The Saudi air defense suffers a catastrophic failure

The International National Interest website said that the Saudi air defense system is suffering a catastrophic failure, despite Saudi spending billions of dollars.

The site stated that Ansarullah’s repeated attacks revealed the weakness of the Saudi air defense system, which cost Riyadh billions of dollars, and this was not the first time that the Patriot missiles failed to repel the attacks against the Kingdom. It added that all types of conventional air defenses can combat small drone attacks, and confronting this problem for Saudi Arabia does not revolve around deploying expensive military equipment, but rather about gathering intelligence to stop any attack before it begins.

In recent years, the report said, Riyadh has spent billions of dollars to build six battalions of US-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles and associated radars. Saudi military has failed to intercept a barrage of missiles that attacked Aramco in Riyadh on March 25, 2018.

“It’s just a never-ending chain of disasters with this weapon system,” said Theodore Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of US missile defenses. Saudi Arabia is facing a “dangerous situation” after its stockpile of Patriot missiles is about to run out, and it has asked the United States, Qatar and European countries to provide it with more.

The report touched on the approval of the US State Department to sell the advanced medium-range air-to-air missile system, with a value of 650 million dollars, and Congress was notified of this, after Riyadh requested the purchase of 280 missiles and 596 launchers of this type; to repel Yemeni Armed Forces attacks.

The cost of one missile in the American Patriot defense system is one million dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal, while the cost of the missile or drone launched by the Yemeni Army does not exceed only $10,000.

Source: Websites.