Lieutenant Colonel Sabah Al-Sabah of the Kuwait Armed Forces described entering the Air Defense Operations Center after a warning on February 28 as Iranian ballistic missiles approached, according to his presentation at the Royal United Services Institute Land Warfare Conference. Kuwait’s network intercepted the opening salvo thanks to years of training and investment, he stated. Subsequent waves, however, exposed the strain of sustained large-scale attacks that combined tactical ballistic missiles with one-way attack drones intended to saturate defenses.
In the first month of the campaign alone Kuwaiti forces engaged 354 tactical ballistic missiles and 852 one-way attack salvos, Al-Sabah said. The officer identified an unsustainable cost imbalance between inexpensive drones and high-value interceptors as the initial key lesson from the fighting. “The tactical scoreboard can say 95 or 98 percent, but the industrial scoreboard quietly says losing,” he stated, underscoring that even impressive interception rates cannot mask the long-term industrial burden.
Al-Sabah’s second lesson centered on the necessity of treating air and missile defense as a genuine coalition endeavor, he told the London audience. Modern threats cross borders without regard for national lines, requiring pre-agreed procedures for decision-making and engagement authority across partners. “The real problem is release authority — who is allowed to shoot at what, on whose say-so, across which border, and in how many seconds,” the colonel said, warning that absent such accords integrated systems remain largely theoretical.
Technology, particularly software incorporating artificial intelligence for tracking and threat discrimination, formed the third lesson outlined by Al-Sabah. Adversaries are shifting toward autonomous drones that dispense with traditional communication links, thereby blunting electronic warfare countermeasures, he explained. The officer connected these air defense insights directly to land warfare, noting that ground forces lacking counter-drone tools will present easy targets on future battlefields.
Iranian strikes during the 2026 conflict targeted both military installations and civilian infrastructure in Kuwait in an effort to erode public confidence in national defenses, according to Al-Sabah. A Britannica compilation of the war’s opening phase records that Iranian retaliatory operations on February 28 struck U.S. and allied sites across several Gulf states hosting American forces, prompting widespread interceptions by local air defenses. The Institute for the Study of War later documented continued Iranian infiltration attempts into Kuwaiti territory as late as May, including an incident on Bubiyan Island that resulted in captures and injuries.
With a current ceasefire in place the threat has evolved toward smaller, ambiguous drone incursions that remain below the threshold for full-scale retaliation while still draining defensive resources, Al-Sabah reported. He emphasized that future security architecture must combine stronger alliances, larger weapons magazines and advanced software capabilities. “The ally does not arrive on its own,” the colonel said. “It is the architecture, the magazines, the alliances and the software — the things we are either building now or we are not.”
