larry johnson speaks yemen; 

 

For most of the Saudi war in Yemen, Ansar Allah’s ballistic missiles were more political than military. They were noisy and frightening, but rarely decisive. In 2017 the press could fairly report that the group’s missiles were often lightened by reducing their payloads and seldom hit what they were aimed at. Saudi air defenses picked off many of them, and the rest fell in empty desert.

That is no longer the picture. Since the confrontation reignited this summer, five Saudi airports have come under Houthi attack since October 5, with 20 dead and hundreds wounded. On October 10, AFP photographed King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh at the moment it was struck. When the Houthis claimed hits on Aramco facilities, the coalition called the claims misleading, but independent journalists reported fires and smoke over the Riyadh refinery. These are not area weapons landing somewhere near a city. They are hits on specific facilities at ranges of 1,000 kilometers or more, against one of the densest air-defense networks in the region.

I spent a career around targeting and military planning, and I know what that pattern means. Accuracy at long range doesn’t come from a better rocket motor. A Scud-derived missile flying on inertial guidance alone accumulates error throughout its flight, and its reentry vehicle adds more. Getting from a miss of several hundred meters to tens of meters requires correcting the trajectory late in flight, through satellite-navigation updates, a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or a terminal seeker. Whatever the hardware, it also requires precise target coordinates. Neither of those is something Ansar Allah can manufacture in the mountains of Saada.

The missile bodies are Iranian lineage. That is not seriously disputed. But Iran’s own precision gains point to their source, and here there are two candidates, not one.

The first is Russia. Since Iran’s 2020 strike on Ain al-Asad, there have been persistent reports that Fateh-family missiles use GLONASS, Russia’s satellite navigation system. For Iran to use the encrypted, jam-resistant military GLONASS signal, Russia would have to hand over the cryptographic keys............more...........