Saudi Arabia oil facilities ablaze after drone strikes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-49699429

78 94 7 years ago

bbc.co.uk

Is there an "observatory" that monitors drone warfare - I have heard of drones dropping grenades down tank hatches, and lots of requests from western air forces for anti drone measures but this is the first "big" target I have heard of.

Plus, worryingly, this does seem a fairly automatable attack. The limiting factor for the attackers must be the supply of drones plus any concerns about wiping their geo fencing / remote self destructs built in. As someone who would get his drones from the local curry's I presume the attackers have some other supply channel ?

malux85• 7 years ago

I love the idea of an open source (or just freely available) observatory that lists drone strikes and centralizes this info!

hos234• 7 years ago

This is just US strikes - https://www.longwarjournal.org/us-airstrikes-in-the-long-war

The rest of the world I guess will catch up sooner or later.

walrus01• 7 years ago

There are a number of military analysts, some amateur, with websites documenting every photo and video they've been able to obtain of Iranian domestic produced drones.

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

"Plus, worryingly, this does seem a fairly automatable attack."

Yes. Cheap. Easily available. Can be launched from a Camel. Don't have to attack major facilities. It is enough to attack pipelines in the desert. How much does a drone cost?

Please consider: https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-War-Terrorism-Globalization...

benj1113• 7 years ago

"Can be launched from a Camel"

That's a feature I wasn't expecting to hear about today.

jonbaer• 7 years ago

https://dronecenter.bard.edu/

_xerxes_• 7 years ago

No need to wipe anything if you build it yourself. Plenty of online guides show you how with cheap Chinese parts. This is for a racing drone, but you get the idea:

https://rotorbuilds.com/build/8778

kmlx• 7 years ago

the facilities are big, and owned by Aramco, a $1 trillion state-owned company. their IPO events began at the Dubai Ritz just yesterday. i would assume this attack is not a coincidence.

lifeisstillgood5• 7 years ago

I think that is very likely.

It's hard to see how the Saudis would give in to such threats directly but there must be a calculation here - can they force the Saudis to the negotiating table with this new capability or can the US supply a missile defence system capable of stopping this?

I suspect that forcing both sides to the table would be the RoW's preference?

What a time to be Trumps new incoming National Security Advisor - busy morning !

baybal25• 7 years ago

No conventional long range AA can shot down small drones flying low and slow.

Short range air defence can, but as its name suggests, it's short ranged.

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

Shorters using extreme tactics now.

phkahler• 7 years ago

Or someone wanting to get in cheap. Or... or... we may never know who or why. There too much money an politics around this.

benj1113• 7 years ago

The geopolitical implications of this could put up the prices of oil more than the cost of the damage. This could actually be a net benefit for Aramco. The shorters would be better off investing in Tesla and encouraging EVs.

jk27277• 7 years ago

This is old news. Just happed again. Saudi Arabia lost the war https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2019/08/19/today-saudi-arabia-fin...

why-oh-why2• 7 years ago

Nice source.

The Houthi have clown prince Mohammad bin Salman by the balls and can squeeze those at will.

Perhaps don’t link to propaganda blogs.

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

May I assume, based on your comment

1. That prince Salman is a serious politician? I mean, give or take a bown saw?

2. That the conclusion of the former news is wrong? It looked more and more unlikely that this war can be won by Saudi Arabia. Now it looks, it might get lost.

By the way, the Emirates left the war already. Wonder why. If I had to take a guess I would say that a drone attack on the Dubai airport would do wonders to their air traffic. But you never know.

"The Houthi have clown prince Mohammad bin Salman by the balls and can squeeze those at will."

no way. You predicted victory for Saudi Arabia.

onetimemanytime• 7 years ago

This is fair game, Yemen is being starved, regardless of age, or guilt.

mysterydip• 7 years ago

Many places have only dealt with physical security at the ground level: fences, ID checkpoints, etc. Drones just bypassing everything by flying over have to force places to rethink that strategy.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

There isn't much to defend against a drone dropping a thermite charge or other bomblet on a facility - if the drone flies high enough even ordinary firearms or EMP/jammer weapons don't work any more.

anovikov2• 7 years ago

But ECM will. Russians reliably defend their airbases in Syria against stubbornly repeated drone strikes.

baybal25• 7 years ago

Add to that that conventional air defence doesn't work either.

Even the most poorly built drone can fly low and slow enough to be invulnerable to anything but human aimed AA guns, but for that one can just double the numbers

bretpiatt• 7 years ago

Real world example of Zerg rush strategy. It will require whole new types of air defense.

Military strategists are actively thinking through this and some high risk private or public sector industrial targets are as well.

Statements like, "Just use EMP or signal jammers." do not take into account the collateral damage and impacts EMP or broad wavelength frequency jamming have either short or long term on the defenders.

Tepix2• 7 years ago

I think it will be pretty much impossible to stop fast low flying drones from the ground. Perhaps other drones are the solution.

mantap• 7 years ago

What I don't understand is that while multicopter drones may only be a decade old, RC planes have been around forever. Why are people only just noticing the problem?

evgen• 7 years ago

Guidance. Until quite recently an RC plane required line of sight to both plane and target and even then accuracy would be limited. Now, with common off the shelf parts, open source software, and wireless cell/satellite networks that have almost global availability anyone can create a guidance package that rivals ones that were only available to a handful of nation-states twenty years ago.

thecleaner2• 7 years ago

I think Yemen war will go down in military history as one of the most successful asymmetrical war initiative.

johnsea• 7 years ago

Not so sucessful for (poor) normal Yemenis who have a failed state instead of a prosperous country which could be wonderful (culture, nature, tourism), such a shame!

thecleaner2• 7 years ago

On the dark side of things I am not sure if Yemen would ever have been too prosperous in the long term. They are bordered by one of the worst countries on the world. Saudi Arabia has funded acts of terror (9/11), harbored international criminals (several of whom fled India) and is practically a serfdom which uses Islam as its recruitment tool. On the other side is Iran which is again super messed up. So it was basically impossible for them to be prosperous for too long. I hope Saudi Arabia has to pay them lots of reparation money.

mikhailfranco• 7 years ago

Consider this:

- KSA is at war with Yemen.

- KSA has a land border with Yemen.

- KSA army has not invaded Yemen.

- KSA army is not deployed in Yemen.

Some parts of Yemen have been captured by sympathetic local forces, supported by the UAE and Colombian mercenaries deployed by sea routes.

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/saudi-arabia-incre...

https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/hundreds-columbian-mer...

It is testament to the terrain; the capability and tenacity of the Houthis; and the lack of capability and tenacity of the KSA army.

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/houthi-forces-destroy-u...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1yTb3vF35M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Kqsc6bA80

auslander2• 7 years ago

What drone type/size? What charge was delivered, was it FPV or pre-programmed route? Stupid article, no details whatsoever.

lifeisstillgood5• 7 years ago

I am also interested in that - but as they could not stop the drone bombing them they did not have that data either.

however an earlier comment linked eventually to mintpressnews and a claim that they are domestically manufacturing drones (UAV-like not consumer)

If these are domestically produced (presumably helped by Iran as opposed to supplied) then the bar to becoming a "threat to your neighbours" just got a lot lower - Yemen was poor before years of war.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/uae-yemen-troop-withdrawal-hou... (No idea about the provenance of this article, but it says Houthi have drones, and they just bombed so it must have something going for it)

auslander2• 7 years ago

Found it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20974932

moksly• 7 years ago

It’s striking how much of the cyberpunk I read in my youth is becoming reality. Back then I though it would be cool, but now I really wish it would stop.

imhoguy• 7 years ago

Like from Mad Max 2 intro https://youtu.be/9n29c-q3_8Q

huhtenberg• 7 years ago

Makes you wonder where the technology came from. Here's one reference from [1] -

The Borkan is a modified Scud

The newer models appear to be the originals, but I find it hard to believe that Yemen could develop a radar-evading 1500km range drone on their own. Someone's helping them, no doubt. Any ideas who that might be?

[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/uae-yemen-troop-withdrawal-hou...

rapsey3• 7 years ago

Iran obviously. That is their ally.

alrs2• 7 years ago

...or any country that wants to see the United States drawn into a proxy war for one of its client states in the Middle East. Or a country that wants to see oil prices rise in the short-term. Or a a country that wants to make European dependence on Saudi oil untenable, and put an end to the US sanctions regime.

The US is now the world's largest oil exporter, so a limited confrontation that leads to picking up slack in the global oil market and selling more arms to Saudi Arabia is very much in its interest.

It could be Iran, it could be others. It could be Iran and others, which is likely, because Iran doesn't have much money to spend right now.

pjc50• 7 years ago

Iran is generally believed to be supporting the Houthi rebels.

peterburkimsher• 7 years ago

Saudi isn't developing their weapons alone either.

Via the Campaign Against Arms Trade website [1], Who is arming the Yemen war? An update. [2]

"So far, the western countries with the largest arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, namely the USA, the UK, and France, have continued to sell arms to both countries"

[1] https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/yemen/news

[2] https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2019/03/19/who-is-a...

baybal25• 7 years ago

You can download pixhawk from the internet, and locations of Saudi radars are publicly available (google maps)

test234• 7 years ago

This is so sad.

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

Well, it is definitely not good. But sad?

Saudi Arabia brought ugly warfare to Yemen and the war has come back.

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

The Iranians are taking over the Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palistinian areas, Yemen. The Saudis and Egyptians are countering them. The whole area is in conflict because of the Iranian government's urge to dominate.

Are there any good guys here? Probably not, but this attack on this refinery is an attack on all countries that use the oil from it. We'll all end up paying for it one way or the other.

The only way out from this is developing energy sources that do not depend on this volatile area.

lifeisstillgood5• 7 years ago

This is an interesting comment

> However, many observers consider that the Iranian role has been exaggerated, taking a fairly distant supporting role at most, with the Houthis acting very much on their own agenda, rather than as an Iranian proxy. Overall, the evidence from SIPRI data, the UN panel, and other sources, appears to support the idea that, while Iranian arms supplies have not been trivial, the primary sources of arms from the Houthis has been local, from those sections of the Yemeni army that supported them, from their former pro-Saleh allies, captured weapons, and the sort of locally assembled equipment discussed above.

[#] https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2019/03/19/who-is-a...

Thanks to earlier post for the link

The implication from tufts is that this is not rebels firing missiles made elsewhere but assembling parts from global (dual use?) supply chains - which does rather imply drone / UAv manufacturing is within reach of any state and most groupings.

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

Without Iran, there is no Houthi force that matters. Iranian ships provide supplies. Iranian advisors train. Strategy is coordinated by Iran.

https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/04/13/iran-developing-houth...

londons_explore3• 7 years ago

which does rather imply drone / UAv manufacturing is within reach of any state and most groupings

This could totally have been done by someone with a $100 drone, a grenade, and a few weeks of electronics work. Program the drone to wait 1 week, take off, fly to the target, and trigger the grenade. The fact the target was a tank of petrol will do the rest.

Do this 100 times on the same night, and the attacker could have a real impact on a nations economy.

NeverFade7• 7 years ago

No, half of KSA's oil production capacity was not taken out by a $100 drone carrying a grenade.

That's like saying you can bring down a massive skyscraper by hurling a lit match into its generator room.

Yes, in theory it can hit the right spot at the right time to start a massive chain reaction, but the odds of that actually happening are impossibly low.

Now multiply by the number of facilities that were hit, and it's the odds of winning N different lotteries with N random tickets.

No, this was done with far more sophisticated military-grade attack drones, backed by robust Command and Control system.

Very likely it was done by the HESA Ababil drone that Iran is known to have supplied to the Houthis and was involved in prior Houthi attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Ababil

Not the sort of drone you can buy on Amazon for $100.

kingofpandora2• 7 years ago

Yeah, it's common for many to assume Iranian aligned factions such as the Houthis or Hezbollah have no agency, motivations or origins of their own.

NeverFade7• 7 years ago

The Houthis wouldn't be so keen to wage war on a rich, large, powerful nation like KSA if the Iranians weren't commanding them to do it.

Also notice how dramatically they stepped up their campaign against KSA since Iran launched its aggressive campaign to lash out against economic sanctions.

There's no inherent reasons the Houthis should be launching sophisticated, high-impact attacks on KSA on a weekly basis. This sort of escalation makes no sense within their own geopolitical context, but makes perfect sense when you consider Iran's contexts and regional goals.

Same for Hezbollah group in Lebanon against Israel. All the recent tensions in that conflict can't be explained by the organic interests of the Lebanese nation or people. In fact, a conflict with Israel is against the Lebanese national interest and would lead to great destruction in Lebanon. However, Hezbollah is escalating and building up towards that very conflict.

The vast majority of Hezbollah's budget is contributed by Iran:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_Hezbollah#Iran

Iran can ill afford to make that investment if they don't get much out of it, and it's pretty accurate to say Hezbollah is acting according to the interest of Iran far more than any other set of interests, including the Lebanese interest.

Hezbollah owes its power and arguably its existence to Iran. It's naive to expect it to act independently of Iranian interests.

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

When I read stuff that doesn't smell like propaganda it sounds more like the Iranian's don't want this conflict. Because they are playing a long game where their odds of winning are high.

NeverFade7• 7 years ago

That quote you presented states that many of the arms held by the Houthis were not supplied by Iran. True or not, this assertion does not support the subsequent that "the Houthis acting very much on their own agenda, rather than as an Iranian proxy".

Even if the Houthis obtain armament from other sources, they may absolutely be following Iranian agenda. Indeed it seems hardly coincidental that their campaign against KSA has been escalating in lockstep with Iran's campaign of violently lashing out against the sanctions imposed upon it.

Moreover, there's very clear evidence that Iran (through IRGC) is supplying the Houthis with their most sophisticated weapons, such as Kornet missiles and indeed drones like those used in this attack:

> The Houthis have repeatedly used a drone that is nearly identical to Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company's Ababil-T drone in strikes against Saudi Arabia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement#IRGC_involveme...

So whether it has other sources to acquire arms seems quite irrelevant. The fact is, the Houthis are using sophisticated Iranian weapons in attacks that are perfectly aligned with Iranian interests (and completely unaligned with identifiable Yemenite interests).

Be careful of uncritically accepting assertions that Iran isn't responsible for the actions of its various proxies. Iran has a strong interest in denying this responsibility, and indeed this denial is the core reason Iran has a proxy strategy to begin with.

aussieguy1234• 7 years ago

It's likely that a terrorist group, sooner or later, will do some kind of drone attack on a western target.

fallingfrog• 7 years ago

So, Saudi Arabia kills some 80,000 civilians in Yemen, and nobody cares, then when the rebels hit a Saudi oil field, killing nobody, and just destroying a bunch of capital, and all of a sudden its terrorism and we’re going to talk about intervening on the Saudis behalf?

Glad to see we’re still very clear on what is important (the property of the ruling class, oil sheiks) and what isn’t (the lives of civilians and children).

Saudi Arabia oil facilities ablaze after drone strikes

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