I am sure Saudi pilots would be delighted to see all those “troopships”, with little defensive capability.
It’s the kind of stuff that careers are made of, little risk and multiple kills that promotion boards get impressed by.
Yeah, I love how people start comparing tonnage in order to gauge a country’s naval defense capabilities. You don’t needs ships in order to sink ships.
This seems really fanciful. The Iranian navy’s amphibious assault capabilities are utterly anemic.
And that’s why neither side can win a decisive victory as neither side appears to be able to invade the main territory of the other. Leaves them with punishing each other with long range attacks. Both trying to cripple each other’s economies. Possibly both making major cyber attacks.
In a one on one duel both sides suffer. Or maybe one has all the technology to dominate and one side suffers a lot more. Even the winning side in a war will suffer as war is very costly and there is no payoff that I can see.
As others have posted, could be other nations get sucked into the conflict maybe including the USA. The whole world has big interest in this war not happening.
On top of that Iran doesn’t have a lot of powerful allies to back them up. The Saudis appear to have the USA to back them. That’s a big, big advantage if the USA does provide significant aid. Decisive.
Hold up, the Saudis have a much better Air Force and they might be able to pull in off. If the RSAF can create a corridor where their ships can move more or less unmolested, then yes they could get some significant troops ashore. Despite Iranian opposition.
But they will have to quickly get hold of a large port to get reliable supplies to their troops and an airfield as well ideally.
Even if the IIAF aircraft cannot attack the ports and airfields, their missile forces can make life miserable for them. Cruise Missile are reletivley cheap and very tricky to shoot down, one of the reasons the Americans and Russians love lobbing them at people.
V-1 made Antwerp less than advertised for the Allies. If they could have reliably hit channel ports (even the most basic modern day CM is many times more accurate and effective than the “cut the engine off and hope it falls on something important” V-1), would have made the Allied operations in Normandy a difficult thing.
[Moderating]
I don’t see any factual question here. Off to IMHO.
I assure you, Saudi Arabia and Iran are not fictional countries.
Or Cafe Society. Whatever.
(I’ve always had a problem distinguishing IMHO and MPSIMS, myself.)
Moving from CS to IMHO as indicated previously.
[/moderating]
Iran could probably get right of passage from Iraq. They also have allies in Yemen. They could land invade Saudi on two fronts.
Iraq doesn’t want any more trouble with Iran, especially now the Iraqi government is predominantly Shi‘i. All they’d need to do would be get out of the way. Maybe help direct traffic, but nothing more. Is it an act of war if you let somebody through to attack the country on the other side of you? If you don’t want to fight them to keep them from crossing your territory?
Iran could easily place their forces in Yemen too, in Huthi-held territory, which borders Saudi. If they haven’t already.
Unfortunately for the Iraqis, yes.
Iraq, left to its own devices with no outside meddling? Perhaps, they are now a majority Shia, Shia-controlled nation (as opposed to when Saddam was in power, nominally secular but very much favoring a Sunni elite) but then, there is still a US presence in Iraq and Kuwait. And as far as getting from Iran to Saudi Arabia while bypassing Kuwait… there aren’t many roads that lead that way. There’s, like, one or two. And I do mean one or two. With very long desert stretches before they lead to anywhere in Saudi Arabia.
The US-led coalition was successful in Kuwait because it was able to achieve air superiority (to the point that what was left of the Iraqi Air Force was better off being buried in the desert) and create an air-defense bubble in the Gulf and parts of Saudi Arabia within range of Iraqi forces. It was able to then mass troops in forward operating bases over a period of months, along with supplies, and then all go over in one big push to bulldoze (in some cases literally) Iraqi defensive positions already battered by air, missile, and artillery strikes.
The US operated with a similar playbook in 2003, only the buildup of troops happened in Kuwait as well (there are still some excellent bases there) and was accomplished prior to the start of the air campaign, allowing for a sort of… “shock and awe” attack within the first few days of the air campaign, rather than after six months of buildup. Plus, there had been intermittent strikes against targets in Northern and Southern Iraq going back to the end of the Gulf War itself: Iraq was never really allowed to fully rebuild its defenses against invasion, so it was already primed. Also, little known fact, an airborne brigade was able to drop into Northern Iraq, meet up with Kurdish rebel’s and US special forces, and seize an airport in Northern Iraq nearly unopposed, thanks largely to the decade-Lon suppression of Iraqi air defenses in northern Iraq.
I see no reason to imagine that an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia would require any less preparation and buildup, but I do wonder how they’d keep such a thing under wraps, even if the US limited it’s involvement to just providing intelligence support (as it did to Iraq after they got themselves embroiled in the Iran-Iraq War).
As for Yemen, fine, but there’s still the problem of moving and supplying a large number of troops covertly.
I agree that Iran can’t do a D-Day style invasion. But a lot of Americans forget that there are other types on invasions. Operation Overlord (or Torch or Shingle or Dragoon or Galvanic or Cartwheel or Detachment) is how you conduct an amphibious invasion if you’re the United States in World War II.
But Germany conducted amphibious invasions too; they successfully invaded Norway and Crete with far fewer resources than the allies used in Normandy. Japan conducted a number of successful amphibious invasions. China invaded Hainan in 1950. Nigeria invaded Biafra in 1967. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. Sri Lanka launched amphibious invasions during its civil war in the nineties. And Iran conducted a successful amphibious invasion against Iraq across the Persian Gulf in 1986. These were all amphibious operations which successfully captured and held territory using less resources than were used for D-Day.
Americans need to put aside the D-Day mentality and realize smaller amphibious operation are possible. An Operation Overlord may be the best way the conduct an amphibious invasion but we’re setting ourselves up for an unpleasant surprise if we think no country can conduct an amphibious invasion with less than five thousand ships.
SA has no substantial sea-lift capacity either. Maybe they could somehow get their two small marine brigades across by requisitioning merchant vessels. But 3,000 lightly equipped troops is not enough to hold anything in Iran proper, I’d bet $$ they’d get over-run long before they could get reinforced. I rather suspect they’d basically be throwing soldiers away.
Noooo, I really doubt it. Iraq is caught between two patrons and as much as large segments of the central government may prefer the Iranians, no way they’re going to let themselves get dragged into a confrontation with the United States. They are well aware which one is the superpower( and the U.S. still has several thousand troops and trainers on the ground in Iraq ). The only way that happens is if rogue militias backing the Iranians start sniping and the U.S. gets exasperated enough to start punishing Iraq and push them into a corner. The entire country would probably disintegrate.
And the United States simply would not ignore whole Iranian army corps trundling across Iraq to assault SA. Even if you argued they should, realistically no president, Democratic or Republican, would. Certainly this one won’t.
The Houthis even if they were inclined to do so are almost certainly incapable of launching a major second land front of their own. They’re locked in a civil war right now and just barely holding their own.
In this case, absolutely.
No, not easily. Again, Iran has no substantial sea-lift ability and no way to give them air cover that far afield if they did. Yemen is on the other side of SA from them. Maybe they can shift small bodies of light infantry smuggled in on cargo ships over time, but nothing substantial and nothing quick.
Stinky Pete is probably correct. If war breaks out it will most likely be a long-distance war of mostly air and missile-strikes. Maybe commando raids or island-hopping. Lots of feet and tanks on the ground only if Trump gets a bug up his ass and sends American troops into Iran. Let’s all pray that does not occur, as it very well could get ugly for everyone quickly.
Large scale invasion is extremely unlikely from either party. On the other hand, strikes on oil infrastructure/shipping that cost a lot to both SA and oil consumers could give Iran leverage if they scale it up and keep it up.
Another is to support insurgents in SA’s eastern region which, unfortunately for SA, has a fair amount of overlap between oil-rich areas and Shia-majority areas: Saudi Arabia's Critical Oil Regions. If Iran-backed Shia insurgents tried to break away the upper Eastern region from SA, SA would have reason to start seriously sweating. Iran could provide training, materiel, intel, fire support and advice to SA Shia militias without the need to get large numbers of its own troops into SA.
I don’t think any of those would compare to conducting an invasion of Saudi Arabia by Iran. Not while Saudi Arabia still has an Air Force (that’s the key: you can’t move hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of troops, with equipment and resupply, across a body of water the size of the Gulf without being noticed, and a prime target for air attack).
I can try and deconstruct all of those examples if you really want (really, I’d prefer not to), but just as an example, let’s look at Iran’s 1986 amphibious operation against Iraq. I pick that one not only because it involved Iran (one of two parties being discussed here, their most noteworthy amphibious operation to date), but because it just so happens I’ve been to that part of Iraq (I spent a year in Umm Qasr a while back).
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Iran and Iraq were already engaged in a land war going back and forth for years, but mostly resulting in stalemate, with the current round of fighting occurring just a bit to the north and west of (basically along the border) where the amphibious operation was conducted. That means massed Iranian troops in close proximity to the border with Iraq wasn’t exactly unusual or unexpected. Another attack against positions in Southern Iraq was expected, they just didn’t think it’d be against the peninsula.
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The Iranians had also had many years to develop air defenses in the area, both with SAM sites and forward-basing of aircraft, allowing them to cover the movement of troops over water and on the open peninsula (it’s really, really flat).
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The amphibious phase of the operation wasn’t so much across the Gulf as across a river at the northern end of it. Iraq’s very narrow spit of of coastline is within sight of Iran, and as you move inland, to the north of the al-Faw, Iraq is separated from Iran by a river. That’s it. That’s the body of water the Iranians had to contend with. Going across a river that they already held one shore of.
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And the result of that very short-legged amphibious operation, with no more than a river to cross was… another stalemate. The Iranians gained the peninsula (largely useless and undeveloped), but couldn’t make it across the next river (okay, technically an estuary) to seize the deep water port of Umm Qasr (with Iraq’s naval base) and couldn’t break out to the north along the peninsula to take Basra (Iraq’s 2nd largest city, after Baghdad).
Believe me, I get it. D-day was the anomaly, not the norm. For that matter, just about everything associated with WWII, cemented in the popular imagination though it may be, was an anomaly, not the norm. But even comparatively small-scale amphibious operations of the sort the US has conducted in the last thirty years throughout the Middle East are complex endeavors, even when you have complete control over the surface of the sea, the air above, and the waters below.
Yeah, as I stated above SA has no realistic capability to invade Iran, which seemed more relevant given the general idea of the question why isn’t (if it isn’t) SA willing to have a war with Iran. Going the other way, Saudi fear of the slim possibility of a conventional Iranian invasion of SA could be a minor factor, but Iran has next to no realistic capability to do that either. In theory it might have the numbers and capability to invade across Iraq. In reality the US exists and certainly would get directly involved in that case, either political party in power, even if it happened with Iraq’s consent, which is also far fetched. And an amphibious invasion of SA by Iran across the Gulf is a ridiculous scenario even under the unrealistic assumption the US wouldn’t actively help to defend SA against that, which it also would.
Realistically the Saudi’s are looking at a ‘war’ of Saudi air raids (basically their strong suit) on Iran attempting to deter Iran from further attacks on the larger Saudi oil facilities. With Iran employing new cruise or ballistic missile, drone, cyber, irregular force proxy etc. attacks on Saudi Arabia in retaliation (probably not so much manned Iranian aircraft raids given Iran’s limited capabilities and SA’s fairly good defensive capabilities in that particular area). The expected outcome of that policy doesn’t seem very promising again given that Iran’s oil exports have largely been sidelined already by sanctions, and even without excessive disparaging of the quality of SA’s military forces or overstatement of the quality of Iran’s, which I think some posts have done. And certainly very risky.
The important point is that an amphibious assault required air superiority. Without it, the troops and ships are just sitting ducks. You left Argentina off the list. And Britain. In both cases, who controlled the air determined the success of the invasions. You can bet, when it comes down to an actual invasive landing, the USA will support SA and the Iranians will be wiped off the Saudi peninsula. The only question is how much damage they do in the meantime. And if they try to do damage remotely, we will see a repeat of the Iraqi “Scud hunts”. The only question will be how much the USA (and then Saudi planes once the USA clears out the defenses) care about collateral damage. If Iran does too much damage to the Saudis’ facilities, then I suppose retaliation and destruction of any remaining Iranian capacity will be the order of the day for the Saudis, along with any infrastructure, command and control, etc.
Both sides know this and unless the Russians or Chinese are interested in propping up the Iranians bigly, the mullahs are far too smart to get into a full war. Sneak attacks are more likely the limit of their plans - and I suspect they misjudged how much detail the Americans could get from the debris of the last attack.
Corry El has the best of the argument. The chances of Saudi and Irani ground forces meeting outside of small engagements in Yemen) is miniscule, and the US Navy isn’t likely to stand by and let an Iranian fleet go sailing for the Saudi coast.
That said, Saudi has the most to lose, as the Houthi rebels demonstrated (and I don’t know if Iran was involved or not, but they were most certainly taking notes). My guess is that the House of Saud will denounce the Iranian leaders, perhaps work with the US and other gulf allies on more sanctions, and at the same time be very careful not to start something that will hurt them more than it hurts Iran (in the Saudi mindset).
Of course the US may be a wildcard in all this…we shall see.