Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Drone Attack Hits Saudi Oil Production
A drone strike hit a major Saudi Arabian oil production facility over the week-end. Estimates are that 5% of global output is gone, and it may take months to repair it all. The Americans have blamed Iran, and Iran has denied responsibility. In all likelihood, the Houthi Rebels in Yemen (Iran's proxies) launched the attack. While this attack has immediate impact (oil prices rose almost 20% overnight), the damage to Saudi oil production is a harbinger of things to come. High-value, vulnerable targets against low-cost methods of attack is a formula for disaster that will become more and more commonplace.
In any sustained conflict, whether war or cold war or merely a labor dispute over wages, the side with the economic advantages tends to prevail. In his book, Germs, Guns and Steel, Jared Diamond demonstrates that the history of modern warfare for much of the last millennium has been decided by which side was capable of producing the most steel. That paradigm is shifting radically now.
Back in the 1980s, two wars illustrated this shift. The first instance was during the Falklands War between the UK and Argentina. An Argentine Pucara aircraft (a twin turboprop with a top speed ot about 300 mph) fired an Exocet missile (top range of 110 miles with an added engine) that sank the HMS Sheffield, a destroyer. Exocets also damaged the Atlantic Conveyor, a 15,000 ton ro-ro container ship used to transport troops and supplies; the vessel sank while under tow after being hit. HMS Glamorgan, a 5,440 ton destroyer, also took damage from an Exocet. Expensive surface ships are vulnerable to cheap missiles, and while anti-missile technology has improved, the threat remains.
The second was the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Soviet helicopters made life hell for the Afghans. The mujahideen got their hands on Stinger surface-to-air missiles, and Soviet aircraft began falling from the skies. It takes a great deal of training to create a crew capable of flying an expensive Hind helicopter gun ship. It takes virtually no training to fire a heat-seeking Stinger that cost about $50,000 in those days. Economically, the Soviet war effort was doomed from the first shot of the Stinger.
The drone strike on Saudi oil production is on a massively more destructive level than those two. Civilian drones are cheap (hundreds of dollars buys a rather elegant one) and easily adapted to military use. Military drones are also fairly cheap (a US MQ-1 Predator runs just over $4 million). Presuming a couple such military drones targeted the facility, it cost $10 million and no loss of life to knock out billions of dollars in oil revenue.
Drones are not the only disruptive technology on the battlefield. Cyber-warfare and artificial intelligence are going to change the way conflicts begin and end, as well as all the points in between. Attacking is cheap and highly effective. Defense is costly and difficult. Moreover, an attack needs to succeed but once, while defense must be (yet cannot be) 100% effective.
The strategic balance between offense and defense has changed with technology. Defending a city with walls of stone worked well until gunpowder appeared. Walls were suddenly useless. Fighting the enemy with cavalry was effective until tanks made mounted troops vulnerable in defense and ineffective in attack.
The world is in a similar paradigm shift, one that might be more dramatic. When 5% of global oil production capacity is gone overnight, chaos is within sight.
© Copyright 2019 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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