Yemen’s Burkan-1 Missile

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

It's Jeffrey's death panel of ballistic missile defense. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:22

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East, and a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog.

Jeffrey 0:29

Hey, Aaron, the Yemenis showed off a new missile.

Aaron 0:33

They did. That's a dog whistle for a new podcast, isn't it?

Jeffrey 0:39

Yeah, absolutely. If you show off a missile, you get a podcast.

Aaron 0:43

That's right. I don't know if we should be encouraging that, but it certainly makes our lives easier when topics just fall into our lap.

Jeffrey 0:52

Aaron, I firmly believe that bad stuff is happening. The fact that we can talk about it in the open source is only good.

Aaron 0:59

Yeah, I think that's right. I think the good part is that I'm talking about it again from the West Coast. I'm still over here. I have sun, although I'm in Los Angeles and it rained for the first time in I don't know, maybe a decade. And coming back from the coffee shop, I was delayed by 20 minutes because the traffic.

And so we're late to record this pod.

Jeffrey 1:16

Yeah, we also had rain come down from the bay. And when it got here, my phone started going crazy because the fact that it was raining means that there are flash flood warnings because we don't ever get rain.

Aaron 1:30

It's California living. The sad part is the next pod, I'll be back in my office. So, you know. It'll be used to rain and perhaps snow around the horizon.

Jeffrey 1:42

Yeah, well, see, here I'm imagining that I'll just be sipping some nice local wine and then, you know, like there'll be a forest fire that nearly burns me to death, but it will be quenched when a giant flash flood comes and, you know, washes me out to the ocean.

Aaron 1:58

I don't actually have any sympathy for you, but I will be back. I'm in the car for this. I will be back on the West Coast eventually, and we'll record in the same time zone. Makes life easier.

Jeffrey 2:09

Yeah, so we're doing this where you're not having any sympathy, so I'm going to tell you I have a clear view of the ocean today.

Aaron 2:17

Staring at my front yard, my parents' front yard. We're not here to talk about the ocean or my parents' front yard. Yemen. Missile. Video.

Jeffrey 2:27

Yeah, that's right. So I don't know if you saw it, but there is a video showing this missile, the Burkan-1, which has all kinds of high-resolution photos, including high-resolution video and close-ups of the missile. You can even see the rivets on it. And they list all of the technical details for it. And so although we are trying to confirm them with measurements, they made it pretty easy for us.

Aaron 2:55

So I didn't see this video. I mean, I will completely admit that to the listeners. I didn't even try and binge watch it at the last minute before the pod started. But it's obviously something that we talked about in a previous podcast, at least what you think. It's the ER scud, the scudder, the scud D. What are people calling it?

Jeffrey 3:17

Yeah, I think it is an extended range scud, although...

Aaron 3:21

You know, the video says that it was done completely indigenously in Yemen.

Jeffrey 3:27

And we can discuss whether we think that's a realistic claim. But yeah, I think it's an extended range Scud, similar to Libya's Scud C, the Syrian Scud D, the G20 missile, as some of our Israeli friends are calling the things the North Koreans launched, and or Iraq's Al Hussein. It's a super Scud.

Aaron 3:49

It's a super Scud. It's interesting because Yemen is an interesting case. It's not one – well, first of all, hardly anybody knows anything about Yemen. It's a country that's just sort of down there in the Middle East. But lots of ballistic missile activity down there in a way that's I think indicative that shows North Korea's tentacles throughout the Middle East in terms of the way missiles proliferate and I think some of the similarities between different countries in terms of missile proliferation habits with the Scud.

Jeffrey 4:21

Yeah, I find it really interesting that Yemen has this civil war going on and the side that's arrayed against the Saudis, the Houthis, are firing these missiles into Saudi Arabia. Right. And that's become –

Aaron 4:38

Sort of a hallmark of – let's call it recent conflict in the Middle East, maybe recent beginning in 1991 with the first Iraq war. It's something that when we first – when people first started to conceptualize the idea of the proliferation of ballistic missiles, it was always thought of within the nuclear context because – These types of missiles are so inaccurate, they couldn't be used sort of, quote unquote, militarily effectively unless you had a bigger blast radius and so you needed a nuclear weapon.

But these weaker actors, the Houthis, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, even the Iran-Iraq war to some extent, are using them conventionally. And I think that we should just begin to think of that as a hallmark of modern warfare, particularly in the Middle East and in places where the Scud in particular, and certain other variants, I should say, have proliferated.

Jeffrey 5:31

Yeah, you know, I am always fascinated as I go back and read documents from the 1980s because the Iraqis and the Iranians are rocketing each other's cities, right? And they're going out of their way to make sure that they can do that. And you look at the American strategic perspective on this, and it's kind of like, well – You know, this is a stunt.

There's no effectiveness to it. And so it's this thing they're doing, but we can kind of sort of ignore it. Right. And and yet it seems to me we have time and again seen conflicts where this purportedly ineffectual use of ballistic missiles is really popular. So, right. The Iraqis and the Iranians do it to one another. Right.

I think people forget after we in the U.S. bombed Libya in El Dorado Canyon in I guess it was 1986. You know, the Libyans fired conventionally armed scuds at Lampedusa. Because I think at the time, Gaddafi said, you know, if he'd had something he could fire at New York, he would have. It was a kind of, the attack was a sort of emasculating humiliation for him, and he felt the need to be able to hit back.

And Saddam, right, fired Scud missiles very famously into Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Aaron 7:00

Yeah, and I mean, I think Saddam and the al-Hussein missile doesn't get Do the credit do in sort of being the granddaddy of them all, of the idea that you could make a Super Scud?

Jeffrey 7:14

Yeah, so, you know, I think, like, why are we surprised that the Houthis are firing missiles at Saudi Arabia? And why are we surprised that these come in longer range variants now? I mean, I'm... I don't quite understand other than to just sort of observe that I think as a community in the 1980s, I think we were so focused on the battlefield value of weapons.

We didn't understand how politically important it is for countries that are feeling attacked to psychologically hit back. And, you know, I mean, the funny thing is, right, like – That's the whole origin of these weapons. You know, the V2 and the V1 in Nazi Germany, at least as the way I understand it, weren't about – I mean, I guess they hoped that it would help win the war.

But it was in large part about creating the sense that it wasn't just Germany whose civilian population was suffering, you know, that they could also make – They could also make London suffer. And so like we're surprised, but I guess we shouldn't be, right?

Aaron 8:28

No, and it's a little off topic, but just it's briefly worth sort of sticking a pin in this maybe for a later podcast is that any ship cruise missiles now within the Yemen context may also play a similar role. Whereas you can't obviously hope to compete with the US Navy, but firing off some C-802s. And in the case of the UAE, being pretty effective with it in the troop transport, has a psychological value.

And it's a way that I think we should view this conflict is that maybe ballistic missiles are becoming sort of a tool of Insurgent warfare. I mean, in a way where you could portray, show videos, at least like you're hitting back, in a way that would psychologically reassure people who were under constant bombardment from a sort of technologically superior adversary, in this case being the Saudi Air Force.

Jeffrey 9:23

And I suppose it's important to say the Saudis feel like they need to issue a press release every time they shoot one of these things down, which is another fascinating aspect to this conflict.

Aaron 9:35

Yeah. And so, I mean, one of the reasons that we got involved and we even sort of battened this podcast around was sort of a question I posed to you in private was, do you believe the Saudi intercept numbers? Because – Every single week goes by in that a Saudi man, Patriot Battery, somewhere in Saudi Arabia, claims a successful hit on an incoming missile from Yemen.

And so it's become sort of one of these daily reporting things that goes on in the war. And have you noticed something, Jeffrey? It's something that I noticed because I follow a lot of Middle Eastern conflicts. All of the Middle Eastern militaries that I follow, whether it be Turkey, whether it be Saudi Arabia, sort of mimic the way Pentagon speak, as I call, you know, on blah, blah, blah.

You know, we took out command and control node. You know, they all sort of have taken a page out of the way that the Pentagon reports its own successes in like other conflicts around the region.

Jeffrey 10:31

Yeah, it really is an interesting question. I mean, I know who the audience is. And I know that the audience is nominally the domestic population. But I think it is so interesting that the language does really seem like it's geared toward impressing counterparts in the U.S. military. And I suspect that's just people don't know any other way to talk.

But, yeah.

Aaron 11:00

So I think.

Jeffrey 11:03

I think the Saudis believe the Saudi intercept numbers. How about that?

Aaron 11:09

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And one thing that is interesting is that we can't – they don't advertise which missile is incoming. And there are different variants throughout – I'm using the word variants. That's not correct. But there's different missiles that are being used throughout this conflict. I think it's indicative of Yemen's history of ballistic missile sort of purchases.

Jeffrey 11:30

I wish you'd stop trying to drive, Aaron. I'm sorry. I thought we were going to talk about Saudi missile defense efforts for a minute.

Aaron 11:44

I am talking about Saudi missile defense. I'm trying to get to the fact that we don't know what missiles that they're intercepting. And it could be a modified SA-2, the modified S-75, the SA-2 missile. And that's also another hallmark and linkage between the changes. The Iraqis did that as well. And some of our Patriot intercepts were of that missile.

And so it sort of skews the numbers.

Jeffrey 12:09

Yeah, you know, I think I have a whole spiel about how nearly impossible it is to know whether you actually intercepted a missile. That's why I joke the Saudis believe the Saudi numbers. Because if you think about it, you don't know what the bad guys are aiming at unless they tell you. And all you know is... Whether the missile comes down or not.

You might visually see your interceptor go up and you see your interceptor explode, but you don't know if it knocked the missile off course or not. And you don't know if the missile missed because it was inaccurate. You don't know if the missile broke up because it was just made poorly. And so... And I think we see this with the Arrow intercept numbers, and we also saw it with the Gulf War Patriot intercept numbers.

All you can really do is say, well, did the missile hit something? And if it doesn't hit something of value, I think it tends to get coded as a successful intercept. Because there's no actual way of knowing whether the intercept kinematically impacted the missile. And then there is no way of knowing... Where the missile was aimed at, and so you can't know...

I mean, it's entirely possible that you could have a missile that was coming in, and it was terribly aimed, and it was off course, and it gets... A glancing blow from an interceptor and actually gets knocked on course, right? Or, or gets knocked into a populated area. And then it looks like it's a hit, but it, or it looks like it, it looks like you missed it, but actually you hit it and vice versa.

So I just, I don't, I don't think there's any kind of philosophical way to approach those numbers. Given the kind of data that we normally see. I know like Ted postal used to try to do like a video analysis, right? But I just – I don't know. I didn't find those persuasive either.

Aaron 14:16

I think that's right. I mean I think the ultimate gauge of success comes in – I mean I think sort of at the bottom level, it's how you code it. But it's – does your intercept result in I guess no civilian casualties if you will? And you can't – it's really hard to judge that. I mean just as you just said.

Jeffrey 14:40

Yeah, so it's entirely possible that the Yemeni missiles suck, and it's entirely possible that they're being intercepted. But this goes to your point. Boy, Aaron, there are a lot of freaking different types of Yemeni missiles.

Aaron 14:51

Right, and so before we got off track about who was driving, I mean, right, there are a lot of freaking Yemeni missiles. There's a lot of weird, odd converts to Yemeni missiles, and the history of Yemeni missiles is just sort of as screwed up as the country's history. Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:09

Yeah, I love the fact – so first of all, I always forget that there were two Yemenis. I think a lot of people have, too. So I guess we call it North Yemen and South Yemen.

Aaron 15:20

We're still fighting over those territories, basically.

Jeffrey 15:22

I mean, right, it does seem like the civil war is just an extension of the dynamics that caused there to be two Yemenis in the first place. Is that right, Mr. Regional Experts?

Aaron 15:35

More or less, there's a great song in Turkish. It's called Yemen Turkusu. It's like a song, and actually the lyrics have been changed as the country went from the Ottoman Empire to a nationalist republic. It's about an Ottoman unit that was sent To go fight in modern-day Yemen, and the battle was so bloody, like the Turks or the Ottomans at that time said, never again will we go fight in Yemen.

And who were they going to go fight? They were going to fight an insurrection in the mountains that have – basically the forebearers of the Houthis. So this is a long-running conflict that I would say even predates northern and south Yemen and obviously the current controversy with the Saudi-Emirati axis versus through the Ali Abdel Salih and the Houthis.

But now they just have ballistic missiles.

Jeffrey 16:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, so – but I was struck that – I was looking, trying to figure out – Why they had so many missile types. And I had forgotten that there had been two Yemen's. And so one thing is that North Yemen bought SS-21s and South Yemen bought Scuds. So they had... They both made arms purchases from the Soviets.

And then... But they bought different kinds of missiles. And so then they, like... You know, get thrown together in this common country. And so presumably the missile forces get mixed. And then on top of that, you add some North Korean missiles, which we'll talk about in a second. And then the country, you know, splinters again. And so now you have this hodgepodge of missile forces, many of which seem to have fallen into the hands of the Houthis and are being fired into Saudi Arabia.

Aaron 17:19

Right, which goes back to your previous point about how you judge the success of Patriot intercepts when we don't even know the sort of baseline quality of these missiles that are being fired because breakup in midair is not something that should be ruled out. But I think what we're most interested in now is 2002 onwards.

Jeffrey 17:40

Yeah. So, Aaron, I – you know, I – That was 14 years ago. It does not feel like it was 14 years ago.

Aaron 17:50

The story is similar to a lot of places. I think that's why.

Jeffrey 17:55

Yeah. Well, also, I think I'm just getting old. But, I mean, I remember when a North Korean-flagged ship, the Sosan – I think it was North Korean-flagged. It was definitely a North Korean ship – gets intercepted off the coast of Yemen by a Spanish naval frigate. It's a cool story, right? Because they – The Spanish, I guess they're special forces, use snipers to shoot out the cables on the masts so that they had a nice clear deck.

And then these Spanish Marines, right, like they like rope down from the helicopters, right? And they seize the ship and it's allegedly carrying cement. And they look under the cement and, you know, there are these Scud missiles, right?

Aaron 18:47

I was a college student.

Jeffrey 18:49

Oh, now you're hurting me, Aaron.

Aaron 18:50

I had just left college. You're hurting my feelings. I'm changing the story. I'm remembering the timeline now better. And I was on Bay Area Rapid Transit on my way from San Francisco to Oakland reading the – where I first read about the story. And it was just at this time when the Iran stuff was happening as well.

And that's one of the things that led me to the Monterey Institute – or Middlebury Institute at Monterey. Excuse me.

Jeffrey 19:15

Well, it was the Monterey Institute when you came.

Aaron 19:17

That's right. This is one of the things that really piqued my interest in Non-Proliferation. So people should read more about this. But yeah, and they uncovered in this raid, it wasn't cement. It was the Scud B, if I'm remembering correctly.

Jeffrey 19:34

Well, so actually it took me a long time to confirm that. At the time, they just said they were Scud missiles, and they showed pictures of the Scud missile components, including some of the airframes. But it's not until much later that you actually get officials using Scud-Bs. I spent like three hours the other day double-checking, like, were they in fact Scud-Bs?

But what I think is really interesting is they see this North Korean ship. They've associated this North Korean ship with proliferation. They inform the Spaniards. The Spaniards do the interdiction. They go in, and they have no idea where they're headed. And ultimately, the Yemenis kind of put up their hands, like, those are our missiles. May we have them now, please?

Aaron 20:19

So this is the incident that led to the proliferation security initiative.

Jeffrey 20:23

Yeah, because it wasn't illegal.

Aaron 20:26

Right, right. And so they tried to put some sort of quasi, I didn't mean quasi, you know, they tried to formalize this procedure, you know, and I think it finally comes to fruition in May 2003, which is a grouping of countries, I think over 100 at the end, you know, with some UN backing, at least, then get the mandate that they can intercept suspected proliferators around the world.

Jeffrey 20:50

Right. So you get PSI, which is an activity, not an organization. Yeah. Bush administration really was clear.

Aaron 20:57

John Bolton hated the idea of international organizations. This is just an activity. It's a cycling club. You just sort of get together on the weekends and you go out for a ride.

Jeffrey 21:07

Yeah. Well, so, you know, it's a statement of principles. And it does have these shipboarding agreements that states can sign. And then there are these exercises, right? So you get sort of intelligence exchanges and things. By the way, I was looking at this. Have you noticed the pace of PSI activities since 2013 has declined dramatically? There are still some formal meetings.

But Since about 2013, PSI has dramatically scaled back in terms of activities that I can see.

Aaron 21:44

I have noticed that, you know, because when I was living in Turkey, PSI would come up every once in a while, because Turkey is a member, and then like some random Iranian jet, you know, like a raw-air jet would be stopped and inspected. At an airport. But that seems to have stopped as well. And I always thought it was because of the Iran agreement.

Jeffrey 22:03

Yeah, although, you know, North Korea is still doing all kinds of bad stuff. That is true.

Aaron 22:07

Like folks in the Middle East. Yeah.

Jeffrey 22:12

Well, so maybe that stuff is just not getting reported, right? Because when the Yemeni missiles get intercepted and the Yemenis say, hey, we paid for those. Those are ours. And the State Department lawyers say, like, yeah, actually, those are theirs. The Yemenis claim that this is a late 90s agreement with the North Koreans and they're just – they'd already paid and they're just taking delivery of the missiles and they promise sort of never again.

Aaron 22:49

Right. So the back story is that in 2002 – We sort of reached an agreement that this is it. No more cooperation with the DPRK on missile agreements. This was going to end and it doesn't. It doesn't in 2009, I think, is when cooperation between COMID, the North Korea's missile salesmen. Is that what they are?

Jeffrey 23:20

Yeah, I think so. I think that's the way to describe it.

Aaron 23:22

Yeah, so the forward-leaning salespeople, you know, we get the first inklings that they're concerned that this cooperation has begun to get.

Jeffrey 23:29

Yeah, so I actually have been going through all the WikiLeaks cables. And one thing I find really interesting is there's just this little hint, which is very unclear. But it sounds like the – It sounds like the Yemenis remain interested in missiles, and so there are two cables out of the... I guess it's the embassy in Bratislava.

Aaron 23:56

Really? I didn't know it was in Bratislava. I try not to read the WikiLeaks, but really? Bratislava?

Jeffrey 24:01

Yeah, apparently they're... I mean... But we apparently have to go like Dimash, the Slovaks, like, Hey, you're not planning on selling any scuds to the Yemenis. Sorry. Yeah. And then, and then as you say It seems that by 2009, there are indications that there are renewed meetings with KOMED again. And it's bad enough that not only are there, I don't know, a dozen cables going back and forth, we're demarshing them, and the Yemenis are denying it, and then we're presenting them with information, and the Yemenis are still denying it.

But then you can see also in the documents, the Papers on North Korea's missile program that we're submitting to the MTCR members, we're saying that Yemeni DPRK cooperation has resumed. So it seems like that promise of never again, never again means, you know, seven years.

Aaron 24:59

I don't actually know the answer to this question, but were the years in question 89, 99, and 2009?

Jeffrey 25:06

No, that's another.

Aaron 25:07

I know that is. I mean, I know that's another Middle Eastern state. But I get – so when I saw 2009 and COVID running around the Middle East, I was like – Yeah, it's the same time, right? It's in the same general timeframe of when we think scud proliferation happened in the – can I say it? You can say it.

I can say it. When we think scud proliferation continued in the UAE. And so I always just wondered if 2009 was a year that – I don't know, something changed, something that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head or I haven't figured out. Right. Those increments always look to me, and Yemen included, of a program, not just one-off purchases.

And the cooperation continues.

Jeffrey 25:55

Yeah, so I think that's right. I mean, I will say, I think the reason that we're so focused on 2009 and 2010 is because that's the bulk of the WikiLeaks cable's

Aaron 26:11

That is a good point.

Jeffrey 26:12

So we can see with greater clarity, the diplomatic back and forth over North Korean proliferation. And so my guess is if we had cables from a different year, we would just see different countries or, or maybe, maybe the same countries. And so that's one thing. But I do think that Something interesting was happening in that in this period, you know, there's a – I think it has as much to do with North Korea, right?

North Korea in the late 1990s goes on kind of a missile sales binge. And I think that's when – Right. So that's when you get the second UAE sale. It's when you get the big Yemen sale. And I think you get – there's a series of other things. Josh Pollack documented a bunch of these in his article that he wrote for the Nonproliferation Review in which he took the – there are these CRS reports, Congressional Research Service reports that contain annual arms transfer data.

And he figured out that the other sales – For ballistic missiles were only North Korea. And he knows that the underlying data is classified, but it's presented in this unclassified format. And so he went back and was able to recreate the year-by-year classified numbers from these unclassified reports, which I thought was, you know, fairly clever. Fairly? That's extremely clever.

Aaron 27:58

Come on, give Josh more credit. Yep.

Jeffrey 28:01

No, no. It's not that. I'm sorry. I'm not throwing shade at Josh. I actually taught that article for the worst workshop ever at the Monterey Institute because I made the students go and recreate that data. And they felt like – they were all angry at me because they felt like I was just making them do accounting.

Aaron 28:19

No, no. That's open source work. That's how it's done.

Jeffrey 28:22

Yeah. Well, that's what I thought. But to judge by the student reviews, not everyone felt that way.

Aaron 28:31

Go ahead. Yeah. Anyways, okay.

Jeffrey 28:35

Well, anyway, so the point is in Yemen, they make this purchase in the 90s. It takes the North Koreans a while to fulfill it. And then there is a little back and forth because the Yemenis complain that the missiles suck and that they have to pay more money to the North Koreans to get them to come back to maintain the missiles that they already bought or to help repair them.

Aaron 28:56

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 28:57

And that sort of bleeds forward. And I think at some point they get those missiles integrated. And then I think they turn around and they want to buy more missiles from the North Koreans. And so at least initially their kinds of denials are like, no, no, no. All that traffic you see with Comid and those bank transfers, that's all about maintaining the missiles that we bought in 2002.

That's all stuff that we warned you was going to continue because that was in the past. We're not making new purchases.

Aaron 29:29

But now that we see the Burkan-1 –

Jeffrey 29:35

I got to think that that missile cooperation in the 2009-2010 period was about buying the extended range Scud, which we also found in Libya and in Syria.

Aaron 29:47

Right. And then we know that from the video that you saw and I didn't see.

Jeffrey 29:53

So the video is pretty remarkable in that not only does it have these, like, super close-up pictures of the thing, but it also has the dimensions and mass, right? It has its width, which is a standard scud width, its length, which is, you know, very similar to either a North Korean extended-range scud or, you know, to be fair, the Iraqi Al-Hussein.

Aaron 30:17

Granddaddy of them all.

Jeffrey 30:18

Right. And sort of describes this missile in great detail. And, you know, again, it claims that it's Yemeni. But to me, it looks like – it sucks. We have to call it the extended range Scud. But, you know, the extended range Scud has a – if you look at it in U.S. intelligence declassified documents, right, it says it's anywhere between, you know, like I think 750 to 1,000 kilometers, which is a big freaking difference.

Aaron 30:43

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 30:44

And I think at the low end of that range, which this probably falls, is something like Syria's Scud-D or Libya's Scud-C, which even though one is a Scud-C and one is a Scud-D, I actually think that they're the same missile, which is aggravating.

Aaron 30:59

Yeah, and we talked about this off-air, but one of these days we'll have to do a missile designation pod.

Jeffrey 31:05

Yeah, a North Korean. You know, actually, I was at a bar doing that the other day. I was traveling, and I was talking to some colleagues, and I had to sort of explain, like, no, no, the North Koreans use Hwasong. Scud is our name. But then to make it even more complicated, when the North Koreans market the Hwasong missiles, they call them Scuds.

Aaron 31:28

Really? I didn't know that, because I have to pronounce Hwasong. We were working on that off mic.

Jeffrey 31:34

Yeah, no, they – it's like a marketing thing for them. And actually, Andrea Berger wrote this great thing for the blog about Mick Ranger, who was this British guy who was implicated in North Korean arms sales.

Aaron 31:53

Allegedly. No, I think he – was he convicted, right? I don't know. I'm just kidding. Oh, yeah. Just to save us the fun.

Jeffrey 32:01

Yeah, yeah. No, I – whatever. Yeah, right. I don't want to get sued. But the point is she tells this story that the way the North Koreans market things is they use the Western designation of the Soviet system because everybody knows those. And so they sort of ask a country like – and they're often using intermediaries initially, right?

I mean – Maybe eventually they – you realize you're dealing with comit. But they kind of start off like, hey, would you like a Scud missile? A person is thinking like, a Soviet Scud missile? Sure. And they're like, I can get you a really good deal if you don't need it to be Soviet manufactured.

Aaron 32:47

So – And come to North Korea for the Iranian-Korean fusion. Futra. Yeah. Yeah. With the dudes with the shigs.

Jeffrey 32:58

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so then this is what happens is like the the the the the missiles. I think there were some missiles that got intercepted in India and they were labeled scuds. Which is just crazy, right? Because it's a North Korean copy of a Soviet missile using the American intelligence name. And then when the Burmese, you know, there's that famous Burmese trip report where they went and visited the main, the missile production facility outside of Pyongyang, and they wrote it up, and they have all the Scud names for North Korea's missiles.

So, you know, the Scud B, the Scud C, the Scud D, and I think the, if I remember it right, the Nodong is the Scud E, and the Musudan is the Scud F. So they pick up Scud and then they start adding their own letters, right, to show that they're successive improvements.

Aaron 33:55

This sounds like a job for the Chinese delegation. They come up with a glossary.

Jeffrey 34:02

Yeah, well, Chinese missile designations are irritating in their – anyway, so the point being, you know, I think we're at this point where, you know, we can, I think, close the book on this 2009-2010 period where there were rumors of cooperation because we now see the missile that looks awfully like precisely the kind of thing that they would have bought in that period.

Aaron 34:29

Yeah, and just to go back to the bigger picture, it's like, why do we care? I just think that we shouldn't, as we said at the beginning, we shouldn't be surprised any longer. Iraq did this back in 1991, being able to extend the scud. North Korea is marketing it, and then it's proliferating to different conflicts, and then weaker actors We'll have an incentive used because they don't operate on the same, let's call it military metric that we do in terms of both reliability, accuracy, concerns about civilian casualties.

And so if we begin to think forward about what all this all means is that ballistic missiles are becoming tools of war even in very weak state. In fact, I would even say almost completely in weak state, whereas in our own country, Military, we don't really think about them at all because they're solely reserved for the nuclear or almost so.

Jeffrey 35:27

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, the appeal of ballistic missiles at this point is that they serve to underscore the fact that you are not totally weak and that you are not helpless, right? That you can hit back. And so it creates this really interesting set of dynamics where You know, there's this whole group of states for whom having offensive conventional ballistic missile capabilities is an important expression of sovereignty and power.

And then there's this whole other group of states, and sometimes it's the same state, for whom having missile defenses to defend against these missiles is in and of itself an expression of state sovereignty and power.

Aaron 36:12

Let me drop on top of that. May help reassure, even though we've had all our talks about how you judge success of those ballistic missile interceptors. But don't you just create the incentives, let's put it in Yemen, to fire more missiles?

Jeffrey 36:51

Yeah, I think you do. I mean, in a perverse way, by playing along with the game, Right. You reinforce the idea that like, yes, the fact that I have to try to shoot down the missile proves that you are right for firing it.

Aaron 37:05

Right.

Jeffrey 37:06

Right. It underscores the political value of them. And and yeah, I think the natural incentive is not to give up, but to get more. And I think we see with. We really see it with North Korea, right? These things are cheap, and they can be made in ways that will stress missile defenses. And then there's the other thing, which I find really interesting, although it's sort of less true now.

But, you know, the technologies are fundamentally similar. And so I think it must be very tempting. And you see a lot of overlap between countries' air defense entities and their offensive missile entities, right? So the Saudi strategic missile force grows out of their – Their air defense force. You know, the South Korean ballistic missile program grew out of Nike Hercules missiles that are at least nominally surface-to-air missiles.

And so, you know, it is kind of interesting. I don't think... Kind of okay with missile proliferation now and I'm kind of okay with missile defense proliferation like I don't feel like it's the end of the world it's just this feature of the world we live in but I do think it's crazy to imagine that like missile defenses are going to slow missile proliferation like I think that's nuts I think missile defenses are going to speed up missile proliferation but maybe the right response is like well we just don't care yeah and and then putting and then and then

Aaron 38:44

A big rethink, or at least, I mean, you'll never get this because of the incentive to try and sell these things, but what exactly should these ballistic missile interceptors be tasked to do? And I think to deter proliferation is not correct, but to provide protection to, say, large sprawling bases in sort of contingencies where U.S. forces deploy abroad is a laudable and good thing.

And so putting them in their proper context within this Because one thing that we should be learning from all of this, I think we have, is that these big bases are nice targets for Scuds. And so you need to have something to protect our own troops, even if you do have a cycle of military.

Jeffrey 39:32

Yeah, it is interesting to me. I mean, I kind of go back to the model for missile defense that I think is acceptable and reasonable is how the British responded to German V1 and V2 attacks, which is they thought it was important to attrite them in order to reduce the number of people who were killed. But they kind of took a really like mathematical approach to that, right?

It really was for them attrition. They weren't planning on a leak-proof defense as you might want if you were facing nuclear-armed missiles. And they weren't – They weren't theological about it. It was all about finding the most cost-effective way to reduce the number of people who were killed by these conventional missiles. So I do find it kind of interesting that we haven't quite gotten there in our own debates.

I mean I have never once heard anybody propose what I think would be incredibly important, which is a very low-cost missile defense system. We're so focused on increasing the reliability of them and getting the intercept rates way high. But actually, it might be cheaper, right? It might be more, I should say, it might be more efficient if you could bring the cost of an interceptor way, way, way down and then just expend a whole bunch of them.

Aaron 40:45

Because you already have to expend a whole bunch of them. Well, that's when the nuclear comes. But yeah, that's a good way to think about it. True.

Jeffrey 40:51

Yeah, but I've never heard anybody sort of discuss like wouldn't low-cost missile defenses provide some benefit that is distinct from the current approach we do it, which is that there are these incredibly expensive gold-plated things. And when people point out that – It's always cheaper for the other side to build more missiles than it is for us to build more interceptors.

You get the kind of like, well, how can you put a value on human life, which is kind of like a non-answer in an arms race scenario. I just think we haven't gotten there. And maybe it's because we haven't accepted that these kinds of conventional missile attacks are just going to be a part of the conversation going forward.

But I think they are. Is that a depressing point? I think in a way it's acceptance, right? Accepting the – The environment we live on.

Aaron 41:39

You're calling for a national HMO plan where people do put a cost on human life. So it's already in place.

Jeffrey 41:45

Jesus. All right. I can already see it's Jeffrey's death panel of ballistic missile defense.

Aaron 41:49

That's a positive no. You have your finger on the button, Lisa.

Jeffrey 41:55

Okay, Jeffrey, are we going to defend Topeka, Kansas?

Aaron 41:58

No. How'd they vote in the last election? No. Let them go.

Jeffrey 42:05

How about Peoria?

Aaron 42:07

No. I like it.

Jeffrey 42:09

Carmel.

Aaron 42:10

Yes. Inland Waterway.

Jeffrey 42:14

Well, I think that is a good place. Thanks. Yeah. All right. Hey, Aaron, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking about Yemeni missiles with me.

Aaron 42:25

Yeah, no, my pleasure. And next week from the East Coast?

Jeffrey 42:29

And thank you, listeners. Hey, if you like the podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps get the word out about what we're doing. Also, if you really like the podcast, please consider a donation to our Patreon page. And again, thank you, listeners.