Saudi Arabia Is Preparing to Crush the Houthis on Its Own, Former US Intelligence Officer Tells Silent Dossier

DeVore knows the national security world from the inside. He served as an intelligence officer in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve from 1983 to 2007, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, and was a Reagan administration appointee at the Pentagon from 1986 to 1988, among the youngest of Reagan’s appointees in the Defense Department. He later served three terms in the California State Assembly and now works at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, according to his official biography. He appears regularly on Fox News and writes opinion pieces for it.

He is also a Republican, which matters. Silent Dossier recently put questions to Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser and a Democrat to the core. DeVore offers the view from the other side of Washington, the side now in power. When he explains why the United States is not fighting the Houthis, he is explaining the thinking of Trump’s camp. The interview was arranged with the help of Egyptian journalist Mohamed Maher.

DeVore’s answer was direct. “A lot of it has to do with encouraging the major powers of the Middle East to begin to act on their own to defend their own self-interests,” he said. “Saudi Arabia has a modern army. They’ve invested a lot of money into their military. They have very good equipment. They have a high level of training.”

The kingdom, he said, can defend itself and its national interests, “perhaps with some assistance from the United States with intelligence support”. That is exactly the support it is getting. According to the Associated Press, the United States has provided intelligence sharing, target identification and planning for the Saudi-led offensive but has not struck the Houthis directly. Asked whether Washington would join, Trump said: “We may. We’re gonna look at it.” He has not done so.

The second reason is Iran. “The US is very busy right now trying to prevent the Iranian regime from exporting any oil or receiving any military supplies to rebuild itself, rebuild its military,” DeVore said. “And therefore, other nations in the region are expected to step up and defend their own interests.” Since July 14, US forces enforcing the blockade on Iran have turned back 135 ships and destroyed 10 tankers that Central Command describes as part of Iran’s shadow fleet, CBS News reported. Washington’s navy and air power are committed there.

Then came his assessment of the kingdom. “I think it’s very evident to me that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has put together a plan to push back against the Houthi rebels in a very effective manner,” he said. “I think that they will perhaps gain some self-confidence out of this effort.”

That is the right reading. Saudi Arabia’s performance in this war has been good, and the picture of the last week, with missiles falling on Riyadh’s airport, does not show the whole war. The kingdom has many options, and the scene can turn. Saudi jets are already striking Houthi targets in Sanaa, al-Jawf and on Kamaran island, according to Houthi officials and Houthi-run media, and Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has said the response to the attacks “must be equally serious”. Saudi Arabia is not waiting for Trump. It is preparing to crush the Houthis, and it has the army to do it.

The Houthis are watching Washington just as closely. Houthi official Mohammed al-Bukhaiti warned on October 12 that if the United States joins the strikes, “there will be a swift and painful response targeting the U.S. and all its interests in the region”. Their threats are aimed at one thing: keeping America out.

The Houthis, formally Ansar Allah, are an armed movement from northern Yemen backed by Iran. They seized the capital Sanaa in September 2014 and drove out the internationally recognised government. In March 2015 Saudi Arabia led a coalition into Yemen to restore that government. Seven years of air war followed until a UN-brokered truce in April 2022 brought the fighting largely to a halt.

The truce held until July 2026, the month the US-Iran ceasefire collapsed, when fighting resumed and the Houthis declared a maritime embargo on the kingdom. In September they took Mokha and islands in the Bab al-Mandeb strait, and they have struck Saudi oil facilities, pipelines and, since October, airports. Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces began a counteroffensive on October 4. On October 8 a strike on Riyadh’s airport killed three people, including a Saudia pilot, and the October 10 strike was the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a decade. For Tehran the Houthis are a way to fight Saudi Arabia without fighting it directly. For Riyadh the war is about its capital, its oil and the Red Sea, which is why Trump’s refusal to join leaves it no choice but to win on its own.

A small group of Egyptian YouTubers with large audiences keeps claiming that the Egyptian army was defeated in October 1973 and that its performance was shameful, waving selective passages from the memoirs of Chief of Staff Saad el-Shazly as proof. They are wrong, and a former Pentagon official has now said so.

“A lot of Americans don’t quite comprehend that the actions of the Egyptian military in the 1973 war led directly to Egypt being the first Arab country to recognize Israel, to come to a peace agreement, an agreement between equals between Egypt and Israel,” DeVore said. Egyptians, he added, are “fairly unique in the Middle East” in having a continuous sense of nationhood that goes back a very long time, while many of the region’s borders were drawn only after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

Think about what a peace with a defeated army looks like. The winner says: we will give you back part of this piece of land, and in return you promise never to attack us again, and you should be grateful we gave you anything. The loser signs and says thank you. Camp David was nothing like that. The 1979 peace treaty bound both sides. Sinai was divided into Zones A, B and C with limits on Egyptian forces, and Israel accepted Zone D, a strip on its own side of the border with limits on Israeli forces. Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982.

No one signs a treaty of equals with an army it has beaten. Nor was it American pressure that gave Sinai back. Israel does not return land for free; it returns land only after it has been hit, and the way it behaves today shows it. The Egyptian army made the peace possible on the battlefield. Silent Dossier has examined Israel’s own 1973 plan to destroy the Egyptian army in Sinai, and how Egypt defeated it.

Israel wants to push Gaza’s population out, and any forced displacement would be aimed at Sinai. Egypt’s army has made clear it will not accept that. Israeli politicians and commentators have answered by complaining loudly about Egyptian forces in Sinai, with claims of 40,000 troops breaking the Camp David arrangements.

DeVore does not see a war coming. “I just don’t see that as very likely,” he said. “Why would it be in Egypt’s national interest to do so? What would they gain from such a thing?” Israel, he said, has no territorial ambitions on Egypt and holds no Egyptian territory, and the idea of a war belongs to “a prior era”.

That testimony matters, coming from a former intelligence officer who has seen a great deal. It says plainly that Egypt does not want to attack Israel, the opposite of what Israeli voices keep claiming about Sinai.

Some commentators in Egypt insist there is no military solution to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, that Ethiopia is too far away and that Egypt can only sit and wait. Ethiopia inaugurated the dam on September 9, 2025, and Egypt protested to the UN Security Council that it reserves the right to take all measures permitted under international law.

DeVore rejects the idea that force is off the table. “If the leaders of Egypt believe that their national interests are at stake, or they see an advantage to be had for their own position within the Middle East, of course, military force is always an option,” he said. That applies “not only with regards the waters of the Nile, but also potentially to stabilize neighboring regions, for example, Libya or in Yemen”. He recalled that Egypt sent a large force to Yemen in the 1960s. He hopes the disputes can be settled diplomatically, “but if they can’t, and they see that their national interests are at stake, of course, it’s entirely possible that the President El-Sisi could determine that the military might have to be deployed.”

Egypt can act militarily if its interests are threatened, and it will. The claim that the dam has no military answer is empty talk. Cairo is already building an air force, with more Rafale fighters and aerial refuelling, that can reach Ethiopia.

The surprise came on Iran. “I suspect it’ll end when the central government in Tehran collapses and is replaced by something else,” DeVore said, pointing to unprecedented inflation, shortages and public anger at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he called “an expansionist, revolutionary arm” of the government that wants “to impose their vision across the Middle East”.

This answer is not convincing. It is the same argument Trump made before he went to war with Iran in February: Iran is falling, it has lived under sanctions for decades, strike now and it will collapse. Eight months later the regime is still standing, the ceasefire collapsed in July, and this week the Revolutionary Guard claimed strikes on three supertankers in the Strait of Hormuz. DeVore is right about the Revolutionary Guard’s ambitions and about Iranians’ anger. He is repeating Washington’s wishful thinking on how the war ends.