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| Arabia |
| Command and Control, Saudi Style |
| 2004-01-23 |
| Fred, I hope you won’t mind my posting this. It’s an attempt to draw the curtain back just a little on the Saudi mindset. The only links are those noted in the text. There was a post yesterday and the day before about the plight of Prince Sultan who was kidnapped from Switzerland and is now being held under house arrest in Riyadh. These two posts coupled with the post of the New Yorker story by Lawerence Wright, which touched on the paranoia and mistrust common in the kingdom, reminded me of something that occurred while I was there and later how I learned why it happened. In 1970- 1971, I was advisor to the communications branch of HQ Royal Saudi Air Force. At that time, British companies were building an air defense system under contract with the RSAF. The system consisted of radar stations located at: Dhahran, (north of) Riyadh, Taif, Tabuk and Khamis Mushayt. (Link to map .) The operation center was in Riyadh. These locations, as well as an RSAF office in Jeddah, were tied together using Tropospheric scatter and microwave radio. One day I noticed that all operations and administrative circuits were to be routed through the manual switchboard at the RSAF operations center in Riyadh. For example, traffic from Tabuk (northwest) to Taif (west central) passed through the radio equipment at Taif to the Riyadh control center where it was patched at the switchboard to a circuit back to the switchboard at Taif. I advised the RSAF Lt Col in charge of the communications branch that this was not only a waste of bandwidth, but also created a dangerous choke point on the subtending microwave link between the Riyadh radar/tropo station and the control center. If any component of that link failed for any reason, the entire air defense system would be out of business. He thanked me for my advice and they continued to build the networks as planned. Fast forward to 1974. A friend of mine was hired by Lockheed to oversee the day-to-day activities of the operation center. He later told me that one day in 1975 he received a call, from the same RSAF Lt Col mentioned earlier, to immediately pull all plugs from the switchboard and to allow no calls to be placed by anyone until further notice. Naturally, he caught all of the heat from angry Saudi Generals about this situation because they had no way of reaching anyone else, including HQ RSAF, where the order originated. (Most likely by Prince Sultan’s father, Prince Turki, Deputy Minister of Defense.) My friend told me he soon learned that King Faisal had been assassinated. Shazaam! The light went on! An epiphany for me! Five years had passed before I learned why my suggestions regarding the asinine circuit routing, which had fallen on not-so-deaf ears, had been noted but ignored. Another lesson in command and CONTROL, Saudi style. |
| Posted by:Gasse Katze |
| #4 GK, that sounds simular to how Sadaam had public utilities installed in Iraq. For a despot control of services or even food distribution is critical to control. Western culture demands redundacy to prevent interuption of services(with the exception of the North American power grid - we do systems design in a direction that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction from how a despot would have the system design. It's interesting to note that we installed a capability to program an offset into GPS during times of war in order to prevent enemies from using the system for targetting. Only problem is we can't use the offset function without screwing up commercial enterprises. We are hampered by our openness. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-1-23 10:23:54 AM |
| #3 interesting - thanks! |
| Posted by: B 2004-1-23 10:08:41 AM |
| #2 "Shazaam!", very cool! High fives all around! |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-1-23 1:58:15 AM |
| #1 If you need to link back to yesterday's article, this should do it. |
| Posted by: Gasse Katze 2004-1-23 12:33:37 AM |