Saudi Arabia - Security Cooperation in the Middle East

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Anthony Cordesman speaking at the 16th Annual AUSPC Conference.

Revisiting Arab-US Strategic Relations: Security Cooperation in the Middle East
Anthony Cordesman

Editor's Note
The word "prolific" is defined as "fruitful; marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity" in most dictionaries but they fall short in describing the word properly by omission of Anthony Cordesman's photo next to the entry. The Center for Strategic and International Studies Web site lists the following publications to his credit in just the last three weeks: "Iran�s Nuclear and Missile Programs: A Status Report," "Iran, Israel and Nuclear War: An Illustrative Scenario Analysis," "Lessons of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War," "Armed Nation Building: The Real Challenge in Afghanistan," and "The Elements of Victory in Iraq."

It was no surprise, then, to those in the Arab-US Policymakers Conference (AUSPC) audience who know of his work to hear some of his co-presenters poke fun at his prodigious production rate and use of PowerPoint slides. Besides his own "admission" in the opening of his presentation there was Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey's reflection on being at the receive end of the CSIS pipeline, "I used to sit in Iraq, and about every 72 hours, I�d get [on my computer] 'boink.' And I�d get this thing that overwhelmed my system from CSIS. And Tony would say, 'Hey, take a look at this for me, will you?' Three hundred pages later, I�d write back. I can�t do it anymore; you�re killing me."

However, as anyone on Dr. Cordesman's distribution list will confirm, his publications are thorough analyses, usually accompanied by scores of tables, charts and background data. They are priceless resources for those whose trade is deciphering Middle East political-military affairs.

We are fortunate today to have Dr. Cordesman's AUSPC presentation -- Security Cooperation in the Middle East -- to share with you -- complete with a link to the PowerPoint slides!

SUSRIS will provide additional AUSPC panel transcripts in the coming days and you can access the audio files in the AUSPC 2007 Special Section on the Web site.

ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. As General Nash mentioned, they have suddenly cut my presentation from six hours to 12 minutes. (Laughter.) And I am going to race through a set of slides. They will be on the web. But one of the key points here when we talk about security cooperation in the Middle East is, it is extraordinarily complex; it is extraordinarily diverse; it is not a matter of dealing with the region. It is a matter of dealing with subregions in countries. It is occurring at a time when we are making fundamental shifts away from a focus on conventional forces and conventional conflicts to issues like counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and asymmetric warfare, where not only the United States, but its friends and allies, have to make major changes in the way they organize and plan their security forces.

And let me stress that one phrase; this is not a matter of cooperation anymore with armies, navies, and air forces. It is a matter of cooperation which must extend to the security services, to the groups which deal with counterterrorism. And it must include, at least at some level, elements of the police. Without that integration, you do not have forces training and equipping to deal with the reality of what they face. And there is no clear line between counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, asymmetric warfare, and conventional warfare. We all try to categorize that, we all try to find definitions which somehow separate them.

They have, in practice, neither a meaning in terms of probability or operations. And what I have listed in these three slides on the changing strategic environment is simply a listing of those factors. To this, I would add one other dimension. We face a level of ideological division and tension within Islam and the Arab world, which has to be reflected in the way we look at security cooperation. It acts out in terms of the risk of terrorism, insurgency, ideological struggles linked to force throughout the region.

It also acts out in terms of U.S. relations with states in the region. We have to be extraordinarily sensitive to what this really does in terms of the armies, security forces, and motivations in the region and their perceptions of the United States. And security cooperation is not something where we somehow take the initiative. To work, it has to be partnership, particularly in the areas of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

All of this, again, makes the point; we are no longer talking about conventional war. We are talking about a spectrum which can range from sabotage to the use of weapons of mass destruction. And security cooperation must anticipate that fact. We also face a world in which extremists have no constraints on the use of force. But steadily, the use of force in every aspect of security operations � counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, conventional warfare � has to be far more sensitive to civilian casualties and collateral damage than ever before.

We see this sensitivity in Iraq; we see it in Afghanistan. We would see it in any conflict in the Gulf, in North Africa, or in the Levant. One thing that I think is terribly easy to forget is what are some of the motives for security cooperation. One is the military strength and the level of resources our friends and allies in the Middle East offer us. This is not a relationship which somehow is the United States providing gifts to the Middle East. It is a relationship which has strong motives for partnership.

Now, I�ve divided this up in a somewhat unusual way. And I won�t walk you through all of these slides, but I do want to make the point; security cooperation is something that varies by country and region. There is basically no conventional threat. There is, as yet, no ongoing proliferation in North Africa. The problem, essentially, there is internal stability. It is to prevent feuding and pointless adventures across boundaries in the North African region. It is to limit the cost of military activity so that development and stability can be achieved as a substitute.

That second bar is Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. We are essentially here talking about aid, military cooperation primarily as a means of securing peace, not as a means of preparing for war. We can argue whether this is desirable, but the fact is, the key priorities here are stability, maintaining and expanding the peace arrangements and again, helping with the issues of internal stability. Israel and Syria are a different story. There is the risk of war. I know that many people here may have their own criticisms of Israel and of U.S. support for Israel.

But I would make the point to all of you, consider, for a moment, what a weak Israel armed with nuclear weapons without U.S. support would be. Would this be more stabilizing? And consider, too, what you have seen about Syria over the last 10 days. I don�t think anyone today is going to argue; there was a serious effort to create a nuclear program and that program has now failed.

When we talk about the southern Gulf, we face a very different situation. We have strong southern-Gulf friends and allies. We have Iran with very large military forces, uncertainty in the future of Iraq and Yemen. There is the risk of a whole spectrum of conflicts directly involving the vital strategic interests of the United States. The issue is oil. No one should have any illusions about that. It is also political ties, historical ties. And those figures do become far more favorable when you look at anything other than manpower.

Our allies can bring, potentially immense military assets to the problem of securing this region if we can improve the quality of cooperation. That�s true of armor, of aircraft, but above all, look at the economic resources involved. The fact is, when you look at Syria, which to some extent at least is a question mark, Syria�s economic power is negligible compared to that of its neighbors. When you look at the southern Gulf relative to Iran, you get an idea � that is the tall bar there relative to the blue bar � of just how much we could draw on with the proper levels of cooperation. And when we look at military spending in the southern Gulf, it is approaching $40 billion a year and will exceed it in 2007. And Iran is expending at a level of less than $7 billion.

The question is, can you make cooperation effective? Can you really draw on this? Another basic figure here is arms deliverance. Look at, again, that tall bar. The southern Gulf has been importing over the last seven years � six years, sorry � some $60 billion worth of arms. Iran imported less than $2 billion. When you look at new arms agreements, and these do not yet reflect the impact of massive new oil revenues, we�re talking $35 billion for the southern Gulf States and about $3 billion for Iran.

These are figures it�s easy to forget when we talk only about politics and we only talk about strategy. But cooperation is not a matter of symbolism. These are not toys. We know all too well that these are forces that get used; they sometimes deter; they often defend. And here, let me just briefly take you quickly through the priorities. Almost all of the forces in this region still have a strong orientation for conventional warfighting on traditional terms: a lack of jointness, stovepipe operations, within the military, a lack of combined arms.

They need to change focus and they need to change content. Counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, for most countries, have a higher priority than conventional warfare. The days in which the number of major weapons platforms determine military capability are over. Most forces in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel and to a lesser degree, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are still about a quarter of a century out of date and becoming obsolescent steadily over time.

Without new sensors, networks, new approaches to the problem of warfare and approaches which cut across service lines and cut across countries, nations are investing in obsolescence and incompetence. And there is a fundamental need for change where we can bring fast capabilities to the table that are really needed by our friends and allies. The same is true in each area of military capabilities � land, air, air particularly the conversion to new battle management systems, precision warfare, to helicopter mobility and the use of transportation for counterinsurgency.

Naval capabilities � these are areas where they need us. And frankly, we need them. Our countermine capabilities, our ability to develop and defend against low-level asymmetric threats in the Gulf, do not, in any sense, match the capabilities we have in virtually every other area of naval operations. Special forces need to change their missions. They need to cooperate far better with internal security forces. They need to be able to cooperate with police. They need to learn, too, the problems of limits, of better preservation of human rights, of avoiding an unnecessary political conflict, backlash, and tensions in the areas where they operate. We face the problem of proliferation. There is the challenge, what is the response going to be? Missile and air defense? Conventional deterrence? Extended deterrence by the United States? Proliferation by friends and allies in the region?

Can passive defense be a partial substitute for active defense and long-range strike systems? This is a critical issue which will play out over a decade or more. It is not going to go away. Even if we can somehow suppress the current Iranian efforts at proliferation on the nuclear level, advances in areas like biotechnology and other areas ensure you simply cannot put this genie back in the bottle. CBRN terrorism becomes a real possibility. One critical area that many countries have not addressed in this region is civil and passive defense.

Let me just give you one obvious set of targets. In the southern Gulf, the dependence on desalination facilities has created a level of vulnerability which has created a whole new target complex far more important to the peoples involved than oil facilities are to them as distinguished from us. When you look at the level of passive defense and security measures on commercial satellite photographs, unfortunately, many of these are cookie-cutter operations which become remarkably vulnerable and targetable because they are so predictable and repetitive.

As yet, the threats have not focused on this. They will. A point here � the United States is having its own struggles between each military service, for resources, as to who gets sensor assets, netcentric capabilities, and battle-management assets. But one of the key lessons of both Afghanistan and Iraq is, for the Australian, Britain, and the United States � we cannot operate with each other unless we have common netting, common information systems, integrated, secure communications, and forces trained to use them.

One great question for the Gulf region, for our allies and friends in this region is, can we create similar systems that allow us to cooperate with them which they will feel preserve their national sovereignty and security and which allow us to operate without a fear of compromise of the system. This is an issue which we have to address in the future. It has not yet been addressed and it is also, frankly, one of the continuing failures of the Arab world.

There has been a great deal of expensive nonsense purchased in areas like the gulf. It serves almost no functional military purpose. It will not support the cause of warfighting. It represents one of the greatest single failures of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and it is an area where fundamental change is required. Throwing money down a rathole in these areas is the current way in which every Gulf country approaches cooperation with other Gulf countries and most approach cooperation between their own services.

This is not the way of the future and it is not the model for cooperation. I won�t walk you through these slides, but I do want to make one last point. People talk a great deal about international cooperation. I read all the time conceptual discussions of new security structures and new ways to bring countries in the region together. There is a natural limit to intellectual rubbish.

This kind of vacuous nonsense has been going on for a quarter of a century. It has produced precisely no benefits and it borders on the edge of surrealism. A, if there is to be better cooperation between countries, it cannot be a matter of slogans; it has to be measurable capability in terms of clear forced plans, real exercises, and proven capabilities. If that is to happen, it has not really begun yet except at a very limited level.

But we are dealing here particularly with the problems of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. And here, let me say something about security cooperation. I have been through one conference after another on cooperation in counterterrorism. I have been in these conferences in the Gulf. I have been at them in the Middle East. I have been at them in NATO. The reality is that virtually all meaningful cooperation in counterterrorism is bilateral. When it happens, it is the United States, working with an individual Arab or regional government. That is not going to change, not in the critical areas of intelligence, not in the sensitive areas of political compromise, discussions of who is a terrorist, in dealing with the problems of counterterrorism.

Sometimes, we can work with our British allies. Sometimes, we can work with our French allies. But this is something that we need to be honest about. It may be possible to have broader cooperation in conventional forces, but at least in the near term, if there is to be major improvements in counterterrorism capabilities in some aspects of counterinsurgency, in the real world, it will be U.S. cooperation with individual countries and talk about broad, strategic concepts and regional cooperation, however noble, has no functional purpose. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

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BY ANTHONY CORDESMAN

Saudi-US Relations Information Service
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� 2007
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