The Sandal Strategy: How Cheap Software and AI Bec...

Summary

• We rated the tank against the drone in Ukraine, and the stealth fighter against the ballistic missile in the war between Iran and the United States and Israel.
• Anthropic’s September threat report described a cell of actors in northern Yemen running three weapons programmes: a guided rocket built around a phone-class flight computer, a multi-stage ballistic missile, and a multi-variant missile with a hypersonic-glide option.
• The same coverage says the group had already built an offline simulation toolkit that does not depend on Claude, and that the Houthis still rely on their Iranian sponsors for the most sophisticated components of their drones and ballistic missiles.

AI Generated Summary

For two years we have watched wars the way our countrymen watch cricket or football: with a scorecard in one hand and a firm opinion in the other. We rated the tank against the drone in Ukraine, and the stealth fighter against the ballistic missile in the war between Iran and the United States and Israel. We thought we understood which instruments win. Then, in a single week in October, Yemen’s Houthis struck the airports of Riyadh, Abha and Dammam, and we had to tear up the scorecard.

Let us say first what no honest commentator can skip. War exists to impose damage on an enemy until he changes his behaviour, and by that cold measure the Houthis have done well. Their strikes closed King Khalid International Airport, killed at least 18 people across the week, and helped push oil above $105 a barrel. Saudi Arabia’s energy minister has promised a “serious” response. One of the dead was a Pakistani resident, which makes this personal for us. Yet effect is not legitimacy. The Riyadh airport has no military facilities, and a missile through a passenger terminal is a crime under the laws of war. As Muslims, we hold the Kingdom close as the custodian of the two holy mosques, and we condemn these attacks without reservation. But a man who judges weapons must report the result as it is, not as he wishes it were.

The picture that went round the world was of fighters in sandals and torn clothes, and many viewers drew a conclusion from it: how could such men do this? The question is the problem. We have spent a century equating military power with the polish of its institutions, the lawns of West Point, the parade ground at Sandhurst, the traditions of Saint-Cyr. Those schools produce fine officers. But a missile does not check the graduate’s certificate. It checks only whether the numbers inside its flight computer are right, and the Houthis, as it happens, have spent over a decade learning how to get them right.

Consider what the other wars have been teaching us. In Ukraine, the decisive contest is no longer between the best tank and the best anti-tank missile. It is between cheap mass and expensive defence. Russia launched about 2,800 Shahed drones in 2023, and more than 41,500 in the first seven months of 2026. Ukraine’s answer is not a masterpiece but a mass-produced interceptor drone costing a few thousand dollars, and its commanders say it now destroys about a third of the aerial threats that fall. Then Russia answered with jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones, reportedly rising from some 350 sorties a month in June to over 3,100 by late September, and interception rates against them are poor. Each side’s advantage lasts weeks.