At 8:00pm local time, a Mirage F-1 fighter jet took off from Iraqs Shaibah military airport and headed south into the Persian Gulf, flying along the Saudi Arabian coast. An Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane, in the air over Saudi Arabia and manned by a joint American-Saudi crew, detected the aircraft. Aboard the USS Stark, a Perry-class frigate on duty in the gulf, radar operators picked up the Mirage when it was some 200 miles away; it was flying at 5,000 feet and traveling at 550 mph. Captain Glenn Brindel, 43, commander of the Stark, was not particularly alarmed. He knew it was fairly common for Iraqi and Iranian warplanes to fly over the gulf. Earlier in the day, Iraqi jets had fired missiles into a Cypriot tanker, disabling the vessel. But no American vessel had been attacked. In keeping with standard procedure, Captain Brindel ordered a radio message flashed at 10:09 PM: "Unknown aircraft, this is U.S. Navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself. There was no reply. A second request was sent. Still no answer. Brindel noted that the aircrafts pilot had not locked his targeting radar on the Stark, so he expected it to veer away. At 10:10 PM, the AWACS crew noticed that the Mirage had banked suddenly and then turned northward, as though heading for home. What they failed to detect was the launching by the Iraqi pilot of two Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles. The Exocets had a range of 40 miles and each carried a 352 lb. warhead. For some reason, the sea-skimming missiles were not detected by the Starks sophisticated monitoring equipment. A lookout spotted the first Exocet just seconds before the missile struck, tearing a ten-by-fifteen-foot hole in the warships steel hull on the port side before ripping through the crews quarters. The resulting fire rushed upward into the vessels combat information center, disabling the electrical systems. The second missile plowed into the frigates superstructure. A crewman sent a distress signal with a handheld radio that was picked up by the USS Waddell, a destroyer on patrol nearby. Meanwhile, the AWACS crew requested that two airborne Saudi F-15s pursue the Iraqi Mirage. But ground controllers at Dhahran airbase said they lacked the authority to embark on such a mission, and the Mirage was safely back in Iraqi airspace before approval could be obtained. As fires raged aboard the Stark, Brindel ordered the starboard side blooded to keep the gaping hole on the port side above the waterline. All through the night the fate of the stricken frigate was in doubt. Once the inferno was finally under control, the Stark limped back to port. The Navy immediately launched an investigation into an incident that had cost 37 American seamen their lives. The Stark was endowed with an impressive array of defenses an MK92 fire control system that could intercept incoming aircraft at a range of 90 miles; an OTO gun that could fire three-inch anti-aircraft shells at a rate of 90 per minute; electronic defenses that could produce bogus radar images to deceive attackers; and the Phalanx, a six-barreled gun that could fire 3,000 uranium rounds a minute at incoming missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident http://www.bluebird-electric.net/aircraft_carriers/aircraft_carriers_pictures/USS-Stark-Navy-Frigate-Persian-Gulf-Exocet- Missile-Attack-Iran-Iraq-War.jpg Im still conflicted by this event. On one hand we were fighting Iran at the time, on the other we should have been prepared for the attack-even if from Iraq-and what was the Stark doing there without a functioning anti missile system?
Exocet missiles were smuggled into Argentina, and one of them sunk the British destroyer HMS Sheffield during the Falklands war (1982). It's a very effective weapon. Thatcher was angry with the French about how the Argentinians could have got a hold of the technology. France basically played both sides of the conflict.
Yup, same missile. And this is 40 year old+ technology, I wonder what a modern anti-ship missile is capable of.
