As you’d expect from the title, both more and less than it seems.
The impact on oil prices is not that big a deal, despite the screaming. If they were to, say, wind up at $75/barrel for a few months, well the last time we had prices that high was…less than a year ago. It’s possible this will push us into a long-delayed recession, but if it does, that recession was going to happen anyway.
If Trump acts like an idiot and attacks Iran, of course, this will turn out to be a big deal. Otherwise, it isn’t a big deal, in and of itself.
Nor should anyone be crying for the Saudis. Assume it is true the attack was launched by Yemeni Houthis with some Iranian support. Remember that Saudi Arabia has been bombing and deliberately starving Yemen for years. They’re at war, and if the Houthis have a bit of support from Iran, what of it? Saudi Arabia itself has supported many organizations which have attacked other nations, possibly including Al-Qaeda and 9/11.
If you bomb the shit out of a country, and they manage to get in one hit against you? Boo-hoo.
Nor should the US care, as Saudi Arabia is a terrible ally who has done more harm to American interests than any other “ally” in the world, with the only possible exception of Israel.
This isn’t a US problem–and it shouldn’t be their war, and they should stop helping Saudi Arabia hit Yemen. But I guess the Sauds have always been good to the House of Trump, so perhaps there will be a war, on behalf of Trump hotels.
That aside, as I have written a number of times, drones are, and were always going to be, a weapon of the weak, and it is becoming harder and harder to defend against them. The US military was incredibly stupid to develop them, because ultimately they remove part of the monopoly of force from powerful countries. A world in which air strikes require jets that only a few countries can build, and which are expensive, large, and easy-to-find is a world which is much more favorable to great powers.
Instead, we have the cost of a somewhat-effective air force and assassination force dropping through the floor. Soon, these things will be routinely used by very small governments and non-state actors to kill their enemies; specific, named enemies, just as the US has been doing for a couple decades now.
This is going to get ugly.
It’s not all bad, taken from a longer point of view. Ages where elites can easily be killed tend to concentrate elite minds. In some places, that will lead to even worse police states, but the other way to solve the issue is to make people’s lives pretty good. People with pretty good lives tend to have better things to do than engage in political violence.
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KT Chong
I bet China sold those drones to the Yemen Houthis – and at very affordable prices too!
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-06-03/cheap-drones-are-changing-calculus-war-yemen
https://www.apnews.com/1da29d68e3cc47b58631768c1dcfa445
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/12/17/china-fueling-drones-arms-race-middle-east/
https://fpif.org/china-is-flooding-the-middle-east-with-cheap-drones/
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2019/7/4/China-is-heavily-contributing-to-Middle-East-drone-proliferation
Herman
I think America should care about this issue but not in the way most people think. If the United States had even a somewhat decent elite we would be using our superpower status to try to broker peace in the region instead of adding fuel to the fire. Same with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. For all of his faults Jimmy Carter was at least partially committed to human rights as an aspect of American foreign policy, probably the last president to have such a commitment. Now our elite is nakedly bloodthirsty and Machiavellian, although in an incompetent manner. I see this as part and parcel of the loss of belief in universal values.
nihil obstet
Ages where elites can easily be killed tend to concentrate elite minds.
Contemplating the concentration of the minds of our elites is horrifying. We end up with a thimbleful of sheer foulness. I’m hopeful that we’re seeing signs that we can rein them in as they have lost legitimacy.
bruce wilder
I immediately thought of the drone swarm used in place of fireworks at the Winter Olympics. The Chinese first applied gunpowder to create fireworks, too.
Even more frightening as an example of the cheapening of great technological power are the possibilities of genetic engineering. Where the atomic bomb required the marshalling of massive industrial resources and the organization of a small army of highly educated experts, the business end of genetic engineering — though also the endpoint of enormous efforts thru time — is basically little more than a guy with a testtube and a pipette in a laboratory equipped with what are now common tools for microscopic observation, numeric analysis and replication.
It is possible to engineer a more lethal flu virus or plague. The practical limits of such technology will be explored, eventually. Whether the political will exists in the so-called advanced countries to develop the technology in ways that make it possible to monitor and counter in a timely way the accidents of nature and the malevolence of Man remains to be seen.
The ways in which the novel technologies of digital communication — technologies of widely and deeply distributed power as well — have been deliberately subverted to enable computer viruses, widespread predatory conduct and frauds is not a hopeful sign.
Ten Bears
It wasn’t just the Ruskies manipulated drumpf ucking ‘Muirkans in the 2016 Goat Rodeo.
Days after Donald Trump rode down an escalator at Trump Tower and announced he’d run for president, a little-known consulting firm with links to Israeli intelligence started gaming out how a foreign government could meddle in the U.S. political process. Internal communications, which The Daily Beast reviewed, show that the firm conducted an analysis of how illicit efforts might shape American politics. Months later, the Trump campaign reviewed a pitch from a company owned by that firm’s founder—a pitch to carry out similar efforts.
The founder of the firm, called Wikistrat, has been questioned by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team as they investigate efforts by foreign governments to shape American politics during the 2016 presidential campaign. Joel Zamel, a low-profile Israeli-Australian who started the firm, has deep contacts in Middle Eastern intelligence circles. There are no known publicly available pictures of him. But he met people in the upper echelons of the Trump campaign.
In April 2016, senior Trump campaign official Rick Gates reviewed a pitch produced by a company called Psy Group, which Zamel reportedly owns. The pitch laid out a three-pronged election influence campaign that included creating thousands of fake social media accounts to support then-candidate Trump and disparage his opponents, according to The New York Times.
After Trump became the party’s official nominee, Zamel met with Donald Trump Jr. and discussed the plan, which echoed both the real election interference already underway by the Kremlin and the scenario Wikistrat gamed out the year before.
Zamel took part in at least two meetings in Washington in 2016 and 2017. And his staff at Psy Group made several connections about their social media manipulation plan with individuals who represented themselves as close to the Trump team.
It’s unclear if the Psy Group plans ever went forward. Some former employees of the firm who previously spoke to The Daily Beast said Gates never pursued the campaign. Others said part of the plan was carried out.
To be clear, Wikistrat’s manipulation sim was just one of hundreds the firm has conducted. And at the time, many firms in the private intelligence sector were looking for ways to explore the ramifications of the growing threat of online propaganda and political interference.
Mark Pontin
I’ve been expecting someone to strap an IED to a cheap drone for the last twenty years.
Ian wrote: ‘The American military was incredibly stupid to develop them….’
Eh. I understand the sentiment, but don’t know they had much of an option, ultimately. I went out to Sandia Labs in August, 2001 — I used to work as a science/tech journalist covering global risk, among other things — and they showed me all these toys they were working on then. A key to amplifying their effectiveness was and is getting swarming algorithms to tie a bunch of drones together. It struck me then that with a numerous enough swarm of small drones you could take down an aircraft carrier.
Overall, in any case, in 2001 it was really obvious that small and networked/distributed, aka network-centric warfare, in the form of drones was the way things were going.
(1) They were the obvious extension of the highly effective smart bombs, precision-guided ordnance the US and allies had already deployed during Gulf 1 against Saddam’s Iraq;
(2) Those smart, networked weapons had been developed in large part because of this guy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_policy_strategist)
— and his theories about a RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs). As you point out often, Ian, the power of ideas and intellectuals can be immense. Marshall was one of the hidden intellectual eminences of 20th century geopolitical history, however one may deplore the fact of his influence.
What the smart Pentagon consultants and thinkers in Marshall’s orbit were pushing was more of the same: distributed networks of smaller “warfighting” units that simply didn’t and don’t provide the targets in a conflict that big platform systems like aircraft carriers do, while being a much better bang for the bucks. It’s hard to argue with that.
(3) Finally, the Chinese in particular had already taken full note of what the US had done in Gulf 1 and of Marshall’s theories, and were implementing them on their own, in their own way.
To quote General Chen Zhou of the PLA: “We studied RMA exhaustively. Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon. We translated every word he wrote.”
Talking of the Chinese, there’s a company called DJI, headquartered in Shenzen, who’ve been pretty much the world leaders in commercial drone technology for a while. It’s an interesting exercise to go through their catalog and think about what an actor with a little inventive flair could do with some of their very reasonably-priced products —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI_(company)
Hugh
Tom in the previous thread remarked that the drones probably were flown from within a few minutes of the oil facility. I would tend to agree. The logistics from flying ten drones from Yemen are large. The drones would first have to be gotten into Yemen. They would need to be put together and kept hidden until used. They would need an airfield to take off from. They would have to be large to fly 500 miles. They would need GPS and sophisticated electronic links all the way in with their controllers. And they would need to avoid Saudi radar.
It would be a lot easier to fly smaller, improvised devices from a few minutes out. They would be essentially undetectable. They could be controlled directly by their handlers. And if it was local talent, the facilities are in areas with large and oppressed Saudi Shia populations, they would know actually what to hit and where it was.
Mike Barry
The original source for Ten Bears’ comment is https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-witness-team-gamed-out-russian-meddling-in-2015.
ptb
bleh, why would the attackers send a big fat flying thing through the radar-filled air hundreds of miles, when they can just get someone to drive the goods through the desert? Recall that Saudi Arabia\’s labor force relies heavily on foreign contractors, a huge portion of which is there under conditions resembling indentured servitude, treated like crap, and given enough time a good portion will eventually hate the locals and would be corruptible.
Also the various hardware involved could\’ve flown in or been brought in much earlier, with the benefit of cover from weather or legitimate movements of aforementioned foreign contractors (i\’m just making this up but it\’s obvious, no?). Given the flammable nature of the target and the precision of the strikes, the weapon itself could just as easily be the sadly ubiquitous anti tank guided missile. A quite small and short range drone could be used for the final targeting. It would need neither to fly nor to communicate with anyone at the time of the attack – could just sit on the ground in the dirt and spot the fixed target from afar, due to the extremely open layout of the place (per satellite photos).
The possibilities are endless, and the technology level needed is a lot more 1980 than 2020, as is the the level of original thinking involved. How Saudi Arabia will defend against this sort of thing I don\’t know.
S Brennan
“A quite small and short range drone could be used for the final targeting”
Yep, we used to call these types of weapons SLMs…built for Tom’s “..short range…infiltrators”
DMC
I seem to recall reading that the Yemeni army(now aligned with the Houthis) possessed some degree of sophistication regarding regular tactical ballistic missiles. The possibility of comparatively simple cruise missiles, launched from their own territory, doesn’t seem all that far fetched.
Tom
https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1173823347265888256
Note how they can’t stop laughing.
That being said, latest story from US Military is that the attacks were launched with cruise missiles from Iranian Territory. Assuming this is true:
This means no less than 3 USAF/USN AWACS crews were asleep at the job and nine US Vessels did not detect the CMs, and the Saudi Defense System is incompetently manned.
At the very least the AWACS should have caught them.
Nay like I said earlier it looks like this was done within Saudi Territory using Drones and with ATGMs such as Kornet or even Konkurs.
Also the Satellite Imagery that has been released is inconsistent with a strike with an Iranian Quds Cruise Missile. Those babies pack a 200kg warhead. Yet we see little neat holes in the right spots to cripple production without causing permanent damage or precipitating an environmental disaster. Make no mistake, the facility will not be operational for at least 6 months while they make repairs.
This also tells us the infiltrators are well trained and coordinated and had good intelligence prep.
Ten Bears
The rest of the story …
Gotta’ wonder how many people may have made some money on oil futures …
Ché Pasa
There have been a number of {“”} Attacks on various oil transport, storage, and holding facilities in the Gulf region since the Trump abrogation of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Much of what’s been going on doesn’t make any sense at all, and whatever has been done may (or may not) be spectacular, but the damage has been to all appearances slight.
The notion that half of KSA’s oil production/transport capacity has been damaged and offline appears to be false, but it’s a convenient excuse for raising oil prices, one often used in different contexts domestically to excuse sudden rises in gasoline and heating oil prices. “Capacity is down because of a refinery fire in some god-forsaken backwater, therefore…” Or the ever-popular “changeover” from one formula to another…
Blaming Iran is the go-to for everything that happens in the Gulf, even though Iran is much less of a regional player than (say) the US or Israel. In this case, the various claims and stories are so conflicting it’s not possible for the unwashed masses to know what happened or who dunnit with any certainty — which is quite likely the point of the exercise. Spiking the price of oil is the outcome whatever the source of the action, and who in the business is not in favor of that?
Does this mean the long-sought War on Iran is soon in the offing? Who knows? Saber rattling is constant, but the Invasion is on permanent delay, no? Wars of words, infiltration, assassination, targeted destruction, chaos, etc. are constants in the region as well. In other words, has anything really changed?
Well, sure. Bibi is worried about his electoral chances, MBS is a nasty piece of work aligned with Bibi who faces his own perils internally and externally, the Yemen Thing is a perpetual disaster on the ground and in the media, and lightly armed insurgents have thrown too many monkeywrenches into the gears of the machine to be ignored. The Overlords are facing an existential crisis, and that leads to panic.
Regardless of the source of the supposed drone attack, the outcome is more panic and chaos. That’s precisely what some factions want. Where it leads is anyone’s guess.
450.org
Just wait, Fentanyl Bombs dropped from drones that can kill 250,000 at a time will soon be in play and that will be provided by China as well. The only way to stop China at this point is to nuke the hell out of it, I’m afraid. In fact, it will come to that. Mark my words.
Eric Anderson
“We end up with a thimbleful of sheer foulness.”
From Time Bandits … one of my all time faves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qw1hcevmdU
Ten Bears
To have launched out of Iran, the drones would have had to fly right over the heads of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group, with all that radar and infrared and who knows what ever detection devices, not to mention helicopters, planes, boats etc etc ad nausium. If Iran successfully flew 10 low-cost drones across the Persian Gulf to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, there’s a reason to be concerned that’s much larger than a momentary bump in the cost of oil. Because the implication of that action would be that the systems meant to safeguard American fleets around the world have a massive security hole.
Ché Pasa
At this rate, there’s no telling what really happened to the Saudi oil facilities. Right now I’m tending toward the notion that the Houthis are telling the truth, that they launched a very successful drone raid on the facilities, a raid that did almost no damage at all but which scared the hoo-hah out of the Saudis — whose elaborate defenses failed utterly.
However, as these things can be, it was a more complex and layered operation. It appears that the Saudis, in panic, set their own storage facilities alight, probably launching useless defense missiles, and caused more damage — all of which is blamed (without question) on Iran because that’s what the Saudi/Israeli/US axis does.
Pompeo is banging the war drums of course, but Trump seems to be waiting for the Saudis to make a convincing case — which they’re not doing. Their incompetence is on full display, so there’s no reason for them to be believed, about anything. On the other hand, mainstream media is eating it up, no doubt eagerly anticipating whatever fireworks ensue. Trouble is, Netanyahoo is distracted and flailing in Israel, and his order to launch has probably been misplaced somewhere. Incompetence all around.
We’ll see how far it goes. Expect a fierce strike on Yemen, but not a whole lot — if anything — against Iran.