A Swing and a Miss in Saudi Arabia

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

I'm a big believer in the truth, Aaron. 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 in Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

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NRDC. We love NRDC. I know. They're one of the early pioneers of open source work and fantastic work on tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

Jeffrey 1:10

Yeah. And the Black Sea Experiment. We should do a podcast on that someday. That is one of my absolute all-time favorite think tank endeavors. Can you imagine actually getting to verify the presence of Russian nuclear weapons on a ship?

Aaron 1:24

They have also the distinct honor of being cited in my PhD dissertation. Yeah. Which I think trumps them all.

Jeffrey 1:33

So, launch a missile, get a pod. Launch a missile at an airport, get a pod. Try to intercept that missile and fail miserably, definitely get a pod.

Aaron 1:51

Yeah, we have to talk. You had the big write-up of your team's work over at the New York Times with a friend of the pod, Max Fisher.

Jeffrey 2:00

Yeah, so we were looking at the Burkhan missile strike that the Houthi forces launched against the airport in Riyadh. And we had started our research by just trying to ascertain which videos went with the strike and which videos did not. Because I think early on there was a picture of a truck bomb going off that had been wrongly described as the missile hitting Riyadh.

And over the course of that investigation, we kind of lost sight of that original goal and then got dragged over to this other observation, which is the Saudis didn't intercept that missile.

Aaron 2:48

Yeah, and this is our second pod on the intersection of missiles fired from Yemen and ballistic missile defense. And the first one, we actually asked a lot of the questions that came out in your open source research about whether they were really hitting them and what counts as an intercept. But I think it looks like in this case they didn't hit it, so I guess there was no intercept.

But I think we should back up and tell the listeners what the Houthis fired first, because I get a lot of questions about what the Burkhan-2 actually is.

Jeffrey 3:21

Yeah, so, well, the Saudis say that it's a Qiyam, which is an Iranian missile, but the Qiyam is just a fancified Scud C. Yeah. And, I mean, it's pretty fancified. It probably has a separating warhead. It definitely doesn't have any planar fins. I'm not actually sure that the Burkhan is a Qiyam.

Aaron 3:42

I am pretty sure it is a Scud C. Yeah, and if you look at the pictures, and maybe we'll put it down, it has a Scud engine, doesn't it? It does.

Jeffrey 3:52

I mean, you know, we can talk about the debris images, but the Saudis released lots of pictures of the debris. And they also released some images of debris from an earlier. Actually, this was a Burkan 2, I should say. The Burkan is probably just a Scud B. But the Burkan 2 is a Scud C. And the Saudis have released pictures of debris from this launch and from a prior launch.

And, you know, it's a little hard to tell because they're blurry. But, you know, it looks pretty scuddy to me.

Aaron 4:22

Yeah, and one of the things that keeps coming out in the open source reporting is that when they rip these things open, there are Iranian components in them.

Jeffrey 4:29

Yeah, I mean, what the Saudis have said so far is that there are Iranian markings, and I actually haven't seen those markings, so it's a little hard for me to verify. You know, it's a little hard for me to verify those claims. There are, I mean, there are some really interesting questions. Like the Houthis have released videos of both of these missiles being launched, but they're like terrible, crappy nighttime videos.

And although we have really nice software to boost the light, the problem is the engines themselves are really quite bright. And so it's either too dark to see or it washes out. But the big thing we've been trying to figure out is can we see planar fins in the launch videos? And the answer is we can't see them.

But I don't know if that's because the video quality is just poor, it is dark, and the planar fins are not that large relative to the missile. Or is it in fact that they're not there and these are just repainted Kiams? I don't know the answer, but, you know, one way or the other, it's a Scud C. It's got a Scud C-looking engine, and that probably means that the warhead had to be reduced in mass in order to get the range of the Burkhan-2 up to the almost thousand kilometers that it flew toward the airport.

Aaron 5:50

So let's talk about that flight profile, because... The Saudis have a lot of Patriots, and I see on Twitters a lot is that there's confusions about what type of Patriot systems they have, and so maybe we should start there. It's like the Saudis have a lot of Patriot Pac-2s deployed. Right.

Jeffrey 6:09

I mean, as best I can tell, what the Saudis have are PAC-2s, which are very similar to the missile defense interceptors that were deployed in the 1991 Gulf War. They've been improved, but they still use blast fragmentation warheads. The Saudis have purchased the PAC-3, which is a more capable interceptor, which has a kinetic kill vehicle, but my understanding is none of those have been deployed yet.

So... As we were trying to model the intercept or lack thereof that occurred, our working assumption was that we were talking about PAC-2s.

Aaron 6:49

Yeah, and then I think it's important just to build the story here, how those radars look, what the limitations are, and how that missile got to Riyadh. So I think that allows for some speculation, which is that one thing that we do know about Patriot radars is that they do not have a 360-degree field of vision. They're working on that to be able to see around in a circle.

And so therefore, I would expect that the launch point inside of Yemen was not one – That the Saudis had planned for, meaning that they didn't have patriots pointed in that direction to try intercept, and therefore it flew as far as it did because the Saudis weren't expecting it from that launch point in Yemen.

Jeffrey 7:33

Well, they should have known, right? I mean, I'm shocked that, hey, Aaron, I am shocked that the Saudis weren't ready for this because, you know, the Houthis fired a Burkhan-2 missile this summer that went like 930 kilometers from Saddam, which this missile also seems to have been fired from. That's interesting.

Aaron 7:56

How many warnings do you need? That's interesting. Well, I guess maybe the better way to think about it is how Patriot actually works. It's not an all-encompassing missile defense system. It's meant to defend a site. Right. It's a point defense. That's a point defense.

Jeffrey 8:20

There were a series of videos on social media, and we wanted to try to geolocate them to recreate the geometry of the purported intercept. And here I think it's important to say, I mean, the reason we started this was the Saudis said that they had intercepted the ballistic missile.

Aaron 8:40

They said they intercept every ballistic missile, and that's what gets them in trouble.

Jeffrey 8:43

Yes, but then on top of that, Donald Trump, Went ahead and on Air Force One en route to Japan said, a shot was taken by Iran, in my opinion, at Saudi Arabia, and our system knocked it down. That's how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we're selling it all over the world. And then he gets off the plane in Japan, and is at a press conference, and he gets asked, And then he says that Japan will be able to shoot down North Korean missiles, shoot them out of the sky is actually what he said, just like the Saudis shot this missile down.

Aaron 9:25

You can't see me, but I'm just shaking my head and looking down at the ground because that's literally uninformed speculation, uninformed nonsense from somebody who should be better briefed.

Jeffrey 9:35

Do you know what it also is? It is Donald Trump waving a big red cape at the CNS OSINT team.

Aaron 9:49

So you said, we know it's a point defense system. We could probably find what they were defending and work backwards. Absolutely.

Jeffrey 9:58

And like I say, we just started, you know, early on we had started because we were trying to just place things. Just to understand which videos were real and which videos were not. And early on, something caught our eye that bothered the hell out of me. I know what it is, but tell the listeners. So... There were videos showing the debris in a neighborhood, and we were able to geolocate that.

And that neighborhood is in the northern part of Riyadh.

Aaron 10:41

And helpfully in a parking lot.

Jeffrey 10:43

In a parking lot between, not between, because they're sort of catty-cornered to one another, but like, you know, next to a shopping mall and a boys' school. And we were able to very clearly geolocate the location, and they showed pieces of debris. So you could tell which part of the missile had fallen in Riyadh proper, and that was the missile body.

You know, it was everything from the very tip, not tip, the forward section of the missile all the way back to the engine. And the thing that was missing... Was any evidence that the warhead had detonated. And in fact, the front, the Saudis later showed the debris, the front end of the missile, the forward section, didn't really look damaged.

It didn't look like it had been hit by a fragmentation warhead that the Patriot PAC-2 might have. And it actually didn't even look like it had been damaged by the explosion Of the warhead if it had been detonated by the PAK-2. And so that got us wondering because something else happened, which is the Saudis said that fragments of the debris fell near the airport.

Aaron 12:05

Yeah, I mean, just to summarize as we continue with the story, I'm lucky enough that you shared, Scott, too, these early images. And we sat for like an hour before a pod like two weeks ago and were like openly speculating about why the debris looked like it did. And it looked like it fell like engine first straight down and there was no warhead.

And we were looking for... Little holes in it to see if it had blast fragments. We couldn't see those either. And so then the brains really started chewing, which led you to your next piece of evidence.

Jeffrey 12:37

Yeah, because there's these other bits of social media. So there's a video inside the terminal at the airport, Terminal 5, where people are running to one side of the terminal to look out the windows. And what they're saying is there's been an explosion. And we could figure out which side it was, and it turns out the side that they're running to is consistent with where the Saudis said the debris fell.

There's another video, which I think is taken by a member of the ground crew looking down the runway at the same point, and you can see a big black cloud coming up, which looks exactly like a Scud warhead detonating. You know, I mean, you see them all the time in Syria, and it's the same cloud. And then there's a still image taken by yet someone else from a slightly different point on the ground, also looking down at the end of that runway.

And it also captures the same plume. And then... We wanted to look carefully, so we got our friends at Planet, you know, they got a photo the day it was done at night. So they got a photo the day of the missile strike, so before it was fired, and then a photo from the next morning, which is the day after it was fired.

And you could see substantial darkening in the place where the cloud had been coming up. And I don't think that's like burning or anything. I think that's vehicles disrupting the ground because you could see in the videos fire trucks and emergency vehicles were racing to the end of the runway. Yeah, that's the New York Times made us do it miles, which I hate.

But that's 12 miles north of where the missile body went down.

Aaron 14:24

Yeah, and listeners aren't looking at a map, but just because I've seen it, it's like they're all in what you would expect to be a ballistic trajectory from where they said they launched it.

Jeffrey 14:34

Yeah, I mean, it's a nice line from, well, where we've seen previous launches, I should say. Right, yeah, previous launches. Yeah, they were kind of vague about exactly where it went up, but... You know, it really, when you model it, the thing that the Saudis said could not be true. If the missile body fell in Riyadh, fragments which are going to have a lot of drag and not weigh very much are not going to go another 12 miles.

The only thing that's going to go another 12 miles is the warhead. And, you know, the reality is if you fire a missile a thousand kilometers, you're either going to deliberately separate the warhead or that warhead is going to be torn off as it reenters the atmosphere.

Aaron 15:17

And we should talk about what PAC-2 is supposed to hit.

Jeffrey 15:20

Yeah. And so PAC-2 is supposed to use fragmentation to either detonate the warhead or damage the missile so much that it breaks up and then the warhead falls someplace else. You know, which obviously in this case would stink because the someplace else would not be the airport. It would have been Riyadh, but like, whatever. When we modeled, like, it was very clear looking at the social media evidence that, That black cloud, and we could tell that that black cloud was from that day, right?

Because you could see the visual evidence in the satellite photograph, you know, that those vehicles had raced to the end of the runway and had disturbed the ground. It was very clear that the warhead had separated from the missile, that the missile body had a much larger amount of drag, and so it fell more nearly straight down.

And the warhead kept on trucking and fell within a kilometer of Terminal 5. And the thing I said...

Aaron 16:20

It's at the end of a runway. I mean, it's at the end of a runway.

Jeffrey 16:22

Right at the end of the runway. And, you know, the thing I said to Max, which I quoted him as saying, it almost creamed the airport, which I feel like... I feel bad being flipped. Like, nobody was killed, so it's okay. But, like, if it had hit the airport, it would have been bad. Even if it's only a few hundred kilograms of explosives.

Yeah.

Aaron 16:41

Okay. And then there's another video, and I think we need to unpack this one a little bit, that shows a salvo fire of five interceptors going up. And you can pick out... Two Patriot sites in Riyadh. And then you could geolocate that salvo fire and then you can assume that the Patriot launcher from which this was geolocated was firing at the Burkhan.

Right, so there are... That is where there might be some outstanding questions.

Jeffrey 17:18

That's right. So there are two sites where Patriots are deployed in Saudi Arabia, one at a military air base closer to downtown Riyadh and one at the airport. The Saudi press picked up and released a video Of a of five missiles being fired, and we looked very closely at that video, and we are moderately to highly confident. Sort of not exactly highly confident, but fairly confident.

That the salvo we saw was coming from the Patriot site to the west of the airport. In other words, this is actually true for both sites, which is why we didn't sort of spend as much time on it as now, interestingly, I think we are going to. But what that means is that the missile fell in front of the Patriot and the warhead went over the Patriot.

And this would be even more true of the other site. But the video is almost, I have a pretty high confidence, well, moderate to high confidence that the video is from the airport because of the type of the buildings.

Aaron 18:40

And I think we should say that Patriot only fires if its fire control software determines that the trajectory of the incoming projectile will threaten what it's programmed to defend.

Jeffrey 18:52

Yeah.

Aaron 18:53

And so if it's going to fall somewhere else, it will not fire an interceptor.

Jeffrey 18:59

So now the place where this gets really interesting is... You know, the Saudis released this video and said, you know, this is the intercept attempt. It was on a Saudi news site. And we couldn't... We had real trouble tracking down the provenance of these videos. Jeremy Binniot-Janes, who has more recent high-resolution satellite images than we do, notes that...

It's not, there are images before the attack that show that the defense is empty. There are also missile, there are also images now that he has, I had not seen, haven't seen still, after the attack, showing that there are no missiles there. Which if that is true, it means it's not just that the missile system fired and missed, it means that there was a fundamental dishonesty about whether there was even a missile intercept to begin with.

Aaron 19:54

Right, so that video was of a different salvo fire. It had nothing to do with the Burkhan launch that nearly hit the airport.

Jeffrey 20:02

Which then raises a whole bunch of other questions, because as far as I know, no missiles have been fired at Riyadh.

Aaron 20:11

Yeah, well, I mean, there's always, the Houthis make claims and then the Saudis push them off. Yeah. And so that is always one of these inherent fundamental tensions about whose propaganda is correct.

Jeffrey 20:23

And the interesting thing is that salvo, as best I could tell, was aimed in the right direction. It was aimed to the south, not to the north. And so there are some possibilities here. It's possible that that system had a false alarm and just did a five salvo. That actually happened in the Gulf War where many of the things that were recorded as kills were recorded as kills because there was a false alarm, the Patriot battery salvo fired at the target, and since there was nothing there, nothing landed.

And so the system successfully scored that as a kill. So it is possible that that, I mean, I think, you know, Jeremy Binney is reasonably convinced that the video cannot be from that engagement. I think that's probably right. I mean, you know, the problem is the system is mobile, so they might have moved it and moved it back.

Aaron 21:20

I mean, you just truly don't know. Just to jump in here, there is evidence from down south that they move their Patriots a lot because they're worried about smaller things being run into it. Conflict armament research suggests that the Houthis are using larger Iranian-made drones and then volley firing them. Missiles behind them and sort of forcing Patriots to move.

Jeffrey 21:45

So, you know, this is like a plot thickens kind of thing. Because, you know, I mean, for us, it didn't really matter because what we were interested in was the high level claim that the system had successfully defended the airport. And in fact, that's false, that the system did not defend the airport. The missile body fell in Riyadh.

The warhead separated. The warhead fell very near to the terminal. And it looks much more like a near miss. That's just a result of poor SCUD-C accuracy. Than it is, in fact, any kind of successful missile defense engagement. But now there is this question, which I think is still open, which is, did they fire and miss, or did they not fire at all?

Aaron 22:27

And they being the Saudi Patriot operators, air defense operators.

Jeffrey 22:31

You know, I mean, as you point out, if you look at the air defenses that are set up, or the Patriots, you know, they are definitely not The sites are not really oriented to defend southward, right? They're really actually oriented to defend against attacks that would come from Iraq or Iran. Yep. Now, you can turn things around, right?

Yeah, sure. They're mobile. Yeah. But it's really interesting. That's all.

Aaron 23:02

What about the last claim is that maybe the Burkham broke up?

Jeffrey 23:07

So I think that's possible. I mean, look, here's the thing. A Scud C, if you extend its range to 1,000 kilometers, is going to break up.

Aaron 23:15

Yeah.

Jeffrey 23:16

I mean, that thing... And we saw that. Yes. And so the reason I believe that Qiyam has a separating warhead is because the Iranians are not idiots, and at that range, you need to separate the warhead if you want to maintain any accuracy.

Aaron 23:31

And we have evidence that they have made this modification elsewhere, at least in the general Scud family.

Jeffrey 23:37

Yeah, there have been other, well, yeah, there have been other missiles where they've separated the warheads. And I think it is probably the case that they have done that on some Scud families. And so now the question is, are they helping the Houthis do that? Are the Houthis doing that themselves? Or are the Houthis just thinking, screw it, when it comes back into the atmosphere, it'll tear off anyway?

Yeah. So, you know, I still have some outstanding questions about what exactly the Burkhan-2 is, what the extent of Iranian assistance is, and how it operates. So there are things I don't know, but I am certain that they did not intercept that missile.

Aaron 24:23

The outstanding questions are because we're missile nerds, and we really want to know what it is. But what is absolutely clear is that There was an explosion at the end of the runway. And you should, I mean, just to wrap this up before we close out here, the end of the runway is obviously close to the terminal.

I mean, it's not like it missed by much. It's a kilometer.

Jeffrey 24:48

One kilometer, which, you know, I mean, I guess maybe people don't like metric. It's less than a mile. I think it's 0.6.

Aaron 24:56

Yeah.

Jeffrey 24:56

Yeah, well, you can do math. 0.6 of a mile. It's very, very close. And if it had fallen between the terminal and the end of the runway, you know, it may very well have fallen on the tarmac and hit an aircraft. Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, okay, maybe it would have to be a slightly lucky strike.

But, you know, hitting an aircraft full of people, hitting the terminal, hitting aviation fuel. I mean, there's a lot of bad things that can happen if a country goes ahead and starts targeting airports. Exactly.

Aaron 25:33

You know, for me, it's all-encompassing. I mean, it just shows how hard this gut hunt is. I mean, Saudi has been at war in Yemen for quite a long time, and the Houthis are still able to launch missiles. Hey, but we're going to get them all in North Korea, right? Right. You know, and the Patriots could be pointed in slightly the wrong direction because, you know, assumptions aren't quite right.

And you have this confluence of events where missiles squeak through, as they should.

Jeffrey 25:59

So what's the positive note here?

Aaron 26:01

I mean, it's gloomy and gray on the East Coast, so I can't even talk about the weather.

Jeffrey 26:04

Look, the positive note is the truth comes out, right? I mean, the positive note is that as a consequence of our work, people are going to take a skeptical look at all these intercepts, and we might actually get some factual information about how well the system is doing. You know, I suspect it's not intercepting very many missiles, right?

But maybe it is, right? And if it is working in a small number of cases, then we actually have some factual information that would allow us to make good defense decisions about what type of defenses to invest in. But if you're just sitting there deploying the system and pretending that it's working and not really looking too closely at it, that's bad policymaking.

Aaron 26:50

I'm a big believer in the truth, Aaron. Me too. Just rigorous methodology. I love methodology.

Jeffrey 26:56

Well, that and organizing.

Aaron 27:01

Yeah, absolutely. For righteous causes.

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Jeffrey 27:49

Have you dropped in on the Slack channel lately?

Aaron 27:51

I have. It's always a robust conversation in there. I was running some missile models with some friends in the Slack channel, double-checking some work I'm trying to do, so a lot of fun. You know, this is a subscriber benefit for our Patreon. So for $5 a month, you can join the conversation. $3 if you are a student.

So head on over to Patreon slash ACW podcast.

Jeffrey 28:16

Hey, Aaron, thanks for joining me.

Aaron 28:19

Always a pleasure. And thank you for listening.