Limiting the Saudi response to the attack on its oil production facilities is Iran’s superior military. The question is why this is the case? On the surface it appears to me Saudi Arabia should be a much wealthier country. If so, why has it not invested it protecting itself? Considering all the bad actors in that part of the world it seems odd to me.
How’s this: The Saudis, having long been a major supplier of oil, have relied on its customers, to include the U. S., to protect their vital source of oil. But now that the U. S. Is self-sufficient and indeed selling oil on the international market, the Saudis have lost their clout. If true will the Saudis now have to build an effective military?
One issue is a simple one: Iran has a much larger population than Saudi Arabia. With all other things being equal (Iran doesn’t lack for oil money and access to military equipment) the side with more troops will win the battles.
I’m not convinced your starting premise is true. For starters, “Saudi Arabia has the world’s third largest defense budget.”
Bur one needs to look at a lot of elements to decide who has a better military. Simple numbers won’t tell the story. A smaller military skillfully used or with superior weapons can often beat a numerically larger army. Maybe, that could be the case if somehow these two countries went into total war one on one.
And who says conflict between the two nations would be one on one? We can’t know what nations would get involved. In the Syria versus Isis conflict several nations were involved in supporting Syria. Already there are a number of nations with embargoes on Iran and definitely the USA is supporting Saudi Arabia.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise. Iran certainly has a bigger military but a large percentage of their personnel are poorly trained conscripts. Saudi Arabia definitely has the advantage in quality of equipment. It’s similar to the NATO/Soviet model. A better equipped professional force against a larger but inferior force.
The Saudi government also doesn’t trust the military. There are a lot of officers who are true-blue Islamic fundamentalists and consider the royal family to be a bunch of degenerates. The royals are concerned that when things turn real, there will be a rebellion within the armed forces and civil war will erupt. Not a good situation if you’re fighting a country like Iran.
This weakens the Saudi military posturing quite a bit.
Limiting the response is the fact that it could lead to full blown war with a comparable military.
It doesn’t matter whether the Saudis consider themselves stronger overall – it would be a devastating conflict for both sides. This is not a game of top trumps.
Also:
It should at least be mentioned that it’s not 100% clear whether Iran did this. We can say for sure it was their technology, but the exact events that led to the drone attacks is still in dispute, and not just by Iran but the international community.
Describing the Syrian civil war as Syria vs Isis I think is very misleading. Remember Assad deliberately released a large number of jihadists early in the conflict.
The Saudi economy is likely more vulnerable to attacks than the Iranian one so they’d like to avoid escalating the conflict with Iran while one of Iran’s objectives may be to bait SA into greater conflict.
I’ll admit it. Syria versus Isis was a poor example.
Point I wanted to make and was better said by other posters is that it would be unlikely to just come down to Iran versus Saudi Arabia with no outside involvement from other nations.
The important point made by other posters is that to go to large scale combat between these nations would almost certainly be terribly bad for both nations. The risk of that being the result is so very high that good leadership in these nations would be determined to prevent escalation to that level. If Iran did launch these attacks, they are taking some dangerous gambles.
A conflict, even if just limited to these two nations, would be devastating, but chances are it would rapidly bring in other factions and/or spread to other regions. The region is pretty evenly split by pro-iran vs pro-saudi.
And another big split (though less even) is sunni and shia.
Sent from my Redmi 5A using Tapatalk
I don’t think that’s a huge factor in this potential conflict. The religious fanatics in the Saudi military are going to be Wahhabis. And whatever differences they have with the Saudi royal family, they hate Shias even more.
That won’t mean anything if the army declares that the government is holding them back and they have to seize power - for the good of the country. It’s happened before.
I think it is simply that SA has more to lose. More infrastructure, more fragile cities, more comfortable citizens.Many of their soldiers had a choice signing up. Lots of casualties means that the survivors will begin to regret their decision. And no one blames themselves for such a mistake. The SA Govt surely knows this.
Iran OTOH while they have their infrastructure and cities, their people simply have less to lose. Perhaps a war, while painful initially, will ultimately make life better there. Could happen-if the war becomes a stalemate or isn’t over quickly SA might bargain with US sanctions for instance. Trump would do whatever SA says in this regard. He values SA far more than he hates Iran.
Corruption, incompetence, and fear of their own military. Saudi Arabia is dysfunctional in general; their military is no different.
They’ve got lots of high quality equipment, but poor training, corruption and general incompetence means that they use it so poorly that nobody is really afraid of them.
Iran is plenty corrupt*, and there’s serious popular discontent. Iran’s strike on the Saudi facilities was impressive but the real combat capability of its military forces in general is also subject to a lot of uncertainty.
I think the actual answer is mainly the one that SA is just more vulnerable under any reasonable assumption about relative actual combat capabilities. SA’s oil infrastructure is much larger, and Iran’s oil exports have been largely sidelined by sanctions. SA claims it will restore previous export capability by the end of this month and full reserve capacity over current exports by November, at which time it would back to ‘everything to lose’ in terms of oil revenues from a war. Iran could repair even extensive war damage to its smaller oil facilities at leisure and still be able to export the relatively small volume they can get past the sanctions now.
And invading Iran is entirely beyond SA’s military capabilities under any assessment.
*In Transparency Intl’s 2018 rankings SA is 58th cleanest worldwide, Iran 138th. That’s general ‘perception of corruption’ and not specifically dealing with the military but as a general idea it seems pot and kettle (at best) to point to Saudi society’s corruption as a weakness v Iran.
The simple answer is look at political rather than military factors. Wars are always political. MBS may be the top dog, but the Saudi government operates by consensus amongst senior Princes. Most of whom think MBS has bitten off more than he can chew with Yemen anyway and that going to war with Iran, especially over Yemen is insane.
The Iranian navy has gone on anti-pirate patrols off the coast of Somalia. If they can send ships as far as Somalia, transporting troops across the Persian Gulf is within the capability.
Unless somebody intervenes to stop them. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the naval strength to stop Iran. So if Iran decides to launch an amphibious invasion of Saudi Arabia, guess who will have to decide if they want to stop it?
Large scale amphibious operations are not trivial, even when unopposed, and even for a country that keeps its amphibious ships out and somewhat in practice as the US does. Iran has a Navy, but not a significant amphibious capability—certainly not enough to land (again, even if unopposed), and hold/resupply territory against an organized counterattack by land. I mentioned islands because it may be within Iran’s capability to occupy them overnight with a couple boatloads of personnel, and maybe hold them if it can forward deploy some sort of SAM capability. And I really would hate to see Iran extending its territorial claims even further into the Gulf. Pretty much everyone who isn’t Iran would. Which means it might be just the sort of thing to do to get some attention and some bargaining chips.
But Iran can’t do a D-Day-style invasion. The US can’t even do a D-Day-style invasion anymore*. That’s a fact. And they’d be even harder pressed to undertake a full-scale seaborne invasion of SA while keeping it under wraps (because while they could cross the Gulf overnight, they probably can’t get all the heavy lift and supplies staged, along with large numbers of troops, on their side of the Gulf overnight).
I suppose Iran could maybe—maybe—manage to raid a port or two, but then I’d be diverging rapidly into IMHO territory.
*ETA: Not without many years’ heads up. Kind of like the first time it did a D-Day-style invasion.