The Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities Sept. 14 pulled the curtain back on one of the Pentagon’s inconvenient truths, namely that despite untold billions spent on missile defense, the United States does not have a reliable shield against low-flying cruise missiles and small, hard-to-detect drones.
All the U.S. technology employed by the Saudis, including early warning radars and Patriot anti-missile missiles, are useless in the age of cruise missiles and cheap, relatively low-tech drones.
In the attack, none of the 18 drones or seven cruise missiles were detected, much less engaged by Saudi air defenses, leaving various U.S. officials sputtering to explain the embarrassing failure.
“We’ve seen air defense systems all around the world have mixed success. Some of the finest in the world don’t always pick things up,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters a few days after the sneak attack that took down 5% of the world’s oil supply.
At the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford suggested the Saudi air defenses relied too much on a single line of defense.
“No single system is going to be able to defend against a threat like that, but a layered system of defensive capabilities would mitigate the risk of swarms of drones or other attacks that may come from Iran,” Dunford said at a Pentagon briefing.
In response, the Pentagon ordered another Patriot missile battery to Saudi Arabia and more high-tech radars, along with 200 U.S. troops to operate them.
But the fact is while the U.S. is hard at work developing new technologies to counter the spread of cruise missiles and drones, for now, the best defense is a good offense, also known as deterrence.
The U.S. has no effective defense against nuclear weapons either, but the threat of a massive response, so-called mutually assured destruction, has kept anyone from employing nuclear weapons for more than seven decades.
But Iran has shown it can attack oil infrastructure vital to the global economy and escape any military response, as President Trump nixed options for a retaliatory strike for fear of sparking a wider war.
While the Iran attacks were a wake-up call for anyone who thought U.S. missile defenses were an impenetrable shield, it’s not as though the Pentagon has been asleep at the switch.
Military planners have recognized the eventual threat from the time the U.S. first mounted Hellfire missiles on a U.S. Predator spy drone in 2001 to target Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.
Full-size drones are inherently slow, low-flying airplanes that are vulnerable to traditional air defenses and can be quickly shot down from the ground or the air if they are detected soon enough.
But Smaller, cheaper drones that can attack in a swarm pose a much tougher challenge, but the Pentagon has been rushing new defenses into the field, including high-tech lasers and high-powered microwaves that can cause drones to crash or lose their bearings.
In July, a system mounted on a U.S. Marine vehicle parked on the bow of the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer used electronic countermeasures to down a hostile drone as the warship passed through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has amassed a vast arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones as part of a strategy of conducting asymmetric warfare when facing a vastly superior military force, such as the U.S.
But it’s not just Iran that has the U.S. worried: Russia, China, and even North Korea are busy developing a new generation of hypersonic missiles that not only fly upwards of six times the speed of sound but can also dart and weave like a running back on a football field to evade conventional missile defenses.
Like the medieval knight who discovers his trusty plate armor is no longer protection from the power of the longbow, U.S. military planners are adapting tactics to the threat of hypersonic weapons and the ubiquity of drones, the “poor man’s cruise missile.”
In a dramatic example of how the U.S. is rethinking its ability to defend against an Iran-style cruise missile and drone attack, the forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command located at an airbase in Doha, Qatar, conducted an exercise last month in which its entire operation was shifted for 24 hours to a back-up facility at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.
The functions of the Middle East command center, known as the Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC, “are so critical and so essential,” Maj. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told the Washington Post, “we can’t afford to have a single point of failure.”
In other words, the small building that houses the nerve center for U.S operations in the region would be a prime target in the event war were to ever break out.
And like the Saudi oil facilities, the al-Udeid air base in Qatar is heavily defended with Patriot missiles and other systems designed to shoot down planes and ballistic missiles that come in high and fast, not cruise missiles and drones that come in low and slow.
And like the armor breastplate of yore, that just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com
