Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces
fourth branch of Saudi Arabia's Armed Forces.
The Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces (RSADF) (Arabic: قُوَّات الدِفَاع الجوّي المَلكِيَّ السُّعُودِي) is the aerial defense service branch of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces (SAAF). It is fourth of the five service branches of the MOD. It has its HQ in Riyadh, where there is also an underground command facility that co-ordinates the kingdom's advanced "Peace Shield" radar and air defense system, with an estimated 16,000 active duty military personnel in 2025. Along with the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), it has the responsibility for securing the skies of Saudi Arabia.
Overview
Towards the end of the 1970s, a paradigm shift occurred with the SAAF with the making of the RSAD Corps as a separate and equivalent service, equal to the Army, Navy, and Air Forces. It is no longer subordinate to the RSLF. The impetus behind this shift is the ever-changing threat. The concern by the Kingdom of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their mechanism of delivery, resulted in the early understanding by the MoD of the requirement to transform, and thus the creation of the RSADF.
Between 2017 and 2020, the RSAF claimed the interception of 311 cruise missiles and 343 suicide drones but failed to stop some of the attacks against the strategic Saudi sites of the Houthi movement and Iran.
Peace Shield
Remote-controlled air/ground radio communications sites.
17 Lockheed Martin AN/FPS-117 long-range phased array, 3-dimensional air search radar.
6 Northrop Grumman AN/TPS-43 portable 3-dimensional tactical air search radar.
Raytheon Improved HAWK air defense missile system.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3447486. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2017 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.