The Gulf State Militaries Are a Joke — For Now

Nobody wants to find out that their nation is a paper tiger, but when it comes to the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf, military impotence is a problem entirely of their own making. For decades, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates operated on a shared assumption: that even though Iran talked a big talk, and even though Yemen and Syria existed in a state of constant breakdown, major war across the Middle East was borderline impossible in the twenty-first century. Whatever problems cropped up, America would handle them, leaving Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Dubai free to focus on their transformation into glimmering cities of the future.

Then the calendar turned over to 2026, and, for lack of a more delicate way to put it, everything went to hell. From Latin America to the Indo-Pacific to Europe, much of the world got a wake-up call this year. But while other nations merely learned that some of their security assumptions were wrong, the Gulf states learned that they had been building a fantasy world — one that failed to survive its first contact with geopolitical reality.

Now those states face the very real prospect that they will have to respond. Their militaries will have to be dusted off and reimagined for a modern age in which open warfare is still possible. Their factories will have to be repurposed and expanded to cope with the reality that having fancy weapons matters far less than having a lot of weapons. They will have to re-evaluate old friendships, secure new partners, and reckon with the possibility that they could come under threat not just from Iran or even Israel, but from each other.

This is the story of how the Gulf’s gilded illusion collapsed, and the difficult, decades-long project of turning six display-piece militaries into forces that can actually fight.

Shattered Illusions

Turn back the clock to late January 2026 — several decades’ worth of history ago, by the standards of this year — and the Gulf states were obviously on the rise. Overflowing with oil and gas revenue, the region had funneled its wealth into gargantuan sovereign wealth funds, building itself into a global player in tourism, transport, logistics, business, and media. It raised monuments to its own ambition, from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa to the fantastical Saudi gigaproject Neom, and poured hundreds of billions of dollars into projects worldwide. The Gulf was a favored partner of the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union all at once.

Even better, its leaders had matured past their early excesses. Gigaprojects like Neom were being drawn down in favor of more realistic investments, and sovereign wealth managers had accepted that they had not, in fact, discovered an infinite-money glitch. Large-scale regional war was supposed to be impossible, yet the Gulf states were already moving into an era of intense competition with one another. The Emirates worked with Israel, Morocco, Ethiopia, and others to manipulate proxy conflicts in a shadowy global game, while Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan joined forces to oppose them.

When violence did flare — an Emirates-backed separatist takeover of Yemen, quickly reversed by Saudi-backed rivals, or Israel’s brazen 2025 strike on Hamas political leadership in Qatar — it all fit a larger logic. Wealthy Middle Eastern powers were entering a new era of regional competition, but their battles would be fought through diplomacy, innovation, and proxy rivalry: a true cold war, in which all sides understood that direct conflict on one another’s soil simply wouldn’t be profitable.

The principle at the very heart of this geopolitics, though, was more fragile than anyone seemed to realize. In Riyadh, Doha, Muscat, and especially Abu Dhabi, sovereign leaders promised their people that no matter what happened across the rest of the Middle East, these countries were safe — so safe that people from all over the world should relocate their families and fortunes to take advantage of an environment found nowhere else. Embedded in that promise was a deeper assumption: that the Gulf had gained some measure of control.

Foreign powers, and the United States most of all, would have neither motive nor incentive to put the region at risk. The chaos beyond the borders could be contained. And as for Iran, well, that was a dying theocracy, a rogue and failing state with nothing left to do but endure a slow collapse.

In hindsight, they could not have been more wrong. When it became clear that Washington intended to take direct, large-scale action against the Iranian regime, the Gulf states responded with fear and warnings of the destruction that would follow. Those warnings were ignored by a White House that did not seem to grasp the near-certainty of an Iranian response — against the Gulf states themselves, and against the critical shipping lane running through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Gulf’s calculus, that the incentives of profit and stability would override any lingering appetite for war, fell apart under pressure. The results were devastating.

Over the course of Iran’s retaliatory campaign, the region weathered attacks that were supposed to be impossible. Iran struck the Emirates, where the region’s money was kept; Qatar, where its proxy allies were given safe harbor; and Oman, one of the most persistently neutral nations on Earth. It went after Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, the kingdom’s best route to export oil outside the Strait of Hormuz, and Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, where one-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas is produced.

It hit Emirati cities directly, shattering the illusion of safety the Emirates had cultivated for so long. Worst of all, American protection turned out to be considerably less than advertised: U.S. bases across the region were devastated, American-made air defenses ran critically low on interceptors, and at times it seemed as though the needs of the Gulf states weren’t even being weighed.

Lessons in Blood and Oil

Shocking as 2026 has been for the Persian Gulf, the past few months have also been deeply educational — and, to their credit, the Gulf states are starting to learn. According to reports by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia carried out direct, secretive retaliatory strikes against Iran at the height of the conflict, the first known occasions either country has taken kinetic action against Iran at all. Smaller states like Kuwait and Bahrain shook their sleepy internal security services into action, intercepting and dismantling Iran-backed cells on their territory. Saudi Arabia even struck Iran’s proxy missiles on Iraqi soil.

When interceptor shortages bit, they reached out to Ukraine. Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, and Doha signed ten-year defense agreements with Kyiv and welcomed hundreds of Ukrainian air-defense experts onto Gulf soil. The Emirates accepted direct military support from Israel and deepened the relationship, then agreed to what will soon become a comprehensive strategic partnership with India. Saudi Arabia accepted eight thousand troops from its ally Pakistan, along with fighter-jet and drone squadrons — and Pakistani sources suggest that in time the deployment could grow as large as eighty thousand.

So the assumptions the Gulf states made were proven catastrophically wrong, and they paid the price in both blood and oil. But their miscalculations were followed, eventually, by adaptation. The region recognized its vulnerabilities and moved to fix them.

More important still, the early signals suggest the Gulf states understand they face two choices: patch the most urgent problems and then go back to sticking their heads in the sand, or embark on a much larger mission to ensure this never happens again. From Kuwait in the north to Oman in the south, all of them appear to be choosing option two — meaning that, for each, it is time to build a world-class military.

Chronic Problems: Why Gulf Militaries Became Display Pieces

The Gulf states are far from a monolith. The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, the strategic neutrality of Oman, and Qatar’s controversial status as a regional black sheep all fracture the region. But on national defense, they have walked the same path for decades: foreign bases on their soil, foreign hardware in their arsenals, and militaries designed on the assumption that they wouldn’t really have to fight.

Each Gulf-state military is essentially a display piece, like a giant medieval sword meant to hang on a wall but unfit to hack apart a watermelon in the park. Each is equipped with high-tech, high-octane gear — advanced fighter jets bought in Washington and Paris, tanks and artillery from London to Brasília and Ankara to Seoul. All are very good at parade marching and patrolling, and on paper all are vastly more sophisticated than their rivals in Iraq, Yemen, or even Iran. Each maintains units that are genuinely capable, whether Saudi assault units blooded in Yemen, Emirati special-forces with histories in Libya and Sudan, or air-defense operators who can reliably handle the occasional rogue drone.

Overall, though, they have earned a reputation as nonsense militaries in many ways at once. Some have bought far more hardware than they have troops to operate; others have invested in equipment that is plainly redundant. Their force structure is utterly conventional — a standard army, air force, and navy — despite unique geographical challenges and advantages that a normal-looking military will struggle to address.

They are known for troops with questionable judgment and worse discipline, the product of trying to fill the ranks with citizens who treat service as a route to personal prestige rather than a profession. They are horribly inexperienced in full-scale conflict — a blessing until it absolutely isn’t — and they have largely declined to build their own military-industrial complex. WarFronts dedicated an entire episode last September to why Saudi Arabia’s military in particular could be so awful.

Yet the poor state of these militaries is no accident. They were designed this way because, in more peaceful times, the design served a purpose. Domestically, Gulf rulers kept their militaries weak and disorganized so the armed forces couldn’t threaten the dynastic royal families that govern much of the region.

Toward one another, weak militaries were a signal from each capital: nobody here intends to fight, so let’s not waste money on an arms race when we could all be making a profit together. Toward adversaries, the militaries were meant as a deterrent — it would look like a poor decision on paper for Iran’s outdated forces to challenge Gulf air power and American-made air defenses directly. Toward allies, they let the Gulf states claim they were partnering with foreign militaries, not merely sheltering behind them.

Most important was the message the Gulf sent to its arms dealers, above all the United States. When a nation buys, say, an F-16, it isn’t just buying a jet; it is buying a platform expected to stay in service for decades. That means a constant stream of replacement parts and software updates, seats in foreign training programs for pilots and ground crews, and a place near the top of the list when modernization packages come around. It is purchasing a relationship — and signaling that it can be relied upon as a strategic ally for decades, because a country dependent on American weapons can’t push too hard against American objectives without putting its own military in jeopardy.

For that reason, the Gulf states have treated military procurement as a form of supplication. The Saudi Army, for example, fields four different multiple-rocket-launch systems: one American, one Russian, one South Korean, and one Brazilian. That isn’t because Saudi Arabia needs four kinds of rocket launcher — in fact it makes the force much less efficient.

The goal was never to be good at launching rockets in a full-scale war; it was to promise the United States, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil all at once that Saudi Arabia is a trusted partner who won’t go off the rails. Each Gulf state does the same, buying weapons for their geopolitical value rather than their tactical value, and sweetening the deal by buying more than they need at less-than-competitive prices.

That approach is one piece of a broader diplomatic strategy that runs through Gulf finance, energy exports, and bids for global influence in culture and sport. But applying it to military hardware was always riskier than applying it to money. In the unlikely event the Gulf states actually needed a functioning military, they were always going to be exposed. That was never a surprise to them; the only surprise was that someone might finally call their bluff.

99 Problems: The Threat Landscape After the War

The Gulf’s next move is obvious: rearmament. Each country now faces a far more serious threat from Iran than it realized, and each has learned the hard way that the partner it relied upon in a worst-case scenario underperformed. The answer is to take self-defense into their own hands — regardless of whether they should have been doing so all along. There is no excuse to let well-understood problems keep festering.

The solutions will be dictated by the threats. The most immediate is Iran. For all the longer-term rivalries the Gulf states have with one another, with Israel, and with powers further afield, Iran is the present danger. Only Iran has shown the willingness to attack critical energy targets, threaten desalination and telecommunications infrastructure, and cultivate a network of proxies able to strike the Gulf from the north, in the militia hideouts of Iraq, and from the south, in Houthi-controlled Yemen.

The first problem is long-range aerial bombardment. Iran has demonstrated the ability to combine one-way kamikaze drones, subsonic cruise missiles, and high-arcing ballistic missiles in coordinated salvos designed to overwhelm localized air defenses — forcing batteries to fire interceptors faster than they can reload. Overwhelm an interceptor-based system like the American Patriot, the Israeli Iron Dome, or the South Korean Cheongung-II, and some threats will inevitably get through.

Worse, Iran can attack from multiple directions at once with proxy help, and fly drones low and slow to evade detection. Even when intercepts succeed, the Gulf sits on the wrong side of a brutal cost imbalance: most Iranian drones cost somewhere in the low five-figures in U.S. dollars, while a single Patriot interceptor runs about $4 million apiece, before maintenance and export support.

The second problem is the Strait of Hormuz and maritime security across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran has proven it can shut the strait — not merely by attacking individual ships, but by changing the risk calculus that shipping companies and, crucially, their insurers face. As a result, the vast majority of ships caught in the strait at the start of America’s Operation Epic Fury are still there.

It is not enough for a maritime power like the United States to organize a mass blockade run and promise cover. The mere possibility that a ship might be attacked by an organized national military is enough to create intolerable risk for insurers and their clients.

Nor is Iran a conventional naval threat. Most of its proper navy was destroyed over the course of this conflict, with many vessels sunk or disabled before making any meaningful contribution. Instead Iran sustains the threat in the strait through three weapons at once. First, missiles, drones, and even shore-based artillery pose a land-based risk to maritime traffic, forcing ships to accept that Iran will take potshots until they reach safer water.

Second, Iran retains hundreds or even thousands of small speedboats capable of swarming, conducting area denial, or boarding ships. Third, those same boats can lay sea mines — and they need not lay many to grind regional shipping to a halt.

Ideally, the Gulf states will eventually move from a purely defensive posture into a deterrent one: developing the capability to retaliate against Iran so forcefully and reliably that Iran wouldn’t contemplate an attack in the first place. For all the reasons already described, the Gulf unintentionally signaled to Iran that it was easy pickings. The Gulf states sit closer to Iran than Israel or most U.S. targets, yet lacked both the expertise and the will to join a U.S.-Israeli offensive and keep themselves safe. To change that, they will need not only long-range strike capability but quick-reaction forces, aerial sustainment infrastructure, and the credibility to prove they could carry out a reprisal alone — shifting their reputation from states that avoid conflict by any means necessary to a serious multinational force willing to get its hands dirty.

Iran is only the short-term threat. To the south, Yemen’s Houthi rebels remain a persistent danger even amid internal strife. To the north, Iraq hosts a range of Iran-backed militias that aren’t guaranteed to stay aligned with Tehran and could menace the Gulf even after Iran is deterred — and Iraq itself, perpetually unstable for two decades, could one day pose a threat of its own. The Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia are vulnerable to piracy, and the Red Sea along Saudi Arabia’s other coast is integral to the same shipping lanes the Gulf depends on.

Finally, there is the long-term threat the Gulf states pose to each other. The Saudi-Emirati rivalry is hardly a secret, and with the UAE leaving OPEC, drawing closer to Israel, and making other bold moves, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are unlikely to reconcile soon. Israel struck sovereign Qatar just last year, so the Emirates’ deepening ties to Jerusalem create friction there too.

Qatar, less than a decade removed from being blockaded by its neighbors, knows it could be isolated again. Oman, proudly neutral for decades, must now consider building military strength simply to protect its claim to neutrality. Tiny Kuwait faces an especially high risk of Iraqi or Iranian ground attack, while Bahrain depends on America’s Fifth Fleet for both economic and security reasons.

Eventually, the Gulf states’ approaches will have to diverge, even if they follow similar paths to rearmament or collaborate in some areas.

Building Up: The Solutions on Paper

None of the Gulf’s security challenges are insurmountable, but charting a path forward is a two-step process. Step one is the easy part: identify the right solution on paper for each threat. Step two is harder: modify those solutions so the Gulf states can actually implement them given their unique constraints.

Start with airspace. The last several months demonstrated the sheer saturation of air defenses needed to keep U.S. bases, energy installations, and other key targets safe — and even that wasn’t always enough. Before Operation Epic Fury, satellite imagery showed dozens of Patriot launchers at airbases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar. Those were American launchers, but they represent a density of defenses the Gulf must learn to replicate with hardware it controls, troops it operates, and placement it chooses.

That likely means looking beyond the United States, at least in part. Building a single Patriot battery takes a long time, let alone enough to fill the massive orders the Gulf would need to place at once. Replenishing spent interceptors, growing stockpiles, and then getting far enough down the export waiting list that 2026 orders come due could take years.

The world offers alternatives: the French-Italian SAMP/T, the German IRIS-T, Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow-3, South Korea’s Cheongung-II, and China’s HQ-9 and HQ-22. Each carries drawbacks — limited combat track records, slow production, export controls, or geopolitical barriers — and countries shouldn’t mix and match if they can secure larger orders of a single reliable type. But there are enough options for the Gulf states to pursue different systems rather than all queuing for the same product.

The UAE appears interested in Israeli kit, having accepted an Iron Dome during the hot phase of the war; Saudi Arabia already uses South Korean systems while hosting Pakistani forces who operate a Chinese alternative.

The Gulf need not confine itself to traditional air defense. Several capitals have already signed long-term defense collaboration with Ukraine, where interceptor drones have proven a low-cost, high-efficacy alternative on the modern battlefield. In the short term, the Gulf can import Ukrainian interceptor drones — especially once Russia’s invasion concludes — and lean on Ukrainian expertise to train its forces.

In the longer term, it would do well to build its own production lines, since drone interceptors are easier to produce in volume than most other hardware. Just as important are directed-energy systems: lasers and microwave weapons that several Gulf states are already moving to procure. While they lack the defense-industrial knowledge to build such weapons themselves, they can pour funding into existing projects abroad or buy up promising startups.

And the Gulf has a special reason to want lasers fast: those weapons struggle in overcast, rainy, or foggy conditions, but the Gulf rarely sees such weather. An average day there offers ideal conditions for the technology.

Beyond acquiring weapons, the Gulf must decide where to put them. Iran’s wartime conduct showed Tehran will strike beyond the strait — the Emirati port of Fujairah, the Saudi East-West Pipeline’s Red Sea terminal, targets across Oman. Those are especially worth protecting because, if Iran blockades the strait, they are the only remaining export routes.

The Gulf states must identify their most critical refineries, petrochemical plants, and export terminals and take a maximalist approach to defending them — which means many more well-trained operators, raising both recruitment and training demands. The region should also build far better monitoring and surveillance, especially across the vast Saudi interior, where drones from Yemen and Iraq can skulk undetected before closing on their targets. Saudi Arabia would likely lead on static surveillance, while other states build streamlined intelligence-sharing protocols; Kuwait and Oman, bordering Iraq and Yemen respectively, may develop their own capabilities or plug into a Saudi-led network.

Taking the Seas: Maritime Security and the Strait

Then there is maritime security, where the Gulf states can barely project power across the Gulf itself. Between all six of them, they possess just nine naval frigates — operated mostly by Saudi Arabia — along with thirty-one corvettes, a handful of minesweepers and fast-attack craft, and not a single submarine. They have relied instead on the United States and on the assumption that if the strait were ever closed, the world’s navies would spring into action for their own sakes. With that approach now exposed as entirely ineffective, the problem is too large to solve in a few years: ships take too long to build, and the world has no spare military shipbuilding capacity.

What the Gulf can do is overhaul its tactics in the short term while expanding its fleets over time. Many Gulf navies lack the personnel to crew the ships they already have, so large-scale recruitment alone could ease the strain. The Gulf also has the money to outbid competitors for warships being phased out by modern militaries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

Those hulls would arrive with deficiencies and wear, but it is faster to overhaul onboard weapons and electronics than to build shipyards from scratch. The goal is to get ships and sailors in the water by any means necessary, building enough presence to matter if the strait closes again.

As Iran has shown, closing the strait is about risk perception more than the destruction of individual ships. So it falls to the Gulf states to demonstrate they can minimize that risk. Some of that comes on the water — training large-scale naval responses to drone and missile threats, proving they can interdict fast boats.

But aerial capability matters just as much: maritime patrol aircraft and, ideally, space-based surveillance to watch the coast and flag threats. The Gulf can also field static equipment to detect mine-laying and undersea operations, guard sensitive undersea cables, and monitor offshore energy extraction. In peacetime, aggressive patrolling across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman would keep them constantly visible and active.

Managing risk means managing perceptions — and the best thing Gulf navies can do is show, constantly, that they are capable of responding once threats are identified.

They may also choose a course that would make most Gulf leaders uncomfortable today: proactively and unilaterally asserting control of the strait, whatever Iran says. Ideally they would set aside internal divisions to build a maritime coalition — even one narrowly limited to maritime security, with the understanding that members will bicker over everything else. If such an arrangement is achievable, the time is now, after every Gulf state has been reminded that Iran threatens them all.

It is also an ideal moment to lay claim to the strait while Iran reels from the destruction of its navy. Rebuilding will be hard for Iran, but there is no telling what its fleet could look like in a decade or two. In any peace settlement, armistice, or ceasefire, the Gulf’s best bet is to assert control quickly and deny Iran the opportunity to rebuild.

It may provoke an international incident — but control of the strait is arguably worth the price.

A Deterrent of Their Own

Finally, the Gulf needs a substantive deterrent against Iran — not because any state seeks a return to open war, but because sometimes the best way to stop someone from hitting you is to make sure they know you can hit back. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have shown they grasp the value of retaliatory strikes, but their retaliation rode the coattails of a much larger American and Israeli campaign. To build an independent deterrent, they need independent arsenals of longer-range weapons and independent air forces capable of striking Iran, Iraq, Yemen — or, hypothetically, each other — without an outside sponsor.

To a degree, the Gulf can simply do what Iran does: stockpile ballistic missiles, long-range drones, and other weapons that can fly across the strait and hit their targets. Saudi Arabia already stockpiles ballistic missiles across at least four, and probably five, bases, and is said to produce its own missiles on Saudi soil. The other states would do well to acquire their own, and all of them would benefit from one-way attack drones. Here again wealth is an advantage, especially in a world where the Ukraine war has ended: Ukrainian drone manufacturers are expected to enter a golden age of military exports, and the Gulf can outbid competitors for contracts or acquire Ukrainian manufacturers outright.

Beyond munitions, the Gulf can turn its air forces into genuine tools of power projection. These countries aren’t starving for fighters — Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular operate advanced F-15 variants. Their problem is a lack of non-combat support aircraft: the air-to-air refuelers and the airborne early-warning and control planes needed to coordinate and sustain offensive air operations.

That is a problem nearly every U.S.-partnered military shares, because American refueling, command-and-control, and reconnaissance are so well developed — and it is one that America’s European and Indo-Pacific allies are only now confronting. Around the world, nations compete over refuelers like the Airbus A330 MRTT and control aircraft like the E-7 Wedgetail and the Saab 2000. Once again, money talks, and few customers can argue louder than the Gulf.

On the air and on the water, the Gulf can also invest in larger, more capable rapid-response forces, especially amphibious capability. In a world where the Gulf states could react to Iranian hostility by immediately seizing the oil-export terminal on Kharg Island or the smaller islands near the strait, Iran would be forced to rethink a renewed conflict. Saudi and Omani forces likewise need to be ready to repel ground infiltrations from Iraq and Yemen, and all Gulf nations have reason to ensure they can defend Kuwait — the one Gulf state Iran could realistically threaten on land, with ground forces that have been mostly irrelevant in its war against the U.S. and Israel.

And even if Gulf ground and amphibious forces wouldn’t play much of a role in a future war, they serve another purpose: as long as quick-reaction forces could pose an urgent threat, an adversary would have to strike them first, before turning to energy or infrastructure. Perhaps their only practical role is to be a missile sponge in the opening days of a conflict — but those are missiles that aren’t used to destroy oil refineries or desalination plants.

From Zeroes to Heroes: The Gulf’s Unique Constraints

Laying out a wish list of capabilities is the easy part. On paper, these new weapons and strategic principles would give the Gulf powerful advantages in a future conflict, both in defending their territory and in posing a credible deterrent. But the Persian Gulf is a unique place, where countries face specific limits most others never have to think about.

The most obvious is geography, especially for the three smallest states — Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Kuwait is the most vulnerable of all: like many small countries it lacks the depth to retreat from a ground invasion, and unlike its neighbors, a ground invasion is a real possibility. Bahrain is less exposed, because attacking it means practically attacking the United States directly — though that didn’t deter Iran last time.

Qatar faces little threat of a ground attack unless it badly angers the rest of the Gulf again, but it too has little territory to hide in. Each of the three can look to nations in similar positions, like Israel or Taiwan, that prioritize their ability to retaliate and impose costs on an aggressor before it ever reaches their soil. Sometimes it is acceptable, even best, for a military to be unbalanced.

Qatar doesn’t really need the hundred main battle tanks it has on order from South Korea and Turkey as much as it needs the ballistic-missile and drone arsenal it currently lacks. When arms purchases were primarily tools of diplomacy, the tanks made sense; that is no longer the reality these nations live in.

Then there is population — specifically, the share of it a country is willing to put in uniform. The UAE’s total population is nearly twelve million, but only 1.4 million, about twelve percent, are Emirati citizens. Qatar’s distribution is similar; citizens make up roughly thirty percent of Kuwait’s population, and less than sixty percent each in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain. Understandably, these countries avoid recruiting expatriates into their militaries where they can, but that leaves a very small recruiting pool — made worse by citizens who enjoy a high standard of living far more appealing than military life.

When nations are very rich but short on citizens to fill their armies, they tend to arrive at the same solution: mercenaries. While much of the world is skeptical of soldiers of fortune, the Gulf is well accustomed to the idea, if at limited scale. The Emirates maintain connections to mercenary organizations recruiting from across the globe, especially Latin America and Africa. Former U.S. and European officers receive lucrative advisory contracts, while lower-wage migrants are recruited into support roles like maintenance, logistics, and food services.

While each country might want its weapons systems and warplanes in citizen hands, it can offload other burdens onto private military contractors — operating air defenses, manning radar stations, even serving in enlisted roles aboard ships, plus guard duty, electronic warfare, and cyber-operations. The Gulf states are already believed to be actively recruiting foreigners for many of these roles. According to sources interviewed by Middle East Eye, they are prioritizing contractors from Muslim-majority nations like Pakistan and Egypt, while keeping specialist roles open for experts from Europe and elsewhere. A conclusion to the Ukraine war could be especially useful, as tens of thousands of Ukrainian combat veterans leave service at home — bringing exactly the drone and air-defense expertise the Gulf needs most if they can be recruited into comfortable contracts abroad.

Nor must the Gulf recruit only combat veterans. One underappreciated effect of the global drone revolution is that drones can be operated by all sorts of people who would never otherwise reach military service. Drone operators behind the front lines don’t need to pass physical requirements of age, sex, or strength, and they don’t face the same risk to their lives — they can work from nearly untraceable points in apartments and disguised locations, or from hardened bunkers Iranian munitions can’t penetrate. If the Gulf states stockpile long-range attack drones, logistics drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and sea drones, those non-traditional operators become a force multiplier, whether drawn from citizens, expats, or contractors — and they further reduce the need to put citizens in the highest-risk fighting roles.

Strategic Cohesion: Competing Without Colliding

The last problem is cohesion. Over the coming decades, the Emiratis and the Saudis are going to have their rivalry. Oman will reaffirm its neutrality, Bahrain will hug the U.S. Fifth Fleet as tightly as it can, and Qatar will probably get up to some type of mischief, whatever that mischief turns out to be.

But whether they like each other or not, each Gulf state is safer if it can call on the others for mutual defense — or, at minimum, trust that its neighbors don’t pose an active threat. When they want to compete, they can do it economically, technologically, diplomatically, or, if they must, through proxy conflicts on someone else’s soil. The Persian Gulf itself, and all the nations that depend on it, must remain secure.

There has already been movement here. In mid-May, the Financial Times revealed that Saudi Arabia had floated a nonaggression pact to be signed by all the Gulf states — including Iran — modeled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords between the Cold War American and Soviet spheres. The proposal quickly drew support from the European Union and most of the Gulf, though the Emirates emerged as the most likely dissenter. Even if a total regional pact proves impossible, the Gulf benefits by sealing as large a nonaggression deal as it can, and by negotiating more specific agreements all sides can accept — for instance a pact to respect and defend Oman’s neutrality, or a commitment for all to come to Kuwait’s defense as the most invasion-prone state.

It would be unusual, in global diplomatic terms, to settle on a patchwork of limited agreements rather than a broad security pact. But the idea that the Gulf states would all sign a single regional security pact right now is implausible at best. These nations plan to compete, to diverge strategically, and eventually to establish superiority over one another. If the one thing they can all agree on is that their region should be kept safe from an Iranian or other outside threat, there is real value in working out an agreement on that principle alone — because the alternative might be nothing.

In the years and decades to come, the Gulf states will have to reconsider everything they thought they knew about geo-strategy, diplomacy, deterrence, and, most of all, power. Their predicament is the result of choices they made, after decades of military policy that failed to take the rest of the world seriously. It is impossible to establish true national security simply by signing checks, and that misunderstanding delivered the wake-up call of a lifetime. But now these countries have a job to do — and, it must be admitted, that infinite-money glitch will be a big help with whatever they do next.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are the Gulf state militaries considered so weak despite their expensive hardware?

Their militaries were designed as instruments of diplomacy rather than defense. Gulf rulers deliberately kept their forces weak and disorganized so the military couldn’t threaten the royal families, signaled to neighbors that nobody intended to fight, and treated arms purchases as a way to buy long-term relationships with supplier nations. The result is redundant, prestige-driven procurement — like the Saudi Army’s four different rocket-launch systems from America, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil — chosen for geopolitical value rather than tactical value, often bought in greater quantities than needed and at non-competitive prices.

What did Iran attack in the Gulf during the 2026 conflict?

Iran’s retaliatory campaign struck targets across the region, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and the historically neutral Oman. Specific targets included Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, its primary route to export oil outside the Strait of Hormuz, and Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, where one-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas is produced. Iran also struck Emirati cities directly and devastated U.S. military bases across the region, while American-made air defenses ran critically low on interceptors.

Why can’t the Gulf states simply buy more American Patriot systems?

Building a single Patriot battery takes a long time, and the Gulf would need enough batteries to fill massive orders simultaneously. The United States must also replenish interceptors spent during the war and grow its own stockpiles, leaving Gulf orders far down a long export waiting list. There is also a severe cost imbalance: an Iranian drone may cost in the low five-figures, while a single Patriot interceptor runs roughly $4 million. As a result, the Gulf is looking to alternatives like France and Italy’s SAMP/T, Germany’s IRIS-T, Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow-3, South Korea’s Cheongung-II, and China’s HQ-9 and HQ-22, plus drone interceptors and directed-energy weapons.

How does Iran threaten the Strait of Hormuz without a strong navy?

Most of Iran’s conventional navy was destroyed during the conflict, but it sustains the threat through three weapons used together. Land-based missiles, drones, and shore artillery pose a constant risk to passing ships. Hundreds or thousands of small speedboats can swarm, conduct area denial, or board vessels. And those same boats can lay sea mines — without needing many to make the strait too dangerous to transit.

The strategy works through risk perception: it changes the calculus of shipping companies and their insurers, so most ships caught in the strait at the start of Operation Epic Fury are still there.

What is the nonaggression pact Saudi Arabia proposed?

In mid-May, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia had floated a nonaggression pact to be signed by all the Gulf states, including Iran, modeled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords between the Cold War American and Soviet spheres of influence. The proposal won support from the European Union and most of the Gulf, though the UAE emerged as the most likely dissenter. Even if a full regional pact fails, the Gulf could pursue narrower deals — such as agreements to defend Oman’s neutrality or to jointly protect Kuwait, the state most vulnerable to a full-scale invasion.

Sources

1. https://ecfr.eu/publication/diversification-nations-the-gulf-way-to-engage-with-africa/
2. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/unpacking-trumps-2025-gulf-investment-tour
3. https://africacenter.org/spotlight/gulf-state-actors-east-africa/
4. https://mei.edu/publication/why-gulf-states-are-investing-central-asia-and-south-caucasus/
5. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/gulf-states-soccer-sports-sovereign-wealth-fund/
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/world/middleeast/gulf-states-invest-syria-iran.html
7. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/beyond-headlines-explaining-trumps-gulf-trillions-2025-05-16/
8. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/construction-projects-awarded-gulf-states-plunge-saudi-arabia-pulls-back-spending
9. https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-essential-role-gulf-states-energy-transitions
10. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/17/donald-trump-gulf-states-ai
11. https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2026/03/mapping-the-damage-iranian-strikes-on-the-gcc/
12. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-caused-extensive-damage-us-military-bases-publicly-known-rcna331853
13. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/04/iran-war-stress-test-gulf-states
14. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/05/11/gulf-states-fear-irreversible-fallout-from-the-iran-crisis
15. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/gulf-states-iran-attacks-retaliation-strikes-energy-oil-gas-water-strait-of-hormuz.html
16. https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2026-march-7/
17. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/six-key-takeaways-about-irans-missiles-two-months-into-the-war/
18. https://thehill.com/policy/international/5849646-iran-damage-us-military-bases/
19. https://www.dw.com/en/why-the-gulf-states-are-wary-of-a-strike-on-iran/a-75593784
20. https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-gcc-states-and-the-us-iran-dance-near-the-abyss/
21. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/gulf-states-and-turkey-urged-trump-not-to-launch-strikes-against-iran
22. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/abu-dhabi-says-drone-strike-caused-fire-barakah-nuclear-power-plant-no-injuries-2026-05-17/
23. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/saudi-arabia-launched-covert-attacks-iran-regional-war-widened-sources-2026-05-12/
24. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/how-secret-u-a-e-and-saudi-strikes-on-iran-shattered-an-uneasy-coexistence-2e4502b6
25. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-uae-iran-attacks.html
26. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistan-deploys-jet-squadron-thousands-troops-saudi-arabia-during-iran-war-2026-05-18/
27. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/pakistan-sends-troops-fighters-to-saudi-arabia-reuters-reports
28. https://apnews.com/article/israel-uae-netanyahu-gaza-palestinians-c2401b72fbd20c72f05a8d0fba759836
29. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-and-israel-established-fund-joint-defence-acquisition-sources-say
30. https://www.hudson.org/security-alliances/blueprint-ambitious-ukraine-gulf-ties-luke-coffey
31. https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/4114326-ukraine-agrees-on-tenyear-defense-deals-with-three-gulf-states-receives-interest-from-11-more-countries-zelensky.html
32. https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-volodymyr-zelenskyy-secures-oil-lifeline-gulf-states-military-support/
33. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/drone-diplomacy-ukraine-is-now-key-security-partner-in-europe-and-the-gulf/
34. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/05/12/ukraine-seeks-to-broaden-diplomatic-horizon-by-selling-arms_6753377_4.html
35. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/15/india_and_uae_sign_defence-pacts_as_iran_war_tensions_simmer
36. https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-signs-pacts-with-uae-defence-petroleum-during-modis-visit-2026-05-15/
37. https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2026/05/challenge-for-the-gulf-states-rearming-after-the-war/
38. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/new-order-gulf
39. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-kuwait-lift-restrictions-on-u-s-military-access-to-bases-airspace-8504c830
40. https://x.com/IISS_org/status/2056272849673789501
41. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5860824-state-dept-arms-sales-gulf/
42. https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-03-30/ty-article/.premium/status-quo-has-collapsed-and-the-gulf-states-are-looking-for-a-new-strategy/0000019d-2d7f-dc71-a7ff-ef7f45070000
43. https://www.newarab.com/news/gulf-allies-turn-ukraine-uk-and-asia-ammunition-runs-low
44. https://www.gmfus.org/news/end-gulfs-gilded-age
45. https://www.wsj.com/world/gulf-allies-turn-away-from-u-s-for-fresh-ammo-9960be73
46. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-continues-remarkable-rise-from-aid-recipient-to-security-provider/
47. https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/open-event/will-iran-rearm-or-reform-war-nuclear-standoff-and-shaken-alliances
48. https://www.iiss.org/globalassets/media-library---content—migration/files/research-papers/2023/06/new-ambitions-at-sea-naval-modernisation-in-the-gulf-states.pdf
49. https://mecouncil.org/blog_posts/the-gulf-states-defense-industrial-base-is-a-priority-of-the-post-war-future/
50. https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2026-may-14/
51. https://time.com/article/2026/05/18/america-saudi-arabia-gulf-economies/
52. https://inkstickmedia.com/deep-dive-are-gulf-states-reconsidering-their-us-alliance/
53. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gulfs-lifeline-is-irans-weapon-2026-05-13/
54. https://www.hoover.org/research/after-hormuz-gulf-search-new-order
55. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/3/19/us-approves-16-5bn-arms-deal-to-gulf-states-amid-rising-iran-tensions
56. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/world/middleeast/us-fast-track-arms-deal-middle-east.html
57. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/04/iran-conflict-could-open-door-for-new-players-in-gulf-defense-market/
58. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5872019-gulf-states-shift-away-from-us/
59. https://ecfr.eu/article/the-postwar-uae-and-the-remaking-of-gulf-politics/
60. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/gulf-states-and-fourth-gulf-war
61. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/04/05/why-the-gulf-states-need-a-new-security-playbook/
62. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-us-china-news-2026/card/egypt-sent-air-defense-systems-to-gulf-states-during-iran-war-Hd3iIWxxfpTq5WiiK3V2
63. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/a-new-order-for-the-gulf-states
64. https://orfme.org/expert-speak/beyond-interceptors-improving-public-warning-systems-in-the-gulf/
65. https://www.twz.com/land/cheap-patriot-interceptor-costing-under-1-million-now-being-sought-by-army
66. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/iran-war-cost-military.html
67. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gulf-states-turn-private-foreign-military-specialists-amid-iran-attacks
68. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-floats-non-aggression-pact-iran-and-regional-states-report
69. https://www.newarab.com/news/saudi-arabia-pushes-regional-non-aggression-pact-iran
70. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2643621/saudi-arabia