How Saudi Arabia Botched Yemen.

Every so often, an overambitious world power manages to horrifically overextend itself and produce the geopolitical version of a generational fumble. The United States took its turn in 2021 with its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Russia did the same a year later, mounting a full-scale invasion of Ukraine but failing to consider that it would need to refuel its gas tanks as its columns advanced on Kiev.

But over the past week, Saudi Arabia became the latest country to join the club when it tried to contain an offensive from Yemen's Houthi rebels, promptly shitting the bed, and then presided over the loss of nearly the entire Red Sea coastline in western Yemen.

In the course of its failed anti-Houthi operations, the Saudi government in Riyadh has given the world a crash course on exactly how not to go about fighting the Houthis through its proxy allies on the ground.

Riyadh failed to see the Houthis coming, squandered its pre-fight advantages, and when the time came for Saudi forces to step up, well, suffice it to say that they didn't.

And this crisis is made all the worse by the fact that the Saudis told the world they had Yemen on lockdown that there was nothing to worry about.

But now we've got Riyadh in disarray, the Houthis in control of the Red Sea's southern entrance, and regional officials quoted by CNN decrying the whole thing as a, quote, Saudi-American fuck-up of epic proportions.

So as Houthi fighters unfold their beach chairs and sip on their kishir tea as they debate which of the passing trade ships would make for the best practice, it's time that we discuss how Saudi Arabia managed to create the one crisis that absolutely nobody needed.

Good in theory. Now, as we begin this episode, it's important that we take a moment and share one of the assumptions that we rely on when we produce our analysis here on Warfronts. That is basic military competence.

And it's a risky assumption to make. Of course, world leaders don't have a particularly strong track record, and especially not recently.

But if we're going to try and assess a situation before it plays out, then we've got to assume that the fighting forces on both sides of a conflict will have their shit together until... until and unless they prove otherwise.

When Russia prepares a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we assume that Russian military planners are aware of the fact that the Ukrainians might, you know, shoot back.

When the United States decides to launch a campaign against Iran, we assume that the leadership in Washington couldn't possibly fail to understand that Iran would respond with attacks against the Strait of Hormuz and against US bases and allies across the region.

Granted, oh, we've identified those specific examples because in each case, those governments decided to go to war with a... the United States.

So, we've got to assume that the United States doesn't have a... a horrifically incomplete idea of what they were facing. But from our perspective as analysts, we've got to assume that global militaries are fundamentally competent in their roles and leave it to those militaries to prove us wrong.

And to Saudi Arabia's credit, well, damn it, they really got us.

In order to understand just what went wrong for Saudi Arabia, let's begin by talking about how this was supposed to go, because we really can't overstate the degree to which Yemen was supposed to be a managed problem for Saudi Arabia to deal with.

So, let's start with the question of how this was supposed to go, because we really can't overstate the degree to which Yemen was supposed to be a managed problem for Saudi Arabia to deal with.

Since it first began its intervention against the Houthi rebels back in March of 2015 alongside the United Arab Emirates, Riyadh has tried to use Yemen as a showcase for its own geopolitical power.

And to its credit, Riyadh was able to build a network of proxy forces in the country, including both the internationally recognized Yemeni government holding territory that the Houthis hadn't yet captured, and an array of tribal militias that fought at the Saudis' beck and call.

Riyadh was able to build up its own arsenal of tanks, warplanes, and other advanced fighting equipment to support its proxies, with a force that certainly resembles a world-class military. The Saudis and their Yemeni allies have held the Houthis to a ceasefire and kept them encircled since 2022.

And when in late 2025 a lightning assault by an Emirates-backed separatist group led the Saudi-backed forces to temporarily collapse, Riyadh and its proxies proved the whole world wrong.

Instead of ceding control of Yemen, as they appeared to do, they reconstituted their forces and exploded back in the opposite direction, eventually dismantling their separatist group even in its own strongholds.

And after the affair with the separatists had concluded, Riyadh was reportedly considering a Yemeni counteroffensive against the Houthis to create a full buffer zone between Houthi territory and the Red Sea coast.

But all the while, there have been ample warning signs that the Saudi perimeter wasn't quite as formidable as it looked. After the Houthis learned that they could target Saudi oil infrastructure in cross-border missile and drone strikes, Saudi Arabia never really fixed that issue.

When the Houthis began a campaign of solidarity strikes, against Red Sea shipping in support of Hamas and Gaza, the Saudis had to lean on the rest of the world's support in the largely ineffective security mission known as Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Then, when the Saudi-led coalition tried to kill a Houthi delegation as it flew out of Sana'a International Airport in July of this year, the Houthis were all too happy to fight back with waves of retaliatory drone and missile strikes.

Even when the US and Israel took action against the Houthis, it was a bad sign for Saudi Arabia, because despite their extensive warfighting capabilities, their advanced combat jets, and their total control of the skies, neither Israel nor the United States were able to deter the Houthis from escalating further.

Saudi Arabia, by contrast, is the owner of a military so terribly special that it inspired our Warfronts team a bit over a year ago to make a video called "Saudi Arabia is Super Rich: Why Is Their Military So Awful?" There's a much larger conversation here about just why the rest of the world has been so willing to let Saudi Arabia take point on containing

The Houthis.

In part, that decision could be explained in this video. In this video, the Houthis are being explained away by Saudi Arabia's influence and its ability to get what it wants from a wide range of larger powers. Partly, the world has been distracted, and after a few years of relative quiet, the Houthis hadn't made themselves much of a priority.

Partly, Yemen's a bit of a backwater compared to some other global hotspots, and if the Saudis wanted to take on that responsibility and take an item off the rest of the world's to-do list, well, more power to them. But all of that logic falls apart as soon as the Houthis cross over from being a potential threat into an active threat.

And Saudi Arabia's containment plan is put to the test.

In the first few days of the Houthi offensive, when the rebels massed their forces and began a push toward the pocket of southwestern Yemen that stood between them and the critical Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the response of the Saudis and the Yemeni allies gave a relatively clear set of insights on how the defense of non-Houthi Yemen was supposed to work.

The Houthis took a fairly big gamble when they began their assault, sending tens of thousands of fighters into an all-out push toward territory near the besieged city of Taiz.

The Saudi-backed forces responded to that over-commitment, with a prompt multi-directional counter-offensive slamming into the Houthi advance from its vulnerable flanks while launching secondary attacks in exposed areas where Houthi defensive forces had been depleted to reassign fighters to the southern front.

Despite media reports to the contrary, Saudi warplanes did get active in the early days, even if the Yemeni forces on the ground would have liked substantially better air support than they'd received.

Overall, the Saudis and their allies on the ground responded quite well in the early going, but that's the thing about glass-cannon militaries: they're great at making a big early impact, but they're prone to falling apart once the going gets tough.

FIRST CONTACT WITH REALITY It's difficult to overstate just how much went wrong for Saudi Arabia to allow this level of conquest by the Houthis in such a short time.

But like any good story, it's best that we start from the beginning with what international sources now describe as a massive intelligence failure.

Speaker De Reuters in the aftermath of the Houthi offensive, an unnamed diplomat, and U.S. president Joe Biden in the aftermath of the attack, explained that the Houthis had managed to assemble a force of roughly 100,000 fighters without being detected.

Quoting directly, "Everyone, including the Saudis, missed the build-up and miscalculated the Houthis' intentions." Aura's Chatham House expert Neil Quilliam explained for the same article, quoting, "They just weren't picking up the signal.

They just weren't seeing the signs." Instead, Saudi Arabia's allies on the ground had little indication that they were about to be under attack, and so they were stuck in defensive emplacements that wouldn't be prepared for battle, relying on forces that had been slowly shrunk over time due to the sheer monotony and relatively low demands of holding their

Positions while at peace.

When the Houthis did attack, Saudi Arabia ran into another problem: the utter unpleasantness of the forces that were still present in this part of Yemen.

By all accounts, the Houthis were willing to go all out in pursuit of victory: massive groups of fighters, liberal use of ballistic missiles and drones, and complete commitment to forward progress whenever it was a real possibility.

The other side of the conflict, however, was a very different situation. Quoting a CNN report on the topic, citing a Western source, "Houthi fighters arrived in Moha on Thursday to find Yemeni battalions that were severely depleted.

Their rosters were filled with ghost names receiving salaries, and the actual strength of their army was only about 20% of what it was on paper." Saudi Arabia had also failed to position new troops on enemy bases in Yemen after the United Arab Emirates completed its own withdrawal from the country earlier this year.

The Yemeni forces, who did show up to the fight, lacked anything close to the support that they would need to hold isolated, easily flanked coastal positions against overwhelming Houthi numbers.

Rather understandably, they instead chose to get out of town, selling off or burying their weapons if they were going to desert or leaving for the next closest defensible town.

But that latter decision turned into a stage-by-stage rout, with the Houthis chasing their adversaries down the coast as Yemeni fighters discovered that they didn't actually have a fallback point.

As one Yemeni fighter told the Financial Times, "We discovered that most of our colleagues had already fled." But the decision those fighters made simply can't be blamed on sheer cowardice when Saudi Arabia made it clear that they wouldn't receive support.

Quoting that CNN report again, the Saudis "didn't move key air command personnel into place and never deployed the necessary service personnel to control and direct combat aircraft." Or, as the Associated Press paraphrased a senior Yemeni official's account, "They were stunned that the Saudi Air Force did not try." The AP source, quoting again, also blamed

Lack of coordination between Yemen's army and multiple allied militias, saying it gave the Houthis a "priceless opportunity." Going back to the testimony of the Yemeni fighter who spoke to the Financial Times explaining his own decision to flee, "When we saw that our leaders had already fled and that we were being left as victims of the war, we fled towards

Aden." Next, the Saudis were faced with a difficult decision.

The Houthis had turned back the initial counteroffensive.

They were moving very quickly, and it was unlikely that the Saudis' proxy forces could stop them alone.

Saudi Arabia could still intervene, but it would have to intervene by relying on its own troops: paratroopers jumping into the fray, perhaps fast-moving warships that could carry soldiers down the coast in a pinch, or maybe even smaller civilian business jets commandeered to fly a wide loop around Houthi territory and drop troops off in places like Aden.

Riyadh could have deployed larger, but still limited, numbers of troops.

It would have been easy for the Saudis to force troops into northern Yemen to try and create counter-pressure against the Houthis and relieve a bit of the strain placed onto the south.

All of those troops would have been badly under-equipped, going into a situation that was poorly understood in very limited numbers, given that Saudi Arabia is only believed to have very small numbers of troops available for a rapid deployment by air or sea.

But then again, that's the risk you take if you're an ambitious, regional power that's chosen to take stewardship of a frozen conflict on the edge of a key global trade route.

If you don't do it really badly, then you might have to spring into action and make do by putting the lives of your own soldiers at risk. Saudi Arabia was faced with the need to intervene directly on the ground in a conflict that it claimed it could manage, and in the moment that mattered most, Riyadh couldn't bring itself to pull the trigger.

In the absence of decisive action, the losses began piling up for Saudi Arabia, as well as for the forces that they'd been backing on the ground.

In Yemen, the Saudi-backed forces were forced to retreat all the way past the southwestern bend of the coastline, giving up the peninsula. It's this peninsula that juts out into the Bab el-Mandeb, and allowing the Houthis to conduct beach landings on critical islands in the southern Red Sea.

Those Yemeni forces have been able to contest Houthi control of those areas on a limited basis, but they don't appear close to launching a real counter-offensive.

Then the Houthis pivoted and began a parallel assault against the city of Marib, forcing Saudi-backed fighters to stretch themselves even thinner, and basically giving up the idea of a counter-offensive in order to keep themselves from losing anything more. At long-range, the Houthis scored a 3-0.

The Houthis scored direct hits on Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline, a vital cross-country piece of oil infrastructure that allows Riyadh to export its oil north through the Suez Canal, without passing through either the Bab el-Mandeb or the Iran-controlled Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia has acknowledged that the pipeline hasn't been shut down for the time being. Then, on Wednesday, the Houthis even claimed credit for shooting down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet, the fifth F-15 to be lost in combat this year after four went down during the Iran conflict. Then there's all the advanced military equipment.

For years, the Yemeni government and its allied militias had been supplied with weapons and armor from around the world, but far too much of that equipment was ultimately abandoned by forces trying to escape the Houthi advance.

According to photos and videos circulating from the combat zone, the Houthis have seized several American-made mine-resistant armored trucks, as well as numerous lighter trucks equipped with machine guns, perfect for light, high-speed maneuver wars in the open desert.

The Houthis have captured ample small arms and enough ammunition to sustain themselves, for quite a while.

Already, the Houthis were experienced in the use of mortars, rockets, kamikaze and bomber drones and longer-range missiles, but the captured kit will probably make the biggest difference in cases where the Houthis want to hit their enemies hard in large-scale ground offensives.

Unfortunately for their adversaries in Yemen, that's exactly what the Houthis are likely to try and do next, targeting the city of Taiz, the inland stronghold of Marib, or maybe even the city of Aden, the de facto capital of Yemen under the internationally recognized government.

In anticipation of further Houthi offensives, Yemeni civilians have started to flee the country on boats headed across the Gulf of Aden or the Red Sea to take refuge wherever they can.

By Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration estimated that nearly 94,000 people had been newly displaced across the country. And after the world realized just how serious the Houthi offensive was, Saudi Arabia failed again, this time to rally the forces of the world to its side in any meaningful way.

Saudi Arabia should have been able to rely on the intervention of Pakistan and Turkey, especially the former, after it signed a mutual defense pact with Islamabad in 2025 and added Ankara to the agreement this year.

But instead, Pakistan claimed that it had no obligation to help Saudi Arabia in this situation, insisting that the Houthis were Saudi Arabia's geopolitical equivalent of a pre-existing condition. For our non-US viewers, by the way, that's an American healthcare thing. Don't bother looking, it'll just depress you.

Instead, Pakistan has chosen to appeal to Iran to try and rein in the Houthis on the basis that the Houthis are an Iran-backed proxy. China has even gotten in on the effort, reportedly pressuring Iran behind the scenes to get the Houthis to settle down. The trouble, however, is that Iran doesn't control the Houthis.

Iran works with the Houthis, it finances them, it arms them. But the Houthis have been Iran's most independent proxy partner for a very long time.

Possibly in a signal that the US understands that distinction, American officials even went so far as to host the Houthis for negotiations at the American embassy in Amman, as US President Donald Trump explained it last weekend: "The Houthis called us, and they said they don't want to fight with us." That is a particularly major problem, because Saudi

Arabia's fallback plan, in case the worst happened, seems to have been that Riyadh would call upon the rest of the world for support.

Again, on its face, that assumption does make some sense: if the Houthis capture the Red Sea coast, then they gain the ability to throttle global trade, and the last time the Houthis did that, Operation Prosperity Guardian arrived to try and save the day.

It wasn't banking on a half-year-long American campaign against Iran, or a growing global shortage of air defense interceptors, or the US building unprecedented resentment among many of its longtime allies, while Russia's bogged down and China sits nonchalantly on the sidelines.

Despite Saudi Arabia's requests, the United States and its allies have declined to provide any support for an anti-Houthi intervention.

The Saudis also asked Egypt, but Egypt isn't interested. And although Israel has entertained the idea of jumping in to save the day, perhaps winning the war against the Saudis would be an option, but if the Saudis don't come up with a solution, then it's up to the United States to decide.

The United States has promised to help the Houthis, but the United States is not willing to join the Abraham Accords in return for assistance, thus making this whole thing a non-starter for Jerusalem.

Now Riyadh has found out the hard way that the Houthis feel that they're in a position to make demands. According to a former US negotiator speaking to Reuters, the Houthis are pushing for Saudi Arabia to lift its restrictions on flights in and out of Sana'a, and ships moving in and out of the port city of Hodeidah.

That means that Saudi Arabia pay war reparations and greatly decrease its support for Yemen's internationally recognized government.

Any compliance by the Saudis only builds the Houthis' claim to international legitimacy even further. The Saudis do not like the Houthis, they'll say, but the Houthis have become such a threat and such a meaningful global player that they simply must be treated as a sovereign entity.

And although a military that hadn't just failed to show up against the Houthis could still threaten to bomb them into oblivion, that isn't an option that the Saudis have right now.

One unnamed golf official told Reuters, "If you don't inflict enough pain on the Houthis, you become hostage to them." And as of now, Saudi Arabia is looking a whole lot more like a hostage than it ever has. Thank you for watching.