by Ted Halstead
This observation was bolstered by the fact that several of the Leopards were flung into the air by the Tomahawk’s explosion, and one actually somersaulted.
The entire attack took less than three minutes.
After five minutes, Bilal ordered his surviving forces to report.
Twenty-seven Leopards had either been completely destroyed or were not repairable in the field. Another fifteen had damage to their tracks that could be fixed. Over half of the remaining tanks had lost all or part of their modular armor, leaving them more vulnerable to a subsequent attack.
Both S-300s had been destroyed, in explosions so violent that five MOWAG Piranha MK-II 8x8 APCs had also been destroyed. Originally designed and built by the Swiss company MOWAG, there was licensed production in many NATO countries including the US, where the Marines used a variant called the LAV-25 with a propeller attached allowing it to ford shallow waters. Qatar’s version mounted a Cockerill 90 mm gun, one 7.62 mm coaxial machine gun, and another 7.62 machine gun on the turret. Each had a crew of three and carried five infantry soldiers.
The question now was whether Bilal would continue to Riyadh after this setback with his remaining one hundred fifty-eight Leopards and twenty-nine Piranha APCs, and no S-300s.
Bilal never even considered turning back. Qatar had implemented mandatory military conscription in 2015 with an average of 2,000 graduates per year in response to growing Saudi pressure to change its foreign policy, and the blockade starting in 2017 had just increased the resolve of its leadership.
One way or another, the blockade was going to end.
Bilal reached for his handset to call his headquarters in Doha. With the loss of both his S-300s, it wouldn’t be long before he had company in the skies above his force. If he and his men were to have any hope of survival, the Qatari Emeri Air Force would have to prove that its recent purchases were money well spent.
250 Miles Southeast of the Omani Coast, Indian Ocean
Captain Jim Cartwright looked at the feed displayed on one of the USS Oregon’s screens relayed by the DDV–X thoughtfully as it showed both the DT-Xs’ capabilities and limitations.
“So, Lieutenant, it looks like any tank those little drones could lock onto had a bad day ahead. But, it’s also clear that some of the tanks were difficult for them to get a lock on,” Cartwright said.
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Fischer replied, his head nodding up and down emphatically. “Some tanks appear to have been equipped with camouflage that was effective against an IR lock. However, as you say if the DT-X could get a lock, it meant one or more hits followed. Any tank hit directly by a Tomahawk was a definite kill, and it looks like the thermobaric warhead performed perfectly. As expected, not every bomblet scored a kill, but we can see many tanks suffering multiple hits that received catastrophic damage.”
Cartwright cocked his head. “Define catastrophic, Lieutenant.”
Fischer shrugged. “The tank has either flipped, or is missing its turret.”
Cartwright laughed and said, “Well, no one will be able to accuse you of inflating the numbers. Do we have a final tally yet?”
Fischer shook his head. “No, sir. First task is already done, designating targets that suffered catastrophic damage. Next is underway, distinguishing mobile from immobile targets. Then we’ll see which immobile targets have repair attempts made, as opposed to just checking for injured crewmen. We have software to help automate that task, for example by tracking the time crewman are visible near a target. I’ll be able to give you some rough numbers within the next half hour.”
Fischer hesitated and then said, “Those tanks took a real hit, sir. But I don’t think we stopped them.”
Cartwright nodded, and patted Fischer on the shoulder. “That’s fine, Lieutenant. I don’t think anyone expected us to. I’ll bet, though, that we just made life a lot easier for our Saudi friends.”
Fischer looked up from his screen and smiled. “Yes, sir. I think our Tomahawks just got a lot more valuable.”
Cartwright smiled back. That was exactly the sort of assessment an attack sub captain wanted to hear. He'd read that a Virginia class submarine cost a bit more than two and a half billion dollars to build, and about fifty million dollars a year to operate. He thought back to the video footage he'd just seen.
Not for the first time, he nodded to himself and smiled.
Worth every penny.
Dammaj Valley, Yemen
Captain Jawad Al-Dajani was just as frustrated as his commander, Prince Ali bin Sultan. First, he’d lost an M1A2 tank to an ambush with that cursed decoy. He’d just had another M1A2 tank replaced that had been lost to a Tosun anti-tank guided missile, an Iranian-built variant of the old Soviet 9M113 Konkurs. Two of the crew of that tank were also killed, though he took some satisfaction in the success of his own M1A2 tank in chasing down the Tosun fire crew, despite their having fired from over three kilometers away. Those three Houthis wouldn’t bother any other Saudi tanks, ever.
But it was a trade-off he knew the Saudi military simply couldn’t afford.
The Iranians could give the Houthis dozens of Tosuns for the cost of a single M1A2 tank. And there were certainly more Houthis in Yemen than there would ever be Saudis sent to fight them. He and all the other tank commanders were doing the most effective thing they could to avoid repetition of that incident, by sitting in their cupolas and looking for Tosuns or other threats, while the gunner relied on the view provided by the M1A2’s thermal and optical sensors.
Even worse was that so far, his platoon hadn’t been able to stop the firing of a single ballistic missile aimed at the Kingdom. Every potential launch site they’d been sent to investigate had been either nothing of the kind, or the launch had already happened, leaving nothing behind but smoking debris.
Today, though, would be different. Jawad could feel it in his bones.
None of the roads in Yemen were up to Saudi standards. Some of the highways in the Kingdom had been designed and built by companies like Bechtel, the largest American construction company, which had built some of its Interstate highways. The roads in this valley were worse than average even for Yemen, because only one led anywhere outside it. The others dead-ended somewhere within the valley.
In spite of this, Jawad’s tanks were still keeping up a respectable sixty kilometers per hour. Jawad grinned as he thought back to his days at the Armor School at Fort Benning, where Prince Ali and most of his platoon leaders had learned to become tank commanders. One of the instructors had declared, “The M1A2 doesn’t promise you the smooth ride of a family sedan.
But it can keep up with just about anything else on the battlefield.”
That first part was certainly true, Jawad thought. He had to be careful about keeping his teeth shut, because otherwise sharp bumps tended to clack them together. But he was hoping that the second part would be true as well, and they would finally bag a Houthi missile.
There! It was exactly where the reconnaissance drone had said it would be!
Only the tip of the missile was visible, and that already told Jawad something. This missile was something new, something bigger than any of the other ones he'd heard about like the Burkan-2H and Qiam 1.
Jawad already had his handset ready, with an extension cable attached allowing him to use it in the cupola. He used it now to order every tank in the platoon to increase speed. He’d deal with bruises and chipped teeth later, once they stopped this missile.
As they turned a corner and the missile came into full view, he could hear his tank’s M240 7.62 mm coaxial machine gun chatter, and the reason was immediately obvious — a Tosun was pointed straight at them. He’d told his gunners not to wait for his orders before opening fire on anything that looked like an anti-tank missile, and he was glad they’d listened. Their aim was confirmed by a secondary explosion, as one or more of the Tosun’s rounds exploded, taking its fire crew with it.
Jawad had missed the Tosun because the missile in front of him was the Khorramshah
r 2, a thirteen-meter tall missile with a range of up to two thousand kilometers, and capable of carrying a warhead of up to eighteen hundred kilograms. Its use in Yemen had been suspected, but unlike the Burkan-2H it had never been captured intact or even clearly photographed in Yemen.
Just like the Burkan-2H, the Khorramshahr 2 was liquid-fueled. It was too dangerous to move while fueled, which meant it had to have propellant added after it was set up at its launch site. Of course, since the Khorramshahr 2 had more than double the Burkan’s eight hundred fifty kilometer range, it took longer to fuel.
No sooner had Jawad formed this thought than everyone could see another Khorramshahr 2 missile lift off about two kilometers away. The Houthis who had scattered from the launch site at the appearance of his tanks cheered.
Without the Houthis’ cheers ringing in his ears, Jawad might have given his next move more thought. As it was, though, Jawad roared, “Main gun fire!”
There was no need to specify the target. Even the dimmest gunner could hardly mistake his commander’s intention, with a thirteen-meter tall ballistic missile standing right in front of them.
Jawad had just enough time to think that he should have moved back into the tank’s body and closed the hatch when the tank’s M256 120 mm cannon fired an M908 High Explosive Obstacle Reduction round into the Khorramshahr 2 missile. The M908 was designed primarily to reduce concrete obstacles to rubble and was a commonly used round in Yemen, since it was effective against nearly any soft target.
Its results upon impact with the Khorramshahr 2 missile were nothing short of spectacular. Immediately following its detonation, the attached liquid-fuel tanker detonated as well.
Jawad barely had time to register the wall of flame headed his way before it killed him, but his tank and the other two behind it were not just incinerated. The shock wave from the blast tumbled all three like toys, and the sheer kinetic force of the explosion was more than any amount of armor could have withstood.
The fourth tank in the platoon, though, was saved from fire and blast by its position in the rear. It had been the only tank unable to turn the corner from behind the hill to exit the narrow road to the small clearing holding the Khorramshahr 2 missile. When he heard the “Main gun, fire!” command he had also reacted instinctively by ducking into the tank and slamming the hatch shut behind him.
That action saved the crew of the sole remaining M1A2 tank in Jawad’s platoon from the fate of the few Houthi survivors of the Khorramshahr 2‘s explosion. Though there were several who had fled as soon as the tanks’ engines could be heard, and so were not killed by blast or fire, they did not escape the Khorramshahr 2‘s payload.
VX nerve gas.
The force of the blast had ejected the warhead straight up which prevented its complete incineration by the burning rocket fuel, though some of the VX was consumed.
While the surviving M1A2 had a robust and well tested NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) protection package, the Houthis didn’t even have gas masks. Not that masks would have mattered, since any exposed skin surface would allow VX to kill its victim. Only a ten-milliliter dose would have been fatal.
Every Houthi who had been fleeing the launch site received far more.
The sole M1A2 tank to survive radioed to base that they had destroyed one Khorramshahr 2 missile, but had seen another launch successfully.
Unfortunately, they did not see any of the Houthis they had left behind at the launch site gasping for air as they died, or they might have been able to give Prince Sultan Air Base some warning.
Because that was the target of the other Khorramshahr 2 missile, which carried the same VX warhead.
Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia
Like every country with a significant air force, the Royal Saudi Air Force dispersed its assets in widely scattered air bases. This was both to ensure the widest possible defensive coverage of Saudi air space, as well as to prevent an enemy from inflicting a crippling blow by hitting a single base.
Prince Sultan Air Base had been selected for one of Iran’s two VX warheads for many reasons. It was one of the bases closest to the Qatari armored force's march to Riyadh, and was a Sector Operating Center. It had been substantially improved by the US Air Force when it served as a base supporting Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom prior to the September 11 attacks. F-15s from No. 55 Squadron had been recently transferred there, and it contained two of the Kingdom’s key strategic assets — its Boeing E-3 Sentry fleet, as well as its Boeing KE-3A refueling tankers.
Since it was only about eighty kilometers south of Riyadh, attacking it would remove one of the capital’s principal defenders.
But that would not be the only result of the attack. Acting Supreme Leader Reza Fagheh had reconsidered his earlier concerns, and decided to pick a target with multiple impacts.
Prince Sultan Air Base was directly adjacent to the city of Al Kharj, where some of the remaining underground water sources were still replenished by rainwater drained from the Tuwaiq escarpment to the west. Some of the wells were up to a mile deep so that the water extracted was boiling hot when brought to the surface, and had to be pumped into pools to cool before use.
This water was the basis for much of Saudi agriculture, and helped Al Kharj grow from a town of 20,000 to a city of 250,000. Almost every crop imaginable was grown in Al Kharj, and it was also home to nearly its entire dairy industry, with about twenty-four thousand head of cattle.
The amount of VX in the Khorramshahr 2 missile’s warhead was enough to ensure it would not only kill most of the bases’ military personnel and the quarter-million residents of Al Kharj, it would also contaminate much of the Saudi food supply, and literally kill its dairy industry.
Even worse, VX was specially designed as a persistent nerve agent. That meant that days or even weeks after it was dispersed, it could still kill. As an area denial weapon, that meant not only would the pilots at Prince Sultan Air Base be dead, their planes could not be flown prior to decontamination by suited technicians who would need days to do the work properly.
Decontamination of the soil to allow crops to grow again would take much longer.
So, the stakes were very high for the crew at the Patriot missile battery covering the capital region, even if they had no way of knowing just how high.
The notice provided by the sole surviving tank in Jawad’s platoon had been helpful to the Patriot’s crew. It gave them the time to establish that the Khorramshahr 2 missile was not merely off-course for Riyadh, but was actually targeted at Prince Sultan Air Base. It also allowed two separate Patriot missile batteries to coordinate their coverage, to ensure that if the missile made a course change to Riyadh it could still be intercepted.
After the Patriot’s failure to stop a ballistic missile attack against Riyadh in 2018, the US had approved its upgrade to the MIM-104F (PAC-3) standard.
This comprehensive overhaul to the system’s computer hardware and software as well as its communications hardware was coupled with a dramatic upgrade to the missiles fired by the Patriot system. Now each launch canister, instead of firing a single PAC-2 missile, could hold four PAC-3 missiles.
The PAC-3 missile was also made more maneuverable, due to tiny pulse solid propellant rocket motors mounted in the front of the missile. An even more significant upgrade was the addition of an active radar seeker, allowing the missile to drop its system uplink and acquire the target itself once it was near, critical when trying to keep up with a fast-moving ballistic missile target.
The accuracy of the PAC-3 missile was improved so it could specifically target the warhead portion of a ballistic missile, giving it the capability to destroy the missile simply by striking it for a “kinetic kill.” However, the missile also included a small explosive warhead launching twenty-four low-speed tungsten fragments enveloping the target — just to be sure.
This upgrade had already been underway when the apartment building in Riyadh struck by a Khorramshahr 2 had collapsed. That disast
er had dramatically speeded the pace of the conversion to PAC-3 on both the US and Saudi sides of the program, and it was now complete. Today would see its first test.
Since the original Khorramshahr missile had been based on the Hwasong-10, which the North Koreans had sold to Iran, it and the improved version 2 had similar capabilities. These did not include detecting and evading interceptors.
Once the Khorramshahr 2 missile was in range of a Patriot battery in southern Riyadh, it launched two canisters of PAC-3 missiles at the target, for a total of eight interceptors. This left it with another two canisters in reserve while the first two were reloaded, in case of another ballistic missile launch.
The first interceptor malfunctioned and veered off course, eventually impacting harmlessly in the desert.
The second struck one of the missile’s tail fins, changing its course from Prince Sultan Air Base to the city of Al Kharj.
The third had been on course to hit the warhead, but could not cope with the last second course change, and also ended up impacting in the desert.
The fourth hit the warhead and the fifth hit the fuselage at almost the same instant. The warhead had been designed to detach and deploy the VX just before the missile’s impact, so that the missile’s burning rocket fuel would not consume it.
With a boiling point of 298 degrees Celsius, VX had to reach an even higher temperature for incineration. Fortunately the hypergolic propellant used in the Khorramshahr 2 missile, a mix of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, served that purpose very effectively.
The remaining interceptors sailed through the expanding cloud of burning fuel and debris. Once the Patriot crew confirmed the Khorramshahr 2 missile’s successful interception, they were detonated remotely to ensure they would not impact an unintended target on the ground.
The plan to neutralize Prince Sultan Air Base and cripple Saudi agricultural production had failed.