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.

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........

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