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Kuwait Defence and Security Report Q4 2010
Business Monitor International, Aug 2010, Pages: 71
The Kuwait Defence and Security Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, defence and security associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Kuwait's defence and security industry.
The high standard of living enjoyed by Kuwait’s small population depends on a number of factors, none of which is guaranteed into the future.
The most obvious of these is the stream of oil revenues from continuing high levels of production and high world oil prices. In the longer term the level of oil reserves in Kuwait is finite and may be even more limited that has been generally believed. Oil revenues represent virtually the whole of government revenue and it is government spending that underpins social cohesion and blunts the incentive for radical change. In the current economic downturn for example the government has paid out unemployment compensation and has taken steps to pay off citizens' bad debts.
Increasing production efficiencies to extract more oil from the known fields will require foreign technology and FDI that is not allowed under Kuwaiti law. Efforts to relax the restrictions on foreign participation are making little progress.
Militarily, the country has been under the protection of the United States. Among other assets, Kuwait hosts Camp Arifjan, a vast, purpose-built US$200mn camp south of Kuwait City, housing 15,000 US soldiers. The downside is that this position is very unpopular with Islamist and anti-Western groups, The protection from direct military attack comes at the price of increased risk from terrorist attack. In common with several of the Gulf State countries, the population is made up from expatriate workers (65%) and Kuwaiti’s (35%). Among Kuwaiti’s the population is split between Sunni (65%) and Shi’a (35%). Allegiance among the Shi’a lies, to a significant extent, with Iran while the country and its Sunni majority align with Saudi Arabia. Some Shi’a, including members of parliament openly state that they are principally Shi’a and only secondly Kuwaiti. Developments in the region outside Kuwait could increase tensions between the two groups, especially if the US/Israel launch military attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Kuwait’s small military forces are dominated by the army, with 11,500 of the total 15,500 personnel. With only a very small industrial base virtually all military equipment is imported. Most comes from the US, but the UK and France have also received significant orders from time to time. There is parliamentary resistance to some of the programmes currently being considered. The need for and the cost of some of these advanced weapons systems is being questioned. - especially in the light of an essentially flat economic outlook.
In this report, we consider several different scenarios for the medium term future. The conclusion is that while the present position is comfortable and secure, the longer term outlook is much less certain.
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