February 26, 2024 - 7:00am
Over the weekend the United States and United Kingdom launched a fourth round of missile and air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. In a joint statement it was announced that 18 targets in 8 locations were hit, including “underground weapons storage facilities, missile storage facilities, one-way attack unmanned aerial systems, air defence systems, radars, and a helicopter”.
Yet these strikes come as the crisis in the Red Sea region worsens. Earlier in the week Houthis struck the British freighter Rubymar with an anti-shipping missile, prompting the ship to be abandoned. Photographs show that it is half-submerged in the water, and so will likely have to be sunk. This is the first ship that the Houthis have truly destroyed.
What’s more, the Houthis are now using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), otherwise known as submarine drones. The UUVs appear to be supplied by Iran, and have wiring attached which allows them to be operated from the shore. They are effectively cheap guided torpedoes and, since they operate underwater, are extremely hard to detect.
It is now increasingly clear that the Red Sea is becoming a testing ground for new Iranian weaponry, and the Houthis have already achieved their goal of imposing an effective naval blockade in the region. Freight container shipping volumes through the region have fallen around 80% since the start of the year, demonstrating that the new weaponry is provoking a response from American and British ships.
China and Iran have ships in the region monitoring the situation, and are no doubt collecting invaluable information on Western defence systems that could be used in a future conflict in either the Persian Gulf or the South China Sea. This raises the question of why the Americans and the British are intervening in the way they are. Why would they give their rivals this sort of information? Presumably they justify their presence and the strikes in Yemen because these damage the capacity of the Houthis to harass commercial ships — but the data simply does not show this.
We can look at three broad periods since the attacks started. Between 19 November and 17 December, the Houthis attacked commercial ships without any interference from Western navies. The Western navies then launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, using naval air defence to protect shipping in the region, on 18 December. On 12 January they moved from a defensive to an offensive posture, beginning the missile and air strikes in Yemen.
Notably, when Operation Prosperity Guardian was launched it barely impacted the rate of attacks, with the number per day falling from 0.39 to 0.38, a statistically insignificant decline. But since Britain and America started their strikes in Yemen on 12 January, the number of attacks have increased substantially to 0.53 per day.
Clearly, then, the American and British strikes are proving counterproductive, serving only to stir the hornet’s nest and increase Houthi aggression. Combine this with the fact they are providing adversaries with intelligence on Western naval defensive systems, and it raises serious questions about the wisdom of the military action. Why are Western leaders continuing to undertake these strikes despite all the evidence showing they are having an entirely opposite effect?
The likely reason is due to what we might call “do something-ism”. “Do something-ism” results from a weak leadership class feeling the need to act when an enemy or a rival engages in a provocation, even if such actions are counterproductive. Weak leaders are unable to make difficult decisions based on evidence and logic, and instead lash out — even if ineffectively — so that it looks as if they are addressing a problem. The fish rots from the head down in such situations, and the rotten head is currently sitting in the Oval Office in Washington DC.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional, and the author of The Reformation in Economics
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SubscribeDoes this author ever think that anything done by anyone except Russia and China, and perhaps Ireland, ever works?
The first step to solving a problem is recognising there’s a problem to solve. The problem we have right now is that the ever-increasing efficiency of technology has created a new class of low-cost highly effective warfare that rich, powerful states with expensive hi-tech weaponry have yet to adapt to.
We will in due course adapt to it, but to we have to accept in the meantime that using million-dollar-per-bang tech to confront things that can be built by amateurs with parts available on Ebay is both pointless and financially impossible.
Giving up the expensive weapons doesn’t counter the cheap weapons being used against our interests. Giving up the expensive weapons definitely gives hegemony to those states that keep them.
We are in a classic bind. There isn’t an immediate solution to win, there may not be a way to win, but there is a quick way to lose.
“do something-ism”, or “sit on my ass and do nowt-ism”.
at least we know which PHILIPPILK prefers.
It’s usually best to assess which is appropriate to a given situation. Also it depends on what one wants to achieve.
Presumably the US/UK hoped that the mere show of force would produce positive results ie scare the Houthis into stopping (although I doubt the UK gave any thought other than “we must support the USA” without getting any benefit in return).
The actual result has been to demonstrate that expensive high tech weaponry doesn’t do what the label on the tin said it would.
That certainly seems to be the case with Trident missiles
I’m not sure it’s that the weapons are not performing to spec – even if they are performing to spec, they are the wrong tool, or at least not used as they should be.
It is notoriously difficult for artillery to affect a highly mobile enemy who does not rely on roads and heavy vehicles – you saw that in Afghanistan, you see it now in Ukraine. Even after a town has been reduced to a moonscape, once the fighting stops, people emerge everywhere.
You need not only highly exact location information, you also need to be able to act on it while your target is still there. And your target does not turn out to be a decoy.
I’m curious to see what happens when the task force runs out of ammunition – ships cannot carry unlimited stocks.
Yes I agree. However I imagine the sales pitch was that the hi tech weaponry was the “Swiss Army knife” of weapons…suitable for many uses…
Of course, that and the sweeteners given to those awarding the contracts; after all the Starfighter, designed as an interceptor could sooo easily become a fighter bomber…
Sorry to leave this here, but you may not be aware of this story, as the only paper in the UK running it at the time of writing is the DM:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13125477/airman-aaron-bushnell-Israel-embassy-dc-washington.html
Guardian
At 13:55 IIRC.
Not quite right. It’s covered in the Daily Mirror, the Daily Star, the Independent, the Times and the Evening Standard. Commentary is very limited, as it seems inexplicable that a rational human being could get so worked up about a conflict on the other side of the world, and which does not involve him, that he should want to commit suicide.
There was very little coverage 8 hours ago in the UK.
The ToL did not report until 15:15.
Maybe they are bombing the wrong locations. They could try bombing Tehran, and see if that works.
I think at least some policymakers might have learned by now that blowing up bits of the middle east just because the lunatic in charge there has annoyed us, might not be the genius move that wins hearts and minds after all.
…the genius move that wins hearts and minds after all.
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Oderint, dum metuant
but if your goal is “to win hearts and minds” then you are probably doomed
Are you willing to take passage in a tanker through the Straits of Hormuz after that?
I wouldn’t be willing to take passage through the Suez Canal route now. That’s the problem.
At a secret location in lovely Devon some undergraduates worked on developing unmanned underwater vehicles from remote control car kits. This was the late 90s. Despite not knowing much at all about RCs or torpedos, by the end of the summer they could could propel a payload sufficiently large to blow up a fishing boat a mile off the coast.
Although they didn’t realise it at the time, the purpose of the project wasn’t to create cheap UUVs – that would be spectacularly unprofitable for everyone concerned. No, the purpose was to answer the following questions: what the threat might look like; what infrastructure would be needed; and what effort would be involved. The answers were: severe; none; and very little.
I look at events in the Red Sea and see that none of the lessons from 25 years ago were learned. You can’t use million pound guided missiles to eliminate UUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles from the battlefield. UUV and UAV assembly, storage and deployment can be spread so diffusely as to offer no target at all. Of course, the lessons of 25 years ago are known and therefore the futility of these air strikes is known to the governments ordering them. Why then are they doing this?
Well, there isn’t a single guiding mind at the centre of Western power structures. Instead there are multitudes of interests each with their own objectives. If enough interests intersect, then something happens; if too few interests intersect, then nothing happens. If something does happen, it often does so to achieve objectives totally unrelated to the stated objective.
Sometimes, the complex intersections of interest result in government doing something that defies logical explanation so unrelated is the action to the stated objective. When this occurs, governments can rely on otherwise very rational minds to metaphorically try to find a corner in a round room and come up with plausible but contorted explanations when Occam’s razor is all that is needed.
As the author writes, the air strikes on the Houthis are wholly performative, to look like something is being done. We’re also getting some target practice in, we’re creating demand for aerial weapons not met by the war in Ukraine to keep open production lines, and there’s a good chance we’re also supporting Saudi military objectives too. No single big objective, some unpalatable objectives, but enough intersecting objectives to justify the strikes for our governments.
The first thing they need to do is remove all soldiers from the Middle East. They have no business being there and they are nothing more than targets.
Once this is done, they need to start destroying Iran’s navy. Everytime the Houthi’s attack, sink an Iranian backed vessel. Problem solved.
So what’s the solution? Allow an effective blockade of the Red Sea, and direct all shipping around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing the cost of everything in the middle of a cost of living crisis? What should we be doing? Cosying up to Iran and asking them nicely to stop?
Also saying the number of strikes is increasing, and therefore any action is futile, is too simplistic. Does any military action achieve its aims immediately these days?
“What you permit, you promote. What you allow, you encourage. What you condone, you own. What you tolerate, you deserve.”
So what’s the solution? – Carpet bombing is. Cheap and effective. But a report of 101 targets destroyed and not a single Houthi killed is what today’s public prefers
Just wanted to be clear that we’re all talking about human (fathers, brothers, wives, sisters, children, babies) lives not dissimilar from our own fathers, brothers, wives and kids right?
Yes, pirates have fathers, brothers, wives, sisters, children, babies. So, what?
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This is a typical pitfall for the short-minded humanist. He is especially concerned about “innocent children” and begins to realize that something has gone wrong only when pirates break into his home, kill his children, rape and kill his wife and then…
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But this happens incredibly rarely. Most of the time, the humanist posts about “innocent children” sitting in the warm chair while pirates are killing people thousands of miles away.
Well said. Every murderer and terrorist has a mother and father, who doubtless will be very sad upon their untimely demise. That does not and should not keep us from sending their progeny to the afterlife.
And what is the genesis of modern day piracy? (U should take some effort to go look that up). lazy intellectuals (and politicians) never address the root causes of things and prefer to stay firmly in the vicinity of effects.. (the ‘bad’ pirate boogeyman… seriously?) .
ill take the label of a so called humanist if that means I treat every life as worthy of consideration and not less than my own. People who think and act otherwise are just being lazy as the alternative approach to human conflict requires, time, patience and respect for the sovereignty of the other.
People who think and act otherwise are just being lazy as the alternative approach to human conflict requires, time, patience and respect for the sovereignty of the other
——
Hernán Cortés was hardly a lazy man, but when he began his conquest of the Aztec empire, he did not bother himself with unnecessary thoughts about patience and respect for the sovereignty of others. Many people knowing the habits of the Aztecs think he was right or, at least, not too much wrong.
Francisco Pissaro was also not concerned with humanistic thoughts when he conquered the Inca Empire. For this he needed 180 men and 37 horses. About 1 million people lived in the empire at that time. Have you ever found out the reasons for such a crushing victory for Pissarro? If not, I advise you to start with the delights of the state structure of the Inca Empire.
If we return to modern times and look at the consequences of humanism in Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, then the issue of respect for the sovereignty of another looks even brighter.
So now, when I hear about the struggle for human rights, I can’t help but ask “What kind of human are we talking about? Maybe Ted Bundy?”
I presume that from a historical standpoint you are OK with the massive devastation visited on the fathers, brothers, wives, sisters, children, babies of Germany and Japan. Quite a good bit of collateral damage in Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Would Hitler or Hirohito ever have been stopped by the kind of warfare Western powers wage today? Isn’t it universally held that Naziism was a cultural product of innate German militarism and xenophobia for which the entire German population bore responsibility and guilt? Why do we subscribe to the nonsense that Islamic cultures are not likewise responsible for persistent hatred and aggression towards the West?
Carpet bombing didn’t work in Vietnam against a diffuse enemy. It’s not going to work in an empty desert against a diffuse enemy. Before you know it you’d be bombing population centres, then Oman and Saudi to stop supplies from Iran. In short order, Eritrea would be used to launch attacks and the carpet bombing campaign would widen to include Africa…
I didn’t said what should be bombed.
How about solving the root problem – Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and starvation of Gaza?
Aah right, THAT’S the root problem. And before 7 October, before the indiscriminate bombing?
Or could it be, just maybe, that the Israelis aren’t actually guilty of the indiscriminate murder, rape and torture of their own people. And maybe, just maybe, they aren’t the route cause of anything except your antisemitism.
Nothing in Mr Gassmann’s statement could be construed as anti-Semitic. He believes that Israel’s bombing is indiscriminate and that the people of are close to starvation. Throwing around aspersions is, though common at the moment, deeply troubling.
Has it occurred to you that Hamas was encouraged to launch its insane attack precisely so that Israel’s known-in-advance response would create the pretext for the mess we’re now describing here?
No, the root problem is that Israel exists. The Houthi and their allies have not changed since 1939, when their grandfathers allied with Hitler.
Actually, things haven’t changed since the 7th Century.
Are the Houthis purely rational actors responding rationally to current events, who will also completely change direction once Israel’s war against Hamas ends?
The solution, for now, is to stop making the situation worse. One way to make it worse would be to produce an unintended consequence whereby it’s China that ends up guaranteeing the safety of that shipping lane instead of the USA. On present trajectory, this is a pretty big risk.
China is already protecting the shipping lane: ships with Chinese flags are freely passing through. The problems we in the West are facing are multiplying beyond our control.
Not exactly “beyond our control” – they’re the consequences of our choices, acts and omissions. Those we can control.
Bibi used to brag that while his government was nurturing Hamas, he controlled the height of the flame, as he put it. It seems were facing Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome…
I refer to the ability to protect any vessel from attack. China isn’t doing that as yet.
The solution, for now, is to stop making the situation worse.
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If your first concern is not making the situation worse, you will make it as worst as it’s only possible.
That simply doesn’t make any sense at all.
Instead of asking what should be done, ask what does the menu of options look like and how much do each of them cost? It might look like this:
Light bites: Cape of Good Hope. Incremental extra cost of shipping £15bn per year. Every dollar Iran sends to Houthis is wasted or someone else’s problem.
Starter: Frigates, decoys and convoys. This order may take several years to cook up because we haven’t got the naval strength for a £30bn per year deployment.
Main: Effective elimination of Houthi attacks by general ground war in Yemen involving Saudi Arabia. £500bn with risk of severe contagion.
Dessert. Financial ruin of Tehran preventing funding of Houthis and others by air strikes and blockade. General Middle East revolt against financing Western governments leading to Western recession costing £4tn.
Sometimes doing nothing is the best bet. Pick your fights, don’t let them pick you.
Nuke Iran
A few years ago, the Houthis were lobbing missiles at Saudi Arabia. The Saudis tried various tactics to stop them, none of which worked. Eventually, the Saudis hit on the idea of bommbing the water treatment plants in the Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. The result was a substantial outbreak of cholera and other water-borne diseases. Before COVID-19, this was actually the world’s largest public health emergency. Did it stop the Houthis? Not really. Their leaders couldn’t care less: these days, civilian casualties are great propaganda, so the more, the merrier. Eventually, the Saudis opted for a face-saving peace deal.
The moral of this tale? Sometimes you need to go for the organ grinder, rather than the monkey.
Just wanted to be clear that we’re all talking about human (fathers, brothers, wives, sisters, children, babies) lives not dissimilar from our own fathers, brothers, wives and kids right?
So what are you recommending? Western paralysis? Western surrender? What?
You need to address your remarks to those egging-on the missile firers and drone launchers. At the time, I thought that the Saudi-induced cholera epidemic was shocking and I couldn’t believe that people in the UK were not protesting about it. At the time of the cholera outbreak, I recall asking a friend, who is both a practicing Christian and an employee of BA Systems working directly with the Saudis, how he could square his work with his faith.
I recall asking a friend, who is both a practicing Christian and an employee of BA Systems working directly with the Saudis, how he could square his work with his faith.
No problem, read my answer to UnHerd Reader. Your friend is a wise man, he keeps both feet on the ground.
No, their lives are cheaper than the lives of our loved ones. At least they think so and skillfully use it, making you feel sorry for those who dream of destroying you.
It’s all about the coordinate system. If you understand that it is extremely unlikely, relative to you, in which coordinate system they live, your range of solutions will expand so that an acceptable solution will be achievable. If not, they will continue to consider you a stupid, worthless creature, they will be right in all coordinate systems, and they will harm you as hard as they could
It’s not just do something-ism, it’s the fact that there have been literally no detererious consequences for those who have done such somethings in the past and seen them fail disastrously that is the issue. Those who ensured we ‘did our bit’ all across the Middle East/West Asia have seen nothing but career advancement and luscious revolving-door rewards since they promoted or pertook in the war-de-jour – and then there’s always the House of Lords if all else fails. You can say the same for pretty much anything of political consequence in our corrupted, two-cheeks, system.
“with the number per day falling from 0.39 to 0.38, a statistically insignificant decline”
This is a bugbear of mine. In statistics, ‘significance’ has a very particular meaning. It means that the value in question falls outside the margin of error, which is usually defined technically as a 95% confidence interval.
So you can have a result with a very small value that is still “statistically significant”, but is not important in the context of the phenomenon under observation. For example, I could calculate that picking one’s nose results in a 0.01% increase in one’s appetite, with a margin of error of plus/minus 0.00001 pp. This is a statistically significant result, but it is not an important result, because the magnitude of the effect is still quite small.
Here it looks like Philip means that the size of the effect is not significant, rather than that it is not statistically different to zero.
Continuing to do things that dont work…When the’precision bombing’ started, was I the only person who remembered the precision bombing during the Falklands war. For example the airfield untouched by all the precision bombs?
“Precision” has increased by several orders since then. Besides what the RAF was doing was like kicking their front gate to remind them of our presence in the area. If you haven’t read the story by the people who went have a read of the bit where the reserve bomber who said something like OK, I’ll save my bombs for Buenos Aires. That caused a reduction in attacking UK Forces because the Argentinians kept aircraft back to ‘defend’ BA. for the whole of the war. I don’t think that was “off-the-cuff” but scripted for effect.
Until pressed, democracies are insufficiently ruthless.
The Western powers (and anyone else who cares about freedom of navigation) should be coordinating with the legitimate government of Yemen, the Saudis and the UAE to completely destroy the Houthis’ military capacity and hold on Yemen. Yes, it will require “boots on the ground”, but it would work. We would plainly have not merely air superiority, but air supremacy, and the Houthis could not realistically provide much resistance to a coordinated attack from Saudi Arabia, the government-held parts of Yemen and Western forces in the Red Sea (which would, for this include marines, not just air and naval assets). No “nation building” afterward, just destroy the Houthis ability to control territory, and let the Sunni majority run Yemen again with a bit of foreign aid to help build any infrastructure destroyed in ridding them of Houthi militias.
Yes – a destroying the Houthis’ military capability would require a land invasion of Yemen.
Whether it would work is a completely different question, and the signs are not good.
The terrain in Yemen is infantry terrain. Neither Saudi Arabia nor UAE have strong, experienced infantry. As the terrain resembles Afghanistan, the Houthis too resemble the Afghani fighters. The Houthis retain a vast missile arsenal, to which the heavily logistics-dependent modern armies that would be invading are highly vulnerable. Invaders’ supply lines are long and difficult, and the invaders cannot rely on local support.
The warning signs are all flashing red. The British colonial experience too argues that an invasion of Yemen would be dicey.
I doubt the British electorate would support any ground war involving British troops in Yemen. Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters.
The worst part of all: British tea supplies are getting delayed.
The military in the US has been greatly weakened by what is effectively the third Obama term. The the kind of smart thinking the writer would like to see guiding responses in the Red Sea and elsewhere is simply impossible. Second raters are managing third raters in the present environment. Another Trump term would begin the process of setting things straight again. A fourth Obama term would see the collapse of both civilian and military morale as has happened in Britain.
Egypt must be pitching a hissy fit! All their sweet dough from operating the Suez Canal has gone right DOWN the drain! 🙂 😮
This is Israel’s doing, let them sort it out. Why is Britain firing off million pound missiles it can ill afford simply to keep a strait open that’s much more important to other nations than ourselves?
The US/UK adventurism is not keeping the straits open – it can’t. What is shutting the straits (to US, UK and Israeli-related shipping – others are not affected) are the sky-high insurance premia, which are a factor of Houthi threat, not the Houthi effectiveness.
The civil war between the Houti rebels and the nominal government of Yemen has run over 8 years with the Houtis prevailing despite the aggressive intervention of the Saudi military–a modern, well equipped, and relatively advanced force–that rained bombs and missiles on the Houtis with such vehemence that even Saudi’s allies began to blanch at the scale of destruction. Yet the Houtis have not only survived but now control most of Yemen. The US and European nations are not likely to exceed the Saudis in the sheer magnitude of weapons deployed and no more likely to prevail. The reflexive political impulse to “do something” will be the undoing of the US and its allies vis a vis the Red Sea situation. Let the Chinese discover the true costs of Middle East involvement. Let us keep our powder dry for the truly existential conflicts that threaten.