“Red Status. I cannot tell you why. Possible incoming.” The short, urgent message appeared on Kuwaiti Colonel Sabah Al Sabah's phone from a trusted contact in the early hours of the Iran War.
Within two minutes, Kuwait’s deputy air defence chief had rushed into the operations centre.
“I found my friend, the air defence operations chief, and I told him the same. I'll never forget the look he had on his face,” the officer said, recounting the events at a London defence conference. “It was of a man not receiving new information.”
“We’re already there,” the officer replied. The sky was filling with Iran’s first wave of almost 100 ballistic missiles.
“The first salvo of Iranian ballistic missiles took flight, and that air defence operation centre became a different kind of place,” Col Al Sabah said. “Every screen aligned, every frequency occupied, every fire unit in the network snapping into a terrible choreography it was designed for.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, the officer said the professionalism of Kuwait’s air defenders stood out. “The voices over the network [were] controlled. I remember them being precise, almost musical in their economy. Co-ordinates, confirmations, release authorities granted in seconds.”
As missiles closed in, Kuwait’s layered air-defence network, including Patriot interceptors, responded.
“I saw the Kuwait air defence system – years of acquisition, training, labour and prayer – doing exactly what it was designed to do,” Col Al Sabah said.
“Then came that word that we have all heard so many times, and I have become so fond of: splash. Splash one, splash two,” he said, referring to the term used when an interceptor takes out an incoming missile.
“Every ballistic missile, every single one intercepted, killed, turned to debris over a sky Kuwait did not yet know was being fought over on its behalf.” he told the Royal United Services Institute Land Warfare conference.
“This all happened in the space of five minutes,” he said. But the danger was far from over.
“I looked at the defence chief, and neither of us had a word, because the screens were already updating, and there was another wave coming, this time with newer tracks that were lower, slower and smaller.” Kuwait, like the other Gulf states was facing a swarm attack of 283 Shahed-136 kamikaze drones.
The shift reflected a tactic increasingly seen in modern warfare of combining high-speed ballistic missiles with large numbers of drones designed to overwhelm air defence systems through mass and persistence.
During 40 days of near-constant attack the nightly waves “found the gaps”, Col Al Sabah said, and key Kuwaiti industrial and military targets were hit.
Tehran's strategy
The intensity of the campaign, he added, was a test of unexpected scale.
“The scale is not what we trained for,” Col Al Sabah told senior British and Nato officers at the conference. “In the first month alone, our forces engaged 354 TBM [tactical ballistic missiles] and 852 one-way attack drone salvos designed to saturate our sensors and exhaust our magazines.”
He called for a Gulf-wide integrated air and missile-defence system, saying that the region should adopt a model similar to Nato’s Sky Shield initiative, which seeks to co-ordinate air defence capabilities across the alliance.
Col Al Sabah suggested that GCC countries should pool sensors, command-and-control networks and interceptor inventories into a common defensive shield capable of responding collectively to missile and drone attacks.
Military analysts have argued that this would allow Gulf states to share radar coverage, distribute targeting information in real time and make more efficient use of costly interceptor missiles during sustained attacks.
Six civilians and six US military personnel died in Kuwait during the Iranian onslaught that also struck its airport, military bases and fuel storage sites.
