Editor's Note: In the coming year, RANE will analyze the implications of shifting demographic trends around the world. This series will be published periodically throughout the remainder of 2026; you can find all parts here.

With their population growth flatlining, Gulf states will double down on narrow, specialized militaries supplanted by foreign forces to maintain their current social-military contract. But this will make them vulnerable to military supply chain disruptions and entanglement with their foreign protectors' strategies, while leaving them ill-equipped to offset a U.S. retrenchment or the collapse of Iran's government. The Iran war has tested the long-standing military-social contract in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, but there remains little sign of a popular or political surge in nationalist sentiment that would alter the long-standing culture of casualty aversion in their military establishments. Even in the face of direct Iranian attacks on their countries, most Gulf citizens preferred to remain on the defensive, with no prominent calls in the media, in public protest or online for GCC states to take the fight directly to Iran or participate in potential ground invasions of the country. As a result, in contrast to other countries that have come under attack in recent years, like Israel and Ukraine, the Iran conflict has not sparked any major military recruitment drives in the GCC, nor plans to expand the size of the countries' ground or naval forces to counter the Iranian threat. Instead, GCC security culture has continued to emphasize the role of limited and specialized native forces supplanted by foreign deployments and private military contractors.

• GCC states maintain relatively small militaries compared to Iran, largely due to their smaller citizen populations. Saudi Arabia has the largest military force (over 225,000 troops plus 125,000 National Guardsmen), followed by the United Arab Emirates (around 65,000), Oman (around 47,000), Kuwait (25,000), Qatar (22,000) and Bahrain (20,000). In contrast, Iran has 610,000 active-duty troops and up to 1 million irregular forces. This stark difference is because Iran has a population of 90 million, while the GCC states combined have only 24-25 million citizens (with the majority of their total population, 61 million, being foreign residents excluded from military service).
• During the 1990-1991 Kuwait War, Saudi Arabia launched one of the region's first mass mobilization drives to recruit soldiers for the National Guard. This was in part because Iraq's army posed a direct threat on the border, and in part because Iraq's annexation of Kuwait sparked a nationalist backlash across the country. 

Gulf states' traditional aversion to high-casualty conflicts stems from their demographic disadvantages. Most GCC states, except Saudi Arabia and Oman, are demographically dominated by foreign workers who typically rotate out of the country after a specified work period and do not serve in the military. This automatically limits the pool of local nationals available for military service. But even in Saudi Arabia, which has a much larger native population of approximately 20 million citizens, the government has been reluctant to deploy large numbers of ground forces abroad, including during its active interventions in Yemen. For most Gulf states, this is partly due to concerns that high casualties in a conflict could destabilize their political economies. This is because the legitimacy of these states is closely linked to ensuring the well-being of their citizens. Their militaries also function as a source of employment in addition to being a security force. While countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have deployed troops abroad in recent years, they tend to withdraw or halt operations when the risk of high casualties becomes too great. For example, the United Arab Emirates exited most of its forces from Yemen after a high-casualty incident in 2015, while Saudi Arabia froze its conflict with Yemen's Houthis in 2022 after hundreds of soldiers were killed during ground incursions. Gulf citizens view military service as a path toward economic security and a means of fostering loyalty, rather than a national security imperative; they generally expect military roles to be limited to home deployments and risk-averse careers. Consequently, Gulf states prefer utilizing highly specialized elite units for deployments rather than large-scale mobilizations.

• In 2015, a Houthi missile killed 45 Emirati soldiers at Marib in central Yemen, the highest loss of Emirati soldiers in wartime in the country's history. The resulting substantial political shock prompted the United Arab Emirates to initially withdraw most of its forces, shifting its strategy to rely on proxies and local allies to support the intervention against the Houthis, before eventually withdrawing entirely from Yemen in 2019.
• It is estimated that over a thousand Saudi soldiers have died since Saudi Arabia launched its intervention in Yemen in 2015. But the government does not publicly report military casualties, as Riyadh is focused on managing public backlash over high losses in a ground campaign that has struggled to take and hold territory from the Houthis. In 2022, the Saudis accepted a ceasefire from the Houthis in part because of these casualties, and have maintained it informally since then. 

Iran's direct attacks did not incentivize the GCC to alter this military social contract largely because Iran's war strategy involved missiles, drones and other asymmetric attacks, rather than a conventional ground invasion. While the asymmetric strategy disrupted daily life and limited energy supplies, it did not create a ground threat significant enough to shift social attitudes away from force aversion. Instead, as patriotism surged, popular sentiment focused on the success of air defenses, securing the skies and hunting down saboteurs, rather than mobilizing a large-scale military build-up. 

• Iran lacks the ground corridors, naval capabilities or airborne forces needed to land at scale in the Gulf states. The U.S. Navy and Air Force also make such a campaign impossible despite Iran's relative proximity to countries like the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Most GCC states are seeing flatlining or declining birth rates similar to Europe, and while no state is yet in fertility decline, an aging and potentially diminishing population will deepen their reliance on the existing military social contract. In the Gulf, as women become more educated and economies develop, social expectations are shifting toward secular careerism rather than large families. This rapid decline in fertility will increasingly constrain the number of youth available for military service in the coming decades. As a result, Gulf states have a strong incentive to develop increasingly specialized militaries that rely heavily on drone and air defense systems, as well as elite forces to minimize personnel demands, rather than large-scale divisions. They will likely also look toward more populous security partners like Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey to provide larger ground forces if a sudden need arises. Additionally, GCC countries will remain tied to the United States' security aegis as long as Washington maintains the political will to remain in the region.

• Saudi Arabia and Oman are the only Gulf countries with fertility rates above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. According to World Bank data from 2024, Oman's fertility rate is 2.5 children per woman and Saudi Arabia's is 2.3, followed by Bahrain (1.8), Qatar (1.7), Kuwait (1.6) and the United Arab Emirates (1.2). 
• Pakistan has a formal defense pact with Saudi Arabia and has recently deployed fighter jets to protect the kingdom from Iranian attacks during the war. Pakistan's armed forces total over 1.5 million personnel, including reservists and paramilitary forces. The South Asian country also has a powerful conventional air force and nuclear arsenal. 
• Turkey sent forces to Qatar to protect it during the 2017-21 blockade and has since kept troops there. Turkey has around 1 million military troops, including reservists, and is developing a brown-water navy for operations beyond its immediate backyard in the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea.
• Egypt participated in Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen and possesses the Arab world's largest ground force, consisting of 1.2 million troops (including reservists), along with a sizable air force.

However, maintaining this specialized strategy creates several long-term vulnerabilities, including increased dependence on high-tech systems that could be disrupted by future geopolitical shocks, greater responsibility for the stability of their defense partners, and misaligned military capabilities in the event of a regime collapse in Iran or a U.S. retrenchment from the Middle East. Gulf states' reliance on high-tech militaries means they will also remain dependent on foreign-made inputs to run those technologies. If future conflicts again interrupt U.S.-protected trade routes in Asia and through the Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb straits, it could thus delay or hinder the import of crucial defense components. In the event of a major disruption to Asian trade, the United States and Asian countries would likely also prioritize their own defense supplies over those for the GCC. While the GCC is scaling up its own defense sector, in the medium term, it is unlikely to develop an industrial base large enough to fully replace supply chains running through the United States, Europe and Asia. Disruptions in those regions — particularly if the United States enters a sustained escalation with a rival like China — could significantly impact the GCC's ability to supply its own advanced forces. Meanwhile, reliance on foreign partners like Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt will create the potential for GCC states to become increasingly tied to the security of those countries. Pakistan's growing defense role in Saudi Arabia will give the kingdom a greater stake in ensuring Pakistan's economic and political security, potentially leading to a relationship of continued bailouts to ensure Islamabad's stability and reliability. Similarly, Turkey's growing security role in Qatar will put Doha in a position where it may need to stabilize Turkish partners and invest in the country, even under less-than-ideal economic conditions. Moreover, these foreign security partners could face their own security crises (e.g., Turkey confronting Israel or Pakistan confronting Iran or India) that might threaten to drag in their GCC allies. GCC states could also face a sudden security vulnerability if the United States suddenly shifts its security focus to Asia, potentially due to a more isolationist U.S. president or a major global crisis elsewhere. Finally, if a destabilized Iran results in a regime collapse, Gulf states' reliance on specialized forces may leave them ill-equipped to manage the resulting power vacuum and spillover effects, such as an influx of Iranian refugees or militants across their borders. Specifically, their demographically constrained militaries would struggle to control the influx of Iranian refugees or militants across their borders, which could destabilize the GCC from an economic, social and security standpoint.

• Though Gulf states are steadily diversifying their military hardware, it will take decades to reduce their reliance on the United States, which provides the bulk of their high-end military equipment. Drone development will also still require access to chip manufacturing centers, which will take years for Gulf states to scale up.
• Pakistan has long required GCC financial support to maintain its economic position. But after the COVID-19 pandemic, Saudi Arabia changed its financial aid policy to impose more restrictions on partners it did not view as productively investing its aid. 
• If the United States substantially reduced its presence in the Middle East to focus on Asia, Gulf states would struggle to replace U.S. naval power. GCC navies are small and lack aircraft carriers, consisting mostly of patrol craft and corvettes.
• The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia's small, specialized forces have enabled them to project power in Sudan and Yemen, but they have struggled to end conflicts on their own, often prolonging them instead. In the event of a regime collapse in Iran, GCC states would be able to back factions but would not be able to secure large swathes of the country.