In yet another sign that President Biden has thoroughly abandoned and effectively renounced his pledge to make Saudi Arabia a pariah, the Biden administration reportedly plans to open up a new U.S. military testing facility in Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. military command responsible for the Middle East and Iran is developing plans to open a new military testing facility in Saudi Arabia, according to three U.S. defense officials familiar with the plans.
The facility will test new technologies to combat the growing threat from unmanned drones, and it will develop and test integrated air and missile defense capabilities. Early planning by Central Command, or CENTCOM, includes calling the facility the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center, drawing a parallel to the White Sands Missile Range, the U.S. military testing facility for extended-range missiles in New Mexico.
While the location has not yet been finalized, the officials said Saudi Arabia makes the most sense because it has large open spaces owned by the government and the ability to test various methods of electronic warfare, like signal-jamming and directed energy, without interfering with nearby population centers.
…Early planning by Central Command, or CENTCOM, includes calling the facility the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center, drawing a parallel to the White Sands Missile Range, the U.S. military testing facility for extended-range missiles in New Mexico.
Beyond the fist-bump, we’re not just not making Saudi Arabia a pariah, we’re opening up a new U.S. base over there.
Those of us cursed with long memories will remember U.S. forces deploying to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, because of concerns that the Iraqi army could move further south and seize some Saudi oil fields. After the coalition kicked the Iraqi army back into its own territory in 1991, U.S. troops remained in Saudi Arabia for years afterwards, and this caused some controversy in the Muslim world. In fact, in 1995, one irate Saudi citizen wrote an open letter to King Fahd:
Do not we have the right to question the objective for allowing them to remain on the land of the two Great Mosques with all their staggering numbers and equipment? Does Iraq still pose a real danger to your throne after the destruction of its army and the starvation of its Muslim people? All facts tend to prove otherwise and emphasize that the danger these forces are stationed here to deter is not an illusive peril from a starved and destroyed Iraq but, as the experts suggest, from the Islamic danger on the inside since the kingdom is witnessing a blessed and heightened Islamic awakening in all the military and civilian sectors.
That irate Saudi citizen was… Osama bin Laden.
The point is not that the U.S. should not refrain from deploying military personnel on Saudi soil because Islamist maniacs like Osama bin Laden have a problem with it. The overwhelming majority of U.S. troops left Saudi Arabia by 2005, with a few hundred at any given time remaining for training operations with their Saudi counterparts. The world’s Islamists didn’t seem to notice or care much; they certainly didn’t mitigate their anti-American rage much, even though one of the factors that allegedly outraged them had disappeared.
The point is that every move in Middle East policy offers a combination of benefits and drawbacks. A long-lasting U.S. military presence on Saudi soil could well, as CENTCOM suggests, “grow intelligence capabilities, strengthen human intelligence networks and develop new and innovative technologies with allies.” Iran isn’t going anywhere, the Iranian regime isn’t getting any nicer, and closer ties to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are a good thing. But this proposal also means building a big new target in a country where Islamists killed U.S. servicemen at Khobar Towers and Islamist attacks are not exactly rare, although thankfully they seem to be occurring less frequently.