Iran Seized Two British Ships--U.S. Moving Air Assets to Saudi Arabia

      If you've been following the news today, you know that Iran's Revolutionary Guard seized a British-flagged oil tanker (crew of 23) and briefly seized a Liberian-flagged tanker Mesdar (operated by a British company) in the Strait of Hormuz. This is likely in retaliation for the seizure of an Iranian oil tanker, Grace 1, by Gibraltar (a UK territory). As to the latter tanker, Reuters reports that:

      Gibraltar said the Iranian vessel, seized by marines in a daring landing in darkness off the coast of the British territory on July 4, was suspected of smuggling oil to Syria in breach of European Union sanctions. 

      Iran has repeatedly called for the ship’s release, denies the allegation that the tanker was taking oil to Syria in violation of sanctions and says Gibraltar and Britain seized the vessel on the orders of Washington.

The Reuters article also indicates that Gibraltar has received authorization to detain the tanker for another month.

     In the meanwhile, a reader directed me to this "U.S. Central Command Statement on movement of U.S. personnel to Saudi Arabia" which reads:

"In coordination with and at the invitation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Secretary of Defense has authorized the movement of U.S. personnel and resources to deploy to Saudi Arabia. This movement of forces provides an additional deterrent, and ensures our ability to defend our forces and interests in the region from emergent, credible threats. This movement creates improvement of operational depth and logistical networks. U.S. Central Command continually assesses force posture in the region and is working with Kingdom of Saudi Arabia authorities to base U.S. assets at the appropriate locations."

Per The Daily Mail:

       The United States is deploying a military contingent to a base in Saudi Arabia that has been abandoned for the past 15 years, officials say, marking a major escalation in tension with Saudi's regional arch-nemesis Iran. 

       The forces deploying to Prince Sultan Air Base, 85 miles south of Riyadh, include fighter jets, air defense missiles and likely more than 500 troops, U.S. officials said on Friday.

      Senior American defense officials said some U.S. troops and Patriot air defense missile systems have already arrived at the base, which was abandoned by Washington after it toppled Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 2003.

So, as I read the situation, the U.S. appears to only be moving air-defense units to Saudi Arabia. And so the saber rattling continues.

      The reader that brought my attention to the CENTCOM statement also mused about the recent spat of power, internet, and positioning system outages that have hit the U.S. and Europe. Were these the results of cyber attacks? Who knows. But while there is probably nothing nefarious about some of the outages, others have still not been explained. For instance, the New York Post has reported that "Con Ed can’t explain what caused the Manhattan blackout." And while Europe's Galileo GPS system is back online after a six-day outage, Wired Magazine notes:

      GSA has so far still provided only a rough sketch of what caused the outage. "The technical incident originated by an equipment malfunction in the Galileo control centers that calculate time and orbit predictions, and which are used to compute the navigation message," the GSA wrote on Thursday in its most specific statement yet. "The malfunction affected different elements on both centers."

      That generally confirms what researchers who use the Galileo system had noticed independently. Satellites transmit packages of data to Earth that convey a set of astronomical positioning and timing data, used to compute satellite orbits and positions. But some combination of errors in the Galileo processing system led it to base these calculations on the wrong date, for example, using July 11 time stamps—the day the outage began—throughout the week. Eventually, the system even interpreted this data as referring to July 18, instead of the previous Thursday. The frozen time stamp seemed to be a symptom of problems with the ground-based processing system, rather than the satellites themselves.

      "From the operational satellites the signals were good, the time was good, but in the messages the satellites send the positions were not updated," says Fabio Dovis, a researcher in the satellite navigation lab at Politecnico di Torino University in Italy. "We tried replacing that part of the message with information on position taken from other reliable sources and you could get the correct position. So it was working, it just seems like there was a problem in the control system that was not able to update this information."

      Researchers say that it's not totally surprising that Galileo would have some issues, given that it has been operational for less than three years. But a full week of downtime is hard to square. Daniel Estévez, an independent researcher, also analyzed Galileo data throughout the week, and says he is surprised that GSA wasn't able to find a manual workaround for the issue.

      "Even if the automatic system for computing orbit and clock products and uploading them to the satellites failed, they could have run all these calculations manually, and have the system running again in one day, perhaps with somewhat reduced performance," he says. "The public communications by GSA about this problem have been almost nonexistent. This is where I think they've really screwed up."

 Interestingly, during the Galileo outage, the search and rescue function, which helps locate boat crews or hikers in distress, was unaffected.