neutralizing the U.S.HARM
anti-radar
missile. According to Gen. Mohammed, none of the HARM
missiles fired at Iraqi air defense targets since
Operation
Desert Fox in December 1998 have hit their targets,
instead wandering “like mules looking for water in
the
desert,” reported Agence France Presse.
Gen. Mohammed warned Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that the
United States and Britain were deceiving them, both
as to
the threat posed by Iraq and as to their true
capabilities in
defending the region. While the exact details and
extent of
Gen. Mohammed’s claims are questionable, Iraq’s
cooperation with Yugoslavia on air defense suggests
there
may be a grain of truth to his basic assertion.
The AGM-88 HARM is a medium-range, air-to-surface
anti-radiation missile. It is designed to home in on
the
electronic emissions from the target acquisition and
guidance radars of anti-aircraft artillery and
surface-to-air
missile sites and destroy them. More than 2,000 were
used against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and the
missiles were used heavily during Operation Allied
Force in
Yugoslavia.
The U.S. and NATO air forces place a top priority on
suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) in the early
stages of combat to allow allied aircraft to target
enemy
ground forces and strategic targets with relative
impunity.
The HARM is critical to that mission.
Because of the Yugoslav Army’s (JA) careful
husbanding
of its air defense assets and its use of decoys, NATO
forces were never confident that they had succeeded
in
their SEAD mission over Yugoslavia. Because of this,
NATO aircrafts were forced to remain at high
altitudes,
seriously diminishing the effectiveness of their
bombing
campaign and contributing to several incidents of the
mistaken targeting of civilians.
The JA developed a variety of tactics and decoys to
blunt
the NATO air assault. Among the simplest of these was
the construction of visual decoys of wood, fabric and
plastic that drew NATO bombs and artificially drove
up the
tally of “destroyed” Yugoslav equipment.
Yugoslav forces also learned to cycle their radars on
and
off quickly to trigger the launch of anti-radiation
missiles
but to foil target lock-on. NATO blamed this tactic
for the
accidental impact of a HARM missile on an apartment
in
the Gorna Banya, suburb of Sofia, about 30 miles
inside
Bulgaria, on April 28, 1999. However, when a second
HARM missile struck near the village of Lyulin,
Bulgaria,
on May 7, 1999, rumors emerged that the JA was using
decoys to divert NATO missiles.
One possibility as to the nature of these decoys
comes
from a British officer who spent six months in Kosovo
and
conducted his own bomb damage assessment. He
claimed the JA used microwave ovens looted from
Albanian homes to simulate the infra-red signature of
armored vehicles and draw NATO bombs, according to
the
Glasgow Herald on Feb. 18. Author William Dorich
claims
the microwave ovens were rigged to “mimic the heat of
a
radar site.” The trouble is microwave ovens do not
create
heat on their own. They vibrate the water molecules
in food
to generate heat. They do, however, emit radiation in
the
range of 2.5 gigahertz frequency – what the military
refers
to as E band.
Several Russian radar systems operate in E band,
including early warning, target acquisition and
height
finding radars for the SA-5 surface-to-air missile
system,
height finding and fire control radars for the SA-2,
height
finding radars for the SA-3 and target acquisition
radars for
the SA-6. That is not to say that you should fear
inbound
HARM missiles every time you heat up a cup of tea.
Microwave ovens only generate around one kilowatt of
power, as compared to the several hundred to over a
megawatt output of the military radar installations.
Moreover, as John Pike, an analyst with the
Federation of
American Scientists, pointed out, the emitter profile
library
in the HARM’s targeting system catalogs not only
frequency but also bandwidth and waveform. Given the
difference in effective radiated power between
microwave
ovens and military radars, as well as the unfamiliar
signal
generated by the ovens, Pike declared he was
skeptical
the ovens would even be noticed, let alone that they
would
be targeted.
But the JA did not steal and deploy a large number of
microwave ovens for nothing. Perhaps the ovens were
modified to increase the resemblance of their signal
to that
of a radar. Alternatively, it is possible the threat
warning
systems in the aircraft that fired the missiles were
more
sensitive and less discriminating than the seekers in
the
HARM missiles. In explaining the Gorna Banja
accident,
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters that the
missile had been launched when the NATO fighter’s
defense system indicated it had been locked on to by
a
Yugoslav SAM system. The missile then went astray
when
the ground radar was turned off. Or perhaps the
HARM’s
targeting system simply did not agree with the
aircraft’s
threat analysis.
Whether the Yugoslav military’s effectiveness at
dodging
NATO’s SEAD efforts was the result of clever tactics,
jamming, decoys, microwave ovens or a bit of each,
apparently the lessons learned during Operation
Allied
Force are being transferred to its ally Iraq. Iraq
and
Yugoslavia, encouraged and assisted by Russia,
cooperated on air defense procurement and tactics
before,
during and after the Kosovo crisis. High-level
contacts
between the three countries have been stepped up in
the
past several weeks. Following visits of the Yugoslav
deputy
prime minister to Baghdad in March and the Iraqi
defense
minister to Belgrade and Moscow in April, Iraqi
Foreign
Minister Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf arrived in Belgrade
May 9 for intensive talks with his Yugoslav
counterpart
Zivadin Jovanovic. Jovanovic will reportedly travel
to
Moscow on May 15-16.
Collaboration among Yugoslavia, Iraq and Russia is
apparently intense, and if Gen. Mohammed is to be
believed, it is generating tangible results. Iraq has
now
claimed it can render HARM missiles impotent, and
thus
its air defense system – being rebuilt with help from
Russia – is a serious threat to U.S. and British
aircraft
patrolling the no-fly zones. But Baghdad will need
more
than a blustering press conference to convince its
neighbors that the United States is not a reliable
defender.
If Mohammed’s assertions are to be credible, Iraq
will have
to demonstrate the renewed effectiveness of its air
defense
system. Iraq may be set to exploit the first “war
dividend”
of the Kosovo conflict.
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