No End to American Warmongering

U.S. Scouring Saudi Arabia for New Bases

Date: 26 January 2021 - 21:37

News ID: ۸۶۹۷۲

YANBU, SAUDI ARABIA (Dispatches) -- The U.S. military is expanding its ability to operate from Saudi Arabia, striking a preliminary arrangement with Riyadh to use various air bases and seaports in the country’s western regions.
The U.S. military has long kept a host of military assets and thousands of troops in Persian Gulf kingdoms on the eastern flank of Saudi Arabia, including at permanent bases in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and elsewhere. But as Iran’s ballistic missiles have improved, those bases have become increasingly vulnerable, the Associated Press wrote Tuesday.
In a conflict with Iran, the United States would be able to transport troops in and out of the region from the west, posture fighters and other aircraft further from missile launchers, and "lily-pad” eastward into the fight, Gen. Frank McKenzie told reporters traveling with him to the region to inspect three of the new locations.
"The Persian Gulf would be contested waters under any scenario of armed conflict with Iran, so you look at the places where you would move your forces as they enter the theater from being in a contested area,” McKenzie said. "Certainly the Red Sea, the western [part] of the Arabian peninsula presents those opportunities.”
This expansion initiative has been underway for at least a year. Its revelation comes as the new Biden administration has vowed to take a more skeptical eye towards the relationship with Saudi Arabia — and to attempt negotiations with Iran. According to the AP, it hints at

the seriousness with which military leaders at U.S. Central Command, which governs all American troops in the Middle East, takes the possibility of a war. And it signals that even as the Biden administration has sought to take a tougher line on Riyadh, U.S.-Saudi ties are deepening at the military level.
McKenzie cautioned that U.S. use of the three Saudi facilities he inspected on Monday —  one commercial port and one industrial port in Yanbu and airfields in Tabuk and Taif — were still "highly contingent.”
"We’re just exploring possibilities here, nothing more than that and we’re working closely with our Saudi hosts,” the Marine Corps general said. "It is nothing more than contingency work now — certainly nothing is firm — but it gives me the opportunity to come out here and look at the ground and see.”
Still, U.S. Central Command has conducted proof-of-concept tests at the industrial port at Yanbu, at least once bringing U.S. troops into the region from the Red Sea, and at both of the airfields. McKenzie said CENTCOM will continue to bring units through Yanbu on rotation to ensure the command’s logistical muscles remain flexible.
The expansion isn’t limited to the three sites McKenzie visited on Monday, he said, but he declined to name other locations that the military is looking to use. It also won’t affect how the military is using its usual network of bases and access points in the Persian Gulf: "You should not see this as a zero-sum game,” he said.
The idea, instead, is to enable the command to take more damage and keep fighting — what the military calls "robustness.” That "means you increase the number of bases you can operate from so if you’re hit you can take that hit, shift to another location and still be able to operate,” McKenzie explained. "What it does is it gives us options and options are always a good thing for a commander to have.”
The Biden administration has sought to draw a clear line between its handling of the notoriously tricky relationship with Riyadh and the previous administration’s. Trump, and in particular his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, embraced the relationship with Riyadh, promoting arms sales and other military support to the country even as a bipartisan group of lawmakers sought to curtail such support over the killing of civilians in the Saudi war on Yemen and the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident Jamal Khashoggi.
But even as administration officials have insisted that they will take a tougher line on Saudi Arabia — Biden referred to Riyadh as a "pariah” during the Democratic primary debates and promised it would "pay the price” for the Khashoggi killing — they have continued to defend the strategic partnership.