Chapter 22
The missiles rose into the clear morning sky, climbing rapidly up and reaching speeds of 3000 knots in a matter of seconds. They were a secret weapon Iran had been working on for some time with assistance from Chinese engineers. The weapon system was called Kalij Fars, which meant, simply enough, “Persian Gulf,” built from the Fateh-110 single stage solid fuel ballistic missile, mounted with a 650Kg warhead. Its relatively short range of 300 kilometers meant that its targets would be limited to the Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz, which made it a kind of defensive weapon against naval incursions into those maritime spaces—because Kalij Fars was a ship killer, designed with an optical seeker to look for moving targets at sea.
The Iranians had dropped the chador on the missile in 2015 in this history, announcing it now had the means to find and kill American carriers entering the Persian Gulf. That was one reason why the Navy ended big deck carrier patrols there years ago. Operating only from the Arabian Sea with those valuable assets, and on a sporadic basis. The shift to the Pacific saw four US carriers based there, and two on the Atlantic. Of those, one was assigned to the Med, the other to the Arabian Sea, but it had been in Norfolk for maintenance when these events flared up.
That was why Carrier Strike Group Roosevelt had taken so long to get to the scene, departing from San Diego for the long journey to Darwin, only this time, the Iranian missiles were not targeting a carrier. The US Security Patrol out of As Sultan Harbor in Oman had been spotted approaching the Strait of Hormuz, and so the Iranians thought they would test the system on the cruiser at the heart of that small task force.
CG Bull Run was ready for trouble of this sort, for US intelligence knew the missiles had been deployed, and so every cruiser they floated had the latest version of their long lance SM-3. Three times faster than the ballistic missiles it was targeting, they were away in a fiery wash once that enemy launch was spotted. Four Vampires had been detected, and eight SM-3’s went out after them, finding and killing all four targets before they even got half way over the Gulf they were named for. Their broken shards would fall there that morning, and take their rest in the sea.
Captain Peter Duncan on the cruiser Bull Run took offense to that attack, and for more than one reason. His ship had sailed with 16 SM-3’s, and he had just expended half of them to stop those missiles. “They want to play darts this morning,” he said to his XO, James, Fallon. Have we refined that contact up ahead?”
“The group is still fuzzy, but we just picked up something turning the corner on the Musandam Peninsula, and at 35 knots.”
“Has to be a patrol boat,” said the Captain. “Let’s say hello with one of the escorts. Give it to an LCS. We’ll see what that new Norwegian missile can do.”
“Aye sir.” The Captain was speaking of the new Naval Strike Missile that had been added to all Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ships. Before that addition, they had been relatively toothless, having Hellfire mission modules that could let them threaten fishing boats at a range of five miles, or discourage Somali Pirates, but little else. Iranian patrol boats outranged the LCS, and would have fired and fled long before the they ever got close, but that was no longer the case with the NSM mounts added. Each Freedom Class ship now carried eight of the missiles, with a 100 mile range.
The US Navy had superb radars and support from aerial recon assets and satellites, so finding a target was generally not their problem. But you had to have a missile with the range to hit the damn thing, and here the glaring flaw in the LCS concept was finally corrected. The ships could finally fight at range, and two Naval Strike Missiles were sent out after that skunk, only to discover that the single target was actually a group of five Iranian Patrol boats. Unlike Bull Run, they had no SAM systems to defend against the missile attack, and so PB Zafar went up in smoke and fire at 08:45 that morning.
Bull Run then joined Hunter and Ranger, with two Harpoons, while the LCS ships threw out a couple more NSM’s. They soon wiped the table clean, sinking the remaining four Iranian attack boats. Three years earlier. The Iranians would have had the draw on the US Littoral Combat Ships with four times the range, and that with the Iranian C-704 miles, which could only get out 20 miles. This time the tables were turned, and it was the US that had the advantage of range.
In our history, there were 16 ships in the Freedom LCS class, and all of them combined could not have successfully engaged or defeated the five Iranian patrol boats under fire that morning. They were, in effect, lightly armed coast guard cutters, with a 57mm deck gun that had a five mile range to go along with its Hellfires. The Iranian boats would have scooted just inside that 20 mile range and fired off ten C-704’s, with a strong possibility of hitting and sinking several ships, while all the US force could do in return was use harsh language.
Lockheed saw the problem clearly enough, and submitted a proposal to the Navy to convert the ships to a “Small Surface Combatant Variant.” They wanted to add a VLS section for ESSM or SM-2, and swap in a better deck gun, but the US Navy passed on the proposal. Instead, the Saudis bought the idea, ordered four ships, and they would get that boat with an Italian made 76mm deck gun, 64 ESSM’s for air defense, supported by 21 more RIM-116C’s, and they even strapped on eight Harpoon II’s. Just one of those ships would have put down all five Iranian patrol boats, where all 16 of the US boats, the entire class, would have remained helpless to lay a finger on them.
Go figure…. At least in this history, the United States Navy wasn’t about to build ships that could not fight known threats it was likely to face, and prevail. It was never any mystery as to what kind of threat the LCS might encounter in littoral waters. They were the province of the fast attack craft, offshore patrol boats, and larger corvettes, all known, right down to the missiles each were carrying. The mystery was why the Navy commissioned ships that could not engage and win against these threats, and why they never corrected the problem in our timeline.
Those five boats had been based on the island of Abu Musa, and an hour later, a pair of Raptors up on CAP detected two more patrol boats near that island. The data was shared with the navy ships, and Captain Duncan saw that they were just outside the firing range of the LCS boats. So he handed the mission to his destroyers. DDG’s Rodes and Starke each had 28 Multi-Mission Tomahawks, with plenty of range for any fight at sea, so they fired four. But all this commotion had given away the position of that task force, allowing the Iranians to try and get off a shot in return.
These boats had a better missile, the Chinese made C-802 with a 110 mile range. The Separ had the range first, and fired all four of its missiles. Then, in a coordinated attack, two Iranian shore batteries would also fire their C-201 Silkworms, so both sides had missiles in the air at 09:45. Four minutes later, the crew of Separ pointed excitedly at a low flying cruise missile, just five miles out. That boat would die seconds later, along with Derafsh, which never had a chance to fire. When the remaining Silkworms tried to creep across the Musandam Peninsula and get at the American ships, the US air defense was more than adequate, killing seven more missiles without breaking a sweat.