Saudi Arabia Turns to US AI Targeting in Yemen, Raising Questions on Effectiveness and Civilian Harm

Saudi Arabia, under pressure from the Houthi movement in neighboring Yemen, has been asking its allies for help. According to media reports, one request was turned down: President Donald Trump declined when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked the United States to take direct military action against the Houthis. What Washington is providing instead is intelligence, including a targeting tool driven by artificial intelligence.

The detail comes from a September CNN report that quoted several unnamed American officials. It said between 100 and 200 US soldiers are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint force command set up to make this possible. Their job is to help Saudi officers use a tool that shows what is happening on the battlefield in real time. Officials described the system as similar to the Maven Smart System, or MSS, which the US military has used while looking for targets in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

MSS grew out of Project Maven, the Pentagon's flagship military AI program, launched in 2017. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote in June that it gathers, organizes and visualizes huge streams of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data. It finds patterns in material such as live satellite feeds and drone camera footage, then labels possible targets: rocket launchers, tanks, suspicious vehicle convoys. It also calculates the best way to hit them. Human analysts once had to comb through many separate sources, which the CSIS researchers described as nearly impossible with hours of footage. Tech commentator Bilawal Sidhu, a former Google product manager, has called it a "Google Earth for war."

The main effect is speed. MSS compresses the kill chain, the interval between detecting a target, judging whether it is dangerous and ordering a strike. When the US attacked Iran in late February, the system helped enable hits on more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours. American forces had previously struck about 100 targets a day.

The Yemen front had been relatively calm after an informal ceasefire in 2022. The Houthis have held large parts of northern and western Yemen since 2015, while the internationally recognized government and other groups, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, hold territory in the south and east. A new Houthi campaign beginning in September has extended the group's control over more of the coast and renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia, including strikes on its main airport and oil facilities. Earlier campaigns by Saudi Arabia, the US and others have not significantly weakened the group.

Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen research fellow at the UK think tank Chatham House, told DW that part of the reason is the Houthis' zero-sum outlook. He said the group's founder held that modern Muslim societies had grown too soft and that hardship is a divine test. "They don't care if the Israelis bomb the airport or the US bombs a hospital," he said, adding that this serves them because their ideology centers on martyrdom and sacrifice.

There are technical limits as well. The Houthis are highly mobile, using truck-mounted ballistic missiles and small drone swarms from hills and canyons, so fighters may be gone before a strike lands, even with AI help. MSS is known to work best in sparsely populated areas, and shifting desert terrain, dust storms, high wind, snow, dense foliage and deliberately planted decoys can all reduce its success rate.

The ethical problem is harder. A human is supposed to verify every target the tool flags and decide how to respond, but that does not always happen. Among the sites MSS targeted on the first day of the Iran war was a school: an American missile killed almost 200 people at a primary school in southern Iran, most of them children aged seven to 12.

Israel's experience in Gaza offers another reference point. Its Gospel system, or Habsora, is the closest in function to MSS. Analysts Frederic Wehrey and Andrew Bonney wrote in War on the Rocks that AI improved commanders' awareness, the speed of strikes and troop survivability, but that those gains were overshadowed by civilian deaths reportedly tied to loosened or removed safeguards. Journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of "The Palestine Laboratory," told DW he sees little evidence that AI will change much on the ground "except for causing huge amounts of civilian casualties," and expects the US and Saudis to find the Houthis have "an incredibly high tolerance level for destruction." What to watch is whether a shorter kill chain in Yemen brings the same civilian toll seen in Gaza and Iran.