So, an anti-Houtis naval task force is forced. I am really curious if it will be 1) Waste millions worth of expensive SAM to shoot down cheap drones. or 2) Actually use the power of modern warships and retaliate by flattening pirate bases
Trust, it's much cheaper to $2 million per drone than it is to launch a campaign against the houthis without thinking this through. Saudis have been blockading and bombing Yemen with US and UK support, Houthis still managed to grow stronger and acquire ballistic missiles & drones capable of striking gas and oil facilities in saudi arabia.
This academic Yadav suggests they're doing this to rally Yemenis who otherwise don't care for the Houthi's political ambitions. Yemen's situation is pretty miserable; humanitarian crises, blockade, rampant inflation, insecurity and war still ravages the country. Leave the country alone and the people are going to look for alternatives to the Houthis. Attack it and the people will rally behind them. It's why even after 7 years of campaigning, proxy warfare and 150,000 people killed from violence later, Houthis are still doing great.
The second major consideration is it's a major crossing of the rubicon moment. If I was the USA I wouldn't be weighing this up as "do I protect the shipping or do I annihilate Houthi bases" instead as "do I protect the shipping or do I start a war that will drag in Israel, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey et European friends" whilst also trying to protect the Gulf states, Taiwan and Ukraine.
Given that Hamas and Houthis weren't exactly friends I conjecture they're doing their best to embarass Saudi Arabia for trying to normalise relations with Israel, whilst also demonstrating they still posssess the missile capacity to strike Saudi energy infrastructure.
Hence why Saudis politely asked USA to chill.
I do think if you got the USA, UK, France, Israel, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey to launch strikes together this coalition would have overwhelming superiority. Yet Israel's ground forces are already bogged down in Gaza, and
I recommend this interesting read of a 2002 wargame simulating an invasion of Iran detailing how the red team managed to 1. survive a NATO style combined arms assault preluded by massive air power strikes 2. inflict disproportionate losses on american navy ships using massed missile and missile boat attacks for reasons why any war planner would want to divide and separate the party combatants from one another. So you would just have to accept any such war might end up with Houthis
targeting Saudi energy facilities en masse and
Hezbollah had in 2018 an estimated 130,000 ballistic missiles stockpiled with more stockpiled since. They've withheld on pain of being NATO'd by the USN carrier groups watching nearby like hawks, but if they start getting bombed it's all up in the air. Ideally, you'd have to get some sort of tacit approval from Iran that action against one of their proxy groups will not escalate to another, because without it the ability to defend energy sites in Saudi Arabia or civilian sites in Israel from a mass saturation missile attack is much more expensive than saying "don't think about it."
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Topic: Israel-Gaza/Palestine war thread (Read 30484 times)