El sistema de defensa saudí no pudo proteger un activo preciado: sus instalaciones petroleras. Un ataque de misiles y drones de bajo vuelo causó un aumento significativo en los precios del petróleo crudo en el mundo. Los ataques a la planta de procesamiento de petróleo de Abqaiq y al campo petrolero de Khurais pusieron de relieve un problema estratégico. Si bien los militares dicen que es imposible proteger por completo los objetivos fijos, como los campos petroleros, de todos los ataques aéreos sobre un área grande.
WASHINGTON — For the past half-century, the United States has trained and supplied the Saudi military, selling the wealthy kingdom more than $150 billion in dazzling high-technology weapons, including fighter jets and air defense systems.
And yet, the kingdom could not protect a prized national asset — its oil installations — from a recent attack by low-flying cruise missiles and drones that caused the largest rise in crude oil prices in a single day. The advanced weapons the United States sold to the Saudis include the Patriot air-defense system, but it is deployed near important military installations, and not oil infrastructure.
Nor has the country’s military managed to defeat Iranian-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen, despite a four-year, Saudi-led bombing campaign that has left more than 8,500 civilians dead and more than 9,600 injured, according to international monitors.
Even with American intelligence providing the latest in surveillance, the Saudi military has often been unable to act effectively, reinforcing a view among national security officials and humanitarian activists that — despite all the sparkling, expensive hardware — Saudi Arabia remains uninterested or incapable of defending its entire territory or competently and humanely prosecuting a war abroad.
During one episode three years ago, American intelligence officials gave their Saudi counterparts the location of 30 Houthi insurgents who had crossed the border and entered the kingdom. But the Saudis were unable to muster anyone to go after them, according to a former senior Defense Department official. The insurgents stayed in Saudi territory for eight hours — a period that included an extended rest break — all the while tracked by American intelligence before returning to Yemen, officials said.
To be sure, Saudi Arabia is an important American ally in the Arab world and a key bulwark against Iran. President Trump has praised the relationship while defending the kingdom’s leadership after the murder last year of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.
Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump noted, is an important trading partner of the United States. “They spend $400 to $450 billion over a period of time, all money, all jobs, buying equipment,” the president said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in June. “I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them.’”
“Who doesn’t love a fancy jet?” asked Becca Wasser, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a policy research institution. “For the Saudi military, it’s been about having prestige items, having a glitter force, without having the skill of being an effective military force.”
Fuente: https://www.nytimes.com
