New understanding of air superiority
BIG shifts in the military balance happen quietly over many years, and then leap suddenly into focus when the shooting starts.
It happened to classic blitzkrieg tactics in the ArabIsraeli war of 1973, when both sides lost half their tanks, mostly to cheap, infantryfired antitank missiles, in just three weeks. And it happened to ‘‘air superiority’’, in the sense that it has been understood for the past 75 years, in Saudi Arabia last week.
Tanks ruled the battlefield from the German blitzkrieg of 1940 until 1973. Only more or better tanks could stop them. Tanks have got a lot more sophisticated since 1973, but so have the antitank weapons, which are a lot cheaper and therefore a lot more plentiful. There is no longer a single, simple equation for battlefield success.
Air superiority, the other main component of blitzkrieg, had a much longer run of success.
The powers that could afford to design and build the most advanced combat aircraft controlled not only the sky but the land beneath it, and could batter weaker states into submission (Nato against
Serbia, the US twice against Iraq, Nato again in Libya, etc) with few casualties of their own.
Fast forward to September 2019 in Saudi Arabia. The oilrich kingdom should be among the privileged, invulnerable few, for it has a very hightech air force and the best air defences money can buy.
It can also call on the immense power of the United States, which maintains military bases in the Gulf states and has promised to protect it. What could possibly go wrong?
What went wrong was a swarm of cheap drones and cruise missiles that the Saudis did not even see coming. According to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who claim to have launched them, there were at least 10 Samad 3 drones (the Saudis say 18 drones hit the Abqaiq oil processing site) and an undisclosed number of Qasif K2 cruise missiles (the Saudis say four cruise missiles struck the Khurais facility).
The Saudis did not see them because they flew nap of the earth, so low they were hidden from Saudi radars.
They were launched from three different sites, but timed to reach their targets simultaneously from three different angles. They disabled half the oilprocessing capability of the world’s secondbiggest producer for at least some weeks — and the whole swarm of them only cost one or two million dollars.
That’s assuming they were built in lowwage Yemen.
They’d cost twice that to build in Iran, and at least 10 times as much in the United States. But that’s still pretty cheap when you consider that a single F35 fighter costs $US122 million ($NZ194 million). You get a very capable aircraft for your money, and a couple of them could do equal damage to those oil processing facilities — but they wouldn’t do a much better job.
They could also get shot down, which would be a very large amount of money (plus maybe the pilots’ lives) down the drain. The drones and cruise missiles can also be shot down, of course, but they’re cheap, they have no pilots, and if there are enough of them, some are likely to get through. If they don’t get through today, send more tomorrow.
The Saudis made it extraeasy for the Houthis (or the Iranians, if you believe the SaudiAmerican version of the story) by not having any shortrange air defences for their most important economic assets, or at least none facing in the right direction.
But this is because Saudi Arabia doesn’t plan to do its own fighting in any confrontation with Iran.
Saudi Arabia’s defence budget ($US67.6 billion last year) goes mostly on buying very expensive military equipment from the United States, but what it is really buying is American military support. In return for all that money, the Kingdom expects Americans to do the actual fighting for it, just as it hires Sudanese and Pakistanis to do the ground combat in its war in Yemen.
The Saudis shouldn’t count on that. Donald Trump knows nothing about foreign affairs or military strategy, but this is the sort of deal he has spent a lifetime imposing on others. He’ll make the sales, but he won’t deliver the services.
The big question that is finally going to be asked, in countries rich and poor, is why the air forces insist on buying ultraexpensive manned aircraft instead of flocks, swarms and fleets of small, cheap, disposable unmanned vehicles. The truth is that air forces are run by pilots, and they like to fly planes, but what happened in Saudi Arabia last week will finally give the civilian authorities arguments that the aviators cannot resist or ignore.
So the shift to primary reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for offensive action will get under way at last, and the result will be the democratisation of air power. Only rich countries with a mastery of high technology can own F35s. Even the smallest, poorest country (and some nonstate actors too) can afford to build or buy a few thousand drones and a couple of hundred basic cruise missiles.
Democratisation is a doubleedged sword.