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Costly and unproductive arms race in Saudi Arabia
HOW TO RESPOND TO IRAN'S CHALLENGE ?
EAST XXI > MAGAZINE > MARC-CHER LEPARRAIN > JUNE 30, 2016
While Westerners denounce the development of the Iranian missile program, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a race for costly and inefficient arms to meet regional challenges.
DR
Regularly, Iran conducting ballistic missile tests.Latest gear concerned with a range of about 1500 km. Such weapons have a strategic dimension.Launched from Iran, they can theoretically reach all over the Bosphorus to the north of India, the Red Sea to the Aral Sea. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stressed that their development is at defensive purpose: " Those who say that the future is in negotiations and not in missile are ignorant or traitors [...] If the Islamic Republic wants to negotiate without defensive power then it will be brought to bow to threats of all weak countries " Khamenei says missiles, not just talks, key to (...)" id="nh1" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">1 . A professor of Tehran University said in an interview with Al Jazeera Khamenei says 'missile and talk' crucial for Iran " aljazeera.com, 30 March (...)" id="nh2" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">2 that Iran needs to keep a " strong missile deterrence " against external threats, and that " the only reason in recent decades nobody has dared to tackle the country is that it has the ability to defend itself " .
These missile tests provoke the ire of the West and its regional allies accuse Iran of violating UN Resolution 2231 Security Council ( UNSC ) of 20 July 2015 following the nuclear agreement between the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of theUNSC plus Germany) and Iran. These complaints are accompanied US new targeted economic sanctions against companies or individuals allegedly linked to Iran's ballistic missile program. The resolution stipulates that " Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology " .
In response, Tehran claims that, firstly, these missiles are not designed to carry a nuclear warhead and that, secondly, nothing concerns ballistic missiles in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Plan Joint Action) concluded July 14, 2015 with the P5 + 1 in Vienna. It is a fact that their disclosure exists only in the 2231 resolution of the UNSC , which intended to endorse the entire plan and ensure its implementation, adds additional conditions, which include the issue of ballistic missiles, " to improve transparency and create conditions conducive to the full implementation of the Action Plan ' 3 . In August 2015, President Hassan Rohani himself has insisted that any violation of the 2231 resolution did not mean for this reason that the Joint Action Plan Iran openly declares that it intends to violate resolution 2231 (...)" id="nh4" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">4 : " there is nothing on the subject of missile defense, and weapons in the Joint Action Plan. All that is on these questions in the 2231 resolution, and we specified in the Joint Action Plan that the violation of a resolution does not mean the violation of the plan ... "
Iran's ability to develop certain military use advanced technologies raises the fear among others Israel and Saudi Arabia. Nuclear power is the prime example, and limiting the scope of its applications only civilian area has been the subject of recent negotiations to lead to the Joint Action Plan. This indigenous scientific capacity notoriously distinguishes Iran from its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula. The difficulties caused by the international embargo imposed on that country for a long time - not counting bloodletting of the war that had declared him Iraq (1980-1988) - have pushed to boost its own capacity for knowledge, served by large and well-trained human resources.
WEAPONRY PURCHASED FOR GOLD
Lack of qualified personnel or because of the extreme numerical weakness of their national populations, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies are still heavily dependent expertise of foreign labor to implement and maintain civilian and military installations. In presenting his April 25 very ambitious plan for reform of the Saudi economy, entitled Vision 2030, of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman said: " Our true wealth lies in the ambition of our people and the potential of our youth . " However, a human resource mastering modern technologies, their organization and their administration is not built in a few years.This is the culmination of a long process that societal attitudes and habits prevalent in the Gulf monarchies have not encouraged, or not enough.This is reflected in the military field in which Saudi Arabia, even more than its peers in the Gulf Cooperation Council ( GCC ) yet swallowed huge sums for decades to acquire armaments and equipment of the art , without reaching use of effective and coordinated manner. His military confrontation more laborious than the end of 2009 against the Yemeni Houthi and the current one since March 2015 against the same Houthi demonstrate the low operational level of the Saudi army, yet with the ultimate of weapons purchased at prices Golden.
The budgets allocated by the Gulf monarchies to military aircraft indeed reach the summits, especially Saudi Arabia, despite the drastic decrease in revenues of these States due to the fall in oil prices on the world market. In 2015, according to theStockholm International Peace Research Institute , the Saudi monarchy has spent nearly 90 billion dollars for defense, which represented the third largest budget in the field, behind the United States and China and ahead of Russia . In 2013 and 2014, Saudi Arabia held fourth place in the rankings, behind Russia. In 2012 and the previous few years, it was " that " in sixth place behind the United Kingdom and France.
In comparison, military spending of Iran are disproportionate and seem stable. Four times lower than that of Riyadh in 2005, the budget that Tehran dedicated to his defense was nine times lower in 2015.
Source: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, June 2016
DISSUASIVE STRATEGY OF IRAN
If these figures are estimates - generally low, as budgets actually spent on defense and security are almost impossible to get precisely for these countries - the trend and magnitude are nevertheless indicative of a state of fact. The arms embargo imposed on Iran has certainly prevented from acquiring new weapons that can not manufacture.The air defense missile contract S300 past with Russia, enabling it to modernize part of its protection against outside air or ballistic attacks. For the rest, be it air weapons, land or sea from the army or Revolutionary Guards, the obsolescence of materials including still many date from the time of the Shah gives Iran a military capability technically lower than counterparts on the opposite bank of the Gulf - assuming that they know effectively use what they have. The few arms that Iran has recently designed and developed, often at the prototype stage, can bridge the qualitative deficit technologically from what monarchies purchased by the GCC mainly in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
As ballistic missile tests which regularly conducts Iran do they fit more in a demonstration deterrent strategy. Despite ranting political goal to get out of the double-Persian Shiite ghetto in which is enclosed Iran vis-à-vis a mostly Sunni Arab world, the Islamic Republic has never seriously considered military action to the " destruction " of Israel, and did not intend. Jacques Chirac did not say anything when he declared in 2007 (at the time raising a strong controversy) about the dangers of playing possession by Iran of nuclear bomb: " I would say it is not so dangerous by the fact of having a nuclear bomb [...] But what is dangerous is proliferation. [...] The danger is not in the bomb it will have, and which will serve him for nothing ... It will send where, this bomb ? On Israel ? She will not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed " Jacques Chirac minimise la menace d’une bombe nucléaire (...)" id="nh5" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">5 . Jacques Chirac minimizes the threat of a nuclear bomb (...)" id="nh5" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">
EXIST AGAINST THE US-SAUDI ALLIANCE
The new statements on May 19, an official body of the Revolutionary Guards on the ability to " shave the Zionist regime in eight minutes " if the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered it are and will remain pure political rhetoric. The positioning as a champion of the Palestinian cause transcending ethnic and religious differences - particularly via Hezbollah or Hamas - is more consistent with the use of this question for purposes of political existence, failing hegemony in a region still dominated by the US-Saudi alliance. Similarly the regime tries he to win against Saudi Arabia by capitalizing more on the weaknesses of the monarchy and the consequences of military adventurism of the United States in the region .Especially in Iraq, where Iran immediately occupied the void created by the exclusion of Sunni power in Baghdad by supporting very actively governments dominated by the Shia majority in this country, and their denominational policies.
The only concrete military actions never performed against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies back to the period 1980-1988, as against attacks against maritime traffic in recent during the war launched by Saddam Hussein, with the blessing and active support of both the GCC that the United States or the West in general, against the nascent Islamic Republic. Since the permanent implementation highlight the Iranian threat, " rogue state " in the heart of the " axis of evil " dear to George Walker Bush is very convenient. It allows among others the United States to justify the installation of a missile shield in eastern flank and southeast of the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty ( NATO ) against Russia, officially intended to intercept ballistic missiles that could come from Iran.
A MONARCHY AND AN INEFFECTIVE ARMY
Number of events in the Middle East against the interests of the Saudi monarchy are opportunities to denounce the actions of the " hydra " Iran, although Tehran is not the author. Thus the uprising in 2011 in the mainly Shiite population of Bahrain against the Sunni monarchy in power in this country.Similarly, the coup in Yemen's Zaydi movement led by Abdelmalek al-Houthi he was denounced by Riyadh as an attempt by Tehran to take the southern flank control of the Arabian Peninsula to lay out the " arc Shia "that already encircles the kingdom to the north and east. Yet this " Shia arc " is more a result of the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 than any deliberate strategy on the part of Iran. This notion also removes a reality, that of sympathies between Iranian and Iraqi Shiites for example, which is not the simplistic caricature image tends to present the political equation advocated by Riyadh: Shiite pro-Iranian = = Iran, when not Sunni Muslim = not Iran, as is the case of Yemeni Zaydi that although they come from a branch of Shiism are closer to the Shafi'i Sunnism that the Twelver Shiism of the Iranian mullahs.
In reality, the main scope of practice which operates in Iran is that of asymmetrical confrontation and unconventional, often through interposed third actors, state or not, as in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.This reality, which leads the Saudi side to denounce the hand of Tehran behind every act of regional actors contrary to its interests, is more difficult to counter a conventional military threat. No army, as well equipped as it is, is not effective in this setting.In addition, it is clear that in this area, the Saudi monarchy is fairly ineffective or is itself targeted by Sunni Salafi movement she looked a time with a benevolent neutrality, if not favored underhand to Occasionally, insofar as they are fighting the Shiite political entities in the region.
The stacking of arms is a futile process if a failure is shown to effectively use them independently. The credibility of Saudi Arabia suffers. The sharp deterioration of the regional situation, the accumulation of disagreements with the United States, fear of Iranian hegemony, fear for the survival of his seat after the 2011 sociopolitical shocks pushed the monarchy to be taken to first time in its history as cascading initiatives ostentatious as provocative - that the arms race is not the least - to openly blackmail the UN who recently wanted to denounce war crimes in Yemen United Nations Chief Exposes Limits to His Authority by (...)" id="nh6" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">6 . All initiatives, specifically, merely add the voltage tensions and war to war.
Google translation
http://orientxxi.info/magazine/couteuse-et-sterile-course-aux-armements-en-arabie-saoudite,1386
HOW TO RESPOND TO IRAN'S CHALLENGE ?
EAST XXI > MAGAZINE > MARC-CHER LEPARRAIN > JUNE 30, 2016
While Westerners denounce the development of the Iranian missile program, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a race for costly and inefficient arms to meet regional challenges.
DR
Regularly, Iran conducting ballistic missile tests.Latest gear concerned with a range of about 1500 km. Such weapons have a strategic dimension.Launched from Iran, they can theoretically reach all over the Bosphorus to the north of India, the Red Sea to the Aral Sea. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stressed that their development is at defensive purpose: " Those who say that the future is in negotiations and not in missile are ignorant or traitors [...] If the Islamic Republic wants to negotiate without defensive power then it will be brought to bow to threats of all weak countries " Khamenei says missiles, not just talks, key to (...)" id="nh1" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">1 . A professor of Tehran University said in an interview with Al Jazeera Khamenei says 'missile and talk' crucial for Iran " aljazeera.com, 30 March (...)" id="nh2" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">2 that Iran needs to keep a " strong missile deterrence " against external threats, and that " the only reason in recent decades nobody has dared to tackle the country is that it has the ability to defend itself " .
These missile tests provoke the ire of the West and its regional allies accuse Iran of violating UN Resolution 2231 Security Council ( UNSC ) of 20 July 2015 following the nuclear agreement between the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of theUNSC plus Germany) and Iran. These complaints are accompanied US new targeted economic sanctions against companies or individuals allegedly linked to Iran's ballistic missile program. The resolution stipulates that " Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology " .
In response, Tehran claims that, firstly, these missiles are not designed to carry a nuclear warhead and that, secondly, nothing concerns ballistic missiles in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Plan Joint Action) concluded July 14, 2015 with the P5 + 1 in Vienna. It is a fact that their disclosure exists only in the 2231 resolution of the UNSC , which intended to endorse the entire plan and ensure its implementation, adds additional conditions, which include the issue of ballistic missiles, " to improve transparency and create conditions conducive to the full implementation of the Action Plan ' 3 . In August 2015, President Hassan Rohani himself has insisted that any violation of the 2231 resolution did not mean for this reason that the Joint Action Plan Iran openly declares that it intends to violate resolution 2231 (...)" id="nh4" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">4 : " there is nothing on the subject of missile defense, and weapons in the Joint Action Plan. All that is on these questions in the 2231 resolution, and we specified in the Joint Action Plan that the violation of a resolution does not mean the violation of the plan ... "
Iran's ability to develop certain military use advanced technologies raises the fear among others Israel and Saudi Arabia. Nuclear power is the prime example, and limiting the scope of its applications only civilian area has been the subject of recent negotiations to lead to the Joint Action Plan. This indigenous scientific capacity notoriously distinguishes Iran from its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula. The difficulties caused by the international embargo imposed on that country for a long time - not counting bloodletting of the war that had declared him Iraq (1980-1988) - have pushed to boost its own capacity for knowledge, served by large and well-trained human resources.
WEAPONRY PURCHASED FOR GOLD
Lack of qualified personnel or because of the extreme numerical weakness of their national populations, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies are still heavily dependent expertise of foreign labor to implement and maintain civilian and military installations. In presenting his April 25 very ambitious plan for reform of the Saudi economy, entitled Vision 2030, of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman said: " Our true wealth lies in the ambition of our people and the potential of our youth . " However, a human resource mastering modern technologies, their organization and their administration is not built in a few years.This is the culmination of a long process that societal attitudes and habits prevalent in the Gulf monarchies have not encouraged, or not enough.This is reflected in the military field in which Saudi Arabia, even more than its peers in the Gulf Cooperation Council ( GCC ) yet swallowed huge sums for decades to acquire armaments and equipment of the art , without reaching use of effective and coordinated manner. His military confrontation more laborious than the end of 2009 against the Yemeni Houthi and the current one since March 2015 against the same Houthi demonstrate the low operational level of the Saudi army, yet with the ultimate of weapons purchased at prices Golden.
The budgets allocated by the Gulf monarchies to military aircraft indeed reach the summits, especially Saudi Arabia, despite the drastic decrease in revenues of these States due to the fall in oil prices on the world market. In 2015, according to theStockholm International Peace Research Institute , the Saudi monarchy has spent nearly 90 billion dollars for defense, which represented the third largest budget in the field, behind the United States and China and ahead of Russia . In 2013 and 2014, Saudi Arabia held fourth place in the rankings, behind Russia. In 2012 and the previous few years, it was " that " in sixth place behind the United Kingdom and France.
In comparison, military spending of Iran are disproportionate and seem stable. Four times lower than that of Riyadh in 2005, the budget that Tehran dedicated to his defense was nine times lower in 2015.
Source: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, June 2016
DISSUASIVE STRATEGY OF IRAN
If these figures are estimates - generally low, as budgets actually spent on defense and security are almost impossible to get precisely for these countries - the trend and magnitude are nevertheless indicative of a state of fact. The arms embargo imposed on Iran has certainly prevented from acquiring new weapons that can not manufacture.The air defense missile contract S300 past with Russia, enabling it to modernize part of its protection against outside air or ballistic attacks. For the rest, be it air weapons, land or sea from the army or Revolutionary Guards, the obsolescence of materials including still many date from the time of the Shah gives Iran a military capability technically lower than counterparts on the opposite bank of the Gulf - assuming that they know effectively use what they have. The few arms that Iran has recently designed and developed, often at the prototype stage, can bridge the qualitative deficit technologically from what monarchies purchased by the GCC mainly in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
As ballistic missile tests which regularly conducts Iran do they fit more in a demonstration deterrent strategy. Despite ranting political goal to get out of the double-Persian Shiite ghetto in which is enclosed Iran vis-à-vis a mostly Sunni Arab world, the Islamic Republic has never seriously considered military action to the " destruction " of Israel, and did not intend. Jacques Chirac did not say anything when he declared in 2007 (at the time raising a strong controversy) about the dangers of playing possession by Iran of nuclear bomb: " I would say it is not so dangerous by the fact of having a nuclear bomb [...] But what is dangerous is proliferation. [...] The danger is not in the bomb it will have, and which will serve him for nothing ... It will send where, this bomb ? On Israel ? She will not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed " Jacques Chirac minimise la menace d’une bombe nucléaire (...)" id="nh5" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">5 . Jacques Chirac minimizes the threat of a nuclear bomb (...)" id="nh5" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">
EXIST AGAINST THE US-SAUDI ALLIANCE
The new statements on May 19, an official body of the Revolutionary Guards on the ability to " shave the Zionist regime in eight minutes " if the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered it are and will remain pure political rhetoric. The positioning as a champion of the Palestinian cause transcending ethnic and religious differences - particularly via Hezbollah or Hamas - is more consistent with the use of this question for purposes of political existence, failing hegemony in a region still dominated by the US-Saudi alliance. Similarly the regime tries he to win against Saudi Arabia by capitalizing more on the weaknesses of the monarchy and the consequences of military adventurism of the United States in the region .Especially in Iraq, where Iran immediately occupied the void created by the exclusion of Sunni power in Baghdad by supporting very actively governments dominated by the Shia majority in this country, and their denominational policies.
The only concrete military actions never performed against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies back to the period 1980-1988, as against attacks against maritime traffic in recent during the war launched by Saddam Hussein, with the blessing and active support of both the GCC that the United States or the West in general, against the nascent Islamic Republic. Since the permanent implementation highlight the Iranian threat, " rogue state " in the heart of the " axis of evil " dear to George Walker Bush is very convenient. It allows among others the United States to justify the installation of a missile shield in eastern flank and southeast of the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty ( NATO ) against Russia, officially intended to intercept ballistic missiles that could come from Iran.
A MONARCHY AND AN INEFFECTIVE ARMY
Number of events in the Middle East against the interests of the Saudi monarchy are opportunities to denounce the actions of the " hydra " Iran, although Tehran is not the author. Thus the uprising in 2011 in the mainly Shiite population of Bahrain against the Sunni monarchy in power in this country.Similarly, the coup in Yemen's Zaydi movement led by Abdelmalek al-Houthi he was denounced by Riyadh as an attempt by Tehran to take the southern flank control of the Arabian Peninsula to lay out the " arc Shia "that already encircles the kingdom to the north and east. Yet this " Shia arc " is more a result of the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 than any deliberate strategy on the part of Iran. This notion also removes a reality, that of sympathies between Iranian and Iraqi Shiites for example, which is not the simplistic caricature image tends to present the political equation advocated by Riyadh: Shiite pro-Iranian = = Iran, when not Sunni Muslim = not Iran, as is the case of Yemeni Zaydi that although they come from a branch of Shiism are closer to the Shafi'i Sunnism that the Twelver Shiism of the Iranian mullahs.
In reality, the main scope of practice which operates in Iran is that of asymmetrical confrontation and unconventional, often through interposed third actors, state or not, as in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.This reality, which leads the Saudi side to denounce the hand of Tehran behind every act of regional actors contrary to its interests, is more difficult to counter a conventional military threat. No army, as well equipped as it is, is not effective in this setting.In addition, it is clear that in this area, the Saudi monarchy is fairly ineffective or is itself targeted by Sunni Salafi movement she looked a time with a benevolent neutrality, if not favored underhand to Occasionally, insofar as they are fighting the Shiite political entities in the region.
The stacking of arms is a futile process if a failure is shown to effectively use them independently. The credibility of Saudi Arabia suffers. The sharp deterioration of the regional situation, the accumulation of disagreements with the United States, fear of Iranian hegemony, fear for the survival of his seat after the 2011 sociopolitical shocks pushed the monarchy to be taken to first time in its history as cascading initiatives ostentatious as provocative - that the arms race is not the least - to openly blackmail the UN who recently wanted to denounce war crimes in Yemen United Nations Chief Exposes Limits to His Authority by (...)" id="nh6" style="color: rgb(26, 64, 161); font-weight: 400;">6 . All initiatives, specifically, merely add the voltage tensions and war to war.
Google translation
http://orientxxi.info/magazine/couteuse-et-sterile-course-aux-armements-en-arabie-saoudite,1386
