U.S. intelligence sources say they believe Iranian forces shot down the Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane that plummeted to the earth like a fireball earlier this week with 176 people aboard—but they believe it was done by mistake.
To casual observers, the idea of killing so many people in such brutal fashion by accident may seem as baffling as the Iranian authorities’ almost immediate conclusion that the plane crashed because of “mechanical failure.”
How does one confuse a commercial plane with an incoming missile? Is that even possible?
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Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Turns out it’s not so far-fetched after all.
Experts say that a mixture of factors could have played into Iran’s alleged downing of a civilian airliner.
First, the SA-15 air defense system that American intelligence says fired two missiles at the Ukrainian airliner was designed to operate independently of an integrated air defense network and may not have been plugged into one—and thus would not have gotten a clearer picture of Iranian airspace that such a network can provide.
More importantly, the context surrounding the incident involving a risky Iranian ballistic missile strike on U.S. forces in Iraq would have left Iranian air defense forces jumpy and anxious.
Finally, reports suggest that Iranian operators of SA-15 systems have mistakenly fired on planes before out of a belief that enemy aircraft could try to disguise themselves as commercial jets.
Taken together, these factors could have combined to lead to what otherwise seems inexplicable: mistaking a large, ascending passenger jet for a threat.
Russian-made
In 2005, Iran purchased from Russia 29 SA-15 systems—known by their Russian name as Tor M1—for an estimated $700 million. While Iran has a number of Soviet and Russian-made air defense systems, the SA-15 is a little different.
“Most surface-to-air missile systems are a composite unit of different components,” says Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “They’re designed to be used as part of a larger network so you’d very much expect them to have and be drawing on and feeding into a larger national air defense picture, which would include a feed-in from civil air traffic control.” By contrast, the Tor is a self contained vehicle with its crew, radar, and launcher all in the same vehicle.
The vehicles are mostly self-contained in order to help them operate independently of a larger air defense network so they can tag along with tanks and other vehicles in combat. In the '70s and '80s, the Soviet Union developed the system in order to provide point defense against Western helicopters, cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions, and low flying aircraft, says Rob Lee, a former Marine infantry officer and current PhD student at King's College London who focuses on Russian defense issues.
With the exception of a deployment to Syria and a fateful encounter with the Israeli Air Force, Iran often has parked its SA-15 systems near important facilities and missile complexes to provide critical infrastructure defense.
WRONG USE
Chris Biggers, a satellite imagery consultant in Washington, D.C., said Iranian SA-15 systems often have been seen in the vicinity of Kashan, near Iran’s Natanz uranium processing plant, and noted that the neighborhood where the Ukrainian jet crashed on Wednesday is close to the Karaj Missile Development Complex, an important facility in the Islamic Republic’s missile production and at least one missile launch site.
That’s generally not what the Russians had in mind when they designed the SA-15. “While Tor occasionally is used for force protection by Russians, it was not designed to function necessarily as part of an integrated air defense network for critical infrastructure defense,” and that is “certainly not” true of the older systems, said Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis and an expert on Russian and Soviet air defense systems.
Iran has more capable air defense equipment, like the S-300 system, that comes equipped with sophisticated radar systems.
“To me a big question here is what kind of command and control systems do these Iranian Tor systems have? Was this a battery operating alone or was it just one or two systems by themselves? Who was the launch authority?” Lee wondered.
MISIDENTIFICATION
Even isolated from the picture that a larger air defense network could provide, the identification of a large civilian airliner as a threatening aircraft or missile still boggles the mind.
“They should never have made that mistake because the SA-15 has a modern 3D radar. It’s designed to track with sufficient fidelity to guide missiles into incoming missile and potentially even precision guided munitions—things that are small, very fast, and have a short acquisition window,” said Bronk. “It should have no problem at all working out even from a pretty quick look that this aircraft is A) large B) slow, and C) on a climbing path—the opposite of what you’d expect from any attacker.”
Mistakes have happened, though.
“In theory, a trained air defense operator should not make such mistakes but whenever theory checks in with practice we find consistently that these things do happen with some regularity,” says Kofman.
As an example, he points to a 2019 incident where Syrian air defense forces mistakenly shot down a Russian Il-20 surveillance plane with an S-200 air defense system after Israeli jets had carried out an airstrike in Syria. “A trained operator that has to aim a beam on a semi-active missile on an aircraft should not in any way, shape, or form mistake a turboprop for a fixed wing fighter jet like an F-16.”
THEY'VE DONE IT BEFORE
Iranian operators have made similar mistakes with the same air defense system in years past during periods of heightened tensions, but for different reasons.
In 2012, The New York Times reported that an Iranian SA-15 system deployed near the nuclear facility in Natanz fired a missile at a civilian airliner, believing that attacking aircraft would try to imitate a commercial jet in order to slip through the country’s airspace unnoticed. The story quoted a classified Pentagon intelligence assessment which said that Iranian forces “have taken inappropriate actions dozens of times” and that “misidentification of aircraft will continue.”
ON EDGE
The SA-15 crew involved in that 2007 incident, according to the Times, had been on edge because of tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and a fear that either the U.S. or Israel might attack it. Experts say that the context surrounding the crash of PS752 this week likely also played an important role in the incident.
Hours before the flight went down, Iran had launched over a dozen ballistic missiles at a base in Iraq housing U.S. troops. The attack didn’t kill any American troops, but in the period surrounding the attack, the situation was unclear and Iranian propaganda had been falsely claiming dozens of Americans were dead. With an uncertain U.S. response on perhaps the tensest night between the U.S. and Iran since the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s military was likely on edge.
“It's hard not to suppose that at the same time they were shooting off a high stress attack on the U.S, they were putting their military on high alert. And when you put your military on high alert, sometimes they get twitchy,” said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
BAD LUCK
One other factor which appears to have worked against the victims of the attack: chance. Unlike the more capable Buk air defense system which shot down the Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine from far away in 2014, the Tor M1 is designed to engage targets at much closer ranges. “This is genuinely a short range system so they [the victims] were genuinely unlucky in being in radar and intercept range,” Kofman said.
