EADS wins large Saudi border protection deal

sources are expected to expand. EADS CEO Louis Gallois told the  Financial Times that “several hundred” people would be hired for its construction over the project’s 5-year period, and Defense News adds that the Saudis will be trained to operate the security system by German border guards, via a “train the trainers” program.

Defense News also reports that EADS was helped in its successful, bid for the border contract by earlier wins in the United Kingdom, Romania, and Qatar, and by satisfactory performance on its northern border contract. “That is true,” DID comments, “but that is very rarely the entire story when dealing with defense contracts in Saudi Arabia.”

This much fencing applies to far more than the Saudi Kingdom’s 560 mile long northern border with Iraq. To the south, the Asir region was taken from Yemen in 1934, and is now the kingdom’s most densely populated and most geographically diverse, with the tallest mountains in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi border with Yemen stretches away farther toward the east as well, and that entire poorly marked area is becoming a serious worry for the Kingdom.

Yemen, a fragile and divided state, is a key trans-shipment point for Somali pirates and a funnel for Islamists into Somalia. In January it also became the headquarters for the launch of “al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula,” a merger of the Saudi and Yemeni branches. The Los Angeles Times reports that:

Saudi officials believe most of the weapons used in militant operations in Saudi Arabia - including some suicide attacks - were smuggled from Yemen…. Securing the 1,300-km border with Yemen is a top Saudi priority…. Several senior members of [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] are Saudis who slipped over the border after going through a militant rehabilitation program in Riyadh. In April, Saudis discovered a cave tucked in the remote Saudi mountains near the Yemeni border that was clearly a way station for Islamic militants.

Yemen has never been very stable, and the New York Times’s William Glaberson and Robert Worth report that the situation there is grave enough that Yemen’s problems were reportedly one of the main reasons President Obama is delaying the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees, almost 100 of which are from Yemen. Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansour al-Turki told the Financial Times that Yemen was a definite concern, adding: “Of course terrorism is important, but there is also drug and weapons trafficking, and we also have to consider illegal immigrants.”

EADS’s successful bid on the Saudi border project is but the latest indication that large defense contractors are looking to homeland security project as a way to bolster their revenues. EADS CEO Gallois is more focused on his plan to diversify EADS’ sources of revenue, and make Airbus a smaller overall contributor to a larger company. EADS competitor Thales is already seeing significant wins, after making strategic capability investments in domestic security technologies. EADS appears to be headed down the same path, and Gallois understandably characterized the Saudi contract as “a major breakthrough in the security market which is booming.”