If Saudi Arabia and Israel went to war, who would win?



Israel, beyond a doubt.

Having worked with many Saudi military personnel over the course of my professional career, I can assure you that a fair percentage of their officer candidates are incompetent, unqualified, undisciplined, and totally dependent on the skills of the vast army of expatriate technicians and Western advisers to operate and maintain their most basic equipment. Some of the individual enlisted personnel take their jobs seriously, but that’s all most of them look at it as: a job. Back when I worked in Saudi the actual operational readiness and size of individual units fluctuated because they were dependent on who showed up for work on any given morning(!)

There is no pressure for the officer candidates to perform well in their technical examinations due to the fact most are guaranteed their positions anyway due to nepotism. The day the Saudis actually hold their officer corps to a reasonable standard of professional competence is the day they will finally have a chance at beating the IDF. It didn’t matter if an officer candidate failed all the tests I gave him, he would still pass the course with nary a word. Nobody took their coursework seriously and this reflected the lax standards of the Saudi military on the whole. They’re terribly complacent.

It doesn’t matter how motivated the enlisted men are, without good leadership the Saudi military is doomed in any conflict it attempts to pursue.

With regards to the overdependence on Western expatriate advisers, generally speaking their training does little good because like I said, many of the Saudi officers fail to take it seriously. The overdependence on Western technicians to maintain all the tanks, radar equipment, missile batteries, etc is also problematic because the first time the Saudis have to go to war without them they’ll be completely clueless. Case in point are the number of Saudi military vehicles abandoned in the Yemen war with easily rectifiable technical problems. The Saudis are inadequately trained in conducting field repairs or recovery efforts, so they simply abandon the vehicle and move on. This will result in greater attrition and eventually cripple their war effort against a foe with similar conventional capabilities and a better grasp of logistics, like the IDF.

Don’t get me wrong, the Saudis have some cutting-edge military equipment, the best oil money can buy. Some of their weapons are most likely more sophisticated than anything the IDF can put into the field. But superiority in equipment means nothing if the Saudis lack skilled personnel or leadership adept at deploying, operating, and maintaining it effectively. As it is the leadership are likely to misuse their excellent equipment and the operators are likely to handle it incompetently.

The Saudi Air Force - which is the branch of the armed forces where one assumes technical competence is taken seriously - was a joke among expat workers when I lived down there.

A few incidents which have been mentioned here on Quora before include the one where the fighter pilot pulled the ejector lever while still in the hangar, killing himself, and the fighter pilot that crashed in the desert after refusing to refuel from a female USAF crew. Most incidents involving Saudi Air Force crashes are due to pilot error, but the Saudi government usually blames the aircraft instead and cites mechanical problems (unlikely, given how well-maintained the aircraft are due to the efforts of the most competent US, British, and French technicians oil money can buy). This has made the Saudis blind to the fact that their pilots are the problem, and need to be held to a higher standard. The IDF does not have this problem and Israeli fighter pilots have a reputation for being some of best in the Middle East.

These are issues that can be corrected with time, but the fact remains that the Saudi military is in need of major reforms before it would have a prayer of engaging and defeating the IDF.


Source: https://www.quora.com/If-Saudi-Arabi...-who-would-win


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