I think this hits on the crux of the matter - Iran isn’t making a play to take Saudi territory, and the Saudis aren’t making a play to take Iranian territory. That doesn’t stop them from fighting, though.
Iran has long known that the Saudis are vulnerable to attacks on their oil infrastructure, and you don’t need to send in the infantry or the tanks to destroy oil infrastructure, heck, you don’t even need to send in manned airplanes to do it anymore. As long as Iran is sanctioned and cut off from world markets, they have very little to lose by striking at the biggest thing the Saudis have going for them; all that juicy, sensitive equipment that moves Saudi oil from underground to consumers around the world.
And the weapon they can use against the Saudis is perhaps a weapon they can use against the US in terms of oil prices; it’s a much less effective weapon than 15 years ago because of the unusual increase in US oil production over those 15 years, but they may want to use because it’s the weapon that’s handy.
If all they did is land and plant a flag, sure. In any real world operation, they would be spending a lot of effort to try and secure a port and and airbase ASAP. Also, like most people you are forgetting that unlike WW2, helicopters exist now. They’d be a significant Airbourne contigent. Plus C130 have rough field capability.
I agree. But the examples you gave all have one thing in common, the attacker had uncontested control of the air. Not really the case in a Saudi Iran conflict.
I’m not sure Tamerlane did forget that. Looking on wikipedia, the Saudis have about 80 small/medium helicopters and 50 large cargo helicopters between their air force and ground force - does it seem to you like that’s enough to keep a few thousand Saudi marines and airborne troops from being overwhelmed by the much larger ground forces the Iranians could bring to a Saudi beachhead in Iran? And what would be the point of taking such a beachhead be anyway?
It seems like in an environment with modern surface to air missiles and antiship missiles, the Saudis landing ground troops on mainland Iran would not be worth whatever objective they were thrown at.
Chinook and Blackhawks aren’t small. It takes about 60 tonnes of supplies per day to keep a brigade operational. A Chinook can carry 10 tonnes of cargo, while a Blackhawk about 4 tonnes if carried externally.
That’s about 6 or 15 sorties a day. Since they’d probably use a mix and have some redundancy, say 20 sorties a day. Presuming 2 flights a day a dozen or so helos are Needed
I am not saying that it would be necessarily a successful operation. Or even likely to be. Just that it’s feasible.
Feasible if unopposed, right? Because I’d hate to be a Blackhawk pilot trying to carry external supplies under fire from man-portable surface to air missiles…
More importantly, what’s the value of this feasible operation to the Saudis? We could theoretically argue until we’re blue in the face about whether the Saudis could do such a thing or not, but until we figure out why the Saudis would want to do such a thing, we’re just obscuring the discourse on the actual conflict.
To put a single brigade (or even a couple) one hundred miles or more across the Gulf… I wouldn’t say I forgot about the existence of helos, so much as I think we have different definitions of what feasible means. A quick in and out raid, maybe. Take and hold? Unlikely.
But then who knows. A lot of this assumes certain things about the material condition of both sides and their ability to engage in a protracted sparring match involving air power. It may prove that one side or the other (or both can’t) keep enough aircraft (fixed-wing or rotary) in flyable condition to keep the other from having a free hand in the Gulf and the coastal areas, and that may produce surprising results that have a number of us quickly backtracking on our claims of what is or is not feasible, possible, impossible, or what have you.
From National Security in Saudi Arabia: Threats, Responses, and Challenges, by Anthony Cordesman, a 2005 publication, at page 245, average flight hours per Saudi Air Force aircrew were about 12-14 per month. Which was an improvement over the less than 6 a month they had been flying. I am guessing even the lower number is far in excess of what the IRIAF can manage, due to fuel and spare parts shortages. Further, the Royal Saudi Air Force is getting to go to things like Red Flag, unlike the IRIAF.
I think it’d be awfully one-sided. Especially if the Saudis were getting US help on the SIGINT and ELINT side.
Yeah, I would like to see context for that…I wouldn’t be surprised if the USAF and USN is about the same. Average would include those who are currently posted in non-flying billets.
I suspect a generous dose of lies, damned lies, and statistics. And I imagine pilots like helicopter, AWACS, tankers, and the like fly the most of all. Still, I think it is fair to say the RSAF gets a lot more stick time than IRIAF. I also have to think that there’s quite a bit more effective AEW and networking in the RSAF than IRIAF.
Saudi Arabia is like a lot of Gulf states: a well-funded military with modern equipment, hampered by cronyism, nepotism and recruitment. A billion dollars’ worth of materiel doesn’t mean much when your soldiers/pilots/whatever have no meaningful experience.
Not surprised. The now former poster LSLGuy once pointed out that many foreign AF and USN/USMC made pilots in non flying billets fly a certain minimum number of hours a year while in the USAF non flying meant absolutely no flying.
IIRC, the minimum number of hours it’s generally accepted a fighter pilot needs to fly a year is about 180, while more than 250 is counterproductive.
Well, it’s not necessarily the case, but part of it is true enough. Iran does have some vertical superiority in some areas, though as to who is the stronger over all? I’d say Saudi, but mainly that’s because of it’s alliances, verse the alliances that Iran has wrt mutual defense treaties and such.
So, why is that? Well, part of it is Iran has their own industrial and military complex, while Saudi relies on buying off the shelf systems from other countries. This isn’t as much of an option for Iran, so they have had to be more self reliant. Part of it is that the Saudi royal house/government doesn’t fully trust it’s military, so it’s hampered somewhat by this. Part of it is that a lot of Saudi upper class/nobility see the military like a play thing…their own personal play thing…where they can go to play at war. Part of that is how they treat the military, from how the regular soldiers are looked at and trained to how they rely on civilian contractors to actually do all the maintenance and upkeep of…well, everything. Part of it is the lack of commitment by those regular soldiers to their service. Obviously some of this also goes for Iran, but overall I think these are more systemic issues with the Saudi military than with Iran’s military. The biggest issue, IMHO, is that lack of their own industrial and military complex, however.
But, as mentioned, the other side of that is Saudi wouldn’t and doesn’t expect to be in a serious fight all by itself. At a minimum, if push comes to shove wrt all out war with Iran, Saudi expects the US to have it’s back. And we wouldn’t be the only country. So, their alliance network is their real strength wrt military power. Just like NATO’s strength is in the alliance and the countries committed to mutual defense. Russia might be stronger than Germany, militarily (in fact, they are for sure), but Germany isn’t all by itself and wouldn’t be fighting Russia all alone and on only it’s own resources. Same with Iran verse Saudi…it wouldn’t be a cage match, it would be a team fighting a single player who MIGHT get some covert help from some of it’s presumed ‘friends’…but can’t rely on even that.
I agree… I suspect that a lot of it is the flying/non-flying difference, compounded by the fact that the USMC is smaller (its aviation component is about 1/4 that of the USAF), and if a subset of USMC pilots get a lot of flight time for some reason, it’s going to skew the numbers.
Somewhat tangential to the OP, but the Quds 1 cruise missiles apparently used in recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities can now be directly linked to Iranian origin; where previously Houthi claims that the system was Yemeni-made were not much believed, but weren’t obviously fictional. If you aren’t interested in clicking through the link, the Revolutionary Guards’ Imam Hossein University apparently showed off the missile in images from early 2018.
This seems a good thread to link to this Youtube video that talks about the attacks and goes into some of the strategic reasons, as well as a lot of the geopolitical things that are impacting this. I think some of the things said about the US and how Trump has backed himself (and all of us) into a corner are pretty insightful, and why Saudi is a weak link…and Trump might not have very many options now that he’s backed us into that corner, especially in light of recent events in the US and the ongoing US presidential elections as well as Trump’s potential impeachment, which wasn’t mentioned in the video but which I think are going to also have an impact on this mess.
The Iranian Navy is a joke, comprised of mostly small quick boats. It’s made to harass the enemy, more than to repel a coordinated attack from the naval forces of a sovereign nation. I just don’t believe it to be a large factor in dissuading SA from making a counter attack. Also, the Saudi ground forces are more of a defense force rather than an invasion force. At last check, the Saudis have 3 Armored brigades, 5 Mechanized Infantry brigades, 3 Airborne infantry battalions, and 3 Special Forces battalions. Support forces include a few Artillery companies, and an Army Aviation wing. Nothing compared to a major power, but also nothing to sneeze at. However, I would speculate that all together, a fair-to-poorly trained force of this size wouldn’t fare too well in offensive operations, but may be able to mount a decent defensive campaign.
The Iranian Navy is a joke, comprised of mostly small quick boats. It’s made to harass the enemy, more than to repel a coordinated attack from the naval forces of a sovereign nation. I just don’t believe it to be a large factor in dissuading SA from making a counter attack. Also, the Saudi ground forces are more of a defense force rather than an invasion force. At last check, the Saudis have 3 Armored brigades, 5 Mechanized Infantry brigades, 3 Airborne infantry battalions, and 3 Special Forces battalions. Support forces include a few Artillery companies, and an Army Aviation wing. Nothing compared to a major power, but also nothing to sneeze at. However, I would speculate that all together, a fair-to-poorly trained force of this size wouldn’t fare too well in offensive operations, but may be able to mount a decent defensive campaign.
The Persian Gulf is only about 150 miles across through much of the Iranian/Saudi coast - you don’t need a navy to fire off antiship missiles from a dirt road on a hillside.
Frankly, Iran would be foolish to invest in a powerful navy, it would just be providing targets to the US. They get much better bang for their buck by having a lot of ground-launched antiship missiles and some drones to detect targets over the horizon.
They have deliberately focused on asymmetric warfare, so as you say, it would be pretty stupid for them to have a big, traditional navy. I don’t know that their naval forces are a ‘joke’…they are what they were designed to be. According to several war games the Navy has done over the last few decades, it’s quite plausible that they would hurt us pretty badly in the confined waters before going down.
But the biggest threat is the very real danger they could take out a substantial portion of Saudi’s infrastructure, disrupting the worlds oil supply. Europe especially would be hard hit, which alone would have fairly dire economic consequences. It would probably cost Iran dearly…maybe everything if their economy comes completely apart…but it would be cold comfort if it also crashes the world economy due to a sharp drop in oil production.