Bahrain HIMARS Order Boosts Gulf Arab’s Formidable Rocket Arsenals

US soldiers inspect a M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) at the Bahrain International Airshow in Sakhir on November 13, 2024. (Photo by MAZEN MAHDI/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

The small island kingdom of Bahrain has become the latest country to order the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System from the United States. When completed, the delivery of the HIMARS to Manama will augment an already impressive array of multiple rocket launch systems in the military arsenals of the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

The Bahraini government requested at least four HIMARS along with associated equipment in a deal valued at $500 million, the State Department’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency disclosed in a press release on Thursday.

The HIMARS is compatible with various American-made rockets and can even fire the MGM-140 ATACMS tactical ballistic missile. Its high mobility, dubbed a “shoot-and-scoot capability” by manufacturer Lockheed Martin, enables it to fire guided rockets at a target in rapid succession and swiftly relocate and reload within minutes, markedly increasing its chances of evading retaliatory fire.

The U.S. deployed HIMARS in support of the counteroffensive against the Islamic State group in Mosul in 2016-17, firing hundreds of rockets from a safe distance. More recently, in 2023, the U.S. deployed the HIMARS to Syria, significantly bolstering fire support for the modest U.S. troop deployment there. Ukraine has also successfully used the HIMARS in combat since Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion.

Acquisition of even a few HIMARS is significant for such a small, albeit wealthy, country like Bahrain, especially considering it was little over a year ago since Manama ordered 50 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks.

The HIMARS isn’t the first system of its kind Bahrain has acquired. It previously bought that system’s predecessor, the M270, in the early 1990s, and ordered upgrades for nine of them as recently as 2022. Additionally, Manama purchased at least four SR-5s, one of the export versions of the PHL-11 capable of carrying 122mm or 220mm rockets or one ballistic or anti-ship missile, from China in 2015, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s arms transfer database.

More broadly, many of the Arab Gulf states, the other five members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, possess diversified arsenals of MLRS acquired over the years, with two exceptions, Kuwait and Oman, which are only known to operate one type each. Kuwait acquired 300mm BM-30 Smerch systems in the mid-1990s from Russia. The SIPRI database indicates Oman acquired six 120mm Type 90 systems from China in the early 2000s.

The small peninsular country of Qatar acquired 18 Astros II systems from Brazil in 1992, again according to the SIPRI records. Much more recently, in 2017, it paraded SY-400 systems from China through the streets of its capital, Doha. The SY-400 can carry either two Chinese-made BP-12A short-range ballistic missiles or 12 300mm rockets.

However, these MLRS arsenals pale in comparison to regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have large, diversified MLRS with even more on order.

Saudi Arabia ordered and acquired the Astros II in the late 1980s, per SIPRI. It also bought at least 10 30-barrel 220mm TOS-1s from Russia in 2017, which can hurl thermobaric warheads.

Riyadh diversified this arsenal further with a 2022 order of K239 Chunmoo from South Korea. The modern MLRS can fire small guided and unguided rockets, tactical missiles, and even anti-ship ballistic missiles.

But the UAE undoubtedly has both the largest, most diversified, and unique arsenal among the Arab Gulf states, and arguably anywhere in the world.

Abu Dhabi already acquired the K239 in 2021 and the HIMARS over a decade ago. On top of that, it also purchased the SR-5s from China in the late 2010s.

Much earlier purchases included the 122mm Firos from Italy in the late 1980s and Russia’s Smerch in the second half of the 1990s.

But what really makes the UAE’s MLRS arsenal stand out, amongst both the region and the rest of the world, is undoubtedly its Jobaria multiple cradle launcher, which it unveiled in 2013.

Essentially, the Jobaria consists of four launchers mounted on a single 10-wheel semitrailer towed by a powerful U.S.-made Oshkosh M1070 Heavy Equipment Transporter. These launchers can each fire sixty 122mm T-122 Sakarya rockets developed by Turkey’s Roketsan.

Jobaria is the largest rocket system worldwide by total number of tubes, a whopping 240!

Despite its enormous size, it requires only a fraction of the military personnel of other Emirati launchers.

“This piece of equipment consists of just one vehicle which is manned by a crew of three, but can generate the same firepower as the UAE’s traditional rocket battery made up of six vehicles manned by 30 operators,” noted a book on the Emirati armed forces.

The Jobaria even has a Guinness World Record for its enormous number of tubes.

That is the regional backdrop of Bahrain’s HIMARS order. Thursday’s DSCA press release affirmed, as those releases invariably do, that Manama’s latest acquisition won’t “alter the basic military balance in the region.”

With the neighborhood already bristling with all kinds of MLRS, that will no doubt be the case.