Saudi Arabia's Nightmare: The Reality of the Houthi Missile Threat

[00:00:00] So every day this week I've woken up and seen some sort of headline that looks like this. From Al Jazeera, Breaking! Saudi-led coalition says 20 attacks in King Khalid Airport since 1 October. This is already different than the headline I woke up this morning that initially said, you know, Saudi coalition shoots down missile headed towards Riyadh, something like that. That's just wild. So what's going on here? Well, the Houthis have decided to take it to the Saudi Arabian government in a truly epic fashion

[00:00:29] and just start launching missiles straight at their main airport. We had one strike earlier this week that killed at least 12 people, injured 300. The airport shut down, airlines are canceling flights, a major summit of oil executives that Saudi Arabia is trying to host. They've all pulled out. It's pandemonium. Well, how the heck did we get here? What's going on? It all starts with this fella. Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS.

[00:00:56] Now, this guy's had an interesting rise to the top. He first began his career in public service by serving as special advisor to his father, then Prince Salman, in 2009, and later became the head of the Crown Prince's Court in 2013. And in 2015, King Saudi Arabia dies and his father ascends to the throne becoming King Salman. With his father in the top seat, he rapidly moves MBS up the ranks of government, naming him both Minister of Defense and the head of the Economic and Development Affairs Council.

[00:01:25] Now, in April 2015, his father, the king, then appoints him as the deputy crown prince. Not quite next in line for succession, but jumping a lot of people in line to be pretty close to the top slot. Now, to further consolidate his newfound power in 2017 in what's been known as the Ritz-Carlton Purge, he had something like 500 people locked up in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Saudi Arabia,

[00:01:49] including other princes, senior government ministers, a who's who of who's who in Saudi Arabian society, and through what's been reported as torture and other coercive techniques, forced them to turn over $107 billion back to the Saudi Arabian state, which is now synonymous with him, as part of an anti-corruption campaign. Now, did that actually probably ruin out a lot of corruption? Yep, probably did. Were a lot of people literally left off that list that probably could have been prosecuted with corruption? Absolutely.

[00:02:18] Was it a great way to send a message to everyone involved who was actually in charge of things in Saudi Arabia? Yes. Now, with this list of newfound power, MBS has come up with a whole array of things that he wants Saudi Arabia to do, a lot of which involves getting away from being overly reliant on just oil for national wealth. He wants to create or has created the Saudi Wealth Fund. There's been the Live Golf Tour, big commute festivals hosting folks like Dave Chappelle over there,

[00:02:47] really trying to take Saudi Arabia in a new, more modern direction in order to secure the kingdom's future in a world that is trying to get off fossil fuels. Very progressive vision for the country. Sucks if you're on the wrong side of them, but hey, there's a lot there to work with. So while all this is going on, he decides to also kick off a war in Yemen against the Houthis. Now, to be fair, there was already an ongoing conflict inside Yemen between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government. Saudi Arabia had some interest in the region.

[00:03:16] You know, it's on their southern border. The Houthis are supported by Iran, their main geopolitical rival. They wanted to assert their security interests. They wanted to support an allied nation state, push back on Iranian influence in the region. But also MBS just wanted to show himself off as this bold military leader who's willing to take steps to assert Saudi Arabian authority and willing to take risks. Okay, nice thought. Here's where they went wrong. So the Saudi Arabian military is not actually designed to be an effective fighting force.

[00:03:45] In a lot of countries with an autocratic monarchy, what you see is you don't want other institutions having any type of power because they can overthrow the monarchy. And the military is an institution that holds a lot of power and can overthrow governments. Just look at what happened in Egypt right across the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia is very well aware of this history. So they don't actually have a powerful military. And I know they buy a ton of stuff from the United States.

[00:04:15] They're actually the number one purchaser of U.S. weapons around the world. Something like 12% of all U.S. foreign military sales went to Saudi Arabia between 2021 and 2025. They buy a massive amount of American hardware. And then they don't use it because to use it, they would have to train people to use it. And the people that trained to use it could then band together and overthrow the government. That's not going to happen. So MBS, classic mistake, classic mistake. He looks at this military full of shiny toys bought from America.

[00:04:42] He looks at this ragtag Houthi militants running around the mountains in Yemen. He's like, we got this. This is low risk. This is low key. We can totally take care of this. And then he takes his military full of shiny toys that have never been used operationally to any great effect. And then he tries to show up and use them to fight a bunch of guys with sandals and cloaks and rusty AKs and whatevs in the desert and thinking, all right, this will be a massive flex. It'll be super successful. It'll be over super easy. And we'll be done with it.

[00:05:12] To be fair, he's not the only world leader to make that mistake. So that starts in 2015. Now, actions have consequences. And things tend to escalate when you add more people to conflicts. So what happened over the next 10 years is Saudi Arabia gets involved. The Houthis go, oh, Saudi Arabia's here. Hey, Iran, we need better stuff. Iran goes, oh, you're fighting the Saudis? Okay, we'll give you better stuff.

[00:05:41] And so Iran starts uparming the Houthis and giving them more asymmetric capabilities to fighting off Saudi Arabia. And this just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. And what's very interesting here, too, is that you literally had a poorer equipped insurgent force fighting a Western equipped and somewhat Western trained Saudi military.

[00:06:03] And in response, supercharged the development of asymmetric capabilities and approaches to warfare to counter that exact technology set. And now we see the U.S. being marginally effective. I mean, depends on anyone to talk about it. I mean, from a tactical operational standpoint, you can say the U.S. military has been pretty effective against Iran. But from a strategic standpoint, like not at all. You know, war being a continuation of politics by other means.

[00:06:32] And you need to align your military objectives to pursue political outcomes that meaningfully improve the life of your citizens. In that sense, complete and utter failure so far, with no hope of it improving on the horizon. Check out the Escalation Trap series with Robert Pape to learn more. Anyway, the Saudi intervention in 2015 actually supercharges the speed of adaptation for the Iranian military trying to develop the weapons techniques procedures to counter Western forces. And they're now using that against the U.S. military. Okay. That's good for us.

[00:07:01] So with all that, what does this week of massive amounts of missiles being fired deep into the heartland of Saudi Arabia from Yemen mean for MBS? Well, it's not good. Yeah, he's consolidated a lot of power. Problem with that is that when you can run everything, you get blamed for everything. MBS has been reportedly running around the capital going from one secure location with a doomsday bunker to another secure location with the doomsday bunker with just a close, close retainer of loyal bodyguards.

[00:07:30] And you have to imagine he's probably trying to avoid being targeted by the Houthis who've shown that they can reach out and touch targets in Saudi Arabia. He'd be a prime assassination target. You also got to think, though, on that road to power where he knocked off all these people. He doesn't have a lot of friends inside Saudi Arabia, per se.

[00:07:48] And you can imagine the people that would look at this internally in Saudi Arabia as an opportunity to knock off the guy who, you know, usurped their own position or scolded a family member or, you know, one time locked him up in a Marriott hotel and tortured them for whatever reason. He probably has some enemies. So all this is clearly a problem for MBS, but it's not just a problem for him. It's a problem for the entire Saudi royal family. There's a pretty basic social contract in Saudi Arabia. It goes like this. The royal family's in charge. They make all the decisions. They get all the money.

[00:08:18] In return, everyone else in Saudi Arabia lives a pretty decent quality of life in a secure, safe location. And the clerics get to run around proselytizing about their version of Sharia law. Now, that's basically the contract. As long as things are stable, the royal family keeps getting richer and richer and everyone else just puts up with it. It's not a bad social contract. What you care about is stability.

[00:08:42] Now, if that same royal family, that same ruling class shows itself incapable of dealing with a threat like the Houthis, not only incapable of dealing with it, but actually taking steps to facilitate this conflict over a decade for no effect. And now all the things that made life in Saudi Arabia acceptable to the population, you know, well, from oil exports that are now under threat. Access to the international community, which is now pulling out because they can't even fly into the airport safely.

[00:09:09] Close ties with the United States, which offers access to universities and technology and all sorts of stuff that, you know, people, especially like in the upper middle class, want for prestige items. That's now a security risk, not a security guarantee. If this social contract unravels, the status of the royal family as the current royal family of Saudi Arabia comes into question. So what happens if we see regime change in Saudi Arabia? Well, it's probably not going to be a smooth process. Rarely is. And are we close to that? No, no, no. We're absolutely not close to that.

[00:09:37] But like, let's think ahead and just how bad this could be. If the current social contract in Saudi Arabia falls apart, there's two major impacts for the rest of the world that need to be considered. One is access to oil. Saudi Arabia, a massive oil producer. We'd see a significant amount of oil infrastructure come offline. Once oil infrastructure comes offline, it's very difficult to get it back up and running again. It's not just a shut on, shut off process. So you'd see a long term loss of key oil infrastructure drastically increasing energy prices even more than we're seeing with Stratto 4 Moves being shut off right now.

[00:10:07] Huge effects for, I mean, not just oil products, but international trade, access to fertilizers, ability to grow food in different areas of the world. It could trigger mass famines. Lack of energy would force rationing in nation states for, you know, do we send fuel to the hospital? Do we send fuel to the factory to produce medicine? Like these are serious trade-offs that countries would have to be dealing with. Cuba's already dealing with it right now. We'd see more countries in that predicament. Other ones, a social one, a social cost.

[00:10:37] So, you know, Islam, one of the major religions of the world, have five pillars of faith, one of which is doing the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, which is in Saudi Arabia. One big point of prestige for the Saudi royal family and for Saudi Arabia in general is that they do have the two holiest sites of Islam in their country. And so every year they get a massive amount of tourist revenue from pilgrims coming in and just a massive amount of prestige and credibility as the ones who facilitate the pilgrimage.

[00:11:06] If one of the world's largest religions lost the ability to reliably pursue one of the key pillars of its faith, you can only imagine the type of social unrest that could trigger across the world. And you can only imagine what type of chaos would ensue when folks try to fight over who actually has control now of Mecca and Medina. You know, nothing says that the map of Saudi Arabia, if the royal family collapses, would continue to look like what it looks right now is one contiguous state.

[00:11:35] These are very real possibilities. These are wicked problems. And MBS has got himself into one hell of a bind. And this is one of the situations where the best possible thing is that the leader takes the loss and walks off to the sunset and says, sorry, let someone else take control and dump all that baggage and hit reset on the whole system. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see that happen. But hey, crazier things, right? So anyway, thanks for watching. Like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend, all that good stuff. And we will see you all next week.

[00:12:03] And if you want to find out what's most likely the next step if something were to happen to MBS, go ahead and sign up for the briefing room on YouTube where we do members only content every week. And this week's companion video, we'll look into exactly that. See y'all there.