Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Targets of Another Saudi Taking Flight Training in America
So another young, educated, privileged Saudi man, here all nice and legal, has attempted to commit mass murder for terrorist reasons. Oh, the authorities are mouthing the usual cautions about letting the FBI get to the bottom of it, and you may believe they are diligently working to uncover or bury the truth as you will. But, the American people already have all the evidence needed to come to a reasonable conclusion. What we might not get is the fuller picture, the full target set. For that, let us turn to a parallel development.
In 1946, the United States establishing a School of the Americas, to fundamentally transform our hemisphere through the very long-term growth of professional militaries in Latin America. As the left recognized this program’s effectiveness, they organized to begin smearing our military and this program as a “School for Dictators.” The left lost this long fight, as the Colombian military became a real, capable, professional force instead of a goon squad trying to outdo communist thuggery, always a losing gambit.
Turning from that instance, understand that we have done the same thing on a much wider scale with a wide range of professional military schools for decades. The point has always been to influence foreign militaries from the middle ranks up. Yes, there are also peer militaries involved in exchanges, where we send officers to their schools and they sent to ours. Set those exchanges aside, and look at the one-way programs. No US student is going to Saudi Arabia to learn to be a military pilot. We are not just providing a service as part of the arms sales package here; we are in the very long-term business of influence operations.
The Pensacola News Journal made the point that the attack happened in just this context:
A shooting at a Naval base that left four people dead (including the shooter) and eight others injured was carried out by an aviation student. He was identified as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi military authorities, a U.S. official told the Associated Press.
[…]
The Navy International Training Center has several partnerships with other countries’ militaries, including the Royal Saudi Air Forces. Among them is an undergraduate pilot basic aviation preparatory training course, a senior executive leadership course and a junior officer enhanced leadership course.
[…]
“The way that program works is that the foreign government has to certify that these are the best of their best, that these are their future generals and admirals and senior military officials for their countries,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz. “The U.S. State Department does a scrub on those prospective trainees, and after that they matriculate into the program.
Now, with that information, look again at a Saudi pilot trainee, likely with assistance or complicity of other Saudi or like-minded Islamist students, gunning down American naval aviator candidates in the storied Naval Air Station Pensacola. The bullets physically struck young American officers’ bodies, but the gun was likely aimed at the Saudi government and our feared influence over a small military that might actually support that government against the Wahhabist tiger the House of Saud has ridden for two centuries.
The facts already leaked about the Pensacola attack, to get ahead of the American people’s (and President Trump’s) righteous anger, are not good:
The Saudi gunman who attacked a Florida navy base on Friday played videos of mass shootings at a dinner beforehand, according to a US official.
Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani – who was training at the Pensacola base – killed three people before being shot dead.
He played the videos to others earlier in the week, several US media outlets report, quoting an anonymous official briefed on the investigation.
Several Saudi students have reportedly been held for questioning.
Authorities have not alleged that they were involved in the attack, which took place across two floors in a classroom.
A Twitter user appearing to match Alshamrani’s identity had also made a series of anti-US posts before the shooting, US media say.
The bullets could be expected to generate bullet points in Congress and in cable television. Cue Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson; is Pat Buchanan ready for his standard riff? Yet, the bullets should have different effect under President Trump, than under the Bushes, Clintons, or Obama. The deaths of our truly best and brightest, like Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, should fire up President Donald J. Trump, who now has Acting Secretary of Defense Esper and Attorney General Barr in position, to yank the reins of the national security establishment hard and compel truth-telling.
Esper’s first words on the NAS Pensacola shooting were not terribly reassuring, as they came off as the same old do-nothing boilerplate:
“Yesterday, I directed that we look at our security precautions across the services in all of our installations and bases and facilities to make sure that we’ve got the appropriate degree of security to protect our service members and their families and our communities,” he said. “That’s underway.”
At the same time, he said that he also “directed that we look at our vetting procedures for all the many foreign nationals that come, for good reason, to our country to train.”
“As you may or may not know, anybody who comes to the United States to train is, or should be, vetted by the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and then ultimately, us, so we need to re-look at all that.”
We will need more, much more, not more of the same. President Trump was measured in his first response, as he should be. Once again, he gave the lie to the Deep State, to the Democrats, and their TruCon lapdogs:
He strengthened his language in a live speech in Florida Saturday evening before the Israeli American Council National Summit [emphasis on his extemporaneous comments off his text]:
I want to express our profound support to our entire nation for the victims of the evil and barbaric attack at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. Our hearts break for the families who lost their precious loved ones in this atrocity, another atrocity. We sent the urgent prayers of all Americans. During times of pain, Americans always stand together, never leave each others side. We do best under pressure.
Today I’m here to talk about how peace-loving nations can work together to build a future of greater security, prosperity, and hope for our children and future generations.
Governor Ron DeSantis gave a press briefing, broadcast on News4JAX, and called out Saudi Arabia, and by extension the Deep State:
Escambia County Sherriff David Morgan, whose deputies stopped the killer by engaging and killing him, responding in coordination with Navy security forces, has confirmed authorities (he and the FBI) know how the Saudi national got the handgun:
A foreign national is allowed to purchase a gun in the state of Florida if a certain set of criteria is met, he said. But he said he could not release information as to whether that is how the gunman was able to get his gun, referring those questions to the FBI, which is leading the investigation into the base shooting.
Morgan said that his deputies did not have contact with the shooter before Friday’s shooting.
The FBI initially planned to hold a press conference Saturday evening, but canceled it at the last-minute due to “a development on our end,” said Amanda Warford Videll, public affairs officer for the Jacksonville Division of the FBI.
Oops. Must be something that needs serious spin-doctoring.
Published in Foreign Policy
I want to know if he was actually killed by deputies and not the SPs and if so, why.
Ya think?
We need to shut down that program for 6 months and then start over with proper (extreme) vetting.
Is this speculation? Or did the shooter explain his motive as such?
If divorcing Wahhabists from kings in Saudi Arabia was our goal, we could hardly train a king’s man without the Wahhabists knowing and applying whatever influence back home.
Which is?
I’m thinking something about the US alliance with Saudi Arabia having a fundamental (!) contradiction at its core?
If this guy was the best of their best, and going to be a future general, admiral or senior military official.
Yeah, I can imagine. They’re really good at scrubbing.
9/11 didn’t teach our powers that be one darn thing. We are still training muslim pilots. We sell them planes and give them guns. We are stupid, stupid, stupid.
My dad was a young psychiatrist in the early 60’s whose enlistment was deferred until he completed his medical training. In 1963 (when I was a toddler) our family moved to Pensacola where my father served as a naval psychiatrist for two years. In the late ‘80’s he confided in me that he had treated naval instructor pilots in those early days of the Vietnam conflict, and their primary difficulty was they were wracked with guilt. He said they told him the Vietnamese were sending over very young men, many of whom had no mechanical background and had never even driven a car before, and our naval pilots were supposed to teach them how to fly military aircraft.
My dad said the pilots told him that young Vietnamese pilots were so incompetent that in final testing the instructors disconnected the students’ landing instruments because they still didn’t have the skills to reliably land a plane safely. They apparently sent those very young pilots back to Vietnam knowing they weren’t ready to fly.
I wonder if the experiences of instructor pilots in those early days of Vietnam helped lead to the screening process we have today?
Obviously the instructors were pressured by their superiors. But I assume they were properly tough and demanding of their American students. It wasn’t the fault of the instructors or the Vietnamese students, but the flag ranks. One more example of Taleb’s principle: Never trust anybody who doesn’t have skin in the game.
Not sure why this happen but if the FBI is investigating I am sure we will never know What happened or why. That give the solution is obviously to change the gun laws so citizens can not possess weapons.
Trump ought to make a Get-Around-the-Deep-State Pipeline for Federal employees who think important information is being suppressed.
Of course. The Saudi’s are Wahabi muslims, the fundamentalist, purest muslims and are at heart our enemies, and the enemies of pretty much anyone not Wahabi. We have allowed them, because of their oil wealth to spread that poison around the world, and into the US. We need to finally recognize that fact and act accordingly.
Well when I joined the AF in the late 70’s they had just stopped training Iranian pilots. One instructor pilot told me how lousy the Iranians sent for training were. One of them crashed a T-38 when he ran out of fuel. Another triggered an international incident when he flew his jet into Mexican airspace because he got lost.
I guarantee you the Saudi “students” sent to us for training are somehow connected to the Saudi Royal Family. If not directly then in some other way. These guys grow up rich, spoiled and entitled. And many are fundamentally schizophrenic about it. They are steeped in a culture of Wahabi Islam, then go party in Bahrain or Dubai or London with booze and hookers. I’ve seen it myself when I worked in Saudi. So when they develop guilt over this, the Sudden Jihad switch can turn them into murderers in a heartbeat.
Seems there were multiple individuals involved. Our shooter, who posted screeds about evil America, and hosted a “party” where they watched videos about mass shootings, a buddy who filmed his rampage, and another couple who watched from a car.
Kozak,
The modern woke western intelligentsia refuses to take the effect of theology seriously. Jihad is a megalomaniacal genocidal doctrine of an absolute nature. It can remain dormant or psychologically suppressed. Something will trigger it and then the mayhem begins. This pattern was seen in Major Hassan and the 911 hijackers.
This is why I think it vital that some of the major sects of Islam fully and openly reject the violent interpretation of Jihad. The other interpretation simply reads the same lines in the Koran as referring to an internal struggle with one’s own inclinations.
Your observations are spot on. Exactly what you describe should be at the top of the FBI’s list of possible causes.
Regards,
Jim
Too Stupid to Survive
As usual Mark Steyn nails it.
When I was an enlisted at Lackland AFB in the late 70’s there were entire Saudi enlisted units marching around the base – I don’t know where they trained or billeted them. There were lots of middle eastern officers around, including Saudis and Iranians. American female enlistees were warned to steer clear of them.
During my second commissioned assignment I was at a pilot training base (Columbus, MS) and my wife was a T-38 instructor. Schedulers generally avoided putting any of the Saudi students with female IP’s. The Saudis were known for wild differences in ability, and for the most part they were minor royalty at home (slang term for them was the Al-Q brothers). Because of the money the Saudis were paying students were kept on way past where an American student would have washed out. There was at least one BOQ suicide of a Saudi who was about to be sent home.
Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls Texas trained the bulk of foreign students but they were all over the system. My wife had 4 Italian students in her UPT class, all regarded as very good. Come to think of it, with the exception of the middle eastern students, the foreign trainees had a pretty good rep.
Just as the boom in fracking-based oil production allowed U.S. gasoline prices to barely notice the attack on the Saudi refineries earlier this year, so should the added American oil production permit the Trump Administration to talk far tougher and make far more serious threats to the Saudis than the Bush Administration or other administrations since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo could.
The Obama Administration sort of rebuffed the Saudis during Obama’s second term in their own warped what-color-is-the-sky-in-your-world way, by trying to realign U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East towards the Iranians, based on the idea they were needed as a counter-balance to the region’s military dominance by Israel. That served to push the Saudi government closer to Israel and in turn cut off some of the financial oxygen to the Palestinians. Once Trump got into office, that did serve to make it easier for the U.S. to relocate it’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem without major protests or attacks, because now Iran was the only main supplier of cash and weapons. But that doesn’t mean the mindset of the average Saudi Wahabist has been changed, or if the Iranian Mullahs were to be toppled next year by the current protests, that Saudi policy wouldn’t just return to its pre-2014 ways once they thought the Iranian threat was over.
Trump does have the ability at the moment, though, to put the screws to the Saudis more than any other president in the past 50 years to crack down on their radicals, because the U.S. only needs their high-sulfur oil right now (and wouldn’t need that if Venezuela ever has its own anti-Maduro revolution) and not the low-sulfur kind American frackers are going to glut the market with when the transport pipelines are completed, but they need us as a guardian against Iran. The U.S. holds the better cards here (though the Europeans might freak out and the Saudis would try to play the China card).
I have a few family members/close friends who have gone through naval pilot training in Pensacola, and they say pretty much the same thing: most of the foreign student pilots are sharp pilots and friendly people…with one major exception. Apparently quite a few Saudis are allowed to pass the course even though their work ethic and flying proficiency is at such a low level that they would be kicked out if they were American.
My strong impression is that the coddling of Saudi pilots is the source of a fair amount of cynicism among their US peers. And now likely disgust.
Like with a cloth?
I was at Maxwell AFB for a summer duty session when I was in the Reserve before I went on Active Duty. Being a relatively new Butter Bar I was quick to throw salutes around. There were plenty of foreign military there, and looking at their uniforms you would swear they were 4 star generals with insignia they were wearing ( fitting my rule of thumb the fancier the uniform the worse the military). Someone finally clued me in to look at the equivalent US rank pinned to their chest. I was about to snap a salute to a guy who looked like he had 3 stars on his shoulder boards, and it turned out he was an E4.
I have to admit I had the same problem when my buddies and I went to Pensacola NAS for the weekend for some beach time R&R, could not make hide nor hair of Navy ranks and we were flinging the salutes. Finally a Navy petty officer pulled us aside and told us were making fools of ourselves….
Sadly, the real corrective requires a massive drubbing of the Democrats in November 2020 to send a real message to the Deep State that the American people want President Trump to do massive correction. And to the Republican allies of the Deep State that following the President’s lead is only path to maintain their office.
I am so sick of the progressives, bureaucrats, regulators, diplomats, and district judges willing to sacrifice our kids to their overweening sense of self-righteousness. Screw them. Enforce the ban.
Is this buying aircraft/training thing a package? Because if so that’s a clear motivation to take on trainees whatever their ability or background. Gotta move those planes.
Beats me. But the senior chain of command constantly monitored the progress of those students. Sometimes the attaches from their embassy would show up for visits. This was all DOD/State Dept sensitive stuff. Despite (or in addition to) the $$$ there was a significant diplomatic component to the program. Before the Shah was overthrown I’m pretty sure Iran was an even bigger customer.
My understanding is that it goes far beyond just buying our aircraft.
Many of the aircraft (and probably other weapons systems) we currently use were scheduled to be out of production by now, but delays in replacement programs (like the F-35) coupled with faster-than-planned exhaustion of the existing inventory (due to an endless wartime posture) means that we still have a need for new aircraft like the FA-18 – but just to maintain parity, and not at the kind of rate that would be sufficient to keep the production lines open.
Foreign sales provide that volume boost that make it worthwhile for the contractors to keep producing these products. So it’s not just foreign airplane sales putting a nice financial cushion on Boeing or Lockheed’s balance sheet, they’re literally keeping some of these programs alive. That’s far too much dependency on foreign powers if you ask me.
Virtually every nation, and certainly every nation in the Middle East, is going to have an air force of some sort. The question is are they Russian equipped and trained or American equipped and trained. Actually, we are near the point where the third option of Chinese jets and pilot training will be on the table.
Small base, small force, so they have a mutual aid agreement for the NAS, which they obviously practiced, because it was a joint response. The deputies got to the killer first as they hunted him through a multistory building, according to reports.
It isn’t the vetting, a distraction here, but rather the lack of ongoing surveillance with quick triggers to act even if our “good friends the Saudis” and our State Department drones squawk.
Good questions. I edited to make clear fact versus speculation. The speculation is grounded in the reality of terrorists of all stripes having larger political goals. A Saudi officer is almost certainly acting to influence his nation and ours. To find otherwise would be a man bites dog story.
I just find it difficult to believe that a base in an active shooter situation would have deputies from off base arriving sooner than SPs already on base.