How Saudi Arabia failed to protect itself from drone and missile attacks
Saudi Arabia’s current air defenses are ‘irrelevant’
Saudi Arabia boasts an arsenal of sophisticated and expensive air defense equipment. They have the American-made Patriot missile defense system, German-made Skyguard air defense cannons and France’s Shahine mobile anti-aircraft system, and they’ll soon have Lockheed Martin’s highly advanced THAAD (terminal high altitude area defense) interceptors.
But these are basically inconsequential, says Jack Watling, a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute who advises Gulf militaries.
“The Patriots are kind of irrelevant,” Watling told CNBC in a phone interview. “The track record of Patriot engaging missiles of any kind is pretty awful, they very rarely hit the target.” The other issue, he says, is that it’s designed for shooting down high-altitude ballistic missiles, not the cruise missiles and drones used in Saturday’s attack.
“These were low-flying cruise missiles. They were coming in far below the engagement zone for Patriot. So you wouldn’t have tried to hit them with Patriot.” In its primary role of shooting down aircraft, Watling noted, the system does perform “very well.”
Aerial photographs found on open-source platforms show three Skyguard batteries placed around the targeted Abqaiq oil facility, which are slow-firing large caliber anti-aircraft guns, as well as French-made Shahine batteries from the 1980s.
Despite being meant to protect these facilities, they Skyguards were not of much use either, Watling says: “The batteries around the site are firstly not the appropriate systems to engage cruise missiles, and there is no evidence that the Saudis have trained using their equipment.”
‘The Saudis… are largely inattentive’
To add to the Saudis’ weapon woes, their military personnel may not be up to the task either, according to Watling and several other experts who spoke to CNBC anonymously.
“The Saudis have a lot of sophisticated air defense equipment. Given their general conduct of operations in Yemen, it is highly unlikely that their soldiers know how to use it,” Watling said. He added that the kingdom’s forces have “low readiness, low competence, and are largely inattentive.”
“So if you’re a battery commander protecting against an oilfield which you never believed was going to come under attack, how carefully are you watching your radar? I’d be surprised if they’d even turned their radar on.”
Even those that do have the technical knowledge, Watling added, “are unlikely to be attentive enough to pick up small unmanned aerial vehicles or low flying missiles on their radar... quickly enough to coordinate countermeasures.”
The Saudi Defense Ministry did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.
These stupid idiots started a war and now they learned how it looks like!
Money can't buy brain
