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Dear Colleagues:
A colleague, who is an aeronautical engineer, and I have
been looking at the technology that was used in the September 14, 2019 attack
on the Abqaiq Oil Facility in Saudi Arabia.
Our analyses indicates an astonishing set of facts. Cruise missiles of the type that could only
be produced by advanced industrial states like Russia and the United States can
now be built at will with commercially available components.
This has very far ranging implications for the situation
between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
From the point of view of Iran, Saudi Arabia has been
aligned with the United States which has been executing an economic war against
it. The attack on September 14 was
executed by advanced cruise missiles that were almost certainly built by Iran,
and were possibly provided by Iran to the Houthis.
These cruise missiles, which we have identified from their
debris, use commercially available small turbojet engines, commercially
available night vision cameras, commercially available GPS navigation and
control systems, and utilize Digital Scene
Matching to achieve precision delivery against targets of the type that
were hit in the September 14 raid.
The unambiguous evidence from satellite photographs
(see
below) show that the targets were hit with a precision on the order of 1
to 2 feet. Such precision delivery is not possible using
GPS alone, and requires the kind of homing technology that can only be
achieved
autonomously with Digital Scene Matching.
The only requirement for being able to build such an economy-busting
cruise missile system is to have modestly trained engineers who know how to
integrate the different commercially available components into a single cruise
missile system. Although this does
require real engineering skill, it means that precision guided cruise missiles with
effective accuracies of only a few feet will now be available to both state and
substate players in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The attack on Abqaiq was an unambiguous signal to Saudi
Arabia that Iran could at will do tremendous damage to Saudi Arabia’s oil
exporting economy. This represents a
remarkable and very important change in the potential balance of power in the
Persian Gulf.
I am in the process of beginning to write a scholarly paper that would describe the technical foundations of these profound
changes in Iran’s leverage relative to Saudi Arabia with regard to an economic
war. The paper would also point out the
obvious, that these implications are also of direct concern to all countries
that depend on access to Middle East oil.
All the technical research for this article is now done, so
it should not take a long time to write it up.
Below I am simply summarizing a number of astonishing
findings from our work. Obviously these
findings would be written up in the final paper so they can be understood by intelligent nonspecialists.
The image below was produced by the company Digital Globe and paid for and released
by the US government. It shows the
results of four cruise missile strikes on oil processing tanks at Abqaiq.
Notice that each of the tanks were basically hit at essentially
the same location.
We have demonstrated in our own research that photographs of
the oil processing facilities from Google Earth are good enough to be used in
cruise missiles designed to do optical homing with commercially available
technologies.
The Image labeled Figure 1 below is from Google Earth data
downloaded with the universally available free software known as Google Earth
Pro. Under the assumption that an
approaching cruise missile would see a similar scene, we have extracted the
image of the middle oil processing facility to be used as the “Target
Identification and Homing Template.” (See Figure 2)
As the cruise missile approaches under the guidance of a
commercially available GPS positioning and control system, it’s commercially
available infrared camera observes the scene ahead of it. Although GPS can produce very high accuracy,
a precision of ± 10 meters is roughly what can be expected from a civilian
processed signal.
The Target Template Image
(Figure 2) is swept across the digital image from the cruise missiles infrared
camera and a “correlation” between the Target
Template Image and every pixel in the Cruise Missile Image is made. For this particular example, the correlation
results are shown in three-dimensional plots viewed from two distinctly
different viewing angles in Figures 3 and 4.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
As can be seen from overlaying the peaks from the
correlation calculation that uses the image (Figure 2) of the middle oil
processing tank, even the images of the adjacent tanks, which are at slightly
different perspectives and sizes in the image are easily matched in the
correlation process.
Since the actual image that the cruise missile
would see in the final stages of GPS guided homing would only include the single target of interest, it is easy to see
how a precision strike with an accuracy of only a foot or two can be achieved
with this commercially available technology.
The ability to produce a cruise missile with "first
world" airframes and propulsion systems from commercially available
technologies is also now available to state and non-state actors.
Figure 6 below shows the debris from one of the cruise
missiles used in the attack that fell short of its target.
Figure 6
This debris very closely matches an Iranian cruise missile
prototype known as the Quds. A picture
of that missile is shown below as Figure 7
Figure 7
The engine displayed on this cruise missile is manufactured by PBS Aerospace
in the Czech Republic and is known as the PBS TJ100 Turbojet Engine (see
Figure 8). The fuel efficiency of the
engine is known and all that is needed to calculate the range of the cruise
missile that this engine powers is a knowledge of the lift and drag coefficients
for the missile and its weight.
Figure 8
Since the geometry of the Quds cruise missile is essentially
the same as that of the US Tomahawk cruise missile, it has essentially the same
aerodynamic coefficients except the Quds is smaller and has a lower overall
weight (see Figure 9)
Figure 9
To make a long story short, the cruise missiles used in the
attack on Abqaiq should have a range of between 1200 and 1400 km, about twice
that of the range that has been incorrectly reported to the US (but apparently not the European) press by Jeffrey
Lewis.
The inaccurate information provided to the US press by Jeffrey
Lewis has significant implications.
The range of 700 km leads to a false conclusion that the
cruise missile attack could not have come from Houthi territory. A simple technological assessment shows that
this claim is false.
Although it is not possible to know from where the missiles
were launched (since they have the ability to do multiple direction changes on
their way to a target), it can absolutely not be ruled out that the missile
came from Houthi territory.
I apologize for this overly broad and sketchy explanation of an article, but I wanted to demonstrate to you
that the findings we will be reporting are very solid.
I also want to emphasize that the technical facts derived
from this analysis have very far ranging policy implications for warfare
between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.
What was demonstrated at Abqaiq was that an economic war
between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have very far-reaching consequences for the
entire world.
There is now no doubt that the technology to essentially
destroy Saudi Arabia’s oil production capabilities is available in Iran and its
allies. This somewhat minor technical
result has major political implications for the world.
Best regards, Ted
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