Of the many lessons that we can learn from the sudden advances by the group Ansar Allah (aka Houthis) in Yemen, the main one is that the US, although it has the raw power to bludgeon its enemies and win tactical victories by bombing campaigns, seems to be consistently outmaneuvered by its enemies when to comes to strategic thinking. Air power is a blunt weapon, incapable of securing and holding territory and yet the US continues to think it can deliver more than it can.
The classic example was in Vietnam. The US poured in massive amounts of troops and aerial firepower that enabled them to seize (or at least destroy) any village or hamlet that they chose, not to mention waging massive ecological warfare and committing war crimes on a massive scale. And yet, general Võ Nguyên Giáp, the legendary wily leader of the North Vietnamese army, was able to stymie their enemies, such as with the French spectacularly in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, that forced them to give up and leave.
While the French and the US had superiority in terms of weaponry and air power, the Vietnamese had the advantage of fighting on their home terrain. Furthermore, this was an existential fight for them, they were fighting for something they believed in, and they were never going to give up easily, while the foreign invaders were dilettantes with little knowledge of who they were fighting and why they were there in the first place. That pattern is being repeated with Iran and now Yemen.
The so-called defense umbrella strategy where the US provided bases to the Gulf states to provide security in exchange for uninterrupted supplies of oil from them has fallen apart. As the recent photographic evidence of the wreckage of planes and buildings at some of those bases show, rather than US bases providing shields, those countries have instead been made into targets that the US cannot defend, which must make those countries wonder what benefits they provide. And we have not even seen the damage to the major base in Bahrain where even the acting secretary of the navy Hung Cao said of Iran that “They blew the hell out of Bahrain”, an admission that the Iranians were quick to echo.
“They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Wednesday, in a rare official admission of the impact of the conflict on a key US facility amid escalating tensions in the Gulf, six months into the US and Israel’s war on Iran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded to Cao’s acknowledgement of the damage inflicted on the US facility. “We appreciate the candor of Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao,” the official wrote on X.
“Our powerful Armed Forces did indeed ‘blow the hell out of the 5th Fleet HQ in Bahrain,’ as well as other bases supporting US aggression.”
The Military Times did not mince words about the implications of this debacle for the US military strategy.
The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged.
Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus.
The idea that this broad functioning hub, built over decades, was significantly degraded in the space of a few days by a regional player is unimaginable.
…The damage is estimated to be close to $400 million. Buildings reportedly harmed include the Fifth Fleet headquarters, a barracks, several warehouses, communications towers and a potable water station.
It’s important to understand that NSA Bahrain is more than just a headquarters. Among its many functions, the installation provides a regional naval operating base for U.S. Navy forces in the Middle East. NSA Bahrain is home to NAVCENT and U.S. Fifth Fleet, along with numerous tenant commands.
Whenever ships, aircraft, personnel or cargo are moving throughout the region, chances are they have been supported by NSA Bahrain.
The installation provides the physical infrastructure that keeps American military power continuously available in a strategically vital region. It is foundational to America’s ability to project maritime power in this critical theater.
The idea that the U.S. could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters — and our sailors stationed there — is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies.
The US troops who had to be suddenly evacuated from Bahrain with just a few hours notice leaving all their belongings behind remain in limbo even six months later, moving to successive temporary housing.
Thanks to commenter Dunc, I read this interesting article by Spencer Ackerman who says that the US is clearly facing formidable strategic thinkers in Yemen and yet seems to not know anything about them.
Then, on Friday, in a stunning move, Ansar Allah conducted an amphibious assault and took an island in the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb.
Amphibious assault—coming onto land from the sea as an invading force—is the most perilous maneuver in warfare. You’re barrelling into the mouth of an entrenched defense that will surely hold the high ground and fire upon you as you seek to come ashore, while your ability to fend off an attack through air power or naval artillery as your forces hit the beach is minimal. Amphibious assault is an established core competency of the U.S. Marine Corps. For extremely understandable reasons, they desire to do it as little as humanly possible.
I have yet to see a proper account of how assault unfolded and what, if any, resistance Ansar Allah overcame. Even if the island were undefended, putting fighters on speedboats to take an island in the middle of a commercially pivotal waterway is audacious to the point of legend. Ansar Allah has drones, but no known aviation assets otherwise to defend their assault. There will be movies made about this some day. Just not in English.
…I mean to observe that the deal between Riyadh and Washington since 1945 has been that the U.S. military safeguards the Saudi state in exchange for cheap and abundant oil priced in dollars. Already the Iranian counterstrategy in this war has been to expose the hollowness of the U.S. security umbrella over the Middle East. Trump has demonstrated American unreliability under fire far more vividly than any military withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ackerman says that the idea that Ansar Allah are mere puppets of Iran never made any sense.
That just cannot be true. Since the late-2014 Ansar Allah coup that ousted the U.S. and Saudi-backed government, Ansar Allah has held Sana’a, the port of Hodeidah and much of Yemen’s northwestern territory, mostly under conditions of a pitiless siege. For practically every day of its hold on power it has fought more powerful and technologically advanced adversaries, and won. Ansar Allah has defeated forces backed by the Emiratis known as the Southern Transitional Council, as well as the Saudi-backed fighters; endured airstrikes by the Saudis; and absorbed naval artillery and airstrikes from the United States. It has done so while scaling up its military capabilities. And it picks its engagements impressively, with a fingertip-feel for moving its opponents into no-win situations. Trump, for instance, reached a ceasefire with the Houthis after their resilience following his escalation left him with the unpalatable option of sending forces ashore into Yemen.
These guys, in other words, show every sign of having farsighted generals. People worth studying. (People worth, at a minimum, knowing by name!)
But that’s not how the U.S. military rolls when it comes to its adversaries, despite priding itself on being a learning organization.
…Ansar Allah successfully leveraged Washington’s unwillingness to deploy ground forces when it encountered the U.S. in the Red Sea. I call that good generalship. War isn’t a matter of reading off capabilities from a fucking Magic The Gathering card to decide the outcome of a battle. Ansar Allah has now triumphed over three different adversaries, adversaries who cumulatively devastated Yemen, and it is in a stronger position than ever. You can coulda-woulda-shoulda this all you want and it won’t change that.
Somewhere in a leadership position in Ansar Allah is the Yemeni equivalent of Võ Nguyên Giáp, the master strategist who commanded the North Vietnamese forces. (And whom the U.S. didn’t respect until long after withdrawing from Vietnam.) I would like to know what this Yemeni general’s name is. If he’s really more like multiple people in a military council, I’d like to learn all their names and what their deals are. He has/they have a lot of insight into how war is fought in the Middle East against impossibly technologically superior forces. And I think we can see more clearly than ever what ignoring that insight has yielded.
But Trump and Hegseth are ignorant dilettantes, convinced of their own smartness and that air power is sufficient to win despite the historical evidence of that not being the case. Trump keeps bleating about how the Iranians are desperate to make a deal and that he is planning to resume bombing again if they don’t, even if those two statements are inconsistent. But the Iranians are clearly thinking strategically and long-term and have already taken the measure of Trump’s threats.
With Trump and Hegseth, it is all part of a package, lurching from one tactical move to another without ever learning anything.
To paraphrase a Wharton professor, The Orange Turd (TOT) is the dumbest goddamn president I ever had. The same terms apply to Kegsbreath.
One of the things going on is that Saudi Arabia has turned out to be even more of a paper tiger. Forces led by officers selected for their relation to the royal family leading mercenaries that are not that willing to risk their lives. Saudi Arabia also looked good when it was only an air war because the Houthis couldn’t challenge them but when it turned into a land battle Saudi Arabia couldn’t plan and couldn’t control cities.
And willing to ignore any advice, even from their own military advisors, to the contrary. This is further exacerbated by Trump’s erratic action. His position is heavily influenced by who he saw or talked to last and can change quickly but if he gets convinced of something he will stick too it no matter how much evidence to the contrary he is given.
This not only makes American action erratic to the point of being nonsense but how can Iran negotiate when Trump flip-flops on the importance of refinement on a day by day basis?
I’m really curious what is going on behind the scenes in that regards. My belief is that things changed because of the truce. Before the truce both sides wanted to cut a deal but Trump’s erratic demands and a poor negotiating team kept anything from happening. Post truce the Iranians have realized their position is stronger and they have concluded Trump is not an honest negotiator, making them much less interested in any deal that doesn’t favor them heavily.
It’s a hard situation to judge though because both sides throw out random threats for internal political consumption.
We can go even further back than Vietnam. Hermann Goering was convinced his mighty Luftwaffe could take Stalingrad. We all know how that turned out.
@JM:
That’s pretty much what killed any attempt at de-escalation of the trade war between Canada and the U.S.: nobody on the U.S. side was willing to give any assurances that Trump wouldn’t just tear up his own deal on a whim like he was currently doing. (The most recent Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement was signed by Trump himself in his first term, as it involves regular scheduled negotiations and renewals.)
The sooner every other nation realizes that Trump fundamentally cannot be trusted to actually keep a deal, even one that he has personally signed, past the moment he believes he would be better off by breaking it… the better off everybody else will be. Trump is personally (and with assistance) destroying the American empire by isolating it from any allies, as well as emboldening any enemies by its screw-ups.
There’s an old saying that diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a big enough stick. Well, ‘nice doggie’ has just been emboldening him, and it’s time to have the stick ready.
Honestly, at least one of the things that needs to be done at this point is guaranteeing that there are non-U.S.-controlled replacements for a lot of current Internet infrastructure. The big tech corporations like Google and Facebook are a non-trivial part of the problem, and what’s happened with Twitter is a perfect example of why we can’t allow certain things to stay within the control of the U.S. Makes me wonder just how many people over in Europe are already considering nationalizing assets… the political firestorm would be immense, of course, and there’s a gentleman’s agreement that about DNS handling that would need to be broken to do this properly, but it’s not impossible for other countries to start actively making sure that as little of their data ends up going into the U.S. as can be managed.
Has there ever been anyone whose word was worth less than TOT’s? I can’t remember any time that he kept an agreement when there seemed even a slight possibility of an advantage in breaking it.
Cash up front, thanks.
Regarding air power, the US military has looked a lot less effective since drone warfare levelled aerial dominance. It wasn’t that long ago that attack helicopters were all the rage.
This article at Foreign Policy goes into how Trump’s war has become the utter shitshow it is. We all know the reasons of course but it’s impressive to see it laid so clearly at the paranoid incompetence of the Trump regime and their gutting of institutional knowledge within the government. Turns out firing all the experts to extirpate The Deep State is just as dumb as you’d think it is.
https://archive.li/v18iO
To be honest, I’m not sure I even see much evidence of the US winning battles at the moment. They just seem to be throwing high explosive around more-or-less at random.
I’m glad you found my link interesting Mano.
@badland #7
Well, Stalin also found out the hard way in 1941 that purging qualified individuals for purely ideological reasons (or pure paranoia) was a really bad idea. He basically stripped the red army of its most experienced officers and promptly they had their asses handed to them by the Wehrmacht. They were lucky the winter came early and in the second year of operation Barbarossa the German supply lines were stretched so thin that the blitzkrieg basically was stopped dead in it’s tracks.
@ dennyk #3
Well no. Goehring promised that he could supply the 6th army at Stalingrad via airlift. For a army of more than 100,000 men. Without air superiority. And barely any fuel for way too little way too small aircraft to transport ammo, weapons, food and other shit a functional army needs. Very Hegsethian.
Jenora Feuer @#4. the French have already decided that it’s a bad idea to have all of their internet provision in the USA and are taking steps to develop home grown versions of all sorts of relevant things.
Jazzlet @#10:
I’m not surprised. Frankly this has been slowly building up since before Trump: European privacy regulations are a lot tighter than American ones (and the American Supreme Court gutted a lot of the basis for privacy regulations anyway) so there have been calls to find ways to stop giving data to American companies for a while now. Trump and the active bending of the knees by the techbros in the U.S. so that they could avoid the constraints that Biden had been trying to set up have accelerated things immensely, of course.
Given that there are parties in the U.S. that would actually love to see some version of the Great Firewall of China applied to the U.S. as well, they might even help cut themselves off to some extent.
Honestly there’s a bit of arrogance there, just like there was back in the early 1990s with encryption export restrictions where companies like Netscape were forced to have ‘export’ versions of their software that didn’t have strong encryption: software like that could be imported into the U.S. but not exported, not even to allies. There was this underlying inherent assumption that the U.S. was the source of all knowledge and expertise and that nobody else would be able to do anything to catch up without either asking the U.S. or stealing from the U.S. That attitude was, of course, complete and utter balderdash even then, but rapidly got more so with the Free Software movement (some encryption algorithms literally got out of the U.S. by being printed in a book using an OCR font, the book being carried out, and then the book scanned outside the U.S. to rebuild the code), and even more so now as Trump and his allies wage a massive war on expertise and science. Germany’s scientific expertise leading up to WWII got scattered by the war and snapped up by other world powers during and after, and we’re already seeing a modern ‘Operation Paperclip’ happening without the need for secret agents as people who had been learning at U.S. universities are leaving the country before they can be thrown out and are taking their expertise to places where it will be appreciated.