Recently, the US Department of Defense announced its withdrawal from the advanced anti-missile weapons system it deployed after the Houthi attacks on Aramco, in exchange for $500 million that Trump agreed upon before his departure, saying that the deal took only 30 seconds.
Saudi experts stated that the Saudi Ministry of Defense has deployed the MICA system that belongs to the National Guard Forces of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. MICA is a system manufactured by France and is a short-range air defense missile, and it does not have the capabilities of the American THAAD system with the high-altitude peripheral in terms of intercepting air attacks inside or outside an area on the distance of 200 km, which Washington agreed to sell to the Kingdom for $ 15 billion, to be delivered to it in 2023, in order to intercept the Houthis attack, who targeted Saudi institutions with 17 drones without a pilot, bringing the Houthi aircraft attacks to 659 booby-trapped Houthi planes during the 6 years of the war on Yemen.
Broader Fronts
The Houthis recently resorted to attacks by sea, which Saudi Arabia tries to intercept through a smart missile system during its launch.
The Coalition of the War on Yemen declared that over the six years of war it succeeded in intercepting 75 booby-trapped boats and 205 naval mines, while the missile projectiles on the Saudi border reached 96,292, and these are usually Katyusha or short-range SAM-7 missiles, which is difficult to intercept.
In a report published by the Washington Institute, a US naval officer ruled out that Riyadh would resort to buying the Russian “S-400” system, given that it does not meet Saudi defense needs for practical and strategic reasons, most notably that it lacks interoperability with the extensive US regional air surveillance network, which is the main thing for the Saudi Air Defense.
Although the years of war have given the Saudi Kingdom’s forces extensive experience in repelling attacks, they have also developed the Houthis’ capabilities as they took used Iranian expertise to launch double attacks on Saudi Arabia through drones and ballistic missiles simultaneously.
The Houthis launch two missiles with the drones, which jam the Saudi radar system, making it unable to distinguish between low and high projectiles, thus allowing them to hit their targets.
International reports cited by Foreign Policy revealed that the war on Yemen costs the kingdom about $1.08 billion annually. Will bin Salman succeed in repelling the attacks, or will he keep the country’s future under the US decisions?
