Don’t Look Now But We Are Losing The War With The Houthis

The U.S. military and its allies shot down at least 28 drones in the Red Sea fired by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen Saturday, the Pentagon said. That’s a good thing. Here’s a question, though, why do the Houthis have any drones left to fire at anyone? Haven’t we been bombing them for some time now? How is it that the mightiest military on the planet cannot prevent continued Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea?

The Pentagon says it is because we lack sufficient intelligence on Yemen and the Houthis. The military says it has destroyed a bunch of stuff but it doesn’t really know how many missiles or launchers or drones the Houthis had to start with.  Dan Shapiro, the Pentagon’s top man on the Middle East, told a congressional hearing last week that while the US military had “a good sense” of what it had destroyed, it did not “fully know the denominator” — meaning the original size of the Houthis’ arsenal before the start of the US military campaign in January.

A number of current and former officials offered explanations for how this was possible. One said that Yemen had declined as a priority and therefore our intelligence “focus” had been lost. Another stressed that it was difficult to collect in “inhospitable terrain” and that it was “inherently challenging”’ to collect in Yemen.

All of this we are assured is in the process of being corrected. The Biden administration has now declared the Houthis an international terrorist organization. That would be, of course, after first removing them from that list at the beginning of Joe’s tenure in the White House. The Defense Intelligence Agency just released an unclassified report on Iranian support to the Houthis, and we are assured that we will now redouble our efforts to stop the Iranians from resupplying the Houthis by sea. Just to make sure everyone knows we are serious we also imposed sanctions on an Iranian military commander and a Houthi militant linked to the ongoing Red Sea attacks.

US intelligence now has a stronger picture of Houthi ties to Tehran, said officials. Officials have also stressed that they intend to apply “diplomatic pressure” on Iran to rein in the Houthis. This would be based on the theory apparently that the guys who give the orders and provide the weapons want the shooting to stop.

All of this, of course, is nonsense. The problem is not that we have been trying in any meaningful sense to crush the Houthi forces attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea and failing. The problem is that we have not been pursuing any strategy with any chance of success and that our efforts, including intelligence collection efforts, have been pathetically weak. The problem is that we are not serious. We have no strategy worthy of the name and our forces and intelligence collectors are so hamstrung as to be virtually useless.

We don’t need a DIA study to tell us the Iranians bring in weapons and munitions by sea to Yemen. It’s been going on for years. So, stop every vessel sailing between Iran and Yemen and sink every one found to be carrying arms and munitions to the Houthis. Then turn the prisoners over to the Saudis to be held until the conclusion of the hostilities.

Stop sending money to the ayatollahs with which they can buy the arms, explosives, drones, and missiles the Houthis use. Stop appointing people to key administrative positions who sympathize with Iran and believe we are the “bad guys” in this affair.

Discard a policy that counts as a win the interception of a cheap drone by a multi-million dollar missile. If the Houthis fire a missile or drone at a ship in the Red Sea every element in their structure connected to that action should be targeted and destroyed immediately. That means all the way from the guys who fired the weapon to the men in the headquarters who gave the orders. Everybody pays the price. That includes the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers who are really running the show.

Do whatever is necessary to collect the intelligence we need on the ground. When the OSS needed intelligence on Nazi troop deployments in France in 1944 it did not label that nation a “challenging” environment for collection and report “intelligence gaps”. It dropped operatives by parachute into enemy territory and required them to get the intel we needed to win the war. Some were caught and killed. We kept sending them in.

All of this probably sounds very anachronistic in today’s Washington where the priority is on proper pronoun usage, not offending anyone’s sensibilities and we are required to take lectures on warfighting from a male Space Force officer in a skirt.  It is also how you win a war.

Right now we aren’t “degrading” any capabilities. We aren’t on the path to victory. Last month the Houthis sank a UK-owned Belize-flagged ship sailing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait and caused an 18-mile oil slick.  The ship sank. The Houthis have hit four US-flagged commercial ships since November.

Last week the Houthis hit a commercial vessel and killed at least three people. The crew abandoned ship. The bulk of commercial shipping has fled the Red Sea and is sailing around Africa.

That’s not what winning looks like. We are losing the war with the Houthis, and the whole world is watching.