Saudi Arabia’s Missiles: Why Riyadh Is Building Its Own

A liquid-fuel missile is like a car with an empty tank. Its fuel is kept in separate tanks and has to be loaded before launch, which takes time, needs a fixed site and gives the enemy a warning. A solid-fuel missile carries its fuel inside it from the day it is made. It can sit on a truck, drive anywhere and fire whenever it is ordered to.

That is how Iran fights. Its launchers move, hide and fire from wherever they happen to be, which is why they are so hard to destroy. Saudi Arabia’s first missiles, the DF-3s it bought from China in 1987, were liquid-fuelled. The new generation will give Riyadh the same mobility Tehran has relied on, with greater speed, better accuracy and a warhead of about 600 kilograms.

Riyadh’s main use for these missiles will be Sanaa. The Houthis have struck deep inside Saudi Arabia this month, including the Defence Ministry in Riyadh on October 22, and the kingdom has not been able to stop them.

The weapon changes the Houthis’ arithmetic. Saudi Arabia can now do to Sanaa what Iran is trying to do to the Gulf: inflict the greatest possible damage until the Houthis decide the price is too high. Take one city and keep hitting it. Civilian casualties would be the cost, and they are the reason Riyadh held back before. When Riyadh accepted the UN-brokered truce in April 2022, one of the pressures behind it came from the US Congress, where members had spent years denouncing the civilian toll of the Saudi-led air war. This time the world will not stand in Saudi Arabia’s way. The Houthis have hit the kingdom too hard, and too publicly, for anyone to demand that Riyadh absorb it quietly.

Riyadh also has the money. Saudi Arabia can afford to build as many missiles as it wants. It does not share America’s munitions shortages, it does not have to ship anything across an ocean, and it can store its stock under mountains. The Houthis will face firepower they have never seen before.

Saudi Arabia has spent heavily on air defence, and interceptors alone have not stopped the attacks. The new missiles reflect a different idea: deterrence. If you hit me, you will be hit.

Iran has run on that idea for years. It cannot match American firepower and has no air defence worth the name, so it threatens the Gulf instead. Its message to Washington is simple: strike me and the Gulf will be struck as never before. If Saudi Arabia adopts the same doctrine and can inflict heavy losses inside Iran, that is a strategic shift. The missiles would not come from the United States or Israel. They would come from Saudi Arabia, a country Washington never imagined would field the volume of fire Riyadh is now planning.

With Iran, deterrence has to be demonstrated: Tehran has to see that the missiles can strike. And the DF-21 class reaches far enough to matter: Kharg Island, which handles most of Iran’s oil exports, Bandar Abbas and the whole of Iran’s coast on the Gulf.

The plant is the clearest sign yet that Saudi Arabia has despaired of American protection. The kingdom pledged $1 trillion of investment in the United States and courted President Donald Trump, and as Semafor’s Saudi bureau chief Matthew Martin wrote on October 23, it has bought little leverage in Washington. As recently as February 2025, Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman was welcomed at the Pentagon with full honours by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; twenty months later, American protection has not kept Houthi missiles off Riyadh. On October 21 the United States ordered its staff out of Saudi Arabia while the Pentagon drew up its own strike plans for Iran.

The costs at home are real. Flights at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport were suspended for more than a week, and from October 8 to 15 about 46 per cent of all departures from Saudi airports were cancelled or did not operate, according to Cirium data reported by Khaleej Times. The Future Investment Initiative, known as “Davos in the Desert”, was postponed until 2027. Investors are leaving, and the entertainment push behind Riyadh Season runs into closed airports. Semafor concluded that Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to move the economy beyond oil, “has never felt further away”. The Economist went further and called 2026 his worst year.

Mohammed bin Salman is fighting on three fronts and cannot close any of them. In Yemen his options are hard: a ground war would take a very long time, there are no negotiations with the Houthis, and the strikes have not stopped. Above that sits a war with Iran he did not choose. With every option difficult, the kingdom has no alternative but to go forward.

The diplomacy around the kingdom shows why it is arming. On October 23 Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, hosted his counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan alongside Britain, France and Germany in Istanbul, with Italy also attending according to later reports. With Egypt at the table beside the Mecca defence alliance of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, and three of NATO’s leading members, it looked like a council of war. What came out of it was an offer to talk to Tehran.

Haaretz’s Middle East analyst Zvi Bar’el described the meeting as an attempt to sketch a diplomatic alternative to a war led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump, while Qatar, which was not in Istanbul, is offering Tehran a non-aggression pact. The ministers agreed to meet regularly, and Fidan said military intervention “is not a solution”. That wave of peace offers, from the Gulf, the region and Europe, and pointedly apart from Washington, shows how much these governments fear a new US-Iran war.

The offer has no plan of action behind it, and it cannot have one. The countries in Istanbul do not hold the decision of war or peace; the United States and Israel do. The Gulf states only react, and every time Iran is struck, it strikes them. Washington will not let them offer Tehran large concessions. The offer is rejected by Iran and by the United States. The war is a private American-Israeli project, and the Gulf will pay for it without the leverage to stop it.

Two things drive the coming war. Washington and Israel believe Iran has resumed nuclear work under Pickaxe Mountain, the deep tunnel complex south of Natanz that earlier strikes left untouched. And Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz again. Its Revolutionary Guard has attacked ships using the southern route along the Omani coast that the United States promoted as an alternative, and Brent crude settled at $116.72 a barrel on October 23.

The strike will come after the US midterm elections on November 3, whatever their result. If the Democrats win, the United States and Israel will strike Iran. If the Republicans win, they will strike Iran. Trump will hit Iran. The United States and Israel are planning to strike in mid-November.

That sets up a race. The al-Duwadimi plant is due to begin production in December. Israel watches the site closely because it is expanding as Saudi Arabia negotiates a civilian nuclear deal with the United States and after it signed a defence pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state. Israel and Iran are both unhappy about this factory. If war returns, it will be among the first targets Iran tries to hit.

Iran’s threats are aimed at its neighbours because that is where its power lies. On October 21 a senior Revolutionary Guard official, Yadollah Javani, said on state television that seven major internet cables run under the Strait of Hormuz and could be hit if Iran’s infrastructure were attacked, and Iranian reports say Tehran has a detailed plan to do it. The water there is shallow, and the precedent exists: undersea cables in the Red Sea were cut in 2024 during the Houthi campaign.

Iran depends on those cables too, a point few people raise, but Iran is already broke and has little to lose. The Gulf has everything to lose. Its capitals want to be the future of artificial intelligence and are building data centres for Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Cut the cables and those plans go back twenty years. Banks would stop, card payments and cash machines with them. Airports would stop, because flight systems depend on the network. Trade would stop. Iran would paralyse the Gulf in exchange for being struck.

Tehran has also hinted it could hit beyond the Gulf, with images suggesting a threat to the US embassy in Cairo, on the argument that Washington has not warned its mission in Egypt as it has warned others. That threat is exaggerated and unlikely. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has made clear that Egypt’s mission is defensive: Egyptian forces will defend Saudi territory and borders, and will not attack Yemen. Iran and the Houthis have understood the message. Egypt is there to support Saudi Arabia, not to strike Iran. And American intelligence usually knows before it issues a warning.