On October 10, 2026, the Yemeni Ansar Allah Houthi group bombed King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 13 people and wounding more than 300, in the bloodiest attack on Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.
Three days later, Aramco headquarters in Dhahran was bombed. After the two incidents, Riyadh opened an investigation into the reasons for the failure of the interception and the absence of early warning.
The violent Houthi strikes came despite the fact that the year 2025 witnessed Saudi military spending amounting to $83.2 billion, which is the eighth largest military spending in the world. Now the big question arises: Why does this huge budget not automatically turn into protection? Is it related to the efficiency of using this huge armament? Or does the matter have other dimensions?
Interesting numbers
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Saudi spending in 2025 rose by 1.4% to $83.2 billion, which is about 12% higher than the 2016 level. Between 2021 and 2025, Saudi Arabia was the third largest arms importer with a 6.8% share of the global total, and received 12% of US arms exports.
On the list of arms suppliers to Saudi Arabia, the United States stands at 77%, Spain 9.5%, and France 4.6%. The Spanish share is mainly due to the purchase of five Avante 2200 Corvettes delivered between 2022 and 2024.
A corvette is a smaller, lighter, and faster warship compared to frigates, and is usually used for coastal operations, coastal protection, and defense against submarines and fast ships.
It is noted that Saudi Arabia’s imports recently decreased by 31% compared to the period between 2016 and 2020. The SIPRI Institute explains this by the purchasing cycle, meaning that there are previous huge Saudi orders that have not yet been absorbed, but Saudi Arabia is expected to remain among the largest importers.
Peter Weissman, a senior researcher at the SIPRI Institute, explained that this decline is primarily due to huge Saudi orders that were placed in a previous period, and whose integration processes (into the military arsenal) have not yet been completed.
It is also worth noting that the 2017 package with the United States, which was promoted at $110 billion, was mostly letters of intent, according to an analysis conducted by Bruce Riedel, a researcher and expert on Middle East affairs at the Brookings Institution.
The Pentagon later announced that the signed letters of offer and acceptance amounted to about $14.5 billion, and that the package included deals previously approved by the Obama administration.
It is also important to point out that the localization of military industries in Saudi Arabia was one of the reasons for the inflation of the military budget, as the General Authority for Military Industries (GAMI) announced that the localization rate of military spending reached 24.89% at the end of 2024, compared to 4% in 2018, with a goal of exceeding 50% by 2030.
The SIPRI Institute described efforts to build a local industry in 2018, when the percentage was 2%, as achieving limited results.
But the localization of “assembly” does not mean that Saudi Arabia possesses the source codes for the weapons or the production lines for interceptor missiles, which are what Riyadh desperately needs today.
The Iran war as a stress test
The US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, 2026, and Saudi Arabia launched a strike on the Ras Tanura refinery on March 2. According to an analysis by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) of the first three weeks of battles, about 70% of the interceptions announced by Riyadh went to drones and missiles heading to the eastern region or to specific oil facilities, which indicates a shift in targeting towards the economic foundations of the Kingdom.
In terms of depletion, an analysis by The National website indicates that the Americans launched about 1,500 Patriot missiles, with about 800 remaining out of a stock of 2,300, and that replenishing the stock may take 30 months.
According to Nawaf Obaid of King's College, Saudi Arabia has more than 1,800 Patriots and has used a large number of them. CSIS notes that no new THAAD munitions have arrived since August 2023, according to press and research estimates.
What is lacking in the Saudi army: weapons or competence?
When Riyadh opened an investigation into the reasons for the failure to intercept the attack on King Khalid Airport, the old question returned: How did Saudi Arabia spend $83 billion and then be attacked in its capital? But the answer starts with the definition of “competence” itself, because the evidence does not point in one direction. In the face of Iranian ballistic missiles in the 2026 war, the interception rate was high, according to reports from two Gulf countries, according to the CSIS Center.
Nawaf Obaid from King's College believes that the coalition is militarily superior to the Houthis, but they are able to make headlines with sporadic strikes. On the other hand, SIPRI notes that the intervention in Yemen did not achieve a quick victory or settlement. There are therefore three tasks measured by different criteria: protecting the interior from cheap, low-profile weapons, offensive operations outside the borders, and political deterrence. Confusing them makes the question bigger than its answer.
A force designed to protect governance
The first thing the literature suggests is that the Saudi military structure was not built to maximize combat effectiveness alone. The National Guard was established in 1955 after an attempted military coup, to protect the ruling family from the army. An academic study on the Yemen war finds that the separation of the National Guard from the Ministry of Defense led to weak communication and poor distribution of resources.
This fragmentation may fuel rivalry between units and hinder the sharing of intelligence and plans, Natasha Lundstedt wrote in Forbes.
In terms of the material dimension, Anthony Cordesman of the CSIS Institute says that Saudi Arabia is a power that has long relied on foreign support and contractors, and he spoke of weak preparedness and poor procurement management. These sources date back to the period between 2004 and 2006. The Congressional Research Service report says that the Saudi army has relied for decades on American sales, training, and maintenance, and that the impact of the new deals depends on investment in maintenance, training, and leadership arrangements.
What makes matters even more ambiguous is that transparency is absent. SIPRI's Peter Weissman wrote that it is difficult to determine whether spending is motivated by defensive or offensive motives, prestige, internal power struggles, or the enrichment of officials, and that the Saudi documents do not include detailed data on the Interior Ministry's paramilitary forces. Therefore, efficiency remains a matter to be deduced and not measured.
An old danger and a strategy without a partner
According to strategic analyses, the most obvious flaw is the disparity between what the defenses were built to confront and what they face today. The Washington Institute's Michael Knights analyzed the failure to intercept the Abqaiq and Khurais attacks in 2019, concluding that the defenses were overburdened, poorly coordinated, and understaffed on a wartime basis. Knights points out that most of them face east without comprehensive coverage, with a scarcity of radars and a failure to take advantage of available warning information due to poor training in the northern defences.
On the other hand, members of the Yemen Front have become more experienced in directing radars with the help of visual observers. Today, Riyadh is investigating the reason for the failure of the interception and the absence of early warning in an attack whose missiles traveled more than a thousand kilometers, although the similarity between the 2019 questions and the 2026 questions does not prove the similarity of the reasons in both cases.
As for Yemen, the problem lies in strategy before tactics. Knights saw that the air campaign in 2015 lacked a clear connection to the general strategy of the war, and that some of the most dangerous things threatening the borders, such as the short-range missile launchers on Najran, Patriot batteries cannot intercept.
In developments in 2026, April Longley of the Washington Institute noted that Riyadh did not succeed in uniting the Yemeni forces under its leadership after the withdrawal of UAE forces, which it describes as Saudi Arabia’s most capable local partner. This means that part of what appears to be a weakness in efficiency is in fact a political and alliance weakness, which cannot be addressed by more weapons.
A comprehensive military solution... is unlikely
April Longley Alley of the Washington Institute estimates that a comprehensive military resolution by either side is highly unlikely, and that a political settlement would be necessary. It indicates that the Saudi-Emirati dispute hinders the unification of Yemeni forces, and that American air strikes - if they come - will not solve the problem without effective Yemeni forces and a unified political plan. Ahmed Naji of the International Crisis Group believes that striking Saudi infrastructure may increase Riyadh’s determination to continue the military campaign.
Riyadh has expanded the circle of support, as the Washington Institute pointed to the participation of France, Britain, the United States, Pakistan and Turkey in defending its territories, and to the joint defense agreement signed in August with Pakistan and Turkey.
Strategic options to build “sustainable deterrence”
Based on analyzes of the British RUSI Institute and the CSIS Center, and compared to the stated goals of Vision 2030, the transformations of modern wars require Riyadh to adopt the following options to avoid the gap between spending and results:
Building “defensive density” with a mix of varying costs:
The RUSI Institute documents that the lesson drawn from the current wars, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East, is that the problem is not the quality of the systems, but rather the small number of them. Launching missiles costing more than $500,000 or a million-pound Aster missile on a drone costing between $50 and $70,000 is an absolutely unsustainable equation.
RUSI warns that tactical laser systems have shown unsatisfactory results in the desert environment of Iraq due to maintenance and reliability problems, that high-power electromagnetic (HPM) waves are still only optimized for small drones, and that the “pennies per shot” cost remains a future goal rather than a proven reality.
So the priority is AI-guided guns, low-cost interceptors, and mobile tactical radars, with directed energy development as a supplementary layer rather than a replacement.
2. Moving from collecting to possessing knowledge:
Saudi Vision 2030 aims to localize more than 50% of spending on military equipment and services by 2030. Achieving this goal in its sovereign sense requires going beyond assembly and manufacturing with a license towards owning the source codes and algorithms of radar, command and control systems, to ensure independent development and modernization without waiting for the approvals of the supplying companies or restrictions on technology transfer, according to a study by the Rand Institute.
3. Unified command for diverse threats:
The CSIS Institute notes that the Gulf partners' defenses remain limited in coverage and that there are still no clear plans for an integrated regional air and missile defense system.
Locally, unifying the battle management and air defense centers under one umbrella of data linked to early monitoring and satellites is the way to shorten the kill chain and shorten the administrative approval steps when intercepting fast and low-altitude threats, according to the institute’s analysis.
Developments of events in 2026 show that the question is no longer why the large budget does not protect Saudi Arabia, but rather how much it can protect for a sufficient period. A large budget is necessary, but it is not sufficient unless it is paralleled by a deeper inventory, broader sensors, cheaper layers, and a political settlement.
