The San Diego Union-Tribune December 15, 2002
Navy faces threats in war with Iraq
By Matthew Dolan, Jack Dorsey and Dennis O'Brien
NORFOLK, Va. -- As the carrier Harry S. Truman battle group deployed for the Persian Gulf, the last thing it had to worry about was the strength of Saddam Hussein's navy.
With roughly 2,000 sailors, the Iraqi navy is less than half the size of the Truman's crew.
But that does not mean sailors from Hampton Roads would be out of harm's way if President Bush decides to wage war against Iraq.
U.S. warships could be targeted in a swarmlike attack by small Iraqi boats or be fired upon with anti-ship missiles. Over Baghdad, carrier aviators could find a hornet's nest of anti-aircraft artillery.
And the Iraqis could mine parts of the Persian Gulf -- a defensive tactic that took out two U.S. ships in 1991.
"Overall, I think the threat will be less than in Desert Storm," said retired Rear Adm. Stephen H. Baker, a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. "But there are always wild cards."
The Truman battle group, which includes 12 ships and more than 13,000 sailors and Marines, is on its way to the Mediterranean Sea, then on to the Persian Gulf.
In early November, more than 8,000 sailors and Marines left San Diego for the Persian Gulf with the aircraft carrier Constellation and its battle group. The battle group includes the carrier, an air wing of 72 aircraft, the cruisers Bunker Hill and Valley Forge, destroyers Higgins and Milius and the frigate Thach, all from San Diego.
The carrier George Washington battle group is in the Mediterranean and scheduled to return next month, but could remain deployed if tensions with Iraq do not ease. Problems with United Nations inspections for weapons of mass destruction, which are ongoing, could spark another war.
The use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by the Iraqis remains an unknown factor in any future war. U.S. sailors now train to use protective gas masks and drill on how to identify these types of attacks against ships and ports.
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In the 1991 conflict, one of the greatest threats to U.S. naval forces came from mines -- Iraq laid an estimated 1,000 of them in the northern Persian Gulf.
Although the potential of these weapons was well-known for decades, two Navy ships were damaged by underwater mines on Feb. 18, 1991.
The amphibious assault ship Tripoli, based in Long Beach, Calif., was serving as the mother ship for mine hunters when it tripped a 300-pound mine. Four sailors were injured. Three hours later and 10 miles away, the Aegis guided missile cruiser Princeton, also based in Long Beach, was hit by two mines. Three men were injured.
Defense analyst John Pike, director of Alexandria-based globalsecurity.org, said the threat of Iraqi mines remains. But he predicts that U.S. naval forces are unlikely to stage an amphibious assault along coastlines where mines would be the likely defense.
The Iraqi navy has never been a major presence in the region, but it used to be much larger than it is today. At the beginning of the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had a navy of 5,000 men and five frigates, six smaller warships, eight minesweepers and 38 patrol boats.
Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm virtually wiped out Hussein's fleet. The U.S.-led coalition surface force -- led by six American aircraft carriers and two battleships -- destroyed more than 100 Iraqi vessels.
Today, experts believe the Iraqi navy's assets include one Soviet-made Osa fast patrol craft with surface-to-surface missiles; five inshore patrol craft, all believed to be inoperable; three mine-warfare craft; an auxiliary vessel; and a yacht with a helicopter deck.
"Iraq poses a limited surface threat, particularly following the Gulf War," according to an assessment released by the 5th Fleet, the Navy's Persian Gulf headquarters in Bahrain. "It has demonstrated some naval activity since accepting the new UN resolution, with its coastal patrol boats steaming inside its territorial waters." The Osa remains berthed and has not been observed under way, the Navy report added.
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The two most recent acts of maritime violence in the Middle East involved small boats packed with explosives and detonated alongside ships. Both were suicide terrorist attacks launched from Yemen.
The first came in October 2000 when the Norfolk-based guided missile destroyer Cole was attacked in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
The second occurred in October, when a French oil tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen. One crew member was killed and 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden.
The Cole bombing prompted the Navy to be much more vigilant about force protection. Sailors are now posted all around ships for the purpose of spotting small boats that might pose a danger.
But the northern Persian Gulf teems with small boats, many of them legitimately plying the water for trade or fishing. Picking out potential threats is not easy.
The potential exists for a number of explosive-laden boats to launch a simultaneous attack against a U.S. warship. Naval planners have given considerable thought to countering such a "swarm attack."
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who commanded "opposition forces" during this summer's Millennium Challenge war game, employed a swarm attack against the U.S. fleet during the exercise.
The small boats were able to launch a successful attack, but Van Riper said most of the damage in the war game was inflicted by a more traditional naval threat: anti-ship missiles.
"Cruise missiles are a greater threat than small boats ever would be," Van Riper said.
In the Gulf War, the Iraqi navy's weapons included the Silkworm surface-to-surface missile, whose 60-mile range and half-ton warhead could sink a frigate or damage a battleship.
The Iraqi navy also had seven helicopters, four of which might have been operational. They carried the Exocet anti-surface-ship missile and, with a combat radius of approximately 150 miles, threatened shipping in the northern Persian Gulf.
Today, according to the Center for Defense Information, the Iraqis' lone Osa patrol craft is armed with four missiles and the navy has no armed helicopters.
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Iraqi air defenses could challenge U.S. forces, according to experts.
In a future war, the United States is widely expected to deploy high-tech weapons -- including pilotless surveillance drones and satellite-guided "smart bombs" -- but not a massive invasion force.
Iraq's 8,000 to 9,000 pieces of high-grade, anti-aircraft artillery were largely unaffected by the coalition air campaign in 1991.
"The air defense over Baghdad continues to be quite dense, and it has not been attacked since the Gulf War," Pike said. "It's outside the no-fly zone, and a lot of their air defense pulled back out of their no-fly zones and into the Baghdad area."
In the last conflict, Iraqi anti-aircraft fire brought down three U.S. planes, and the ground-to-air fire has a psychological impact on allied pilots, officials said.
How many Navy aviators fly sorties over Iraq might depend in part on which countries in the region allow the U.S. Air Force to use bases, Pike said.
"The Navy could carry one-third to one-half of the air campaign," he said. "But they'll have a vastly improved lethality rate. It won't go on for 40 days and 40 nights," as it did in 1991.
Baker said the U.S. military's ability to coordinate strikes has vastly improved with real-time information-sharing nearly achieved.
The Defense Department continues to be under-equipped for defeating surface-to-air missiles and other enemy air defenses, even though the General Accounting Office called attention to the problem almost two years ago, the GAO said.
According to a report in Aerospace Daily, wing fatigue and engine problems have forced the grounding of some aging EA-6B Prowler aircraft, on which the Navy relies for radar-jamming.
The Navy has a requirement for 104 Prowlers but had only 91 in the field as of February, according to the newsletter.
Other published reports say Iraq has boosted the range of some surface-to-air missiles as part of its ongoing efforts to shoot down patrolling U.S. and British warplanes.
Iraq also is reported to have converted commercial trucks imported under the U.N. oil-for-food humanitarian program for possible use as mobile anti-aircraft missile systems, which are more difficult to detect.
An U.S. military operation against Iraq would likely begin with big attacks on all elements of Iraq's air-defense system.
A globalsecurity.org report said Iraqi air-defense systems have been improved in recent years. They have become "amalgams of Western, old East European and Far Eastern technologies that behave in nonstandard ways. That makes them less predictable for the U.S. and British planes that are their targets and increasingly difficult to counter."
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