In February 1991, a single Iraqi Scud splashed harmlessly into the waters of the Arabian Gulf 150 meters from the massive commercial pier at Al Jubayl in Saudi Arabia. Had this missile landed on the ammunition-laden pier, or been part of a volley of multiple missiles, the results could have been catastrophic. With another possible Gulf War looming, defending vulnerable ports from such a threat is more important than ever.
The United States transported "the equivalent of the entire population of Alaska, along with their personal belongings, to the other side of the world, on short notice," in preparation for the war to liberate Kuwait in 1990-91.1 This movement occurred as if little menaced its safety, but real threats existed. In the decade since, such threats have proliferated worldwide, with the potential to deny U.S. military access to critical areas of the world. One Gulf War incident at Al Jubayl in Saudi Arabia illuminates the reality of such menaces to the planned projection of U.S. forces, and the need to address the antiaccess threat.
As in most major military operations, the seas provided the critical transportation link for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Al Jubayl has one of the largest commercial piers in the world (more than a mile long), with extensive space to stage military forces. About 20% of Desert Shield and Desert Storm cargo moved through Al Jubayl. Among the forces deployed to the theater, the ships of Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons 2 and 3 (five and four ships, respectively) carried the equipment and 45 days of supplies for 30,000 Marines. The first three of these ships from Diego Garcia arrived at Al Jubayl on 15 August 1990.
These ships carry significant amounts of supplies. Each squadron carries about 2,000 containers, 800 of which contain ammunition. The ammunition and other combustibles such as fuels have an explosive arc of about 4,500 feet. In other words, if just one ship had exploded at the Al Jubayl commercial pier, the blast likely would have destroyed all ships at the pier and everything on it. In August 1990, this included thousands of U.S. Marines and other personnel living in the pier's warehouses.
In the early morning of 16 February 1991, the Iraqi Scud hit the water near the Polis ship Wodnik, less than 1,000 meters from the USS Tarawa. Arrayed on the pier near the Tarawa were thousands of tons of ammunition. The author was on the pier the day of the attack.
Staff Lieutenant General Hazim 'Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ayyubi, commander of the Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles corps during the Gulf War, noted in his 1998 book Forty-Three Missiles on the Zionist Entity that Iraqi forces already were prepared to fire Scud missiles—with both conventional and chemical warheads—in early August 1990. Al Jubayl was one of the planned target areas.
Patriot missiles provided the sole active defense capability against the use of Iraqi Scud missiles. The initial Patriot battery arrived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on 13 August. Al Jubayl was the second location to have operational Patriot coverage, starting on 4 September.
On the afternoon of 15 February 1991, the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) pulled into Al Jubayl to offload a six-plane Marine Corps AV-8B detachment. On board were 2,793 sailors, Marines, soldiers, and civilians. Other ships and numerous U.S. and allied personnel also were in the port at that time. The pier area had a wide array of supplies and equipment stored on it, both in the open and in warehouses. On 15 February, the ammunition stored on the pier included 155-mm high-explosive and white phosphorus rounds, Army missiles, cluster bombs, and 500-pound bombs.
During Desert Storm, the Iraqis fired 88 Al Hussein missiles (more commonly known as Scuds), the 66th in the direction of Al Jubayl. National sensors detected this launch, providing alert and warning information to the tactical units in theater. At 0207 local time on 16 February, the missile landed 150 meters from the pier. It hit within the harbor's breakwater, just 125 meters off the bow of the Polish hospital ship Wodnik and less than 1,000 meters from the Tarawa. The latter ship's lookout reported hearing "a boom" and sighting a "flash" in the sky. The Scud's warhead did not detonate. Some small pieces of missile debris hit the aviation support ships Curtiss (AVB-4) and Wright (AVB-3), the Wodnik, and the pier near these ships.
Many in the harbor area initially assumed a Patriot missile had engaged and hit the incoming missile. In fact, the battery was down for replacement of a part in its main computer and did not come on line until 0212 local, minutes after the attack.
That this was a close call was not generally known. The Central Command situation report said the missile hit either out to sea or in an unpopulated area. At 1st Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters, the intelligence officer briefed the commander that the Scud "landed approximately 10 miles southeast of the port." The Patriot battalion's watch log listed the missile as having landed outside the battery's coverage area.
This reporting, it seems, led to inaccurate examination of this incident in analysis of Patriot operations and Scud performance during Desert Storm. One Patriot missile performance analysis stated simply there was no detection and the missile hit ten miles north of the Patriot battery, "outside the defended area . . . confirming that this was a nonthreatening Scud." Thus, postwar analysis of Patriot effectiveness excluded this case. As for the Scuds, errors on this incident might have created a more than 50-meter error in assessments as to the accuracy of Iraqi missiles fired during Desert Storm.
In fact, the U.S. military knew the exact location of missile's impact; U.S. military personnel recovered the missile virtually intact from the bottom of the harbor. Analytical discrepancies as to the Patriot's effectiveness or the Scud's accuracy, however, are of limited importance. The key issue is that U.S. (and allied) forces were at risk and came within less than a kilometer of a major catastrophe.
This incident demonstrates clearly that the Tarawa was at risk, along with the other ships, equipment, and personnel in the Al Jubayl area. Although the official assessment found no conclusive evidence the missile was targeted at the Tarawa herself, the circumstances suggest the launch might have been an attempt to hit the amphibious ship. The launch took place north of the Qurnah "Scud basket," in an area from which only one other Scud launch occurred during the war, and there was no other launch against Al Jubayl after this. In addition, although Al Jubayl was well publicized as a major logistics port, the Iraqis had not previously conducted a missile attack against it. The Iraqis might have learned of the Tarawa's presence in Al Jubayl in a timely manner through a variety of paths (local civilians, for instance, knew of the ship's arrival and might have provided information to Iraq). The final circumstance was that the attack occurred 13 hours after the Tarawa's arrival. The Iraqis could have conducted this missile strike within perhaps four hours' notice of the amphibious ship's presence, leaving nine hours for the intelligence, communications, command, and planning process to support an attack.
The Iraqi ballistic missiles, far from precise weapons, were used strategically to stress the coalition. With this in mind, it is reasonable to question whether the launch of a single missile against the Al Jubayl port area had any realistic chance of causing significant damage. Basic calculations suggest that hitting the Tarawa was unlikely. The Al Hussein was estimated to have a 1,500-meter circular error probability. With the missile aimed at the middle of the pier, the one-shot attack had about a 1 in 2,000 chance of hitting the Tarawa directly and less than 1 in 200 chance of hitting the ships or the ammunition dump on the pier.
Today, however, a number of systems, techniques, and tactics—including guidance improvements, salvo launches, or protracted campaigns—could increase the effectiveness of Scud attacks significantly. Many guidance systems, such as those being exported by North Korea, are available to improve ballistic missile capabilities. Thus, Iraq's current missile capabilities might be much more accurate than those of a decade ago. Use of a cluster-munition warhead also would have increased the damage from a single missile, thereby lowering the importance of improved accuracy.
A warhead detonation within even a few hundred feet of the ammunition dump would have produced fragments capable of triggering detonations. Similarly, a Scud near miss could have damaged a ship. Although a one-missile attack had a very low probability of hitting the Tarawa, Iraq fired five-missile salvoes multiple times during the war. Such a multiple-missile attack would have greatly increased the possibility of a hit on any of the high-value targets in the Al Jubayl port area.
Clearly, a calculation of potential damage would change greatly with the use of a missile carrying a nuclear, biological, or chemical warhead.2 The Iraqis had biological and chemical munitions available that they did not use during the war.
That the Patriot battery at Al Jubayl failed to engage the Scud highlights the desirability of having, where possible, multiple theater ballistic missile defense assets. When the attack occurred against Al Jubayl, many U.S. Navy ships—including four Aegis cruisers—were operating in the Persian Gulf. Navy missile-defense systems, had they been deployed on Aegis ships, could have provided defensive coverage for Al Jubayl.
Improvements in the arenas of communications, sharing data, and network-centric operations also point to new options for dealing with the Scud threat. The Aegis system had the capability to track Scuds. Thus, in a networked environment, even if an Aegis could not have shot down an inbound missile, the information could have been passed to another system (another Aegis platform, a Patriot battery ashore, or an airborne laser) that could have then engaged the missile.
As the events occurred, this missile attack had no substantive effect on the war, and with a single launch, the missile had only a small chance of hitting the Tarawa or another high-value target in the port area. Nonetheless, the attack is a clear example of a military-technical antiaccess threat. Consideration of this attack as a case study leads to a number of conclusions important to the Navy and the nation:
- A realistic ballistic threat existed—and exists—to debarkation points for military operations. A requirement thus exists for theater ballistic missile defense in port areas, whether provided by land, air, or sea forces.
- The U.S. military must incorporate threats to ports and other staging areas in its doctrinal development and war planning, focusing on minimizing the build-up of at-risk forces and supplies when capabilities to defend them adequately are not present.
- Port (and airport) control under a real or potential missile threat should be the same as if the port were threatened by long-range artillery attack. With a ballistic-missile threat, a port is more similar to a port or beach in a World War II amphibious assault.
- U.S. Navy combatants were in the Gulf prior to the arrival of the first major logistics force. If the Navy had possessed a missile-defense capability, these ships could have provided coverage for the arriving logistics assets.
- Redundant or overlapping missile-defense coverage from several different systems is desirable, because relying on a single unit or single approach risks vulnerability at critical junctures caused by maintenance or other reasons. A critical part of this approach is developing tools for timely and accurate synchronization of sensor coverage among all platforms relevant for defeating missile threats.
- Securing against ballistic missiles does not, by itself, provide security against other threats, from modern cruise missiles to suicidal terrorists. Ballistic missiles have proliferated, however, and the threat is far from limited to Iraq; even the Taliban had Scuds.
- Concepts of power projection must change. The emphasis should move from early and rapid force projection to early firepower projection. Absent an early arriving theater ballistic missile defense capability, putting U.S. forces into vulnerable ports—such as the Tarawa in Al Jubayl—is inviting disaster.
Adam Siegel is a senior analyst in the Northrop Grumman Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Virginia. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he served as the Center for Naval Analyses representative on board the Tarawa.
1. LGen. William G. Pagonis, USA, Moving Mountains: Lesson in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1992), p. 1. back to article
2. For an analysis of the potential impact of weapons of mass destruction attacks on Al Jubayl and Ad Damman, see Greg Weaver and J. David Glaes, Inviting Disaster: How Weapons of Mass Destruction Undermine U.S. Strategy for Projecting Military Power (McLean, VA: AMCODA, 1997). back to article