The Next War of Attrition is in Yemen

Battlefield dynamics in Yemen shift quickly, but Houthi aims do not. A movement organized around radical ideology and perpetual conflict now shares a border with a state organized around modernization and prosperity. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis both have formidable but very different military capabilities, and neither can force a quick decision on the other. That is the recipe for a long war of attrition. The closest precedent is the war in Ukraine, to which the Yemen war is increasingly linked, and which may be instructive for the Kingdom on how best to prepare.

There is also a parallel to be made with the related conflict between Iran and the United States, the fallout from which has severely affected the GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia. Essentially, we are witnessing the leverage of a lesser military force when that party has a much higher threshold for pain and disruption than the stronger party. Iran and the Houthis are both betting that the Saudis are sufficiently anxious to hold on to their peaceful model of business, tourism, energy and investment to settle at almost any price and end the present conflict.

The Houthi mindset

The Houthi ideological program is anti-Saudi, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, anti-liberal and antisemitic. It has long cast the Saudi monarchy as an American-Israeli puppet unworthy of the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Some of this is personal: The father of Abdelmalek al-Houthi, the group’s leader, clashed for years with Saudi-backed clerics and was rumored to have been targeted for assassination at their behest.

But the grievances against the Kingdom also has a territorial dimension. In the 1934 Treaty of Taif,

Imam Yahya of northern Yemen settled the border with the Saudi state and ceded Jizan, Asir, and Najran provinces. The Houthis, who present themselves somewhat ambiguously as heirs to the imamate, have revived claims to all three provinces. The purpose is to stoke resentment of the Saudis and to leave the Kingdom’s southern border unsettled. This territorial dimension intersects with the allegation that the Saudis are not fit to control Mecca and Medina: Abdelmalik recently reiterated that Mecca belongs to the Islamic Umma, rather than being a province of Saudi Arabia. The Houthis implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – claim the whole of the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula, “from Mecca to Mahra”.

The deeper reason the Houthis cannot stop is structural. The Houthis depend on mobilization, and for a movement of that kind peace is a threat rather than a reward. Conflict is what holds the project together, as it justifies extracting resources from an impoverished population, excuses unpaid salaries and collapsed services, and lets the security apparatus treat every critic as a collaborator. For a deeply unpopular regime, war with Saudi Arabia and its local Yemeni partners is the most useful conflict available and could yield significant returns if the Houthis can extract concessions at the negotiating table. It was already clear during Ambassador Fitton-Brown’s period of responsibility for Yemen that the perverse incentives of the war economy meant that Houthi negotiator Muhammad Abdelsalam was viewed with suspicion by Houthi field commanders, who were benefitting from the war economy and associated “respect”, and had no interest in being transformed into administrators with responsibility to balance their power.

The Houthi menu

The Houthis approach is predatory: isolate each victim and deal with it alone. They pursue bilateral deals that peel off potential adversaries, and calibrate each attack so the victim would conclude that a limited response is cheaper than a sustained one. They have cultivated the sense that they are somebody else’s problem, Israel’s when they fire missiles at Eilat, Riyadh’s when they strike Abha, etc. A decade on, the Houthis have have attacked many different states, and yet no one has owned the problem.

It is troubling that US negotiators have recently sat with the Houthis in Muscat and apparently taken at face value Houthi assurances that their quarrel is only with the Saudis, not with American – or even the Israelis! All this while threatening the US economy and risking the lives of US nationals at civilian infrastructure in the Kingdom.

In the current round of fighting, the Houthis have three key options for escalation.

The first is domestic expansion within Yemen. It is the least risky for the regime because it stays within a conflict the world has learned to ignore. New territory brings new populations to tax, new ports and crossings to control, and new momentum to display at home. The drawback is that this also pushes the Zaidi Houthis deeper and deeper into Shafa’I (Sunni) territory, where the population is hostile to their agenda.

The second option is maritime. Attacks on commercial vessels and Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab inflict harm, especially in the economic realm, and they are extremely difficult to deter and defend against. The drawback is that shipping is a global interest, albeit somewhat elastic, and so a sustained campaign against it may invite the involvement of states with maritime commercial interests that would otherwise stay out of a Saudi-Houthi war. It also, by violating the Law of the Sea, provides an unimpeachable legal basis to build an international military coalition against them.

The third option, targeting civilian aviation, is the riskiest. A recent Houthi attack, on October 10, killed at least twelve people in the deadliest attack on the Kingdom in more than a decade. One US national was among the dead. The strikes came with a threat to airlines, “for the last time,” to stay out of Saudi airspace. This type of attack is probably the most likely to galvanize an international coalition and demonstrates that the Houthis have an extremely high appetite for risk.

The Houthis are testing how far they can take this. Downing a passenger aircraft would almost certainly bring the overwhelming response, including direct American strikes, that the Houthis have spent recent decades seeking to avoid (albeit with an imperfect record). The threat alone can inflict some damage to Saudi Arabia, so the threats will continue. Whether the Houthis will continue or even take escalation in this realm even further will depend on whether they believe anyone would make them pay.

The wars are already connected

It might be tempting to treat the Russia-Ukraine and Houthi-Saudi comparison as merely illustrative, but the two wars are materially linked in both directions.

Russia’s involvement with the Houthis is the most direct link thus far. By mid-2024, Russia had recruited hundreds, possibly even thousands, of Yemeni men for the Ukrainian front through a Houthi-linked network operating out of Oman. Also, during the Houthi Red Sea campaign of 2023 to 2025, Russia reportedly passed satellite targeting data to the Houthis. And the Shahed-136 that Iran supplied to Russia, which Russia now mass-produces and improved upon, belongs to the same family of weapon the Houthis fire at Saudi infrastructure. Russian innovation may yet flow back through Tehran to Sanaa.

Russia’s public posture toward the Houthi problem has been one of ostensible concern. In September, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Houthi attacks on Saudi civilian targets “unacceptable,” and President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed freedom of navigation through the Bab al-Mandab by phone. Riyadh should not mistake this for neutrality: Moscow treats the Houthis as a pawn in a larger game.

The mechanism is not complicated. A crisis on the Arabian Peninsula drains Western attention and, perhaps more importantly, Western munitions. In late March, the Pentagon was reported to be weighing whether to divert air defense interceptors bought for Ukraine to the Middle East, because the war with Iran was straining stocks of critical American munitions. This is the outcome Moscow has been working toward since it abstained on the 2015 arms embargo against the Houthis and then spent a decade obstructing the UN panel that documented its violations. Russia does not need the Houthis to win; it needs them to keep fighting. It makes a similar calculation over supporting continuing Iranian resistance to the Americans.

The link is starting to run the other way too. Kyiv’s growing ties with Saudi Arabia are more recent but no less consequential. On March 27, the two countries signed a defense cooperation agreement centered on counter-drone expertise. More than two hundred Ukrainian anti-drone specialists are now deployed in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and Riyadh is reportedly negotiating a large purchase of Ukrainian interceptor drones that cost between one and three thousand dollars each. Until recently Riyadh was deepening ties with Moscow through OPEC+ and BRICS, and yet it is now importing Ukrainian expertise to defend against weapons Moscow helped perfect.

Saudi Arabia’s dilemma

As in Eastern Europe, no quick decision is likely in the Saudi-Houthi conflict. The Houthis cannot be bombed out of Sanaa, as the coalition learned between 2015 and 2022. While the Yemeni government’s counteroffensive along the coast has stabilized the front and claimed gains around Mokha, it remains a long way from the capital. That leaves Riyadh with three paths, none of them are likely to be easy.

The first is appeasement, which would feed the movement. Since June, the Houthis have demanded a deal that lifts the blockade on their ports and airports and restores the flow of cash into Sanaa. Such a deal would ease the regime’s revenue crisis and pay for its next tranche of weapons. The Kingdom tried a version of this approach after 2022, and the result is the war it is fighting now.

The second is deterrence, which fails against an adversary that seeks out perpetual conflict. Deterrence assumes an enemy that weighs costs and benefits in measurements that the Saudis understand, and that appears not to be the case. For a movement like the Houthis whose legitimacy rests on “resistance,” conflict is not only a hazard but also a realization of an extremist aspiration.

The third is defeating the Houthis outright, which means returning to a war Saudi Arabia already fought and abandoned. A strategy that could succeed does exist: cut Houthi supply lines of cash and other material while backing a unified Yemeni ground campaign under a single command. But this will require sustained pressure over time in order to crack the Houthi defenses and then ultimately the regime.

Attrition, then, is the most reasonable path forward. The question is not whether Saudi Arabia will be in a long war but whether it will be prepared for one. Attrition is survivable for the side that innovates and devastating for the side that assumes the war will end in a quick and decisive maneuver. The length of the war also introduces uncertainties about changes in the posture of allies, especially the US. There is a need to bake in bipartisan agreement in Washington, DC, that it is a US national security interest to ensure that the Saudis, and the Internationally Recognized Government of Yemen, and the Law of the Sea prevail in this conflict.

Two Ukrainian lessons

Ukraine survived attrition against a far larger adversary for two reasons, and both apply to Riyadh.

The first is adaptation. It built a drone industry from almost nothing into one producing millions of systems a year, fielded interceptor drones costing a small fraction of a Patriot missile, and compressed production and procurement timelines.

The Saudi-Ukranian March agreement imports some of that expertise but may not necessarily transfer all of the knowledge necessary to built its own industry. A defense that depends on imports from a country at war is precarious at the best of times.

Riyadh has the money and the stated intent, and Vision 2030 set a goal of localizing half of military spending by the end of the decade. But localization so far has meant licensed assembly of foreign designs rather than innovation under fire. The Kingdom has not reached a wartime tempo in which a new counter-drone system is conceived, tested against live Houthi attacks, and fielded within weeks. That is the capability Ukraine built and Saudi Arabia lacks.

The second lesson is diplomatic. Ukraine did not survive alone. It built a coalition of dozens of states that supplied weapons, trained its forces, financed its budget, and shared intelligence. For the Houthis, a coalition of this kind is the worst possible development, and it is exactly what their strategy of isolating victims and claiming false symmetry is meant to prevent.

The current war gives Riyadh the chance to build one, but the pieces remain fragmented. Ukraine’s example is that a coalition does not assemble itself. It must be rallied, placed under a single command, and given a shared objective beyond absorbing attacks. The Houthis’ own escalation, which has now killed citizens of a dozen countries at a single airport, is doing part of that work for Riyadh. The Kingdom’s task is to turn condemnation into commitment before the moment passes.

So what would this coalition look like? The Saudis already have a maritime group of 14 that opposes Houthi blackmail against them in the Red Sea. But the US, UAE, UK and the other European powers are not part of it. With US leadership and assistance, this needs to be remedied. This is achievable, on the basis of three compelling legal bases: enforcement of the Law of the Sea; the legitimacy of the Yemeni government (and illegitimacy of the Houthis); and the legitimate defense and self-defense of Saudi Arabia.

Ari Heistein is a veteran Yemen analyst who advises corporations and institutions on the Houthi threat, and works with Israeli UxS startups to bring defense and dual-use technologies to the U.S. Department of War. Edmund Fitton-Brown is the Former British Ambassador to Yemen and Senior Fellow at FDD.