If you’ve been following the news recently, you could be excused for thinking that the blockade in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthis has been defeated. In recent months, we’ve heard barely a squeak from foreign policy “experts” about the insurgency. Does this mean the matter has been taken care of? Not quite.
Today, the American military has given up on trying to defeat the Houthis. Just a fortnight ago, faced with a deterrent bolstered by zero US aircraft carriers, the Houthis managed to board a Greek-flagged oil tanker, plant some explosives, and chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” as the vessel went up in flames.
week, the Pentagon quietly admitted that the tanker is still on fire and now appears to be leaking oil.
This should probably be huge news: one of the most important trade routes in the world is now disturbed by a rag-tag group of militants, and the US Navy has thrown its hands up in defeat and sailed away. And yet, we just don’t want to talk about it.
The reason for this seems to be fairly straightforward: more than just sharing a sense of growing embarrassment, we no longer know how to talk about what’s going on. After all, America’s Navy is supposed to be the most powerful Navy in the world. As every war film of the past two decades has insisted on reminding us, all it takes is a single aircraft carrier to force a developing nation to its knees.
If the Houthi rebels attacks holds, it will mean at least two things. First, the entire world will receive dramatic evidence of the growing military and political impotence of the West, which will have real-world consequences for Western diplomacy in regions like the Pacific.
Second, and possibly more importantly, the Suez Canal is one of the most important trade routes in the world, and forcing container ships to go around it will manifest itself in supply crunches and structural inflation, particularly for European economies. Europe is already contending with the dual disease of anaemic growth and an energy crisis; a disturbance of a major trade route is the opposite of what we need.
This is, however, exactly what has happened, and this time around, the US clearly doesn’t know what to do. In December last year, the US Navy and US Central Command first launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, which was supposed to safeguard shipping traffic against Houthi missile strikes. In January, when this mission began faltering, it launched Operation Poseidon Archer, designed to bomb the Houthis into submission and deter them from further attacks on trade. The result has been underwhelming in the extreme: months later, Yemeni casualties have amounted to “at least” 22 dead, while the US has lost several expensive MQ-9 reaper drones to Houthi anti-air missiles and two Navy SEALs who drowned while trying to impound a shipment of rocket components bound for Yemen.
At first glance, the low casualties would suggest a simple lack of American will; the problem, many would say, is that the US is simply playing with the kid gloves on. But this isn’t really the case. The US has, to the best of its ability, attempted to accurately identify and target Houthi weaponry and launch sites inside Yemen, but there’s just one problem: it can’t. In this era of drone warfare, mobile launch platforms, and advanced tunnelling infrastructure, the US simply lacks the ability to identify and blow up the majority of drones or missiles before they are launched. This problem is not exactly new, either: “Scud-hunting” was problematic enough during the first Gulf War, and Scud launchers were huge, lumbering things. Today, with the new drone and missile technology, finding a drone launch platform inside a mountain range is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
And there’s a more obvious problem, too: the drones are cheap, and American interceptor missiles and precision guided bombs are extremely expensive. Added to this, the way in which these bombs are delivered — manned jet aircraft — adds another layer of expense, because jet fighters can cost upwards of $100 million in flyaway cost, and far more when pilot training (at least $10 million for basic competency), maintenance and infrastructure are factored in. In other words, the more America fights the Houthis, the more they will lose.
Underlying this strategy is what could be called a modernised approach to Second World War-era practices. Today, the planes are faster, the aircraft carriers are bigger and use nuclear propulsion, and the destroyers are outfitted with missiles rather than guns — but the rationale behind their deployment is entirely backward-looking. The use of manned aircraft for long-distance bombing once had a central role because there was no alternative; if you wanted a big ball of explosives to land accurately via the air, a human had to be up there to guide it. That, of course, is no longer the case, and yet a combination of prestige, complacency and the absence of a functioning industrial base all conspire to make the US military increasingly irrelevant.
The result of this can now be witnessed in the Red Sea. If the US Navy cannot even stop the Houthis attacks, the idea of lifting a blockade around Taiwan is a complete fantasy. If the US cannot compete with the arms production of Iran, then the notion of somehow out-competing China should be put to bed immediately.
But this is also why the Red Sea defeat will be met with silence. More than any other conflict raging today, it highlights the crisis within the West’s military organization, as well as the fact that there is no real way to fix it. To admit our powerlessness is to admit that the era of Western hegemony is already over. Faced with little alternative, we will continue to let the Houthis blow up our ships — and then pretend that none of it really matters.
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