Wampum

My guess (updates)

24 hours post-event:

"It's looking more like indirect fire," said Col. Joseph Curtin, an Army
spokesman in Washington, meaning weapons like mortars, artillery shells or
rockets. If it was indirect fire, it is not clear whether the strike was a
random hit or whether insurgents somehow obtained coordinates of the dining
tent.

In Mosul, officials said that there was a single explosion, and that its
shrapnel created uniform perforations in metal kitchen appliances and other
objects, as if ball bearings or similar projectiles had been part of the
explosive device.

Begin Original Post:
I started groveling about looking for the original name of the site now known as Forward Operating Base Marez, previously known as FOB Glory, which used to be an Iraq AFB, which I saw at one point today but forgot to jot down. While I was reading I kept clicking missile-ward, and ended up looking at the Scud B documentation (Venik readers"R-7") ... minimum range of about 160 kilometers" and this:

For the missile to be accurate, it must be fired from a pre-surveyed site against a target whose coordinates are exactly known according to a common grid. The targeting problem is more serious than it may appear because the world is not perfectly round, and locating launch site and target to precisely the same standard of measurement requires both sites to be measured using a common system.

There have to be firing points more than 160km from FOB Marez/Glory that are on a common grid. My guess is that a unit of the Iraqi Regular Army is now 6 minutes and 555kg of payload away from anyplace in Iraq between 160km and 280km distant from their firing point. There may be more than one unit active, and more than one firing point that is operational, or could be made so. They won't be the first to have a fire-on-friendlies protocol for the deterence of mutiny, nor the first to have a fire-on-self protocol when overrun. GW1 and a decade of air surveillance coupled with an inventory of surface-to-surface missiles three generations deep, conventiionally armed and not completely known to US war planners, and ignored during the great ballistic WMD snipe hunt, is a risk.

This wasn't just another car bomber who got lucky.

Source: http://www.csis.org/burke/reports/941015lessonsgulfIV-chap11.pdf
See also: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/mosul-airbase.htm

Posted by EBW at December 21, 2004 06:05 PM | TrackBack