In 2019, a swarm of Iranian drones and cruise missiles slipped past Saudi Arabia’s American-built air defenses and knocked out half the kingdom’s crude oil production in a single morning. Riyadh spent billions upgrading its defenses in the years that followed. Seven years later, the lesson has returned — harder, wider, and aimed at every country on the western shore of the Persian Gulf simultaneously.
Within 96 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, Tehran had destroyed or damaged at least two AN/TPY-2 radars — the $300-million-apiece “eyes” that guide American THAAD missile interceptors — at bases in Jordan and the UAE, and struck a $1.1 billion early-warning radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Iran destroyed a key $300 million radar system crucial to directing US missile defense batteries in the Gulf. Tom Karako of CSIS called these “scarce strategic resources,” noting the Army’s “eight-battery force is still below the force structure requirements of nine set back in 2012, so there aren’t exactly any spare TPY-2 lying around.”
A Saudi defense analyst writing in Arab News has now laid out what this means for the Gulf Cooperation Council in the starkest terms yet: the US-led missile defense architecture that was supposed to protect Vision 2030 infrastructure, oil terminals, and civilian cities has been exposed as dangerously fragile — and the GCC must avoid being dragged deeper into someone else’s war.
Kill the Eyes, Kill the Aim
Iran’s campaign followed a textbook three-step sequence borrowed from air-defense suppression doctrine. First, strike the early-warning radars that detect threats at long range. Second, destroy the fire-control radars that guide interceptors to their targets. Third, hit the batteries themselves. If the simultaneous neutralization of multiple AN/TPY-2 radar nodes is accurate, it would signal a deliberate Iranian strategy to target the sensor backbone of the US-led missile defense architecture rather than its interceptor launchers.
The systems are large and expensive but also fragile — a Shahed drone carrying a small explosive payload can cause enough damage to take them out of the fight for an extended period. Iran exploited a brutal cost asymmetry: cheap drones mixed with ballistic missiles in large salvos force defenders to fire interceptors costing millions per shot at every incoming track, because the political cost of a single “leaker” hitting a populated area is unbearable. Air and missile defense systems in the Gulf have been stressed and, at times, overwhelmed by Iranian retaliatory attacks, sparking fears that stockpiles of advanced interceptors will soon run dangerously low.
The UAE has borne the heaviest burden. It has intercepted 241 of 262 ballistic missiles as of March 10 — a 92% interception rate equivalent to Israeli rates in previous confrontations — though only two of the 21 that got through actually hit UAE territory. But a 92% rate against 1,700 missiles and drones still means dozens of impacts on civilian infrastructure.
Neutrality’s Death
The GCC states gave ironclad assurances to Iran, continuously and emphatically, both before the war and up to its very eve, that their territories would not be used to attack Iran. The GCC’s extraordinary ministerial statement of March 1, 2026, made this explicit. It didn’t matter. The presence of Western military bases, naval facilities, and forward operating sites across at least 19 locations in the Middle East means that, in Iranian calculations, political neutrality clashes with the reality of logistical and technical involvement.
Monica Marks of NYU Abu Dhabi told Al Jazeera that “seeing Manama, Doha and Dubai bombed is as strange and unimaginable as seeing Charlotte, Seattle, or Miami bombed would be for Americans.” The Gulf states “saw this war coming in slow motion” and “exerted a huge amount of effort to stop it,” but a cornered Iranian regime would “choose fratricide before suicide,” taking its Gulf neighbors hostage rather than accepting defeat.
The Middle East Council on Global Affairs argued that the escalation has exposed the limits of traditional Gulf neutrality. Iranian decision-makers may calculate that expanding the battlefield will compel Gulf states to restrain the United States — but this is a perilous gamble that could just as easily drive the Gulf states closer to aligning with the US, eliminating them as moderating actors.
The UN Security Council on Wednesday adopted a Bahrain-sponsored resolution condemning Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, with thirteen of the 15 members voting in favor and Russia and China abstaining. Iran’s ambassador called it “a deeply regrettable day” and “a manifest injustice against my country, the main victim of a clear act of aggression.”
The Road the GCC Must Build
Turki Faisal Al-Rasheed’s prescription is direct: the GCC must close ranks, develop autonomous sensor coverage that doesn’t collapse when a handful of American radars are destroyed, localize interceptor stockpiles, and invest in layered defenses combining high-end systems with cheaper alternatives and passive protection. Most critically, it must resist being pulled into direct participation in a US-Israeli war against Iran.
The GCC states should resist US pressure to participate directly in offensive operations against Iran. They host US military infrastructure that Iran is now targeting, yet none of them sought or endorsed this war. Qatar’s former prime minister warned that a direct GCC-Iran clash “will deplete the resources of both sides and provide an opportunity for many forces to control us under the pretext of helping us.”
The most dangerous outcome is not regime change in Tehran but the possible disintegration of the Iranian state — unleashing refugee flows, militia spillover, and sustained energy disruption that would directly threaten Saudi stability and Vision 2030. The GCC stands at a fork: one path leads to escalation, exhaustion, and dependence; the other demands the courage to say no to being used, yes to self-reliant defense, and always to protecting development first. As Al-Rasheed puts it, the choice is between becoming the ramp that wrecks someone else’s armored car — or building the road that carries the Gulf’s own future forward.
Original analysis inspired by Turki Faisal Al-Rasheed from Arab News. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
By ThinkTanksMonitor
