The September attacks on two Saudi oil refineries were the first truly strategic missile strikes in a very long time. The cruise missiles and drones struck at the heart of the Saudi state by showing how easily Saudi Arabia’s income could be cut, with potentially dangerous consequences for its ability to keep its population contented. The attacks also reminded the Sunni government that many citizens in the country’s oil-producing areas are Shia Muslims who may look to Shia Iran for leadership. The Shia Houthi rebels across the border in Yemen—who claimed responsibility for the attack—are themselves pitted against a Sunni government, and the Saudis presumably are assisting Yemen because the rebellion might otherwise reverberate across the border.
Despite the Houthi claims, it is generally accepted that the attack was prompted—and possibly carried out—by Iran. Like Saudi Arabia, Iran depends on oil sales to support its economy, and U.S. sanctions have hit it hard. Iranian attacks on and seizures of oil tankers appear to be intended to force the United States and Europe to lift sanctions; if Iran is not allowed to sell its oil, then no one else in the Gulf will be, either.
No country in the Middle East, except possibly Israel, is particularly well equipped to deal with the sort of coordinated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attack that caused so much damage at one of the Saudi sites. The kinds of small UAVs used are cheap and widely available, and many can navigate with GPS. The small, slow UAVs were well suited to evading Saudi Arabian pulse-Doppler air-defense radars, which use a target’s speed to pick it out of surrounding noise and tend to filter out slow-moving targets such as100-mph UAVs. The second site, however, was hit by easier-to-detect cruise missiles. The rationale for using different weapons on each target is unclear; the choice may have been based on range or even availability.
No one would welcome a tit-for-tat oil war in the Middle East but, given expanding production elsewhere (including North American shale oil), the main victims would probably be in the region. Governments there likely will move toward a mutual deterrence construct. This would require any victim of an attack to be able to prove publicly and beyond a reasonable doubt who the attacker was. Otherwise, a false-flag operation might catalyze a strategic exchange between rivals, while the camouflaged instigator is left in a particularly favorable position.
The Saudis apparently had no warning of an attack, and no detection system showed definitely where the attacks originated. But it seems clear that debris and unexploded UAVs and missiles are identifiably Iranian. Even so, it would be helpful if the attacks could be shown to have been launched from inside Iran rather than, say, by forces unknown somewhere in the vast empty spaces of the Arabian Peninsula or on a ship at sea.
Saudi Arabia has long invested in conventional air defenses, but clearly it could not defend important assets against low-cost attacks. What could (or should) have been done? Some accounts claim witnesses heard gunfire.
Saudi Arabia possess Oerlikon radar-guided antiaircraft cannons, but how well such guns can pick out a small UAV from surrounding radar clutter is unknown. If acquired, a UAV is not a particularly difficult target to down, because it flies slowly (albeit at low altitude). Short-range surface-to-air missiles can be useful around key facilities, but they require persistent radar threat detection. Against low-flying UAVs and cruise missiles, that typically would require airborne radar. The U.S. Army has tested such a system, the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), which housed a radar on board a tethered airship. It was intended to form part of a U.S. national antimissile system, specifically to deal with low-flying threats, but was canceled in 2017.
The easiest way to locate specific targets in an oil facility precisely enough for a UAV attack would be for someone with a GPS receiver (such as a smartphone) to walk around the facility recording locations. With this data, the attack planner could shape the UAV’s flight to avoid obstacles and approach from the best direction. Flight planning would probably be the most difficult part of the operation, but the necessary software is now widely available.
The most obvious defensive measure would be to jam GPS near vital installations. But the precision navigation and timing (PNT) system has been integrated deeply into the civilian world. The Saudis doubtless find GPS helpful in the deserts, and in the United States, GPS is used in all sorts of applications. It also is a crucial element of the air traffic control system. Widespread intentional jamming would considerably complicate civilian life. And commercial antijam GPS receivers are becoming more widely available, as airlines and general aviation increasingly worry about GPS spoofing.
The irony in all of this is that when GPS was invented, the U.S. military recognized that it might cause problems. GPS initially had two different signals—a precise, encrypted one for military use only and a considerably less precise civilian one. There also were provisions to turn off the civilian signal in wartime. As the Cold War ended, however, the Clinton Administration decided that precision GPS offered such potential for civilian applications that it opened the precision signal to all.
Part of the rationale was that “the end of history” meant precision GPS would not be turned against its creators. Other countries, less optimistic, sought a backup in case the United States did turn off civil access. The French pressed Europe to develop the Galileo PNT system, Russia developed Glonass, and China has begun to deploy its own Beidou PNT system. Galileo is only now being deployed, but the existence of so many systems makes it impossible for the United States to eliminate the sort of high-precision navigation that made the attacks on Saudi Arabia possible.
The strategic attack on Saudi Arabia may have been the first in some time, but it probably won’t be the last.
