Lessons Learned from the War in Yemen

Aaron Stein 0:04

You are listening to the Arms Control Walk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I am Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Scott LaFoy 0:14

And I am Scott LaFoy, super producer of the Arms Control Walk podcast and consultant.

Aaron 0:20

I think we're getting the band back together. I know that Jeffrey and Anne's schedules have kind of changed up on us a little bit, so we're still working on a mechanism to get all three of us in the same room at the same time. Even though we're in quarantine, life is still very busy.

Scott 0:32

Yeah, you know, same room at the same time may not be the correct phrasing anymore. But same virtual room, the same breakout room on Zoom. But yes, as things are a little chaotic, so we are doing a pod today on the missile war in Yemen.

Aaron 0:49

Yeah, I mean, you and I, I mean, along with I know a listener, Luke O'Brien, have been following this very closely. Adam Rawnsley, another fan of the show, has also been following it really closely. So I feel like I've been talking about the missile war in Yemen like in private for a really long time. And I'm just remembering that you and I went to the material display where we got to see some of those goodies all shown off.

And I don't think we've really talked about it on the podcast. Or if we have, I'm forgetting about it.

Scott 1:18

We have talked about it a couple of times because first off, we got real excited the first time we went to the material display and we came back and potted from your office, if I remember correctly.

Aaron 1:29

That is true. That is true. We got super excited. We're like, we got a podcast. And you like ran home and then met me back in my office when I was working in D.C.

Scott 1:36

Yeah. And then we've done an episode or two on the Burkhan when the Burkhan 2H missile first showed up. That's that one that's the Qiyam paint job extended scud that the Iranians smuggled in. So when that first started showing up, we also did a podcast sort of analyzing it because that's the one that was really weird. It showed up without fins and we were trying to track down information on it.

So we've touched on the missile war. We've touched on Yemen a little bit. But we haven't really made it a big focus like North Korea is or Iran is or open skies. So today we can work on fixing that a little because a wonderful report came out last month out of CSIS Missile Defense Chair.

Aaron 2:21

Yeah, and I mean – First of all, I just want to say that the two authors of the report, so Ian Williams and Shaan Shaikh, and I hope I'm pronouncing that second name correctly. I think both you and I would agree, you did a really good job with something that is really, really difficult, which is trying to parse through all of the sort of information slash disinformation about missile launches in Yemen to try and build a data set.

And they did a good job with that, would you say?

Scott 2:52

They did a great job with it. Like you said, this is something we talk about in private with Luke and Adam. This is sort of our WhatsApp war that we discuss. And they've put together a data set that really helps with one of the problems we've always had when discussing it, which is just getting accountability on numbers.

Because this is a conflict where ballistic missiles have been used very heavily. But it's very hard to count them because of the complexities with reporting. Like we always joke about that. I'm a missile pedant on Twitter about like, what should be a missile? What should be a rocket? What should be a short range missile? And this is like exactly one of the reasons that's complicated because everyone uses weird words, makes it really hard to track.

And then, like you said, there's so much disinformation, like active disinformation campaigns around missile and missile intercept reporting.

Aaron 3:44

Yeah, I mean, and listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Arabic word for missile and rocket is the same thing, and so it's like sometimes when it flies across on Twitter, like, it's the same word, and sometimes you don't really know which one is which. And two, we, I mean, you, me, and Luke, I think, over too many drinks sometimes in D.C., have talked about, you know, sort of the Patriot aspect of this, because, you know, Jeffrey had done that open-source investigation with his team, trying to track at least the The Burkhan strike on the airport in Saudi Arabia and whether or not the intercept was successful.

Scott 4:21

That's right.

Aaron 4:22

Right. And so I think we should just dive right into the report right now. I mean – Yeah. And what it is that attracted us to the report and what it is that we think – Basically some of the big takeaways and some sort of, let's say, constructive critiques. We really do want to emphasize that the report is good and that everybody should go and read it, but we read this or looked at this, and of course we have some questions about some things that we'll talk about in the

Scott 4:49

And I'd say most of my critiques are actually addressed by the authors and are a data problem more than anything. But yeah, so this is the report's called The Missile War in Yemen, and it basically is looking to create a pretty comprehensive primer on, I guess at this point, the first five years of the continued civil war in Yemen, Iranian proxy war in Yemen, and Saudi intervention and invasion of Yemen with UAE assistance.

And heavy targeting and logistics assistance by who knows mystery, mystery to everybody. And so the, the aspect of this conflict that of course is most interesting to us, arms control wonk is the missile missile defense aspect of it. This is the, this conflict has seen the most missile usage Since, technically, depending on how you define missiles, technically since the Iraq War, where we absolutely pounded the ground with ATACOMs over 500 times, but we don't typically get that counted in missile war calculations.

And then several hundred or over 100 intercept at least attempts. And so this basically pairs with a really nice data visualization that CSIS has worked on that basically just is trying to give a month-by-month breakdown of the war and sort of when missiles were fired, where they were fired at, what kind of missiles were involved, whether or not there was an intercept, etc.

And one of the big issues with this data is, of course, this is mostly documentation data. This is documentary data. So it's data that is coming from media sources. It is data that's coming from a panel of experts reports with the United Nations. And so it is somewhat beholden to the authors of that data. Which frequently are heavily invested in the outcomes of that reporting.

So you'll have instances where missiles will be reported, the Houthis will report that they've launched a missile and that it struck a target and that it was successful. The Saudis will report that two missiles were actually intercepted and everything's fine and no satellite imagery will ever be produced and we will not know. And so that's that's one of the big data issues in general with the entire events in Yemen.

And the authors are very clear about this up front. That's again, that's not a critique of them. They're very upfront about this, that they are sort of tabulating the full score. And really, disinformation campaign assessment is not their bag so much. Yeah. And so that just means that some of the numbers may run high. Like we were expressing a little bit of skepticism because I think there's something like over 150 successful Patriot intercepts reported.

Many of which occurred before the PAC-3s appear to have been delivered into Saudi Royal Air Defense hands. Yeah. And I think we've established on the pod our opinion about the PAC-2 in terms of its effectiveness. Jeffrey and his team.

Aaron 8:08

Yeah, go ahead. You should repeat it.

Scott 8:09

Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. Yeah, and the PAC-3 seems to be a fairly serviceable system. The PAC-2 is an air defense missile essentially modified for ballistic missile usage. That makes it not ideal. It's literally just not optimized for that target.

Aaron 8:26

A ballistic missile target, man.

Scott 8:28

Yes, specifically ballistic missiles. It's perfectly serviceable against certain cruise missiles and UAVs and aircraft, but it and its 10,000 different modifications that I'm not going to list here have a little more trouble against ballistic missiles. And so that brings a lot of the... Saudi claims into question when they said that they are, you know, intercepting Tachkas, which are, you know, old but still fairly precision weapons with these somewhat inefficient ballistic missile defenses.

Aaron 9:01

We'll come back to the Tachka. But I was curious, you know, like. How you classify – and I know the report sort of touches on this – like what is a success? Because some of the missiles that are being fired are relatively inaccurate. If they fall in the desert and are harmless and interceptors were fired, do you classify that as a success or does it always have to hit the incoming missile?

Do you know what I mean?

Scott 9:24

Yeah, so they actually have a good methodology for this. So the way they define it, and again, their definitions are good, but some of the data sources that they're pulling from are actively disinformationing, so it's going to still be hard to tell. But their definition is basically that a defensive missile system had to physically strike and prevent an offensive missile system from reaching its intended target fully.

That means that debris can still come down and damage. That means that if the booster separated from the warhead, if one of those things was intercepted, but not the other, that could still potentially be classified as an intercept. So it's it's it's a good definition for intercepts. They're not like playing around with the terminology a bunch.

Aaron 10:13

Yeah. Do you want to talk about Tosca?

Scott 10:16

Yeah. So so just in terms of what the Tachka is, the Tachka was, I guess, at this point, two generations back from the Russian Iskander. It is a when Russians have it, it's nuclear capable. Their exports are not nuclear capable anymore. Unless severely modified by aftermarket folks. But basically, there are a few Tachkas. They're small. They're solid propellant missiles, so they're quick to move around.

They can actually do the shoot-and-scoot stuff. We see them a lot in Syria and Ukraine as well. They're fairly effective missiles compared to the Scud, which is a liquid missile. It's very slow. It's what has been in operation since like, what, the 50s, 60s. It's very old. It requires constant upgrades to keep it kind of modern. And basically, it's just kind of like it works.

It's kind of like the AK-47 of missiles. It works. It will fire. It's not the hardest thing in the world to train on in terms of missiles. It's also not going to hit anything you aim at for the large part. Yeah. So the Tochka seems to have the again the numbers are kind of hinky because of the the sources reporting it, but the Tochka seems to be a fairly precise weapon that seems to be what yields the most sort of casualties per launch in terms of it actually can hit what they are aiming at, whereas the Scud has a much higher margin of error.

But you see fewer Tachkas being launched as time goes on because Yemen essentially had a legacy stockpile of Tachkas left over from the Yemeni civil war in the 90s. And so you just see those drop off. There are no more Tachka strikes after a certain point. And you start seeing the switch to scuds because these scuds are actively manufactured and shipped in via Uncle Iran, who's just bringing in plenty of gifts for the Houthis to keep things going.

Aaron 12:14

Yeah, and I think we should just – for the listeners, I mean long-time listeners of the show will know, but maybe new-time listeners, is that the Burqan or the Qiyam, which is – we call it a super scud. I mean it's essentially a scud. With a detachable warhead and no fins. So it's nice and slick. And that seems to be, that has been, at least according to the data set, the main workhorse of the Houthis because they are, as we know, receiving shipments from the Iranians to outfit the Houthis, either operated by Iranians themselves or perhaps by the Houthi proxies to hold targets as deep as Riyadh at risk.

Scott 12:57

Right. And it was a pretty big deal when Riyadh first started to get held at risk. Like early in the conflict, the Houthis had access to sort of whatever parts of the arsenal the Saudis didn't interdict, didn't preempt. If you remember, the sort of invasion kicked off with that huge picture of the alleged scud depot that the Saudi Air Force struck.

And like, you know, the first day of the invasion, they were just like, oh, we did it. Mission accomplished. All the scuds were taken out with one bomb. We won. And as literally everyone in the world could predict after saying those words out loud, then missiles started to hit Saudi airspace. Yeah. So the Burkhans started coming in later.

The Burkhans weren't a pre-existing – as far as we're aware, the Burkhans were not a pre-existing capability in Yemen. The Yemenis were – or the Houthis were working off of basically old Russian stuff. Some North Korean stuff, some probably kludged together other things. And one of my personal favorites, the Kahira one, which is a conversion done to an S-75 surface to air missile.

So instead of going after aircraft, it just works like an artillery rocket.

Aaron 14:15

It's really Mad Max, too. It just looks lovely. We should do an arms control Wong Swag of that. If we could put that together, I would buy that.

Scott 14:24

Oh, man. There's a great one that the PRC used to operate where they took the Chinese version of the S-75 and they put it on a tank. So it's a tank with a giant surface-to-air missile on it, and it as well looks very Mad Max.

Aaron 14:42

Yeah, see, I want that stuff sitting on my desk. My wife will kill me now that we're in quarantine, but I want that stuff. That's the stuff I want.

Scott 14:52

And then the other thing is there's a lot of rockets. And we're using lowercase r rocket here, like 120 millimeter rockets, like very small pieces. From a ballistic missile perspective, very small artillery rockets that are either quasi, like partially guided or unguided. Those show up in the... In one of the intercept databases, which it possibly... So I haven't broken out all of the numbers.

That may also be one reason the intercept databases seem so surprisingly large in some cases, would be the prevalence of what I would call small, relatively easy to intercept rockets, which Don't send me angry emails like, I know that's hard still, but compared to intercepting things like a Scud, er, or a Tochka the 120s and the smaller systems aren't, aren't exactly the same amount of rocket science needed. I think so, so it's a big range speed. I could think you could for, yes, for ease, it's just those rockets lowercase are, yes, it's still hard, but they fly slower.

Yeah. They're much smaller, so they provide a little more complexity for radars, but they are much slower, and the fail... Well, yes, they are much slower. So that's sort of the general rundown in terms of the major hardware and whatnot. It started with this legacy Soviet, North Korean-maintained, other people-maintained, older systems... They sort of ran out of those or lost a bunch of those.

The Saudi Air Force preempted or retaliated against tons of ballistic missile sites during the opening, I guess, two years of the war. And so now it's switched significantly over to either systems they can move around or the Burkhan-2 that is being actively provided in. So the actual arsenal has shifted as they've sort of flushed certain things that they can't continue to build out.

Aaron 16:52

Yeah, and this isn't exactly revelatory for people who've studied up on the scud hunt in the US war in Iraq in 1991 or the Israeli war with Hezbollah in 2006. But the left of launch stuff that the report gets into a little bit is – In addition to missile defense being extremely hard, the left-of-launch stuff is hard, too.

I mean, there's just the amount of aircraft that you have to dedicate to the mission to go hunting for scuds, in this case, or touch guns or something along those lines. Is obviously resource-intensive, it's expensive, and two, it takes aircraft that you could nominally be used to be looking for targets of opportunity elsewhere, right? To assist your allied ground forces, which we're not really talking about, but part of the thing was to try and assist with...

With the Saudi-backed government pushing Aden, off to other missions, right? And in that sense, ballistic missiles, while inaccurate, or perhaps some of the launches... Emanating from Yemen causing no damage because they're inaccurate missiles and Saudi Arabia has a lot of desert, right? It still doesn't mean that that launch had no military effect, even though it didn't hit anything.

It still requires going and sending up aircraft to look for them when they could be doing other stuff. Does that make sense?

Scott 18:23

Absolutely. And it's a really... They actually mentioned this a decent amount in the report, and the authors, I think, have a pretty good understanding of it, where it's very hard to assess the exact outcomes and the exact military value, but they are definitely tying up air assets in scud hunt modes that could be doing other things. So even, like you said, even if a missile launch is...

Totally worthless in terms of did it hit anything? Did it hit its intended target? Whatever. At least several, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum, plus several hours of human time for the entire crews involved had to be spent on hunting down like, geez, a converted Sam in the middle of nowhere that had almost no strategic value.

Aaron 19:17

Right. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Scott 19:19

It's like a perverse economy of force. It's very hard to ignore ballistic missiles coming in. There's a lot of pressure on a military commander to handle that situation as well because these can target civilian areas and in some cases are more... Reliable to hit civilian areas like, they're, they're very hard to do counter force with. It's hard to do precision targeting, but it's easy to hit civilian areas. So you have a, you face a lot of pressure to actually handle the missile situation, even if the missile situation is not the most immediately effective in terms of getting any sort of positive outcomes for your side.

Aaron 19:59

Yeah. And the report also talks about sort of the naval component of this because these missiles weren't sort of materializing. They didn't have legs. They didn't walk in there. So as we understand it – I mean as I understand it. The missiles were coming in to Yemen two ways. The first of which was that they were being shipped by sea and then sort of moved in pieces from larger ships into smaller fishing vessels, dhows as they're called.

And they would move across and despite sort of the Emirati and Saudi naval efforts to I believe the U.S. Navy at some point, to interdict all of these things. Some scored through. And there was a porous border with Oman, right? Yes, that's exactly right. And there was two ways in. And the report goes into this. And so, like, with the challenges that left of launch – And then the challenges of interdiction at sea, it sort of thrust the entire, not the entire, but a considerable amount of defense from these ballistic missiles onto the Patriot system.

And so it really drove home the efficacy or the need for missile defense, but also some of the limitations of that.

Scott 21:10

Yes. They can't interdict everything at sea. They can't retaliate against launchers that they don't see ahead of time, which means there is going to be something that gets through unless there's a defensive shield.

Aaron 21:23

I think that this is a point worth really emphasizing is like how big of a deal this is, right? Yes. Like again, like, and we've talked about this on previous podcasts and probably like, it's a point I always make, but you know, we tend to fixate and like, On whether a missile is accurate, right? Because that's what we tend to fixate on.

We fixate on this idea that if we drop a bomb or if we fire a missile, it falls within an aim point, sort of typified in our head by the footage that we see on cable news networks of bomb strikes, right?

Scott 21:59

They're accurate.

Aaron 22:00

Whereas... That capability is relatively limited – or actually, it's actually proliferating, but it's more or less limited to sort of high industrialized states, most of which have linkages or reliances with the United States. But then you run into this thing, and as we know from the Iranians, they can hit targets if they shoot at it. Just ask at Ain Asad Air Base in Iraq.

But the things that they are exporting to the Houthis are not accurate. But they don't have to be accurate, because what they're trying to do is different militarily than hitting a precise coordinate on a map. And just the fact that the Houthis, who are a state actor but who could be quasi-non-state, depending on how you classify them, even if it's IRGC embeds who are firing these missiles, you basically have...

You know, the Arab world's most poorest state, you know, but on top of that, the governing entity, which is, you know, like it's extremely poor on top of that, sucking down and tying up the resources of two of the richest Arab states and who are technologically superior in every single way to the Houthis. Now, people will say, well, the Saudis suck, you know, they're not great, yada, yada, yada.

That's immaterial to the point here, which is just like... These missiles, despite not being accurate, despite not being what we would call militarily effective in terms of their outcomes or effects in terms of where they explode, were a big deal. I mean, still are a big deal. And there's really no answer for them as long as they can continue to squirt on in through these different rat lines that run into the country.

Scott 23:43

Yeah, they're there. They create a lot of chaos and a lot of economic and political pressure. And this is something that I keep going back to the report. I'm sorry. I'm just very excited about this report. The report actually talks about this is sort of alternative values of missiles. Yeah. The political value of a missile, you know, can you use this to fight a PR war?

Because as as we on the podcast are very well aware, a missile launch is a can be if sort of filmed and produced correctly, can be a very powerful PR tool. That can be used in a lot of different ways. That can be used for or against state propaganda. And sort of one of these things was they actually have specific, like, quotes in here from folks on both sides about the Houthis saying, like, we are trying to use these to send the message that basically, like, as long as you're here, you're being held at risk.

Like... The civilians should not be supporting this because of course now, you know, we can hit Riyadh now. And what that sort of turned into was, Oh, now the Saudi invasion feels justified. Because now the civilians feel attacked. So it became like popular support swung around in the opposite way, which kind of is a common experience in a lot of places with ballistic missiles.

Like they're very hard It's very hard to get the outcome you want or you think you can get when you are using ballistic missiles or other precision long-range strike assets, both militarily and politically. And economically, for that matter. We can go back to the whole terror bombing and industrial bombing from World War II stories, even. It's been somewhat consistent over time, with some exception.

Aaron 25:26

And the Houthis got creative, and you have to think it was the Iranians who were helping them out. And, like, I don't know if it was, if it was the Houthis who came up with it or the Iranians, but either way, the information flows both ways. This is something that Rawnsley and I were talking about a long time ago, and I know it's in the report, because it was in some of the Panel of Experts reports, like, going back in the day, I just can't remember, which is, we'll talk about drones and cruise missiles in a second, I think we should come back to that, but, like, Like basically drones to like confuse – I mean confuse isn't the right word, but like cause problems for Patriot engagement radars.

Scott 26:05

Oh, they'll straight up blind the radars with it.

Aaron 26:06

Blind it, right.

Scott 26:07

Yeah, I think you can use more intense words than confuse.

Aaron 26:12

You're the radar expert. Sometimes I don't want to go off the reservation, but like blind the radar and then they volley fire ballistic missiles behind them. Like that's just fun. Like, like you hate to, that's clever. Okay. That's really, really clever. And I'm not supposed to say it, but I use that in a war game once we volley fired.

I stole it from the Houthis. So like I was playing around in a war game and we did that. And like, I stole it from the Houthis who probably got it from the Iranians. And they came back to me as I was playing around in a war game. But it's clever, right? Like these guys aren't dumb.

Scott 26:47

It's these cheap, relatively cheap. I mean, you've seen, you know, Rawnsley and other folks' analyses on these drones. They're not, you know, they're not Reapers. They are not these crazy top of the line. We touched everyone. We did not touch anything. I swear we only took pictures.

Aaron 27:05

We were allowed to touch them.

Scott 27:07

No, we weren't. We weren't? No.

Aaron 27:10

We were allowed to pick up the drone pieces.

Scott 27:13

Oh, that actually may be the case.

Aaron 27:14

We were allowed to touch them. I followed the rules. They let us pick up the drone pieces.

Scott 27:18

I'm going to leave it in regardless because it's funny to me. But I mean, yeah, we saw those drones. We handled them. What was it? Not a motorcycle engine. That's not a lawnmower engine.

Aaron 27:29

They're essentially two strokes lawnmower engines.

Scott 27:34

Yeah, like these are not, like can you imagine if someone was talking about the, you know, putting up Reapers and Predator drones and they were just like, oh, these are commercial off-the-shelf lawnmower engines. Like, oh, that's not probably what they're contracting for. And that's enough to mess up a Patriot battery, a multi-billion dollar system. Right. That's incredibly clever and cost-effective, regardless of what your state's like.

This is a concern with North Korea, with the THAAD radar. Every time they see North Korean drones, they get found around the THAAD deployment areas. This is a real concern. Thinking of cheap UAVs, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles as part of a mature, complex salvo is a very expensive prospect to defend against at pretty much all sides of it.

Because we were having this discussion off pods, like tracking those small UAVs is hard.

Aaron 28:29

As I understand it, maybe a listener can chime in here if I kind of, again, go off the reservation. But in theory, they should be easy to find because they aren't built with low observable features.

Scott 28:45

Because we're looking for harder things. They should be the easier thing to find.

Aaron 28:49

They should be the easier thing to find. And I think in a perfect world they are. But I think for particularly like a rotating fighter, like a fighter jet that's like on drone patrol, they fly lower to the ground. So sometimes they get lost in ground clutter because they fly so slowly. And two, they can fly outside your beam relatively easy, like the angle of your beam, your radar beam, and so you kind of have to go hunting and look for them if you don't pick them up on radar with sort of non-traditional measures, and I always assume that that's what the targeting pod, which always makes me think of this good study, another good study for listeners who are interested in this.

It's a 2006... No, it's a RAND report written by Benjamin Lambeth, and I'm not going to remember the name of it, but it's... An in-depth study of Israeli air operations comparing 2006 war with Lebanon and then Operation Cast Lead, which I believe was in 2010. And sort of the lessons learned that they came from that. And there's a really good section in there about how like Hezbollah would use drones to penetrate Israeli airspace.

And what they would have to do to defend against that. Like they had Patriot, but Patriot in, I believe it was PAC two or could have been PAC three, you know, is depending on the missile between 750,000 and $3 million a missile to shoot down, you know, a fantastic Iranian drone, or they would have to put up, I believe it was F-16s or F-15s that were just basically on drone patrol, you know, in either case, right?

Like, and there's a good, there's a good section on this. And I would, Maybe I'll put it in the show notes, because it's a good report. It's an easy report to read. It is long, but it's a fun report. It's really interesting. Because in many ways, the 2006 war with Hezbollah is the antecedent to the 2015 war that we're seeing now.

Hezbollah did a lot of the same stuff.

Scott 30:39

That's crazy and ironic. I can't imagine a common through-line between Hezbollah and...

Aaron 30:45

Right up to and including in-ship cruise missiles and hard-to-find trucks that look like civilians, which is fun. ... But it's very resource-intensive and costly. In the F-16 or the F-15, I'm not remembering exactly which aircraft they used. It wasn't designed to go on drone patrol. Do you know what I mean? There's something that the mission wasn't designed for.

Scott 31:08

It's like this perfect microcosm of sort of like what the United States in particular, but generally sort of United States-adjacent states always get criticized for in modern operations, is that even if these systems work flawlessly as designed... We use exquisite systems and exquisite solutions, and they are ludicrously expensive compared to basically someone aggressively red teaming them. Like there are new emerging cheap technologies that are moving faster than the contracting cycle for, you know, multi multi role aircraft.

Like that's a very complicated problem that the industrial base just hasn't quite figured out yet.

Aaron 31:53

I mean the Iranians did this to us in Syria. I mean for listeners, I'm writing a book on the US war in Syria. So out in June and that's another reason I'm so busy and haven't been potting as much.

Scott 32:03

This is going to keep happening. Like the more – UAV technology proliferates especially when you can put lawnmowers or model airplane engines smuggled across the Chinese border into your thing. Like it's – If you can pay two thousand dollars three thousand dollars to build something that even for a couple seconds can reliably knock out if like not destroy but just knock out you know a multi-billion dollar missile system that like that's that's a hard cost curve to argue with

Aaron 32:40

Yeah, and I think another thing is, you know, going back to the, and the CSI report talks about this, and I think we talked about this on the podcast with Fabian, which is the attack on Abqaiq and Quraish, you know, so it was the introduction of accurate cruise missiles. But I think the interesting part about them, as I understand it, and again, is that most of the Patriot that, That Saudi has, has a radar that only has 180-degree field of vision.

So you can fire from behind it. And, you know, Jeffrey's talked about this with South Korea and the sort of viability or at least the military utility of a North Korean sea launch deterrent, even if it's kind of clumsy and just not really all that good, is the ability to fire from behind missile defense radars.

Scott 33:34

Which is literally the Southern SLBM problem that the United States had in the cold war. These, these same problems keep coming up.

Aaron 33:42

Right. And with maybe with what do they call it? You know, we talked about the, the, the, the nuclear cruise missile, the Russians for the batch nuclear cruise missile. You can fly over the Southern pole. Exactly.

Scott 33:55

Oh yeah. You can just do whatever you want with it.

Aaron 33:57

You can do whatever you want with it, including kill your own scientists. But like Is that one of the things that happened in this war, it's incredibly interesting, is that particularly after the Trump administration began to impose its maximum pressure strategy, One of which was to essentially try and cut off Iranian energy exports. The Iranians began to punish, you know, if we're not going to be able to export, nobody's going to be able to export, right?

But rather than close the Strait of Hormuz, which is sort of like where everybody's brain goes, is that they sort of flexed. And one of their flex was the attack on Abqaiq and Quraish, where they used cruise missiles probably fired from southern Iraq, To fly and hit, you know, basically big oil processing facilities. And one of the things that came out of that, as I understand it, was that most of the Saudi Patriot radars, or all of them, were oriented or pointed south because they had to defend against, bringing this full circle, the Houthi ballistic missile and cruise missile threat from the south.

So the Iranians fired from behind their missile radars. Yeah.

Scott 35:11

And it's the same problem that the UAE hypothetically faces, because if I remember correctly, the UAE operates THAAD batteries, which are fairly high performance against a variety of targets. And those just straight up are not aimed the correct direction for any Houthi anything. They are aimed at Iran, is my understanding.

Aaron 35:33

Yeah, and again, then the Saudis had to take sort of ancillary action to defend their North-eastern flank, which required the United States to move in Patriot batteries on their behalf with sort of More upgraded and modern radars, I believe, that has a 360-degree field of view and sort of in a nod for Middle East wonks like myself.

You know, the bolstering of the American position in Saudi Arabia was always to provide overwatch of the Gulf for the Saudis back as far as Operation Ernest Will in the 1980s. But, like, it just goes to show, like... One of the fun things I love with – and I really shouldn't be complimenting the adversary, but you have to give it to the Iranians.

They had some – they're clever. Oh, they're not dumb.

Scott 36:27

Yeah.

Aaron 36:27

This point-counterpoint thing where like Patriot is good and I think it's the CSIS report. You know, we tend to focus on the misses, but they, they, they do have successes. And yes, there are probably problems with the data set, but it's the best data set that we have.

Scott 36:43

Oh, bar none. Yeah.

Aaron 36:45

Yeah. And I mean, as a compliment but for as good as they are You know, there's a counterpoint that can be exploited, and it's that point counterpoint that, that's interesting to watch as an outsider to how this one played out, because it really is allegorical. I mean, this is what, and this is something that Rawnsley always says is like, you know, this is what a throwdown with around would actually look like, you know, like bits and pieces of it played out in the past 15 years across the entire Middle East. Yeah, I mean, and yes, I mean, like.

And the Iranians were better. The Iranians have better missiles than what the Houthis were using. And they have a whole bunch of the missiles that the Houthis were using. And so they have a lot of options to make life uncomfortable and how much it takes, even in this limited slimmed down version, that the Houthis have to defend against these missiles.

Scott 37:43

Well, and I feel like the sort of other way of looking at that also is, again, even if all of these systems, which I know we're particularly critical of them on the pod, even if these systems were working perfectly as advertised, are they actually solving your problems? And the answer is not all of them, at least, especially not at cost.

But there's only some. It's a tough problem. This is going to be one of those pods where we're going to complain a lot and talk about how this strategy is complicated and then offer no helpful advice.

Aaron 38:16

I hope this pod doesn't come off as I'm criticizing missile defense. I think Patriot is a system worth investing in. I think THAAD is a system worth investing in. I really do delineate between THAAD, Patriot, and sort of the GBI, which we've talked about on podcasts before, which is sort of the big missile defense. I think SM-3 is worth investing in.

I think that I am not sort of a non-believer in missile defense. But I'm a skeptic of some of the claims that the CSA-esque authors point out, which comes from industry that says that they have 100% success rate.

Scott 38:56

Oh, Raytheon's very emphatic about their success rate on that, which I do find interesting. And it's probably worth looking into in another pod entirely about what those claims mean. But yeah, they literally have one where they say 100% success rate. It's fascinating.

Aaron 39:11

So what's the big takeaway for you from the report?

Scott 39:14

So I think this report sits as a really solid historical like and military operational analysis of the first five years of the missile war in Yemen and is one of the most comprehensive looks at missile combat I have seen in recent years. Missile like, you know, there's like theory of air power people, naval power people. There's not a lot of missile power people there.

Aaron 39:38

They're listening to the podcast.

Scott 39:40

Yeah, exactly. Hey, the five other missile power people, hey, we probably all know each other on Twitter. But like... I appreciate this as a document and their dataset on their website is basically creating a really easy to access foundational raw primary source dataset and a pretty good historical narrative and analysis of what went on and some of the problems that we've seen with reporting, What sort of operational lessons can be learned.

And then if you are a student of this war, now you don't have to do all this footwork yourself for your analysis. If you're a cruise missile person who's focusing on naval combat, now you don't have to do your own footwork to learn everything about the ballistic combat that was going on at the same time. They basically sort of solved...

Part of the like war study question for when you're looking at this, I think this is a very valuable document for anyone studying both the war in Yemen and just the operational use of ballistic missiles in general. Like, I have a really long paper that sits on my hard drive that is sort of the history of all conventional ballistic missile usage and I started that paper like six months after the invasion began in Yemen.

And so that paper literally has the starting portions of that. And this is the exact kind of thing I would want to bring into that to sort of expand and discuss it. Again, I think there's a lot of other things you can pull out of this paper. And we have some slight disagreements on sort of the optimism of some of the numbers and the reporting, but it's just reporting the raw numbers.

And I think that's an immensely valuable piece of... Research material for the field. Just anyone who's doing the yeoman work of building databases and releasing them to the public and then writing up, you know, writing a hundred page report explaining what the data is and what the context of the data is. That's just immensely helpful. That's just an immensely helpful service someone does.

Aaron 41:53

So I guess thank you, CSIS?

Scott 41:57

Yeah, sorry. That was probably supposed to be a short question. It's a good report. Go read it. I'm going to put it in the show notes. This is just something that's going to be very helpful for missile folk trying to parse a very complicated information environment for operational data. And just, of course, because this is the arms control on pod, I want to do a shout out to, of course, Jeffrey and his team who did sort of technical analyses based on video imagery of like actual Patriot performance.

We talked about this a little in the middle of the pod, but I believe it was specifically some of the strikes on Riyadh International Airport and the Patriot two intercepts. And basically, Jeffrey and his team broke open that video and said, hey, this does not look like it was a successful intercept. Right. Calling that into question. And just for people going into this report, if you are on sort of the technical analysis side, that's not the point of the report.

The point of the report is not to assess Patriot performance at a technical level. That's obviously something we focus a lot on on the pod. But this is a lot more for if you're kind of doing the war study side of it.

Aaron 43:02

Jeffrey's work on that was groundbreaking. I mean, just to give you a shout out. It was incredible. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, it was basically from that video where we had like, we kind of knew it already and we did know it, but it basically confirmed that the Qiyam or the Burqan has a separating warhead.

Scott 43:22

I believe that is correct and I think that's the first time we – yeah, I think you're correct. That's the first time we came at least closer to confirming it.

Aaron 43:30

Right. I mean we knew in theory that he kind of had to because of like the stresses on the airframe over that distance. But he kind of confirmed it. I remember that. I mean I remember – Such a good analysis. It was really good. Yeah. And so, yeah, we want to make sure we give the proper shout outs to the, to the pod father.

So for, for listeners, including the five who are, are missile nerds on par with Scott and I'm, I'm on a tier below. Okay. I'm going to be honest, but Scott's in his own tier, but there are people in Scott's tier and I, I feel fairly confident that they listened to the show, but if you want to know who these five missile nerds are, they're hanging out in our Slack channel and to, Get access to our Slack channel.

You have to go over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. For $3 a month if you are a student and $5 a month if you are not, you can gain access to this Slack channel where missile nerds congregate, where arms control wonk people congregate, and where really cool stuff happens and leads to stories of the Washington Post and other major news outlets.

And it's a good place to be.

Scott 44:35

Also, we are about to undertake a small fundraiser for Arms Control Wonk just to try and keep the lights on in chaotic times. We're not ready to announce the full details of it yet, but just keep an ear out because we've got something fun that is cooking in the next couple of weeks. And I can't underline this enough.

It's stupid, but it's so good. Like all my favorite missile things.

Aaron 45:01

I was about to say, stupid but good is sort of like where we live on this show. With that, it's now 10.27 p.m. on the East Coast. I want to go to bed. So, Scott, nice chatting with you.

Scott 45:16

Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Aaron 45:18

My pleasure, and thank you everybody for listening.