{"id":177436,"date":"2019-09-22T18:29:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T23:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/22\/a-deep-dive-on-the-oil-field-strikes-in-saudi-arabia\/"},"modified":"2019-09-22T18:29:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-22T23:29:00","slug":"a-deep-dive-on-the-oil-field-strikes-in-saudi-arabia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/09\/22\/a-deep-dive-on-the-oil-field-strikes-in-saudi-arabia\/","title":{"rendered":"A Deep Dive on the Oil Field Strikes in Saudi Arabia"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
Potential attack routes<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Imagery of the attack<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Detail image with directions<\/i><\/div>\n

A week ago, cruise missiles\/drones (really a missile) hit the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khuaru oil field, knocking out about 5% of world oil production<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Houthis in Yemen claimed responsibility, but the Saudis and the US government claim that it was an Iranian strike<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While it is highly likely that the Iranians have been providing the technical support to the Houthi drone effort, the provenance of the actual attacks is unclear.<\/p>\n

What is clear is that the House of Saud is facing some well-deserved blow-back for their brutal war on the people of Yemen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a claim that the Houthis lacked the ability to make a missile with the range for this task, but given that the Houthis literally had a static displays showing missiles with ranges up to 1700 km 2\u00bd months ago<\/a>, which would suggest that these capabilities are nowhere near as difficult to acquire as has been implied.<\/p>\n

The question here is guidance, and why I call this a missile rather than a drone; the 1250 km range puts the vehicle well out of the range of the control of a base statement without a satellite link, which the Houthis do not possess.<\/p>\n

The attacks are very precise.<\/p>\n

In fact, the precision seems to exceed the what one could get with GPS, which could not be any less than the 15 meter range.<\/p>\n

It is possible that they get less error by using  a D-GPS installation<\/a>, which could increase the accuracy to less than 1m, but the nearest installation (Al-Ahsa International Airport) would be about 80 km away, and you would need a relatively sophisticated inertial guidance to preserve that position information.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the use of Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) might work, but again this would seem to exceed the capabilities of the Houthis.<\/p>\n

Given that the Russian KH-5, that the Iranian Soumar is derived from has a CEP of 25m, this implies some sort of terminal guidance.<\/p>\n

The two alternatives here are some sort of image based targeting, either TV of IR, or the use of a laser designator on the ground.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Given that the area around both Abqaiq and Khuaru are majority Shia (See map, blue is Shia, red is Sunni, yellow is Wahhabi), I think that there is a very real possibility that there was someone on the ground designating the targets.<\/p>\n

As an aside, it should be noted that these attacks indicate a serious shortcoming of the US Patriot SAM system as compared to the Russian S-300 and S-400.<\/p>\n

First, the Patriot has about a 90 degree coverage as compared to the full 360 degree coverage given by the Russian systems.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that the MEADS missile system would have resolved this issue. <\/p>\n

Secondly, the Russian systems are designed to use quick erecting elevated radar masts which are more likely to detect low flying cruise missiles.<\/p>\n

Certainly, the Russians are using this event to sell their systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Potential attack routes Imagery of the attack Detail image with directions A week ago, cruise missiles\/drones (really a missile) hit the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khuaru oil field, knocking out about 5% of world oil production. The Houthis in Yemen claimed responsibility, but the Saudis and the US government claim that it was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[817],"class_list":["post-177436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177436"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}