Posted on 04/08/2011 10:03:32 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Saudis ask U.S. for price quotes for warships
Saturday April 09, 2011
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has asked the United States for prices for surface warships with integrated air and missile defenses, helicopters, patrol craft and shore infrastructure, the U.S. Navy said on Friday.
The Navy is preparing a rough cost estimate that would be delivered possibly as soon as May, Navy spokeswoman Captain Cate Mueller told Reuters.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest U.S. arms buyer and is expected to remain so despite political upheaval in the Middle East.
The request for medium surface combat ships and the rest of the hardware was received by the Navy in July through the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, Mueller said.
Earlier on Friday, Lockheed Martin Corp executives said the first phase of the so-called Saudi Naval Expansion Program-II could be worth $20 billion, attributing the estimate to U.S. Navy officials. The company would likely vie for any such orders.
Other likely competitors would be Australia's Austal Ltd and General Dynamics Corp, which teamed up to build a Littoral Combat Ship for the U.S. Navy, as is Lockheed.
Paul Lemmo, a Lockheed vice president for business development, said the company would pitch a multimission version of its fast new coastal combat ship, perhaps fitted with Lockheed's Aegis weapon system.
In October, the Obama administration notified Congress of a proposed arms sale to Saudi Arabia potentially worth as much as $60 billion over 15 to 20 years. It would be the largest arms deal on record if all purchases are made, including 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and upgrades to 70 more
(Excerpt) Read more at forexyard.com ...
We’re going to be fighting the Saudis one of these decades.
And they’ll be using our weapons we sold them against us.
There are some advantages to being the arms supplier. 1. You know all the technical details including weaknesses. 2. You can build in weaknesses if you need to exploit them. 3. You have those of whom you supplied by the short hairs if they want to keep their purchases in working order.
Make sure what ever they are sold have kill or shut off switches. Then I don’t have a problem. Lets screw them for a change.
As long as they fight Iran first.
HERTZ strike force rental- ("dirty deeds done dirt cheap")[/sarcasm]
It never ceases to amaze me how we give billions of dollars of military hardware to a country that produced most of the 911 hijackers, finances schools that preach hatred of Christians and Jews, wants to establish an international Muslim caliphate, wants to finance a victory mosque at Ground Zero, interferes in our media by owning a large chunk of it, arrests women for driving, and forbids visitors from even carrying a personal bible with them for personal use.
The elite political class in this country is mentally ill.
Saudis ask U.S. for price quotes for warships.
Price,all of your OIL and GOLD.
Hell, 0bama would sell the whole US Navy to them if he could.
the ‘bammers is making deals isn’t he?
i forgot to add this- for the coming invasion and the muzzification of the US unless the Chi-coms get to us first thru Alaska........ then they will go door to door ; death by gunshot :)
sorry about my post just my irrational fear
I started to think that too, but based on the rest of the Middle East war tactics.......they park their tactical vehicles against apartment houses and hide behind women's skirts..........
Don’t mistaken the Saudis’ for another country in the same AO; they pay hard cash for all their arms….
Bam Bam bowing to his masters again?
It will be deja vu; it already happened in Iraq. US troops fighting Iraqis armed with weapons we gave them to fight Iran...
“It never ceases to amaze me how we give billions of dollars of military hardware to a country that produced most of the 911 hijackers, finances schools that preach hatred of Christians and Jews, wants to establish an international Muslim caliphate, wants to finance a victory mosque at Ground Zero, interferes in our media by owning a large chunk of it, arrests women for driving, and forbids visitors from even carrying a personal bible with them for personal use.”
Anarchists are right in their assertion that no government should be trusted; this is an example of why. It should also be noted that the Saudis probably won’t be using any of this stuff; the average Saudi doesn’t work. They tried a program called “Saudization” to lessen their reliance on foreign workers (not just Bengalis & Indians for manual stuff, but also Westerners as engineers, etc.); I’ve never heard that the program was successful. One of the reasons Kuwait fell in one day was that they don’t work, either; in fact, they were brutal in their treatment of their “guest workers” because they hadn’t fought hard enough (if at all)to defend Kuwait against Iraq. I guess all of their imported domestic help was unknowingly enlisted in the Home Guard; they keep a short leash on those workers because of their numbers in comparison to the number of actual Kuwaitis.
For too long the US has allied itself with the Arabs that don’t work; there are many more Arabs in the world that do work.
You are wrong.
The fight will be against Iran. To fight people on the Arabian Peninsula means they have already been conquered by Iran.
Iran, not Islam, is the enemy.
What our Navy is now a sales team for the Saudis?
—
Right now that is the battle which is shaping up. The Saudis are now virtually in military control of Bahrain via a power sharing agreement with the Bahrainian king. The battle is not so much with Iran per se, but between Shiite and Sunni.
Both Bahrain and Saudi have substantial Shiite populations - living mostly along the respective Iranian boarders and, coincidentally, on the richest strip of oil deposits.
Iran wants to annex those areas for itself to shore up its flagging oil fields. Neither the Saudi nor the Bahrain military is a match for the Iranian military.
Ships, planes, tanks, missiles, and lots of ammo are going to be needed soon in this coming battle.
surface warships with integrated air and missile defenses, helicopters, patrol craft and shore infrastructureIt appears that the Saudis don't trust Obama with the US naval capabilities deployed in the Erythraean theater.
Interesting way of looking at it.
E Z
Sell the muzzies all the weapons we can.
On one condition:
Use them against Israel and we will nuke you.
The US military usually supports arms sales and negotiations associated with them.
The Saudi military is not exactly weak compared to Iran. For one, they have technological superiority. And the usual jokes of Arabs being stupid doesn’t count, since they have plenty of Pakistanis, Indians and Europeans helping maintain and probably man their military. Not to forget alliances with the likes of Pakistan, Britain and the US.
Having the Iranian mullahcracy all high and mighty ensures that there will be no war against Israel — other than by Iranian proxies Hamas and the Hizzies. As the old saying goes, Hamas doesn’t want war, it wants the fruits of war; Iran isn’t that way. There’s already severe fragmentation of Hamas (that’s natural I think, given that it is just a violent criminal gang), and the Iranian-backed elements want to force another war against Israel.
This probably means that there will be a 1970s-Beirut-style civil war inside Gaza, as that worked well for the Iranian proxies over 25 years ago. Then, Israel rushed in and ejected Arafat and Fatah — and that turned out to be an error, or at least opened the way for the piecemeal, gradual takeover of the country by Iran.
In Gaza, the end result will be a joining of forces between Fatah and the fruits-of-war factions of Hamas, but the fighting could go on for years. Israel’s best option will be to make sure neither side gains an overwhelming advantage, so that the terrorists and other jihadists bleed each other to death.
I went to school with some Palestinians who were “guest workers” in Kuwait at the time of the invasion; they weren’t pro-Saddam, but they had nothing but contempt for the Kuwaitis.
Kuwait was the modern day promised land. Saddam promised it to the Palestinians or so I was told by a very nice young Kuwaiti who asked me to join him for tea on the Al Khobar corniche.
I hadn’t heard that.
These guys were the bottom rung of society over there; they were simply looking for work. They had no ambitions beyond that, and I don’t think the area could sustain a population as large as the Palestinians’ anyway.
I used to believe similarly. Then I learned more history.
Recent decades and events around the world (from Europe to Indonesia) have shown that most Muslim nations are enemies of all who are not Muslim.
“Iran, not Islam is the enemy.”
You got it totally wrong.
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