A New Posture: How Saudi Arabia is Reshaping its Military Readiness

On November 9, Yemen’s militant Ansar Allah group, widely known as the Houthis, publicly released a letter addressed to the leadership of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades announcing the suspension of attacks on commercial shipping. This move effectively paused the group’s two-year campaign of maritime disruption in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. This announcement comes as Saudi Arabia intensifies naval and air exercises, reflecting Riyadh’s efforts to boost combat readiness and strengthen coalition interoperability amid persistent regional instability, especially on its border with Yemen.

Although the Houthis declared an end to the offensive, the de-escalation warrants considerable caution. The group has long employed a pattern of tactical pauses followed by regrouping and renewed escalation—an approach designed to preserve resources, absorb external pressure, and resume hostilities from a stronger position.

This dynamic remains evident today. Operation Rough Rider and targeted Israeli airstrikes have significantly degraded the Houthis’ war machine and command structure, while intensified interdictions of weapons shipments have disrupted key elements of their resupply lines. However, these setbacks have not eliminated the Houthi threat.

The Houthis retain both the military capability and strategic intent to continue offensive strikes, as starkly demonstrated by the sinking of two merchant vessels in July and the attack on a Dutch-flagged cargo ship in October. For Saudi Arabia, whose economic trajectory increasingly depends on secure maritime corridors through the Red Sea, this residual threat remains consequential.

Riyadh’s Calculated Restraint

Since the onset of the Houthi maritime campaign, Riyadh has adopted a low-profile—quietly coordinating with Western partners, including the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian and the EU’s Operation Aspides, while avoiding membership in naval coalitions or direct kinetic support.

This restraint is intentional. Riyadh views the fragile 2022 ceasefire understanding with the Houthis as essential to preventing broader regional escalation and avoiding the resumption of cross-border attacks. While part of the group’s propaganda warfare, periodic threats from Houthi-linked figures have deepened Saudi concerns about becoming a direct target.

Unwilling to risk an open-ended confrontation, the Kingdom has instead prioritized strengthening its own maritime and air defense readiness through sustained bilateral and multilateral exercises with partners. This approach serves multiple strategic purposes: it allows Riyadh to reinforce deterrence, enhance operational adaptability, and strengthen joint-response capabilities without triggering the political and military costs of direct engagement in Yemen’s increasingly complicated conflict.

Strengthening Naval Power Projection

For the Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF), strengthening maritime power projection and coalition-ready interoperability has become central to securing the Red Sea and Gulf waterways.

Red Wave 8

Launched on November 9, Red Wave 8 brought together Saudi naval, land, and air forces, supported by the Interior Ministry’s Border Guard. The drill’s objectives were threefold: enhancing interoperability among Red Sea partners, securing critical shipping routes, and safeguarding the freedom of navigation and global supply chains.

First conducted in 2019, Red Wave is a Saudi-led joint naval exercise held annually at King Faisal Naval Base in Jeddah, reflecting Riyadh’s growing ambition for leadership in regional maritime security. The latest iteration tested a wide range of naval operations—from medium-intensity missions such as counter-smuggling, counterterrorism, and coastal defense to higher-end warfare above, on, and below the surface.

This mix of assets facilitated formation maneuvering, live-fire gunnery against surface and aerial threats, counter-UAV and USV operations, electronic warfare activities, and anti-submarine warfare simulations supported by Egyptian submarines. Saudi Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk naval helicopters conducted live-fire engagements against surface targets, further integrating air-maritime operations into the exercise. The drill also featured a land component for special forces, including urban-warfare and hostage-rescue scenarios.

Red Wave 8 aimed not only to sharpen the combat readiness of participating naval forces but also to strengthen inter-force coordination through intelligence sharing and harmonized operational concepts. Beyond its tactical objectives, Red Wave has evolved into a central pillar of Riyadh’s emerging Red Sea security architecture, reinforcing the Kingdom’s leadership role by bringing diverse regional navies under Saudi command.

Bridge/Jisr 26

Simultaneously with Red Wave 8, the RSNF’s Eastern Fleet conducted the Jisr (Bridge) bilateral naval exercise with the Royal Bahrain Naval Force. Launched in November, this 26th iteration of one of the Gulf’s longest-running bilateral drills is designed to strengthen Saudi-Bahraini interoperability and joint maritime readiness.

Over three days, roughly seven surface combatants participated. Saudi Arabia provided most of the naval platforms, including the Al-Jawf minehunter, the Faisal patrol boat, the Al-Yarmook corvette, and several HSI32 fast interceptor boats, while Bahrain contributed the Abdul Rahman Al-Fadel fast-attack craft. At sea, units rehearsed operations ranging from formation maneuvering and maritime interdiction to surface warfare, including live-fire tests of Close-In Weapon Systems (CIWS) and naval gunnery. The drill also incorporated land-based naval activities, such as marine live-fire training, urban and coastal warfare exercises, and diver operations.

The joint drill underscored the depth and continuity of Saudi-Bahraini naval cooperation, offering a vivid demonstration of how shared security concerns continue to drive sustained bilateral defense integration.

Blue Sword 4

Only a few weeks before Bridge 26, the King Abdulaziz Naval Base also hosted the fourth iteration of the Saudi-Chinese joint exercise, Blue Sword. First launched in 2019, Blue Sword is a biannual maritime counterterrorism and anti-piracy exercise conducted alternately in Saudi Arabia and China. The exercise has become the flagship platform for Saudi-China operational engagement.

The latest iteration focused on a broad set of tactical proficiencies, including close-quarters combat, sniper shooting, complex live-fire room-clearing and ship-boarding drills, and hostage-rescue missions. The exercise also incorporated naval mine-countermeasure operations as well as counter-UAV and counter-USV techniques, reflecting their growing relevance in littoral conflict zones.

Beyond tactical training, Blue Sword deepens operational familiarity between Saudi and Chinese forces. For Riyadh, it serves both as a practical investment in counterterrorism and maritime interdiction capabilities, and as a geopolitical signal of its widening defense partnership with Beijing. It will be revealing to see whether such exercises continue in the light of Saudi Arabia’s new status as a Major non-NATO ally to the United States.

While these exercises did not explicitly identify a counter-Houthi component, strengthening and testing combat capabilities to neutralize irregular threats and dispersed adversaries is critical for contemporary maritime operations in high-friction theaters, such as the Gulf and the Red Sea. As the Houthi movement’s ability to combine asymmetric tactics, long-range precision weapons, and disruptive maritime operations has grown exponentially, strengthening shared readiness, operational cohesion, and cross-fleet response mechanisms is critical for the Saudi naval forces.

Enhancing Joint Airpower

For the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) and Royal Saudi Air Defense Force (RSADF), enhancing joint airpower delivery through integrated training has emerged as a core pillar of the Kingdom’s evolving defense posture.

ATLC-35

On October 30, Saudi air forces joined the large-scale, multinational ATLC-35 (Advanced Tactical Leadership Course) at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. Held since 2004, ATLC has grown into one of the region’s premier exercises for integrating air operations and missile defense assets under contested conditions.

The drill simulates high-intensity Composite Air Operations (COMAO)—large, multi-platform sorties that combine fighters, tankers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, and missile-defense systems to replicate the demands of modern aerial warfare.

For its part, Saudi Arabia deployed Tornado multirole combat aircraft and aircrews, missile teams, logistics specialists, and support personnel. Saudi units participated in mission sets central to sustained air operations—defensive and offensive counter-air, combat search-and-rescue, night flights, and aerial refueling.

Sky Swords

A few weeks earlier, Saudi Arabia and Oman conducted Sky Swords 2025 at King Abdulaziz Air Base, Dhahran. The six-day bilateral drill, which focused on tactical integration between Saudi F-15SA fighter jets and Omani F-16s, reinforced bilateral interoperability and fine-tuned tactics for coalition operations, including defensive and offensive maneuvers as well as air-refueling in real-world air warfare scenarios.

Taken together, ATLC-35 and Sky Swords demonstrate a layered Saudi approach to airpower: cultivating multilateral interoperability through high-intensity multinational coalition drills, while deepening bilateral security ties that enhance tactical cohesion and logistics interoperability with regional neighbors. Enhanced air combat readiness with like-minded partners also reflects the significant strides Saudi Arabia is making in its own national defense architecture, most notably demonstrated by the deployment of its first THAAD battery in July 2025.

Preparing for a More Volatile Security Landscape

For Riyadh, rehearsing complex air warfare tasks appears to be less about individual sorties than about building the institutional and technical capacity to generate and sustain credible, integrated airpower in a rapidly evolving regional security landscape. Saudi Arabia’s network of naval and air exercises underscores a strategic shift toward anticipatory defense in a region where threats are fluid, asymmetric, and increasingly transregional. Even if Houthi attacks remain paused, the underlying drivers of maritime and aerial instability will endure.

As uncertainty persists over the Red Sea, Riyadh is poised to deepen its investment in multinational interoperability, layered air and missile defense, and high-end maritime readiness. The coming years are likely to bring greater integration with regional partners, more technologically complex drills, and a steady shift toward a deterrence posture built on distributed, resilient, and coalition-enabled combat power.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Gulf International Forum.