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Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

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11–20 of 193 posts

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#11

So I guess that 5% someone will need to buy from the US? Sounds to me like someone is making things great again...

Haha, yes, Trump and the Houthi rebels are real tight, the huge arms sales to KSA are just a diversion.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#12
post #2

The use of drones in this way by rebels makes me rethink the media image of a rebel. They are educated, lawyers, doctors, engineers.

While I don't disagree, I was curious how sophisticated these are compared to, say, those American freedom dispensers. The embedded video is kind of interesting, the one showcased there towards the end looks like a slightly oversized model airplane painted in military gray.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#13
post #2

The use of drones in this way by rebels makes me rethink the media image of a rebel. They are educated, lawyers, doctors, engineers.

Yemen is a really poor country, they don't have this capability. This is a proxy war, we had a lot of them in the past 100 years.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#14
Al Jazeera

>The attacks come as Saudi Arabia, the world's leading crude exporter, steps up preparations for a much-anticipated initial public offering of Aramco.

I wonder if this was timed by the rebels, or if there were outside influencers who had a vested interest in this.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#16
post #9

An unusual (and worrying) part about this incident is how drones are being used, not with an explicit military goal in mind, but rather for the purpose of economic strangulation. Like terrorist operatives, drones are relatively cheap and expendible. But unlike terrorism, which seeks to grind away at the enemy's resolve, this kind of attack attempts to deprive an enemy of the money needed to fund its operations. Like…

I mean, it's not really that new. Saudi Arabia, with our help, has been turning an economic vise on Yemen throughout the conflict, using the weapons we supply to embargo their ports and choke off the flow of goods, even essentials like food and medicine.

The only difference here is that the relatively much weaker combatant found a unique chokepoint in Saudi infrastructure that was easy to exploit. You couldn't, say, cut off an entire country's food supply with drones in this way. My suspicion is that it won't be too difficult for the Saudis to harden their defenses against this particular kind of attack.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#18
post #9

An unusual (and worrying) part about this incident is how drones are being used, not with an explicit military goal in mind, but rather for the purpose of economic strangulation. Like terrorist operatives, drones are relatively cheap and expendible. But unlike terrorism, which seeks to grind away at the enemy's resolve, this kind of attack attempts to deprive an enemy of the money needed to fund its operations. Like…

You've just described air power. Except now it's actually possible to destroy industrial facilities instead of maybe hitting a city.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#19
post #14

Al Jazeera >The attacks come as Saudi Arabia, the world's leading crude exporter, steps up preparations for a much-anticipated initial public offering of Aramco. I wonder if this was timed by the rebels, or if there were outside influencers who had a vested interest in this.

The rebels said that they had help from allies inside Saudi Arabia, maybe it was people who wanted to do economic damage, kind of like an over-the-top version of a news article designed to hurt stock prices.
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