US missile defense sale to Saudis seen as effort to thwart Russia
The Donald Trump administration OK’d a $15 billion sale of anti-missile technology to Saudi Arabia after Riyadh moved to buy a rival Russian system.
The Donald Trump administration’s approval of a long-delayed, $15 billion missile-defense sale to Saudi Arabia is widely seen as a way to thwart a rival Russian bid.
The State Department announced that it had approved the sale of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) on Oct. 6, barely a day after the Saudis signed a preliminary deal for Russia’s S-400 system during King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud’s visit to Moscow. US experts say the Saudis would have great difficulty operating both.
Deploying both systems would mean “having two maintenance systems that can never cross paths, and having two spare parts pipelines,” said Dave Des Roches, a former Defense Department and White House official who now works at the National Defense University in Washington.
“They would be seriously challenged to employ those two systems simultaneously,” Des Roches told Al-Monitor. “They would have profound institutional challenges in fielding the S-400, THAAD and Patriot [air and missile defense system] at the same time.”
