Saudi Arabia Turns to US AI Targeting System Against the Houthis
The United States is supporting Saudi Arabia with AI-assisted target selection in its fight against the Houthis in Yemen, but experts warn that the use of AI raises technical, political and human rights questions, Deutsche Welle reported on October 25.
Saudi Arabia has asked numerous allies for help in the face of attacks by the militant Houthis from neighbouring Yemen. Media reports say US President Donald Trump rejected a direct military intervention against the Houthis when Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman asked for one. Washington is, however, supplying intelligence and an AI-assisted targeting system.
What the US is providing
According to a CNN report from September, between 100 and 200 US soldiers are stationed in the country for this purpose. Citing several unnamed US officials, CNN said the soldiers belong to a newly created joint command and help Saudi forces use a system that lets officers see in real time what is happening on the battlefield.
Officials said the system resembles the Maven Smart System (MSS), which the US military has already used to look for targets in Iran, Iraq and Syria. MSS grew out of Project Maven, the US military's main AI programme, launched in 2017. Experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington described it in a June analysis as a platform that merges, sorts and visualises huge data streams from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The software recognises patterns in live satellite or drone images and marks potential targets such as missile launchers, tanks or suspicious vehicle columns.
Technology commentator and former Google product manager Bilawal Sidhu calls MSS a kind of "Google Earth for war." The system sharply shortens the "kill chain," the time the military needs to identify a target, assess its danger and order a strike. In the US strikes on Iran in late February, MSS enabled attacks on more than 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours, whereas US forces had previously hit about 100 targets a day.
A war that has flared up again
An informal ceasefire negotiated in 2022 had kept the long war in Yemen relatively calm until recently. The Houthis have controlled large parts of the north and west since 2015, while the internationally recognised government and other groups backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold areas in the south and east. Since the start of their latest offensive in September, the Houthis have taken more coastal areas and stepped up attacks on Saudi Arabia, hitting the country's most important airport and oil facilities. Despite their military efforts, Saudi Arabia, the US and other states have so far failed to weaken the Houthis decisively.
Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen expert at the British think tank Chatham House, told DW recently that the Houthis follow a "zero-sum approach." In his words, the movement's founder considered today's Muslim societies too "soft" and viewed poverty and hardship as divine tests. "They do not care whether the Israelis bomb the airport or the US a hospital," al-Muslimi said. "That actually suits them very well, because their ideology revolves entirely around martyrdom and sacrifice."
Technical weaknesses and ethical questions
Users have already pointed to technical weaknesses of MSS that could become a problem in Yemen. The Houthis are highly mobile, using truck-mounted ballistic missiles and small drone swarms and operating in rough terrain with hills and ravines. Even with AI-assisted targeting, the fighters could be long gone before a strike is possible. MSS works best in relatively thinly populated areas, but changes in desert terrain, dust storms, strong wind, snow and dense vegetation can lower its success rate. The same applies to deliberately placed decoys.
The shortened kill chain also raises an ethical question: a human must check the target identified by the AI system and decide how to respond, but that does not always happen. Among the targets MSS identified on the first day of the war in Iran was a school; a US missile killed almost 200 people, mostly children aged seven to twelve, at a primary school in the south of the country. Israel has also used AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip, with a system called Gospel, or Habsora, that comes closest to MSS in how it works.
Analysts Frederic Wehrey and Andrew Bonney wrote in War on the Rocks that in Gaza AI improved commanders' picture of the situation, reduced human losses when mapping tunnels, speeded up strikes and raised soldiers' chances of survival. But "the benefits of these functions were overshadowed by a rising number of civilians killed, reportedly because safeguards of this technology were loosened or abolished." For that reason, Australia-based journalist Antony Loewenstein doubts the Houthis can be defeated with comparable technology. "I think there is hardly any evidence that using an AI system on the ground will change much - except causing an enormous number of civilian casualties," he told DW. "And I think the US and the Saudis will find that the Houthis can accept an incredibly high level of destruction."
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