Costly Saudi weapons prove no match for indigenous Yemeni ballistic missiles, drones

Billions of dollars spent by Saudi Arabia on cutting edge Western military hardware mainly designed to deter high altitude attacks have proved no match for ballistic missiles and combat unmanned aerial vehicles that Yemeni armed forces have domestically developed and manufactured, a report says.

The report on Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network said Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a devastating military campaign against Yemen on March 26, 2015, spuriously claiming they would emerge victorious within months.

But more than six years after the onset of the war, Yemen has become a quagmire for Riyadh, and the kingdom has suffered enormous military and economic losses, which are estimated to stand at billions of dollars.

Despite massive efforts by Saudi media outlets to cover up the extent of damage caused to the country as a result of the military aggression against Yemen, the spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree once stated in a news conference that more than 10,400 Saudi soldiers have been killed and wounded in action.

Saree noted that 400 Saudi troops were killed and wounded throughout last year.

Moreover, at least 22,615 Saudi-sponsored Takfiri militants loyal to Yemen’s former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi have been killed and wounded in battles with Yemeni army troops and their allied fighters from Popular Committees.

Yemeni army soldiers and their allies have also managed to destroy more than 14,527 armored vehicles, tanks, personnel carriers and bulldozers belonging to the Saudi-led military coalition.

Yemeni forces have fired 1348 homegrown ballistic missiles at military sites and strategic facilities deep inside Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the report said, pointing to the attack on the kingdom’s major production centers at Ras Tanoura, owned by state-controlled oil firm Saudi Aramco, in early March 2021.

While most of the Yemeni ballistic missiles have struck their designated targets inside Saudi Arabia, dozens have been intercepted and destroyed by Saudi defense systems. This means the Riyadh regime has had to spend huge sums of money to activate the systems for incoming missiles.

Al-Mayadeen highlighted that Yemeni air defense units downed as many as 20 Saudi unmanned aerial vehicles in 2021.