Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by kingofpandora » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

lapnitnelav wrote: post #21

AndrewBissell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

SA's economy is -AFAIK- mostly / completely dependent on natural ressources. Given that SPOF, one can't help but think of the IRA's threat to Margaret Thatcher : "[...] we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always."

Or Kissinger's aphorism that (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "the military loses if it doesn't win, while the rebels win if they don't lose."

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

#52

Post by hos234 » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

bidatzi wrote: post #37

lacker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really not have this capability? You can buy a decent drone off the shelf for a thousand bucks, how hard is it to strap an IED on the back?

With a range over 1000km?

How do they know how far the drone flew? Could be just Lawrence of Arabia on a camel crossing the desert and launching from outside the compound wall for all anyone knows.

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

#53

Post by AsyncAwait » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

rhegart wrote: post #42

tdhz77 wrote: 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.

Iran funds this. The advanced rockets by Hamas, the drones by the Houthi. Proxy war like usual. They are using Yemen for themselves uncaring of lives, we are killing so many innocent in Yemen. Life’s complicated but after the Iran deal, funding these groups by Iran increased significantly, and so did our subsequent killing of innocents.

Iran! Of course let's mainly blame Iran, not KSA or the Western powers enabling them, this is an in depth analysis indeed.

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

#54

Post by jillesvangurp » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: 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…

This is classic war fare and not terrorism. The Saudi's have made a mess of the conflict in Yemen, which is more or less part of a bigger proxy war that also involves the US and Iran. On paper it's rebels vs what passes for a government there locally. But in practice it's Iran sponsored weaponry vs. Us & EU sponsored weaponry. If you look at a map, the reasons are obvious. The Saudi's are connected to international waters via two narrow straights that border on Iran and Yemen. Yemen is strategically relevant to Iran for this reason because it allows them to isolate the Saudis.

What Iran is demonstrating here is that they can put the squeeze on oil supplies. The wars in the middle east are fundamentally oil centric. It's about who gets to supply oil to the world in exchange for vast amounts of dollars. The ideology gets the headlines usually but if you follow the money, you end up in Riyad, Teheran, Moscow, Washington, and Tel Aviv. Iran is making a very basic point here: we can shut down your oil any time we want.

It's a clever move since it puts everybody on the spot economically. In related news, Trump is planning to meet Rouhani. I'm guessing they have a lot to discuss.

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

#55

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #39

wbl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What prevented that from being possible before?

Technology. Now with relatively cheap drones you can have surveillance, bomb delivery, and you can mostly hide and not risk your operatives loosing their lives. Before there was the annoying bit of having to brainwash them to blow themselves up along with the bomb they where delivering on foot, by car or boat.

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

#56

Post by HarryHirsch » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #39

wbl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What prevented that from being possible before?

You needed airplanes, and antiaircraft weapons were so much cheaper. With drones the calculation is the other way around. It completely changes the face of war, offensive warfare is now possible again. Ernst Jünger said something similar when he witnessed the first tanks in World War 1.

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

#57

Post by droithomme » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

chvid wrote: post #40

avocado4 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My thought exactly. This is too expensive an attack. But for Iran it makes sense (or at least follows the pattern of their recent behavior) and they also have the capability.

Absolutely absurd claim. It's not expensive at all. Iran may or may not be providing technological assistance, but US amateur enthusiasts and mom and pop chinese resellers definitely are. No Iranian conspiracy here or needed. Drones are not magic genies unavailable to all but the elite. Drones, including these fixed wing models, are kid tech these days, including drones with 1000 mile ranges that can carry bombs that can destroy a facility.

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

#58

Post by zdkl » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

PorterDuff wrote: post #24

tibbydudeza wrote: post #17

Drone are similiar to the Toyota Hilux is akin to the BMP.

The Toyota Jihad model does appear to be a popular truck in certain quarters. I've been surprised for years that infrastructure wasn't more effectively attacked. It seems to me that a ton of mayhem could erupt just from a guy with a Barrett 50 cal.

The problem there is that that's a well understood threat model, mitigated with (unqualified) manpower. Responding to drones requires a more technical solution which might not be realistic to deploy en masse.

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

#59

Post by HenryBemis » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #41

beaner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevented that from being possible before?

Air power wasn't usually available to smaller players in capacity large enough to be reckoned with.

Basically it momentarily eliminates the advantage of supreme military power; "you got F16s", and you spend $1.8m [0] for each cruise missile, and we will make you never sleep again with 100k (I have no idea about the types of drones and their costs - just throwing a number).

Similarly, once can disrupt (peacefully - no deaths) civil aviation, e.g. use of drone in Heathrow airport. [1], [2]

[0]: https://www.johnlaurits.com/2018/cost-of-tomahawk-missiles-t...

[1]: https://dronedj.com/2019/08/14/climate-change-activists-shut...

[2]: https://voyagesafriq.com/2019/01/08/heathrow-airport-drone-s...

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

#60

Post by _ptgt » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

partialrecall wrote: post #10

tdhz77 wrote: 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.

It should be noted, engineers being well represented in these sort of rebel/revolutionary/terrorist organizations isn't a new phenomenon. Here is an article from a decade ago: https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris... The notion of terrorists as uneducated goat farmers is more a manifestation of western biases than it is an accurate representation of the truth.

Without commenting on your larger point, it's doubtful that Yemeni engineers are building these drones.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world and presumably their engineering capital is presumably not huge. The Houthis are backed by Iran. Iran (which has far more engineering capital and was accidentally gifted a US military drone several years ago) has military drones.

It sounds far more plausible to me that Iranian support is how the Houthis obtained these drones.