Let's just say that Americans representing the
kingdom are making a killing while pushing U.S. jobs
overseas.
By Andrew
Cockburn
September 29, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
The old maxim that “the U.S. government exists to
buy arms at home and sell arms abroad” was
never truer than today. Our defense budget is
soaring to previously undreamed-of heights and
overseas weapons deals are setting new records.
Indeed, the arms sales industry has become so
multi-faceted that while some American corporations
push weapons, other U.S. firms are making money by
acting on behalf of the buyers. Thus
a Lockheed Martin-Raytheon team recently dispatched
to Riyadh to negotiate
the finer points of the ongoing $15 billion deal
for seven Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
batteries jointly manufactured by the two companies,
found themselves
facing not Saudis across the table, but a team of
executives from the Boston Consulting Group.
This behemoth, which
has $7.5 billion in global revenues, is just one of
the firms servicing Mohammed “Bone Saw” Bin Salman’s
vicious and spendthrift consolidation of power in
the kingdom.
For arms dealers
doing business in the kingdom, the most visible
overhaul to date has been the consolidation of
control over Saudi weapons purchases, and all
branches of the armed forces,
in the hands of MBS himself.
Previously,
control in this area had been distributed among
different factions of the ruling family, thus
enabling each to enjoy the financial rewards
(read: kickbacks)
traditionally attendant to such deals. But MBS has
made it his business, in every sense of the word, to
cut out potentially rival middlemen by centralizing
all Saudi defense business under the umbrella of the
General Authority of Military Industries, with
management in the trustworthy (he hopes) hands of
close relatives and henchmen such as Mutlaq bin
Hamad Al Murashid,
the Princeton-trained nuclear engineer charged with
developing the Saudi nuclear program.
The Boston Group
has cultivated a market in advising foreign
governments on arms
buying, promoting the fostering of their own
military-industrial complexes, or, as BCG executives
demurely expressed the strategy in a
2018 paper:
“Unlike the way business was done in the past,
today’s buyers want the defense contractor to invest
in their country’s infrastructure, help develop
their local defense capabilities, and diversify
their economies.”
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
So-called “offset”
agreements have long been a feature
of major weapons export deals in which
the exporter undertakes to award
sub-contracts for the weapon system in
the purchasing country, or else offer
some other quid quo pro in the form of
business or technology transfer.
Their massive expansion in
recent times, as highlighted in
the BCG paper, brings an additional
benefit for all parties involved. But
it comes at a risk of sending U.S.
defense jobs overseas, and opens up
security vulnerabilities, since
sensitive technology is now being shared
with foreign arms manufacturers abroad.
But
the promise of a lucrative offset contract to a
company in which an influential figure on the buy
side has an interest could be a powerful inducement
to swing the decision in a favorable direction, an
elegant solution to pesky prohibitions against
bribery, including the hated 1977
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was inspired
in part by revelations of arms-deals bribes by
Lockheed and others.
As the
well-informed Paris-based security news service
Intelligence Online
delicately puts it:
“One of the reasons for [the success of such
arrangements] is that they are not totally covered
by the transparency criteria governing commission
payments [AKA bribes] which were brought into force
by
OECD convention in 1997.”
(Not, of course, to suggest that BCG itself has base
motivations in facilitating offset deals today.)
Of course, if the Riyadh based BCG office
(“always buzzing with a motivating and inspiring
vibe,” according to the corporate website) had the
true interests of Saudi Arabia at heart, they would
have thrown the THAAD sales force out on their ears.
THAAD is a system distinguished not only by its
enormous cost ($1
billion plus per six-launcher battery), but
also by its total uselessness for the Saudis.
Presumably, the Saudis have been sold on the THAAD
as a defense against Iranian ballistic missiles like
the old Soviet Scud and its various Iranian
upgrades.
As its name suggests, the THAAD aims to
intercept incoming short range or medium range
ballistic missiles arcing down into the top of the
atmosphere 25 to 90 miles up and no further away
than 125 miles. The THAAD’s radar must therefore
“acquire”–spot– the actual missile warhead,
distinguishing it from nearby broken up pieces of
its spent booster rocket or from decoys
deliberately launched with it. The radar must then
track and predict the future trajectory of the
warhead itself, not confusing it with any of the
accompanying bits and pieces. Relying on the radar’s
predictions, the THAAD missile interceptor, once
launched, must quickly accelerate to MACH 8 speed
and guide with absolute precision to hit the target
warhead directly, like a bullet. Near misses won’t
do.
After a series of
early, disastrous failures, the Pentagon is now
touting a fifteen out of fifteen string of
successful THAAD launchings.
Needless to say, not one of these tests has been
against a ballistic missile target accompanied by
booster debris or decoys, much less against half a
dozen of such missiles fired at once.
This alone should be reason enough for the Saudis
to toss the deal, but even if the system could
perform as advertised, it would have been entirely
irrelevant as a defense against the September 14
Houthi attacks on Abqaiq and Kurais. The drones and
cruise missiles employed clearly came in at low
altitude, while THAAD is designed to operate against
high altitude targets. The Patriot and Hawk
batteries already in place are of course no better
suited to confront low altitude threats, which are
inevitably masked by ground clutter.
Even if the
attackers had been obliging enough to send in
ballistic missiles with a high-altitude trajectory,
the THAAD would have offered little succor, since
its infra-red seeker, as noted, cannot distinguish
between actual warheads and decoys. Nor would the
Russian S-400 system cheekily offered by Putin in
the aftermath of the attack have fared better, and
for many of the same reasons.
Such realities
have found little place in the outpouring of
commentary on the attacks, with little or no
attention paid to easily available evidence. For
example, published pictures of the damage at Abqaiq
clearly show a number of liquified natural gas
storage tanks pierced in the same place on their
western sides. As former Pentagon analyst Pierre
Sprey pointed out to me,this clearly shows
that the attacks came from the west, not the north,
as claimed in numerous media reports.
The consistent
accuracy demonstrated by these impact holes
indicates that the terminal guidance was not GPS,
but rather human drone controllers, manually
steering the slow flying drones, via the drones’
video cameras, into the target. For control
purposes they would have to have been in line of
sight to the drones (the only alternative would be
an easily detectable satellite link) so they could
have been no further than 36 miles away at most,
assuming the drones were flying at a likely 300 feet
altitude.
Instead of such
cogent analysis, we have been presented with
unquestioning reports of Saudi “evidence” that the
attacks came directly from Iran in the form of
pictures of an alleged wrecked Iranian drone
discovered somewhere close to the targeted area.
Motivated and
inspired, presumably, by the enormous sums of money
to be made, the Boston Consultants and others
advising the Saudi regime must have little interest
in drawing attention to such tiresome details. There
are arms to be bought and sold, and that is the
whole point, bringing that old maxim, “the U.S.
government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms
abroad,” into a sharper, and yet more twisted,
focus.
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s
Magazine and the author of five nonfiction
books, including Kill Chain: The Rise of the
High-Tech Assassins (2016). He has written for The
New York Times, The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity
Fair, and National Geographic, among
other publications.
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