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For all its wealth, Saudi Arabia is a very vulnerable nation. Though it is one-fourth the size of the U.S. and has a 1,560-mile-long coastline, its population is generally estimated at only about 5 million.* Now, for practically the first time in their history, the Saudis have something worth defending. As Saudi government officials never tire of saying, their country is virtually unprotected. It is probably true that never has so much been defended by so little.
In the current debate over whether the U.S. should sell the Saudis the F-15 (see NATION ), the Israelis and others have argued that Saudi Arabia does not need so sophisticated a plane for defense purposes, and would be tempted to use it against Israel in the event of another Middle East war. In fact, most U.S. defense experts are convinced Saudi Arabia has very serious defense problems that could be partly alleviated by the sale of the F-15.
The fact is that during the 1973 war, the Saudis moved what planes they had as far as possible away from the fighting. They could not risk losing them. So serious are the Saudis' defense problems that the F-15s could hardly buy the country more than a couple of days of breathing time if it were attacked by any enemy. At the very most, the Saudis have only 96,500 men in their armed forces and reserves, including 41,000 national guardsmen, who are not considered front-line troops. Their air force consists of five squadrons of American-made F-5Es and obsolescent British Lightnings of 1950s vintage. Their navy consists of a converted U.S. Coast Guard cutter, three Jaguar-class PT boats and a few other bits of flotsam and jetsam. When they look south, the Saudis are alarmed by the rising Soviet influence across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, where there are now 16,000 Cuban soldiers supporting the leftist regime in Addis Ababa, and about 1,000 Russians. The Marxist regime of South Yemen, which has occasionally made raids across the Saudi border, has an army of 20,000, backed by 500 to 1,000 Cubans and a small but unknown number of Russian advisers.
Over the next decade, U.S. military strategists believe, the primary threat to Saudi Arabia may come from Iraq, with which the Saudis share 400 miles of a common but ill-defined desert border, enormous oil wealth and little else. Iraq, which is expected to surpass Iran in oil production by the mid-1980s is a power of the future. But even today, the radical Ba'ath regime in Baghdad has nearly three times the air capability of the Saudis, more than twice as many tanks, armored personnel carriers and helicopters, and five times as many men under arms.
At present, the Saudis cooperate closely with both Egypt's Sadat and the Shah of Iran. Together the Saudis and Iranians, despite a certain amount of mutual distrust, serve as a restraining force to prevent Iraq from absorbing the small, oil-rich Persian Gulf state of Kuwait, as Baghdad would like to do. But the Saudis realize that if either Sadat or the Shah should be displaced by a more radical regime, their own security would be dangerously affected.