Zeroing in on that CNN story, I thought a few points were weird. Maybe you guys can straighten me out?
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The ballistic missile was intercepted and brought down by a Patriot missile. Hey, that’s good, no one likes their airports bombed. Is that common, though, for a neighboring nation to shoot a ground-to-ground missile at another nation? I guess I would have to leave out the many cruise missiles or drone-launched missiles the US lobbed at Iraq and Afghanistan (and Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc., etc.), as well as the ground to air missiles launched by Russian tourist-soldiers that took out that passenger airliner over Ukraine. And short range rockets between Palestine and Israel. It feels vanishingly rare.
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Serious question though: When was the last time a Patriot hit anything? I remember hearing about them “saving Israel” in the Gulf War as Hussein launched ineffective/intercepted SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv. And not long after the war, there was talk about how the Patriots really didn’t intercept many at all. Have they been in active use for the 25+ years since the Gulf War? I have heard glowing reports about our “Iron Dome” technology that helped cut down on rocket attacks in Gaza, but I thought that was different than the Patriot system. Smaller, faster, better (though maybe not suited for ballistic missiles?)
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Saudi Arabia is helping the official Yemen side in the Yemeni civil war, and so the CNN article begins with Yemeni rebels striking at Riyadh. I don’t know much about the Yemeni civil war except it has caused a great famine and was where President Trump first sent servicemen to their deaths way back in January. I’m surprised that the Houthi rebels got their hands on what must be a sophisticated weapon of war. Wikipedia says that the Burkon (or Volcano) H-2 is a vehicle-launched missile with a range of 800-2,000 km (a Proclaimers’ range of 500 - 1,240 miles). With that kind of range, gosh wow, that reaches pretty much all of the Gulf states and a chunk of eastern Africa as well.
https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/83/5783-004-68FE1414.jpg
- And the CNN article states that Yemen’s Defense Ministry is Houthi- (or rebel-)controlled. I didn’t catch that on my first readthrough. This led to more confusion with the quote from the “senior Yemeni air force official told CNN that the claim that Saudi Arabia intercepted the ballistic missile is false. ‘The Saudi regime cannot hide the heavy fires that was seen by thousands of Saudi nationals in the King Khalid Airport premises [instead of shrapnel harmlessly falling to the ground in uninhabited areas kind of by but nowhere the Riyadh airport] as result of the Yemeni missile,’ the official said.” Was this official officially Yemeni or officially a rebel? Lying about the effectiveness of the missile, or whether it was intercepted or not, would be more in the interest of the rebel than the nationalist, right? And I would think the rebels are doing well for themselves if they are controlling the defense ministry, right?
And this doesn’t even get into the Saudi Crown Prince’s coup, it’s just one portion of the mass of things on his plate. Perhaps the average subject would be more likely to get behind him if the neighbor’s civil war has spilled into their kingdom. I am not suggesting that the Yemeni allying with the Saudis launched that missile at their Saudi friends just to do the Crown Prince a solid, though. It’s just…weird. What can one rebel missile do to a kingdom even if it hit its target at the airport? Are the rebels trying to do actual strategic damage against the leader of the coalition supporting the official if beleaguered government, or using asymmetric warfare to (best case) freak everyone out?