The Missiles of October
(11am Eastern Time)
In October 1962 the missiles sat on launch pads in Cuba and the world waited to see whether they would fly. In October 2026 they fly every night. They come out of Yemen and fall on Riyadh, Dhahran, Abha and Medina.
The Houthis are kicking ass. The Saudi-led coalition says they attacked Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport 20 times this month. The airport strikes between October 6 and 12 killed at least 20 people and injured more than 370. The important international airport is still closed. On Tuesday a Houthi missile set the executive headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran on fire. On Thursday Saudi air defenses intercepted a cruise missile over Medina, then a ballistic missile in the same area. Medina. The second holiest city in Islam.
A summit between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman), scheduled for Riyadh on October 24, has been postponed. Canada, Japan, Poland, South Korea, New Zealand and the United States have all issued travel cautions for the kingdom. Riyadh is supposed to be a global hub for business, tourism, sports and investment.
And, of course, it is smack dab in the middle of Vision 2030. 3.3 trillion dollars to promote tourism and investment in the kingdom. In July I wrote that a Saudi future built on stability and an IRGC strategy built on uncertainty could not coexist. This week a Reuters analysis described Tehran and the Houthis as "hammering the weak point."
The Houthis have always been hard to kill. They fought six wars against Ali Abdullah Saleh's army between 2004 and 2010 and came out of each one stronger. They took Sanaa in 2014. They survived seven years of Saudi bombing after 2015, shut down much of the Red Sea after 2023, and outlasted an American air campaign in 2025 until Washington agreed to a ceasefire. Israel killed their prime minister and their chief of staff last year. They kept firing.
This time it's different. They have always been excellent tactical fighters. What changed is the missiles and drones Iran has supplied them. In the old Saudi war most Houthi missiles aimed at Riyadh were intercepted or killed few people. They were more a nuisance than anything. Twenty dead in a week at Saudi airports is something else. So is the timing. Missile attacks from Iran drained the Saudi interceptor stockpile back in March and April, before the Houthis even started. The Houthis waited until their enemy was depleted of anti-missiles.
So where are the missiles coming from? I assumed the IRGC, and the evidence points that way. Every advanced Houthi weapon system is of Iranian design. They arrive in crated kits. Smuggled in, of course. Assembly is required. Conflict Armament Research examined seized shipments this year and found components coded for assembly in Yemen under Iranian designations. Its head of research called them "DIY kits."
A lot of the parts are Chinese. Between 2021 and 2025, 35 percent of the material seized on its way to the Houthis came from China, compared with 21 percent from Iran. Most of it is dual-use stuff: industrial machinery, chemicals, components. Iran provides the designs, the expertise and the critical pieces. Chinese factories provide the rest. Weapons experts in Aden found what looks like the rear fin of an Iranian Kheibar Shekan ballistic missile inside a container that left China aboard the commercial ship CMA CGM Verdi, bound for the Houthi-held port of Hodeidah. Iran depends on foreign technology for its own missiles too. It is supply chains all the way down.
This week Saudi Arabia officially acknowledged what the evidence already showed. Iran continues to arm, train and support the Houthis. Apparently, shipments are still coming in. Anti-Houthi forces seized one in late August. The Houthis also keep a real stockpile. On October 6 the coalition said it destroyed a depot in Saada holding 20 ballistic missiles.
Riyadh sits about 620 miles from Yemen. Dhahran is farther. These missiles assembled by the Houthis come in surprising diversity. The workhorse is a descendant of the Scud missile. The Burkan-2H brings Riyadh into range. The Toufan appears to be a rebranded Iranian missile with a range of up to 1,200 miles. The Palestine-2 is a two-stage, solid-fuel missile the Houthis call hypersonic. (Any ballistic missile flying that far is hypersonic. The solid fuel is the important part, because it means quick launches and little warning.) Then come the Quds cruise missiles, built around a clone of a Czech commercial turbojet. Then the Samad-3 drone, Iranian in design and in its guts.
The Saudis have opened an investigation into how all of this keeps getting through. The early findings, leaked to the AP, are embarrassing. The Houthis sent drones first to clear a path, then cruise and ballistic missiles behind them. Some warheads change direction in flight, which Patriot interceptors struggle to follow. And investigators want to know why there was no earlier warning of weapons that flew more than 600 miles to reach Riyadh. Reuters reports the Saudi missile warning system went silent days before the onslaught. On YouTube, War Fronts adds that Riyadh had cut back on public air raid alerts to preserve a sense of normality. No alert sounded before the mass casualty strike on the airport.
It’s ironic that Saudi Arabia is the world's top buyer of American weapons. It bought the best air defense money can buy. Patriot. THAAD. A radar network commanded from an underground bunker. Nearly 200 F-15s. And the "cheap" Houthi weapons are the hardest to stop. Patriot was built to kill fast, high-flying ballistic missiles and aircraft. A Samad drone is slow, low and cheap.
A brief economics lesson...A Houthi drone costs up to about $50,000. Most of their missiles run about $200,000. A PAC-3 interceptor costs around $4 million. A THAAD round costs $12 to $16 million. Every time Saudi Arabia fires a state-of-the-art, expensive anti-missile the Houthis win the exchange, even if the drone/missile never hits anything. What typically happens at the moment is that the drones empty the launchers so the cruise missiles and Burkans arrive while the Saudis are reloading. Or a cheap missile is knocked out by one costing millions. A refill for their depleted status was ordered in January. It may not arrive before 2028.
Ukraine learned to fight Iranian-designed drones cheaply. Interceptor drones. Machine-gun teams on trucks. Helicopters. Jamming. It saves its Patriots for ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia has little of that cheap layer, and its air force is split between bombing Yemen and defending home. So it fires its most expensive interceptors at its cheapest threats. I suspect they are working to adapt to that as I write this.
John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago political scientist and one of America's best-known hard-nosed realists, argues this is the general condition of modern war. Offense overwhelms defense, and the cost exchange favors the attacker. Israel took hits in the 12-Day War and again this spring. Ukraine has run short of Patriots. I mostly agree. He goes too far when he says there is no way to fix it. There is always the other answer to missiles. Destroy them before they launch. Hit the launchers, the depots, the supply lines. That is what Epic Fury did to Iran.
In August I wrote about one of the most precise large-scale air campaigns in history. The Houthis are showing the cheap version of the same principle. Offense dominance cuts both ways. Whoever can keep doing damage longer wins.
The surest way to stop missiles is to take the ground they are fired from. Ground troops could make them impossible to be fired to begin with. Allied bombing never stopped the V-2s falling on London and Antwerp in 1944-45. Allied armies overrunning the launch areas in the Netherlands did. In 1991 coalition aircraft hunted Iraq's mobile Scuds for weeks with little to show for it.
That option is not politically viable right now. Trump said this week he has no plans for ground troops. Pakistan and Turkey are in Saudi Arabia to defend it, and neither will cross into Yemen. The Yemeni government's offensive is aimed at controlling the coast, Taiz and Marib. The missiles come from Saada and the highlands around Sanaa. So the Saudis and whoever is fighting with them are fighting with one hand tied behind their back. Mountains are the best terrain to defend on the ground. They can only bomb the region. There are no ground troops willing to take the ground. So here we are.
In the autumn of 1962, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, sent Egyptian troops into those same Yemeni highlands to back a republican revolution against Yemen’s royalist imamate, with Saudi Arabia backing the royalists. The force grew to around 70,000. It became known as Egypt's Vietnam. The Saudis tried their own ground war after 2015 and it went badly too. So, the only thing that will stop the missiles will be the Houthis running out of them.
Meanwhile everyone is talking about mediation. Absurdly, Iran's foreign minister offered to help broker talks between the Houthis and Riyadh. Tehran is shopping for legitimacy. A Houthi official told the AP that Russia and China have reached out about a ceasefire. The Houthis say they welcome mediation. They want a “comprehensive” end to the war. They reject a temporary ceasefire.
Compare that with Tehran's terms for reopening Hormuz. Lift the American naval blockade. Release frozen assets. End the war on all fronts. All fronts includes Yemen. Both demand an end to a blockade. Both refuse a partial deal. The Houthi demands sound like an extension of IRGC demands, which is sort of like shouting to everyone Iran’s connection with all this mess.
To be fair, the Houthi grievance over the blockade is real and goes back to 2015. A former American ambassador to Riyadh calls them an Iranian partner that is "increasingly independent-minded." Fine. The IRGC has simply learned to line up Houthi grievances with Iranian strategy. Iraq's Kata'ib Hezbollah publicly cheered the strikes on Saudi Arabia. See the network at work here?
Then there is the other strait. A week after Rubio announced that Iran had "lost complete control" of Hormuz, Iran sank a container ship. The Singapore-flagged GFS Pride was struck on October 13, caught fire and went down. All 21 crew got off. BBC Verify counted twelve ships attacked between October 5 and 11, the most of any week in the war. The IRGC says the ship hit a mine on an unauthorized route. That is its standard explanation now, and a warning to everyone else.
It just makes what Rubio said so unnecessarily inaccurate. What an administration we have in charge here!
Earlier this month Saudi tankers went dark to survive Bab el-Mandeb. In Hormuz that no longer works. The Greek maritime monitor Marisks says ships face indiscriminate attacks regardless of flag, cargo, direction, or whether their trackers are switched off. Today Iran's navy announced another tanker burning in a "prohibited area" after it turned off its tracking systems. And Iran raised its price. An army spokesman said the strait will reopen if the United States leaves the region. "If it does not leave, we will expel it."
Washington is weighing the Mother of All Bombs. CNN reports new strike plans that could use it on Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites, before or after the midterms. Trump told Newsmax it is "like a tiny nuclear bomb" but "not nuclear at all." A week ago he promised no attack on Iran before November 3. On Tuesday in Alaska he told a crowd, "Wait till you see what we do to Iran."
It’s like a circus sometimes.
Netanyahu, facing his own election on October 27, says an attack now is "not convenient." There are reports of discussions for joint operations before the elections. Netanyahu reportedly told his security chiefs that Trump brought it up. The White House calls that false. Everybody gets their own mythology. The midterms are still part of the battlefield.
In October 1962 it took thirteen days for both sides to look at the missiles and step back. Nobody is stepping back in October 2026. One Yemeni analyst put it neatly: the Houthis are betting on pressure, the Saudis are betting on time. The Saudis cannot defend the sky and will not take the ground. So they absorb the hits and wait for the Houthi stockpile to run out. I wouldn't bet on it running out first.
Eighteen days to the midterms. What then? The Mother of All Bombs? Lost complete control? No one knows what to believe and this is not good for Donald Trump.
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