Among those skeptical about our ability to deter the Houthis is Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain. She expresses her thoughts in a piece at The National Interest. Basically, she thinks we’re trying to deter the Houthis on the cheap. A sample
In the early hours of Friday, January 12, the United States and the United Kingdom launched strikes against the Houthi rebel group in Yemen. The first strikes were aimed at more than sixty targets across sixteen different sites and were focused on missile, radar, and drone facilities controlled by the Houthis. A second wave targeted twelve additional sites, while a follow-on attack in the early hours of Saturday, January 13, struck a Houthi radar site. Although the strikes damaged or destroyed ninety percent of their targets, the Houthis retained approximately three-quarters of their drone and missile capabilities.
At this point our strikes have had the opposite effect if any. She explains:
In my book, Cheap Threats: Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States, I examine why the United States struggles to coerce weak states like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The argument draws on the logic of costly signaling, which asserts that signals must be costly for the sender in order to effectively signal high levels of commitment; by contrast, “cheap talk†cannot convince the receiver that the sender is highly resolved. In other words, signals that are cheap and easy to send do not convey any information about the sender’s underlying resolve or motivation.
While I agree with her conclusion I don’t agree with her reasoning. I don’t believe that the problem is that we’re not spending enough. The opposite, if anything. What we’re doing isn’t cost-effective. As I see it the problem is similar to the one we faced in Afghanistan. The Houthis have no centralized command and control. For an airpower strategy to be effective we’d need to strike a lot of worthless targets and kill a lot of people who don’t have much to do with the attacks on Red Sea shipping. Not only would an air-sea-land invasion of Yemen be horrendously expensive, we’d need to be prepared to occupy the entire country to eliminate the attacks on shipping.
And, as I’ve pointed out before, one of the effects of our attacks is to boost their repute which attracts money not just from Iran but from others in the Gulf who hate us and there’s no lack of those.
To use an analogy I’ve applied before in a different context, when a neighbor’s dog bites your kid, don’t talk to the dog. Talk to the neighbor.
“The opposite, if anything. What we’re doing isn’t cost-effective.”
As I’ve pointed out so many times…….. You are correct, if you define the object to be targeted as the (this time: Houthis, formerly – Afghans). Its almost a fool’s errand. But if you define costs not as $ spent swatting flies, but as lack of effectiveness in achieving larger policy goals, then you go to the source: Iran.
Biden disagrees. That’s his prerogative. He, like Obama, is/was President, not me. But his policy is also idiotic, and totally ineffectual.
Sadly, this is, and was, predictable and predicted. Shorter: he’s a limp dick.
We must make a decision, do we think the disruption of commerce and potential loss of life to Americans and our interests merit an effective response, or not? (Europe should as well, but that’s more of a financing decision) So far, we have Joe playing in the Romper Room. Talk about unsuited by temperament.
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I think that Robert Gates called it right: Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue for the last 40 years.
Yes, let’s invade. Start wars with Yemen AND Iran. We have done so well with wars in that area and surely this time they will just roll over, or great us as liberators or something. Make a list of wars in the ME/Asia that you think have gone well for the US.
Which again leads into the fantasy ideas that people who know about the military from watching movies vs real life. Suppose that we are going to launch land attacks in Yemen. When would we do that? The fantasy people think we have huge numbers of troops just sitting around with an infinite amount of supplies and up to the minute intelligence so we can attack anywhere. In a situation where no American lives are truly at risk and where the attacks have largely been ineffectual and where the Houthis have spent years hiding from us while we supplied intel to Saudi Arabia so they could try to kill them whoever is in charge will want to have time to plan and to solve the logistical issues before landing and fighting in another hilly/mountainous area against experienced tribal fighters, now with drones.
Steve
Is it a coincidence that this is the same waterway where the Suez crisis that marked “the emperor has no clothes moment” for the British empire?