INS Hanit: Stories From the Sea (Part #2)

Yesterday I opined about the INS Hanit incident, basically linking to all the relevant information reported in the press regarding the analysis, conclusions, and questions left unanswered of the incident. If you haven't read Part #1, and researched the details provided to satisfaction, this blog entry may not make much sense.

in the INS Hanit story there are some lessons learned, and some questions for the US Navy in its own path to deploying a ship with a minimum crew capabilities on a small ship deployed for a long period of time.

I believe the story I told in part #1, which might make me a gullible fool, but I refuse to go into any specifics into why other than to say I've been lucky enough to encounter a second source, a more credible source in my opinion, answered enough questions to confirm the details of the story told by Rambo Rabbi Brody Lazer is accurate.

For me, accepting the story as true allows me to speculate on aspects of the battle that are relevant to current and future naval design, as well as current and future missile defense. In a break with the traditional posts of this forum, the rest is admittedly almost completely weakly sourced speculation.

For example, as there was no structural damage except on the helicopter pad to the INS Hanit, and considering the crane on the SA'AR 5 is not small, large enough in fact to hoist an 11m RHIB from the helicopter pad over the ship into the sea, and from the sea onto the helicopter pad, accepting that the crane was what was hit by the C-802 isn't much of a stretch. It leads to a question though, why the crane?

Well, for starters the crane is the largest part of the INS Hanit that isn't coated with radar absorbing materials (or at least was at the time). When it comes to stealth coating, the parts of a ship that are sometimes excluded are weapons, sensors, and things like the crane itself (probably not the crane cover).

Additionally, the C-802 is believed to require a designation source radar system. This radar would have been the more powerful coastal radar systems of Lebanon that the IAF took out after the INS Hanit incident. It is possible those radars were capable of detecting the INS Hanit, or perhaps the crane of the ship, and provide enough bearing on target to effectively launch.

However, many experts have opined for years the Iranian version of the C-802 likely has a limited terminal guidance system, and considering the rather historically limited demonstrated capabilities of the Iranian C-802 version, it is entirely plausible that the terminal radar didn't even detect the INS Hanit, but was able to detect the crane which was deployed over the hanger in an upright position.

The damage to a deployed crane from a C-802, which btw has a rather substantial warhead for an anti-ship missile, would tend to indicate the elevated impact blew most of the exploding fuel and fire into the sea across the ship, leaving a burning crane and burning fuel on the helicopter pad. That fuel would be hot enough to burn through the helicopter pad into the crew quarters and engine room directly below it, which btw, were the only two areas of the ship that was reported to take direct damage.

Assuming something like this is what happened with the INS Hanit, then either the stealth system of the INS Hanit is a legitimate capability, or the terminal guidance system of the Iranian C-802 leaves a lot to be desired. Considering the C-802 was detected by other Israeli corvettes, but not the INS Hanit, it is possible the jamming capability of the C-802 is effective, but only against a limited axis (straight ahead). Considering a total of 5 C-802s were reported to of been fired in the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war, but only 2 missile hit... 1 against the crane of the INS Hanit, and the second 60 km offshore on the small merchant ship Moonlight with the other 3 missiles missing completely, the C-802 effectiveness can be legitimately questioned.

Did stealth make a difference? Hard to tell, there is so very little reported on the 2nd C-802 missile attack on August 1st that we don't know if other defensive measures, like ECM, was used to deflect the missiles. The largest part of the INS Hanit that didn't have stealth coating appears to be where the C-802 hit, so there is evidence that hull form + stealth coating played some part in the defense of the ship.

The story appears to be a tale of human error leading to a wartime defeat to the Israeli Navy, yet it was the human element of Israeli religion that played a direct role in the low casualty rate. If it was indeed stealth techniques applied to the INS Hanit that prevented the hull from getting hit, but the lack of stealth on the crane that led to that damage, again human error not technology would be what is to blame. In the end, the total story with the details provided by the Rambo Rabbi does tell of a believable war story that almost always rears its ugly face in battle, but is also dismissed by professionals as the elements involved in the fog of war.