Financial Times: Yemen revealed the limitations of Saudi Arabia's expensive arsenal

An English media, investigating the dimensions of the Saudi defense failure, emphasized that Yemen revealed the limitations of the Saudi military arsenal.

According to Ambassador Arjan, in continuation of the analyzes of Western and American media about the quagmire that Saudi Arabia is caught in Yemen, the English newspaper Financial Times published a report in which the inability of Saudi Arabia's air defense systems to counter the increasing attacks of the Yemeni armed forces, despite having a huge and advanced military arsenal and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons.

The report concludes that having an advanced military arsenal and spending large sums of money on weapons does not guarantee protection against less expensive and more flexible attacks. The description of this article is as follows:

How did Yemen reveal the limitations of Saudi Arabia's expensive arsenal?

Saudi Arabia has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building one of the most powerful military arsenals in the region, including American weapons from Patriot missiles to F-15 fighter jets.

However, Yemeni attacks this month have increasingly targeted locations deep inside Saudi Arabia, including Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport, clearly revealing the limits to the impact of this Saudi spending. On Tuesday, the Yemenis appeared to have targeted the headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, the world's largest oil company.

In this context, analysts and people familiar with Saudi Arabia's military believe that this country has had problems adapting to the rapidly evolving tactics and technologies of the Yemenis. In addition to the pressure on the reserves of regional interceptor missiles, after months of Iranian attacks in the recent war, Saudi Arabia's ability to defend itself has been significantly questioned.

In this context, Bilal Youssef Saab, senior manager of Trends US, a consulting company based in Washington and a member of the Chatham House think tank, said: There is no such thing as perfect defense and one should always expect breaches. However, airports should also be on the list of critical infrastructure to be protected, along with energy facilities.

He emphasized that Saudi Arabia's inability to deal with the current attacks is due to the new and advanced tactics of the Yemenis and the lack of coordination of the Saudi missile defense systems.

According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Saudi Arabia spent 6.5 percent of its GDP on military spending last year, which is one of the highest rates in the world.

This figure reached 13% in 2015, the year when Mohammed bin Salman, the current crown prince and then defense minister, formed a military coalition to start the war against Yemen. After that, Saudi Arabia was involved in this war; A war that the United Nations described as the worst man-made humanitarian crisis in the world. During these years, Saudi Arabia carried out intense airstrikes against Yemen, until a ceasefire was established in 2022.

The surprising equations of Sana'a for the Saudis

But the ceasefire was fragile and not fully implemented, effectively falling apart after Riyadh targeted Sanaa's runway in July. After that, the Yemenis launched a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia, launched operations to control the Red Sea coast, carried out numerous attacks against Saudi energy facilities, and significantly disrupted Saudi oil exports.

At the same time, an attack also targeted the vital east-west oil pipeline of Saudi Arabia, which led to its closure, and Saudi Arabia claimed that this attack was carried out by the allied groups of Yemen in Iraq.

In the meantime, since the past weeks, the Yemenis have repeatedly targeted Saudi airports in the context of intensifying their operations and forced the airlines in this country to cancel thousands of flights.

Saturday's attack on Riyadh's now-closed King Khalid International Airport killed 13 people and wounded 300 others, making it the deadliest such attack in nearly a decade.

Considering that the Saudi military leaders have gained years of experience in the war with the Yemenis, people who have previously worked with the Saudi Arabian army say that the problem is not a lack of experience, but is related to other issues.

"I worked for a long time with the Royal Saudi Air Defense Force, and the country has an advanced defense system," said David Darosh, a professor at the Thames Marshall Institute, a consulting and training firm that has provided training programs for Saudi Arabia's top defense leaders.

Yemeni tactics to circumvent the Saudi defense system

Accordingly, military analysts believe that after years of war with Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States, the Yemenis have a much better understanding of how to penetrate modern radar systems and interceptor missiles, while a four-year ceasefire with Riyadh has allowed them to rearm with the help of Iran.

A source familiar with the matter stated that the Yemenis used drones believed to be Samad-2 or Samad-3 models - long-range, fixed-wing attack drones - to create areas covered by interceptor missiles.

"What we're seeing now shows that the Yemenis have also been gaining valuable operational experience, learning from failed attacks, adjusting their tactics and improving their ability to challenge advanced air defense systems," said Mohammad al-Basha, founder of the Washington-based consulting firm Pasha Report.

He added: Yemenis and their Iranian supporters have learned tricks about the strengths and weaknesses of Western air defense systems.

Yemenis have also benefited from lessons learned by Iran and its regional allies during their confrontations with the United States and Israel, including missile attacks on military bases and critical infrastructure across the Gulf states.

The nightmare of running out of interceptor missiles for the US and its allies

Saudi Arabia has a comprehensive air defense system, including Patriot and THAAD systems, surface-to-air missiles, interceptor drones, radar networks, electronic warfare equipment and even the Sky Shield, a Chinese-made fiber-optic laser weapon designed to counter drones.

However, the supply of interceptor missiles remains a critical, if somewhat ambiguous, factor, analysts said. Since February, the Persian Gulf countries have widely used Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems against Iranian attacks.

Therefore, it is clear that the current stocks of interceptor missiles of the Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, are very low, and in the meantime, the United States has warned even its closest allies that the supply of Patriot interceptor missiles is very limited, because Washington prioritizes its military needs.

Experts believe that now Saudi Arabia is facing additional pressure on its air defense; Because if the tensions in the region escalate again, the Saudis will have to face the attacks of Iran from the east and Yemen from the south, and this means that they have to divide their power.

Robert Tulast, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said that with the right planning, the Yemenis could mass enough missiles to knock out even the most fortified targets. Meanwhile, in the current situation, the Saudis find themselves in the same position as the Ukrainians, Israelis, or Americans.

He added: It is clear that the production of these advanced interceptor missiles is difficult and needs to be prioritized. In addition, protecting a country like Saudi Arabia is much more difficult than protecting Israel due to the large size of its military bases, airports, oil facilities and cities that no single air defense network can fully protect.

Yemen's clever strategy to confuse the enemy

Sasha Brochman, a Bahrain-based researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Yemeni attacks across Saudi Arabia are part of a strategy to disperse and weaken Saudi Arabia's air defense capabilities.

He explained that the Yemenis will target an important site for you for several days in a row until you start transferring your limited resources to that site, and then they will monitor where these resources are coming from. They scatter your capabilities and force you to move them and then attack another site that is important to you.

In this context, Robert Tulast, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said that protecting Saudi Arabia against missile attacks on this scale requires destroying launch sites in areas under the control of Yemeni forces by combining accurate and painstaking intelligence gathering with the deployment of a large fleet of Saudi Arabia's F-15 fighter jets to carry out attacks, similar to what American and Israeli warplanes did when identifying and targeting missile launch sites in Iran.

He added: Of course, we should mention here that despite the extensive use of satellite and drone surveillance capabilities, the United States and Israel faced many problems to destroy Iran's mobile missile launch platforms and were not successful in many cases. So it can be said that this is a game of chance.

Analysts believe that the Yemeni forces have networks of caves and tunnels, both natural and artificial, throughout the mountainous regions of northern Yemen. They have also withstood Saudi airstrikes for years and, more recently, massive US and Israeli bombings.

In this situation, Saudi Arabia has asked for help from its regional and European allies, none of whom have entered the war directly, but the most important blow to the Saudis in this regard was related to the negative response of the United States to directly entering the war against Yemen.

Although Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called Donald Trump last month to ask for his support against the Yemenis, the US president has remained vague in his public statements about whether he will intervene. Analysts say this has worried Riyadh, even as Washington continues to provide information and help identify targets.