Saudi Arabia Is Taking the Hits for Now. Its Revenge Will Be Crushing

Saudi Arabia is among the ten biggest military spenders in the world. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute puts its 2025 military spending at about $83 billion, and the kingdom operates American Patriot and THAAD air defences. That money has not bought safety, for four reasons that CNN laid out on October 13.

The first is size. Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the Gulf, with dozens of cities, airports and oil sites to protect. The East-West pipeline alone runs about 1,200 kilometres from the Gulf coast to the Red Sea, and no commander can put a Patriot battery beside every stretch of it.

The second is that the kingdom is under fire from three directions. The Houthis launch from Yemen in the south. Iran-backed militias in Iraq have sent drones at the East-West pipeline, which satellite images showed damaged after an attack on September 22. Iran fired about 1,000 missiles and drones at Saudi targets during the most intense phase of its war this year. Very few countries have ever had to defend against three fronts at once.

The third is stock. The Iran war has run for eight months and burned through a large share of the kingdom’s Patriot and THAAD interceptors. A US Defense Department inspector-general report found that the Iran campaign “resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply”. Money cannot instantly buy missiles that factories have not yet built.

The fourth is tactics. The Houthis rarely fire one missile at a time. A ballistic missile climbs high and drops steeply, a cruise missile flies low and manoeuvres near the ground, and drones come in numbers. Fired together at one target, they force the defenders to choose what to shoot. An initial Saudi inquiry into the airport strike found that drones went in first to clear a path for a mix of cruise and ballistic missiles, according to regional officials who spoke to the Associated Press. The Houthis also keep modifying their missiles to get past defences.

CNN’s analysts conclude that no country could stop all of this. The gaps over Riyadh reflect an unsolved military problem, and they say little about Saudi competence.

A fifth factor is political. According to military-tracking accounts, American air-defence units in the region have stopped engaging Houthi missiles and drones aimed at Saudi targets, keeping their interceptors for a possible return to war with Iran. The United States is short of air-defence missiles itself. President Donald Trump has declined to join Saudi Arabia in striking the Houthis, and now he is not defending it either. Michael Ratney, a former US ambassador in Riyadh, told CNN that American reluctance “stokes the perception” that Washington has abandoned a partner. We have explained why Trump will not join the war.

On October 4, Iran’s foreign ministry offered to help settle the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has left the offer on the table. A government that believed it was losing would take a way out. Saudi Arabia has a plan of its own, and it is prepared to absorb the strikes until it can take its revenge. Its first answers have already landed, with Saudi jets bombing Houthi fuel depots around Sanaa and Hodeidah. Those raids are the opening, and the main blow is still to come.

The New York Times has identified what Riyadh is counting on: the Houthis and their Iranian backers are overconfident. They think they have won and that Saudi Arabia has given up. Football fans have a word for what comes next. A remontada is the comeback from a losing position that nobody in the stadium saw coming, and it usually belongs to the side that took the goals without panicking and waited for its moment. After the first airport strikes we argued that the Houthis misjudged Saudi Arabia, and this week has only made that clearer.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Gulf state paying. On October 13, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told the Shura Council that state revenue fell 42 per cent in the first half of 2026 and public spending fell 14 per cent. He blamed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and direct damage to energy facilities at Ras Laffan.

Qatar is not at war, and it has been hit far less than Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia or the UAE. Yet it cannot ship its gas, it has no alternative export route, and repairs to two damaged LNG lines at Ras Laffan will take about three years. Qatar will not go bankrupt, because its sovereign wealth fund holds around $500 billion abroad. Still, one of the richest states on earth, with barely 300,000 citizens, is cutting spending, and its losses will deepen if the war runs through the rest of the year.