What Happened To The Billions The Saudis Splashed on American Weapons?

As the poorly equipped but highly motivated Houthi tribesmen dismantle its ultra-expensive military infrastructure in real time, Saudi Arabia may be approaching the moment when it’s compelled to examine the difference between what it possesses and what it is.

With easy petrodollars overfilling its kitty over the years, this British-imperialism-generated, utterly corrupt faux-kingdom has been among the most devoted patrons of the international arms bazaar: American and British aircraft, American and British missiles, radar, air defense, armored vehicles, precision munitions, advisers, training programmes, and intelligence cooperation.

Billions upon billions of good American dollars were poured into the machinery of modern war in the desert kingdom ruled by one of the most corrupt and ruthless regimes in the world. Adnan Khashoggi’s name should still ring a non-Pavlovian bell.

And there is Yemen with its rugged mountains, incredible poverty, an intricate tribal society, a fractured state with a population that has endured decades of foreign intervention, but refused to give up the fight.

Yemen also has the Houthis, fearless, ferocious empire-slaying warriors, who have once again demonstrated the inconvenient truth that even sophisticated weapons do not win wars by themselves.

No one would know what folly prompted the Saudi Crown Prince, Chainsaw MBS, to embark on his latest military misadventure.

It was his bombing of an airliner at Janaa airport that, once again, threw the old Saudi-Yemeni conflict into a new confrontation and dangerous phase - this time with Old Testament fury.

The Houthis, with pent-up anger against the Saudi blockade, have made rapid gains along the Red Sea coast and seized strategic territory from their well-armed foe, whose rented mercenaries melted away, abandoning expensive, sophisticated armory.

Just like in Afghanistan, expensive American arms have fallen into the wrong hands.

It was reported that Trump twice rebuffed the appeal of America’s top arms purchaser for direct American military intervention, even as the fighting menaces the faux-kingdom and the wider regional energy system.

One is tempted to ask a very impolite question: what happened to all the weapons the Saudis purchased at enormous cost over the years? And what happened to the touted “security umbrella” Uncle Sam pledged to its Arab vassals?

Behind this sits a ruder question: what happened to all those proclaimed friends of the Saudis?

Lazy Western journalists have a dangerous habit of treating the map of West Asia as though God Himself drew the political borders and handed them down from Mount Sinai.

It was nothing of the sort.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a twentieth-century Anglo-imperialist construction, not Jehovah’s. Before its consolidation into its modern form, the Arabian Peninsula was a mosaic of feuding dynasties, tribal territories, religious communities, and rival centers of power: the House of Saud, the Hashemites, the Rashidis, the Kingdom of Hejaz, the Yemeni Imamate, Ottoman holdings, British possessions, and British protectorates.

With British sponsorship, the Saudi state emerged from prolonged conquest, alliance, and religious mobilization under Abdulaziz Ibn Saud.

British Parliamentary records show that between 1917 and 1923 London paid Ibn Saud roughly £542,000 in subsidies, first tied to the struggle against the Ottomans and later to conditions on his foreign policy and relations with neighboring territories.

The British learned from their experience in Africa and brought it to Asia; they need not manufacture local rulers. They needed only identify the ruler whose interests would coincide with their own.

Nigerians, Kenyans, Ghanaians, should know this playbook well.

British imperialism gave way to the American one as oil transformed everything. Saudi petroleum and strategic geography went to one side of the ledger; American capital, technology, arms, diplomatic cover and security architecture went to the other. Riyadh acquired wealth on a scale almost unimaginable to the Yemenis across its southern frontier. Washington acquired a pillar in the Gulf and access to the world's most vital energy region.

But the Saudi armed forces acquired something else: dependence on an external military-industrial ecosystem.

Importing weapons is not the problem itself, since every country imports some military technology. The problem arises when dependence becomes so complete that buying weapons and renting security become indistinguishable.

Rather than build up their indigenous capabilities as the Iranians did, the corrupt and effete Saudis depended on American and Western military contractors and foreign mercenaries.

Per the. US Government Accountability Office, between fiscal years 2015 and 2021, the Department of Defense administered at least $54.6 billion in military support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, overwhelmingly through Foreign Military Sales.

That is an astonishing quantity of military hardware. But, as the Americans found out in their duel against the Iranians, military power is not military hardware. A fighter jet does not create strategy, as a missile does not confer political legitimacy. A radar system does not manufacture national cohesion, just as an arms contract does not create an ally.

To grasp the peculiar bitterness of this complex Saudi-Yemeni relationship, one must understand Yemen and its culturally grounded people.

Yemenis do not see their country as a political desert waiting for others to organize it. It has one of the oldest civilizational histories in Arabia: ancient kingdoms, deep religious traditions, intricate tribal structures, and political memories by far older than the Saudi state.

The ink on the Kingdom's 1932 consolidation was barely dry when the two countries fell into dispute over their frontier. Like the lines drawn across Africa in Berlin, Yemenis do not regard the frontier as a mere line on a map; it cuts through tribes, families, trade networks, and historical identities. War, almost inevitably, came in 1934, and Saudi forces, aided by their British sponsors, seized Yemen’s Asir, Najran, and Jizan provinces. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Taif.

A treaty again formalized the contentious border in 2000, but, like elephants, Yemenis kept the old grievance in memory.

This is why the lazy formula of "Saudi Arabia versus Iranian proxies" misses so many nuances.

As a regional power, Iran matters greatly in the equation. The Houthis' relationship with Tehran is clearly important for both sides. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry matters, but it would be foolish to consider Yemen as an empty chessboard for Tehran to shuffle pieces.

Yemenis have a history of their own, and it has repeatedly taught outsiders with superior technology a rather unpleasant lesson.

The Ottomans learned it; so did the Egyptians and the Americans. For whatever reason, the Saudis refused to learn it.

That is what explains their folly.
Yemen has a remarkable capacity to convert military superiority into political frustration. This is not because it is immune to force; war has devastated it. It is because its geography and social structure impose a peculiar logic on anyone attempting to dominate it.

Yemen’s mountains are not only stubborn, but the tribes are inconvenient, and, sadly for invaders, local loyalties do not dissolve even under bombardment.

As the Russians have proved time and time again, men defending their own terrain have a different relationship with war from soldiers fighting far from home. Which is precisely why America’s essentially expeditionary forces record is streaked with failures from Vietnam to Iran.

That is the context from which the Houthis emerged. They are not simply men in robes clutching ancient rifles, a caricature as intellectually lazy as it is militarily misleading.

The movement has acquired missiles, drones and other sophisticated capabilities. Iranian assistance has been important, but the Houthis have also built local capacity and exploited Yemen's geography, networks and political divisions. They represent not the romantic fantasy of sandals defeating fighter jets, but the fusion of local mobilization, terrain, indigenous networks, and imported technology.

That combination is extraordinarily difficult to defeat.

Saudi Arabia has not lacked money, weapons, foreign advisers, or access to some of the most advanced military technology on earth. Yet the Yemeni war refuses to conform to the assumptions of the arms catalog.

Advanced stealth, or whatever fighter aircraft can fly thousands of kilometers and place precision munitions within meters of a target. But those gizmos need pilots, who need training. They need maintenance, which needs spare parts, which need foreign supply chains, which need political relationships.

Suddenly the "sovereign" weapon system turns out to be embedded in an international apparatus on which the sovereign itself depends.

Here is the great joke of modern procurement - a cash-poor movement can build a crude drone and repair it in a workshop. A rich state can buy a magnificent aircraft whose upkeep requires a continental industrial base.

The decisive question every African defense minister should ask is this: which system keeps functioning when the supplier becomes unwilling, unable, or unavailable? Nigeria learned the bitter lesson when Uncle Sam refused to sell it vital weapons in its battle with civil and uncivil insurgents.

It’s sad to watch the frustration of the Saudis who, for decades, have sat at the center of America's Middle Eastern strategy. Washington sold it weapons, supported its forces, and cultivated a close security relationship.

But when the Houthis came knocking, the Saudis discovered, to their chagrin, that alliances have conditions.

This shows the gap between a security partnership and a blank cheque. The Saudis are learning the bitter lesson that US Presidents face domestic constraints.

A war that seems indispensable to Riyadh may seem optional to the POTUS.

It is the elementary lesson of international relations that small states most often forget: no foreign country is obliged to die for you merely because it sold you weapons yesterday. The arms dealer and the ally are not necessarily the same person.

A nation can outsource its banking, its construction, its manufacturing, even parts of its infrastructure. But a self-respecting sovereign state should guard one thing with particular suspicion: its security.

It’s only indigenously developed security architecture that can guarantee a nation’s sovereignty.

Once your defense depends on somebody else's satellites, intelligence, spare parts, ammunition factories, training academies, and willingness to intervene, your sovereignty acquires an asterisk.

While you remain sovereign in law, strategically, that is another question.

Ukrainians are learning this bitter truth to their exasperation.

Africa should pay close attention. We have spent decades buying military equipment from Europe, America, Russia, China, Turkey, and beyond.

Foreign technology is not the sin; the sin is buying the weapon without acquiring the knowledge and the wherewithal to build your own.

Buy the aircraft, but learn to maintain and eventually build it. Buy the drone, but develop the electronics. Buy the armored vehicle, but build the capacity to repair and then manufacture it. Buy the missile, but cultivate the science and engineering to understand it. Buy the satellite, but master launching, operating, and exploiting it.

A second lesson is that no matter how one may agree or disagree with the Houthis, condemn their actions, or object to their ties with Iran. None of these alter the strategic fact that they have repeatedly shown they can absorb punishment, roll with the punch, adapt, and fight on. They know their mountains and their villages. They understand their social terrain.

This is not to argue that the Saudi military is without capability, or that the Houthis have rendered modern weapons obsolete. The lesson is far subtler: technology amplifies power; it does not create it from nothing.

A state must first possess the political, industrial, social, and strategic foundations on which imported technology can operate.

Africa has made the same mistake, just in a different form. We have spent decades believing we can import national security by so-called technology transfer.

Look at Nigeria.
We buy helicopters and call it modernization. We buy armored vehicles and fighter jets, install foreign radar, and call it modernization. Then the ammunition runs low, or an aircraft needs a specialized component, and the modern army discovers it is waiting on a foreign technician.

That is not military independence; it’s military consumption, aided by corruption.

There is an enormous difference between having weapons and having a defense industry; between having soldiers and having doctrine; between having uniforms and having strategic culture; between having a flag and having sovereignty.

The Houthis have not defeated modern military technology; they have exposed its limitations when it is not matched by political and strategic autonomy.

Africa should not wait for its own Yemen to teach the same lesson.

The Saudis bought some of the most sophisticated weapons in the world. The Houthis built something harder to purchase: the capacity to survive on their own terms when they operate on their own ground. That doesn't make them invincible or their politics immune to criticism. But it confirms what every serious strategist knows and every arms salesman would prefer we forget: A country's ultimate weapon is not what it can buy.

It is what it can sustain.
The Saudi-Yemeni war is not merely another Middle Eastern quarrel. It is a warning to Saudi Arabia, to America and, above all, to Africa.

Do not confuse wealth with power. Do not confuse weapons with sovereignty. Do not confuse an arms supplier with a friend. And do not imagine that a foreign manufacturer's most expensive product has given you the capacity to defend yourself.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com