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| Abqaiq refinery is burning |
No matter who was behind the attack on Saudi Arabia's oil installations, what is quite clear is that billions of dollars of military purchases from the US and the UK by the Saudis were unable to prevent such an attack.
I found Abdus-Sattar Ghazali's comments on this issue interesting.
The Journal of America
With $295 billion 2019 defence budget, Saudi Arabia failed to stop a drone attack on its oil installations from the Yemeni rebel ragtag militia.
Drones launched by Yemen's Houthi rebels attacked the world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and another major oil field, sparking huge fires.
The facilities are operated by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant, and produce up to 70% of the country's crude oil output.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting "people familiar with the matter," reported that Saudi Arabia is shutting down about half of its oil output following the strikes. The shutdown would amount to a loss of about 5 million barrels a day or roughly 5% of the world's daily production of crude oil, the Journal said.
The attack by the Houthis in the war against a US-backed and Saudi-led coalition comes after weeks of similar drone assaults on the kingdom's oil infrastructure, but none of the earlier strikes appeared to have caused the same amount of damage.
While the Houthis do not have significant financial resources, the drones have given them a way to hurt Saudi Arabia, which was the world's third-highest spender on military equipment in 2018, investing an estimated $67.6 billion on arms, the New York Times said.
"This has given the Saudis a challenge they can't confront, no matter what their financial, military or intelligence capabilities are," Farea Al-Muslimi, co-founder of the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies, which focuses on Yemen, was quoted as saying.
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