Saudi Arabia can fight the Houthis, it may not be able to defeat them

Saudi Arabia can afford a long war. It can buy aircraft, missiles, drones, air-defense systems and intelligence. It can absorb losses that would bankrupt a poorer state. Yet that does not mean it can defeat the Houthis. That distinction has become impossible to ignore. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly called Donald Trump twice last week and urged Washington to strike the Houthis directly. Trump declined, although Washington agreed to provide intelligence and targeting support. The episode is revealing not because Saudi Arabia lacks military power, but because Riyadh appears to recognize that the Houthi problem is no longer one that firepower alone can solve.

The timing matters. The Houthis have seized Mocha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast and moved toward strategically important islands at the mouth of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. At the same time, attacks attributed to Iran-aligned forces have disrupted Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, the very infrastructure designed to give Riyadh an alternative route around the Strait of Hormuz. This leaves Saudi Arabia facing a strategic problem that is much harder than defeating an insurgency. It must protect an economic system built around a handful of extraordinarily valuable and geographically exposed nodes. The Houthis do not need to conquer Saudi Arabia. They only need to make Saudi Arabia’s critical infrastructure sufficiently vulnerable, costly and unpredictable.

Saudi Has the Firepower

On paper, the balance is overwhelmingly in Saudi Arabia’s favor. Riyadh spent an estimated $83.2 billion on its military in 2025, making it the world’s eighth-largest military spender. It possesses advanced fighter aircraft, precision weapons, sophisticated air defenses and extensive access to Western intelligence and technology. The Houthis, by comparison, are a much poorer non-state actor operating from one of the Middle East’s most difficult physical environments. Yet the conventional balance has never translated into decisive strategic victory.

Saudi Arabia entered Yemen’s war in 2015 with overwhelming airpower and a clear political objective: prevent the Houthis from consolidating control over Yemen and restore a government friendly to Riyadh. Years of airstrikes imposed enormous damage and slowed Houthi advances, but they did not produce the political outcome Saudi Arabia wanted.

The lesson is that airpower is poorly suited to solving a political problem when the adversary can disperse, regenerate and operate below the threshold of conventional war. The Houthis have spent the past decade adapting precisely to that imbalance. According to ACLED, they conducted nearly 1,000 rocket and missile attacks and more than 350 distinct drone attacks against Saudi and Emirati territory between 2015 and the April 2022 truce. More importantly, the character of those attacks changed. Guided missiles accounted for just 15 percent of Houthi rocket and missile events in 2015, but 89 percent by 2022. Drone attacks also increasingly outnumbered missile attacks.

That evolution points to a fundamental strategic mismatch. Saudi Arabia has generally sought to punish the Houthis by destroying military assets and degrading their operational capacity. The Houthis, meanwhile, have increasingly sought to deny Saudi Arabia the ability to operate securely and predictably. That is the difference between punishment and denial. A military power can destroy a missile launcher. It cannot easily destroy the political and economic incentives behind a dispersed missile force. It can intercept a drone. It cannot guarantee that the next drone will not find another vulnerability. It can strike a command center. It cannot bomb away the geography that gives an adversary access to a strategic maritime chokepoint.

The 2019 attack on Abqaiq and Khurais illustrated the problem dramatically. The assault temporarily knocked out more than half of Saudi oil production and almost 5 percent of global oil supply.

Whether the attack was launched from Iranian or Iraqi territory or claimed by the Houthis, its strategic lesson was unmistakable that a relatively inexpensive asymmetric attack could impose enormous costs on one of the world’s most heavily armed states. That is why Saudi Arabia’s military superiority should not be confused with strategic invulnerability.

The Houthis Are No Longer Fighting Only for Yemen

The most important change in 2026 is that the Houthi threat is no longer primarily territorial. It is increasingly geographic and economic. The seizure of Mocha and the Houthi advance toward Perim Island and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait have altered the strategic map. Bab al-Mandeb is not simply another battlefield. It is one of the world’s principal maritime chokepoints, linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Reuters reported that Houthi forces reached the strategic island of Perim on September 11, putting them closer to the maritime gateway through which energy and commercial traffic moves between the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

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That development matters enormously for Saudi Arabia. For years, Riyadh has invested in reducing its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz. The East-West Pipeline is central to that strategy because it allows Saudi crude to reach the Red Sea port of Yanbu without passing through Hormuz. But the geography of the current conflict is beginning to turn that strategy against Riyadh. Hormuz is under pressure from Iran. Bab al-Mandeb is increasingly exposed to the Houthis. And the East-West Pipeline has itself been disrupted by drone attacks attributed to Iran-aligned forces in Iraq. Reuters reported that the pipeline outage could threaten as much as 4 percent of global oil supply, while Saudi crude production had already fallen sharply from earlier levels.

This is no longer a conventional war in the familiar sense. It is a contest over the reliability of economic geography. That distinction is critical.

Iran and its aligned forces do not need to seize Saudi oil fields. They do not even need to shut down every shipping lane. They only need to increase the risk attached to the routes through which Saudi energy reaches the global market. This is chokepoint warfare. The objective is not necessarily to control every inch of territory. It is to acquire leverage over the narrow points through which enormous volumes of trade must pass. 

That is precisely why Houthi capabilities matter beyond Yemen. ACLED has documented how the group previously used drones and missiles against airports and hydrocarbon facilities rather than concentrating solely on battlefield targets. From 2018 to early 2022, 43 percent of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia targeted civilian airports and energy infrastructure. The logic is brutally efficient that attack what the adversary cannot afford to lose. For Saudi Arabia, that means oil infrastructure, ports, pipelines, airports and increasingly maritime routes. The Houthis therefore do not have to win a conventional war. They only have to make the cost of maintaining normality rise faster than Riyadh’s ability or willingness to absorb it.

Can Saudi Afford to Defeat Houthis?

This is where the question of Saudi military capability becomes inseparable from the question of Saudi economic strategy. Riyadh can certainly retaliate. It can intensify airstrikes, deploy more intelligence assets, expand missile defenses and work with regional partners. Saudi Arabia has enough resources to impose substantial costs on the Houthis. The harder question is whether escalation would actually solve the problem. A heavier Saudi campaign could force the Houthis underground. It could destroy launch sites and command infrastructure. But it could also generate the very response Riyadh wants to avoid: more attacks against oil facilities, cities, ports and shipping. That is the escalation paradox.

If Saudi Arabia restrains itself, the Houthis may consolidate their position around Bab al-Mandeb and strengthen their bargaining power. If Saudi Arabia escalates dramatically, the Houthis may retaliate against the infrastructure that makes Saudi Arabia economically powerful but strategically exposed. The request to Trump therefore makes more sense in this context. MBS was not necessarily asking Washington to fight Saudi Arabia’s war for it. He was seeking to alter the cost-benefit equation by adding American military power to the deterrence equation. Trump’s refusal to authorize direct strikes, while allowing intelligence and targeting support, exposes a new strategic reality that Riyadh cannot automatically assume that Washington will absorb the escalation risks associated with every Saudi security problem.

That leaves Saudi Arabia with a difficult choice. It can fight the Houthis alone. But a war of indefinite containment would consume resources and expose critical infrastructure. A campaign designed to achieve decisive victory could be even more dangerous because it would invite retaliation against precisely those assets Saudi Arabia is trying to protect. The central problem, therefore, is not Saudi Arabia’s military weakness. It is Saudi Arabia’s strategic exposure. The Houthis possess less firepower, less money and fewer sophisticated weapons. Yet they can exploit a fundamental asymmetry, the cost of launching an attack can be tiny compared with the cost of defending every potential target.

A cheap drone can force the deployment of expensive interceptors. A single strike on a pipeline can disrupt millions of barrels of potential exports. A credible threat to shipping can raise insurance premiums even without sinking a single tanker. A temporary closure of a chokepoint can create economic consequences far beyond the battlefield. This is why the Houthi challenge should not be measured by the territory the group controls or the number of weapons it possesses. It should be measured by the amount of strategic uncertainty it can impose.

Saudi Arabia therefore faces a paradox that extends far beyond Yemen. It has sufficient military power to fight the Houthis, but military superiority does not guarantee strategic immunity. Riyadh can degrade the group, deter some attacks and impose painful costs. What it cannot easily do is eliminate the geography, economic exposure and asymmetric incentives that make the Houthi strategy possible.

That is the real lesson of the current crisis. Saudi Arabia does not need to become militarily stronger simply to defeat the Houthis. It needs to become strategically harder to coerce. That means diversifying energy routes, hardening critical infrastructure, improving integrated air and missile defense, strengthening maritime security, expanding regional intelligence cooperation and, above all, reducing the number of single points of failure on which its economic model depends. The Houthis have exposed a vulnerability that money and military technology alone cannot solve. Saudi Arabia can win battles against them. But unless Riyadh changes the strategic geometry of the contest, the Houthis may not need to win the war.

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