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Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes
- kache_ 7y agoAl Jazeera >The attacks come as Saudi Arabia, the world's leading crude exporter, steps up preparations for a much-anticipated initial public offering of Aramco. I wonder if this was timed by the rebels, or if there were outside influencers who had a vested interest in this.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoDrone are similiar to the Toyota Hilux is akin to the BMP.
- PorterDuff 7y agoThe 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.
- zdkl 7y agoThe 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.
- PorterDuff 7y agoIt's just one more case where there is a mismatch between offense and defense realities. I'd much rather try to design an anti-carrier missile than design a carrier that was missile proof.
- tdhz77 7y agoThe use of drones in this way by rebels makes me rethink the media image of a rebel. They are educated, lawyers, doctors, engineers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- algaeontoast 7y agoDoes anyone have more info on the specific kind(s) of drone used in the attack?
- avocado4 7y ago(removed)
- capableweb 7y agoI tried quickly to find a source that confirms this since you didn't provide one but I cant find anything. Where did you get "It's Russian / Iranian technology deployed by Russian / Iranian mercenaries" from?
- MiroF 7y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-refineries-drone-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/middleeast/saudi-ar... for the tech claim. The "mercenaries" claim is wrong (at least in Yemen) though.
- capableweb 7y agoSo that link writes: "Iran has supplied drone technology to the Houthis fighting the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, a panel of experts reported in January 2018 to the United Nations Security Council. United Nations investigators say the Houthis have since obtained a more advanced drone than those cited in that report, with a range of 930 miles, The Associated Press reported." So it's not clear if the source of the recent, more advanced drones is the same as the previous ones that the UNSC reported. Or am I missing something else from the article?
- rm999 7y agoNon-WSJ link: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/14/saudi-arabia-is-shutting-down-half-of-its-oil-production-after-drone-attack-wsj-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/14/saudi-arabia-is-shutting-dow...
- eee_honda 7y agoWow, CNBC is really going all out to propagandize here. No mention of Saudi led war on Yemen, which would obviously motivate the Houthi's to attack Aramco (the Houthi's quoted in the article even make reference to the "aggression" of the Saudi Monarchy against Yemenis). Instead, they jump right to Mike Pompeo (on Twitter, no less) denouncing Iran and concluding that there's "no evidence" the Houthis are responsible.... ridiculous.
- fit2rule 7y agoI'm really expecting the 'no evidence' line to come back and bite Pompeo in the ass. I hope someone has the balls to ask him "where's the evidence Iran is behind the attacks - and real evidence this time, not fake national-secrecy bullshit". I won't hold my breath though. I know that America is in the grips of war profiteers who will stop at nothing to get yet another heinous, evil, illegal war started for their profits.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoSo I guess that 5% someone will need to buy from the US? Sounds to me like someone is making things great again...
- AndrewBissell 7y agoHaha, yes, Trump and the Houthi rebels are real tight, the huge arms sales to KSA are just a diversion.
- phkahler 7y agoNo, the 2020 slogan appears to be "keeping" things great.
- aazaa 7y agoAn 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 terrorism, even the threat of loss of key infrastructure can have consequences (e.g, the interest rate a country is forced to pay as risk premium). Also as ub terrorism, the targets are "soft" and therefore difficult to defend. It looks like there's something new here that could serve as a model in other conflicts. The most vulnerable players are those who have put all their economic eggs in one basket.
- AndrewBissell 7y agoI 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, cut off an entire country's food supply with drones in this way. My suspicion is that it won't be too difficult for the Saudis to harden their defenses against this particular kind of attack.
- lapnitnelav 7y agoSA'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."
- reaperducer 7y agoIt's been trying to both diversify and privatize, but progress is very very slow. Probably fear of instability, IMO. "The petroleum sector accounts for roughly 87% of budget revenues, 42% of GDP, and 90% of export earnings." https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sa.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... Anecdotally, I met far more Saudis when I lived in Seattle than I did when I lived in Houston. I wonder if that was part of the diversification effort.
- RocketSyntax 7y agoHas there, will there ever be peace in the middle east? feels wrong to say middle east... arab world... don't want to box them in by religion either.
- salmon30salmon 7y agoJust to educate, “Arab” isn’t a religion, it is an ethnic group. A majority of Arabs are Muslims, which is the religious designation. The Middle East is no more warlike than the west. Remember is only been a couple generations since World War 2, and sectarian violence has been around within the last two decades in the west.
- weberc2 7y agoYou don’t refute “the Middle East is a violent place” with “there has been violence in the west in the last 20 years”. Violence is a spectrum, not a binary, and there is a chasm between the Middle East and the West with respect to how violent each place is. We can find non-racist explanations for the violence disparity without forsaking reason.
- RocketSyntax 7y agohasn't the region been consistently violent compared to the rest of the world for the last 2,000 years?
- weberc2 7y agoI'm not a historian, but I doubt it. My understanding is that the middle east was quite a lot more civilized (for some conventional definition of the term, anyway) than most/all of Europe throughout most of the middle ages. I'm of the impression that the middle east only became appreciably more violent in the last century (oil-related conflicts in the middle east amid rising quality of life all over the world). I'm only speculating though; I'd be interested to hear from someone more knowledgable on the subject.
- 7y ago
- buboard 7y agoThese are some kind of terrorists i can get behind
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JacobiX 7y agoUnfortunately, there is no technical information yet about the type of drones that carried the strikes. Could it be the shahed 129 ?
- lefty2 7y agoNo, it was actually the CX-6057 Flying Egg https://www.amazon.com/WayIn®-CX-6057-Flying-2-4GHz-Control/dp/B01828KFDS/ https://www.amazon.com/WayIn®-CX-6057-Flying-2-4GHz-Control/...
- mrnobody_67 7y agoPlaying out as Naval Ravikant predicted on the After-on podcast: https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/044 https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/044 Eventually cheap drones, anonymous assassination markets, etc. will make commercial flying a thing of the past. Written summary of podcast - https://podcastnotes.org/2019/03/20/after-on-naval-01/ https://podcastnotes.org/2019/03/20/after-on-naval-01/
- badfutureahead 7y agoToday it's basically a week-long project to train a neural network to fly towards a jet engine in a 3D simulation. Then you just need to hook that to the drone control software. No amount of jamming helps you here, this is radio control off, GPS off, entirely visual "guided missile" approach. And this approach scales, with 20 drones, 2 drones assigned to each engine, you can engage 5 taking off planes in a row off a busy airport. And you can pick the direction which will make the planes crash in the nearby city. With a "hire people to do stuff for bitcoin" project (there are several) you can prepare this in a bunch of countries (you just tell them you need some drones setup for an aerial shooting/light show or something). The future is scary.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vhold 7y agoI imagine the countermeasure will be cameras with computer vision controlling microwave lasers.
- sharpneli 7y agoThis is bit on a tangent but it’s bit amusing. The term for that is maser. That term came before laser which was derived from it. And now we have come the full circle and are calling masers microwave lasers instead of lasers ”maser but for visible light”
- barnabee 7y ago
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoDefense Digital Services has a project working on defense of this kind of stuff If you're into that sort of thing, you should go check them out as they're hiring a lot of folks
- carlsborg 7y agoDo the big CL option MMs keep positions open over the weekend?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peter303 7y agoEnvironmentalists say they might shut down Heathrow airport with drones because they dont like new construction. They would announce an hour in advance such a demonstration. Authorities warn of severe prison sentences if they catch some doing this.
- tedivm 7y agoThat's a little different- they just want to fly drones around, not blow things up.
- badfutureahead 7y agoAlready done, 19 arrested, and it's a climate change protest: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49696973 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49696973
- peter303 7y agoTrump may be secretly transferring unspecified nuclear technology to Saudis. (Jared goes there often) There is a meeting about this next week. The cover story for this is that Saudi would like to diversify their energy production. Some people fear this includes weapons technology. https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-campaign-to-export-us-nuclear-tech-to-saudi-arabia https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-campaign-to-...
- jrnichols 7y agoWhat concerns me (but doesn't surprise me) is seeing the news about how Wall Street will handle this, and the immediate assumption that oil prices will spike rapidly when trading begins on Monday.
- age_bronze 7y agoMake no mistake: these aren't rebel, this is Iran, trying to force the world to buy oil from her by terrorizing the competition.
- riazrizvi 7y agoJohn Bolton is fired and oil drops 2% as hopes for war and restricted oil supply fade for the worlds exporters. A week later we get drone strikes against Saudi Arabia by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. It’s like Jeff Goldblum once said, ‘Nature finds a way’.
- yyyk 7y agoDidn't anyone look at the map? The drone strikes have nothing to do with the Houthis, they don't have the range. This is a purely Iranian operation with obvious motives - control oil supply from ME. This adventurism is going to lead into a huge war which will be bad for anyone in the region. Perhaps that can't be stopped now.
- tyingq 7y agoFrom a WaPo story: "U.N. investigators said the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500 kilometers (930 miles). That puts the far reaches of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE in range." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/saudi-tv-channel-fire-at-aramco-facility-no-cause-given/2019/09/13/6f419234-d69e-11e9-8924-1db7dac797fb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/saudi-tv-ch...
- yyyk 7y agoWell, if one believes their 'taking of responsibility', of course you believe they have the flight range, which means you assigned 'their' drones a flight range, which is then picked up to 'explain' it. If you apply a more realistic standard (no actual evidence including footage, no way to guide it, no facilities in Yemen to even test it), it's obvious this is an operation by a state, and only Iran can fit the bill.
- tyingq 7y agoThe UN investigator's range estimate is from May. https://www.apnews.com/18f9c169f398464ba53c19e3963d3fba https://www.apnews.com/18f9c169f398464ba53c19e3963d3fba
- yyyk 7y agoThe UN 'investigator' never examined a model, but simply repeated news reports about the previous time the Houthis claimed an attack. That's exactly what I said: * (A) believes the Houthi claims. * Ergo argues they have drone X. * People repeat they have drone X based on (A), despite the only actual source being the Houthis themselves.
- justinzollars 7y agoFill up your gas tanks.
- trhway 7y agoOne of the side effects of Russia's maintaining of the official decorum of non-involvement ("little green men" of unknown origin in Crimea, and the whole tank battalions taking their tanks on voluntary vacation to Donbass :) in similar situation in Ukraine was avoiding opening themselves to the risk of otherwise legitimate counter-strike by Ukraine and scaling up of the war. Saudis seems to have forgo such risk in favor of full military power they can apply in the open war. Nothing helps a regime popularity better than a quick victorious war ... until counter strikes hit deep home where it really hurts, like the Saudi oil fields in this case. Reminds about the Berlin bombing that USSR did several months after the start of the war in 1941 - the almost unstoppable, at the moment, German forces were already deep in the USSR territory with the Moscow and the glorious relatively quick and easy victory pretty much already in sight, the Germans had full air superiority, and reaching Berlin from the yet unoccupied USSR territories was on the edge of USSR bombers capabilities. 11 bombers took part in the raid. The actual damage to Berlin, if any, was minimal, yet the psychological impact was huge on the both sides. ( US have the similar story of bombing of Tokyo in 1942 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid)
- cheaprentalyeti 7y agoThe Houthi are Iran's "Little Green Men," in the same way as you say the Donbasses in Eastern Ukraine were Russia's. Heck, Iran and Russia are allies, and each other's "little green men" in this conflict, where the objective is to boost your economy by wrecking your competitor's ability to produce or ship to market.
- SergeAx 7y agoCommercially available drones are easily detectable ("a week project", as said before) and very fragile. I believe automatic anti-drone systems are now months from being deployed worldwide. It is not even necessary to be very powerful: something like airsoft gun gonna be enough.
- WhoBeI 7y agoI don't think it's that easy.. There's numbers.. Systems using missiles can be zerged with disposable decoy drones until they have no ammo or tricked if using thermal tracking. Gun based ones can have a hard time tracking/predicting if the drones randomize movement around their attack vector and/or randomize speed. The environment and the approach will matter as well. They come in low, tracing the terrain or snaking through it, will make keeping lock hard. What if it's rush hours and they come in just above car height along a crowded street. Then, of course, you can just have them semi-adapt. If they see a bunch of explosions in the air around them maybe switch to pre-programmed mission #2? Defending against drone swarms is going to be tricky. Here they only had a few low tech ones and had a significant impact. I wonder how one would go about designing a system that should go for a target but be in no rush to get there though..
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- microcolonel 7y agoThough of course at that point you might as well just use artillery.
- snovv_crash 7y agoFor multirotor, sure. Fixed wing is more robust though.
- humble_engineer 7y agoYou're a bigot.