Why the US can’t beat the Houthis

The United States Navy has effectively lost control of the Red Sea, because the current American way of waging war, which involves missiles and drones launched from remote locations, has its limits and does not guarantee control of the territory. It only gives the illusion of it.

Complete air supremacy is not equivalent to victory on land or at sea, it is not control of the territory and therefore it is useless to defeat a militia which instead makes the control of an environmentally hostile territory its strength. An expert, Gary Anderson, who served as Chief of Planning (G-5) of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force, responsible for the Indo-Pacific area, tells us this.

Vietnam is a good example.

By the early 1970s, the United States had near-total air supremacy over North Vietnam. However, because the North Vietnamese had embedded critical military infrastructure among civilians, American air strikes made only a minimal strategic difference. In a time of internal dissidence, the United States could not make a decisive impact on the war with air power alone.

Amphibious raid

Only an amphibious raid in North Vietnam could have broken the stalemate and gained strategic advantages against the communist militias, depriving them of control of the territory and the possibility of positioning themselves among civilians. This would also have reduced supplies to the Vit Cong in South Vietnam and would have left uncertainty about the possibility of further intervention in the North.

It was the Cold War and most American politicians feared that a large-scale raid would lead to intervention by the Soviet Union or China and the raid would only be successful if the Marines' retreat preceded direct intervention of the great powers, and would still have left North Vietnam weakened. At the time, however, strategic fears and weak public opinion prevented intervention.

Many Americans who did not live through that period (and some who did) believe that Saigon fell to Viet Cong peasants armed only with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. In reality, the South was invaded by a modern combined-arms North Vietnamese army using Soviet-made tanks, artillery and anti-aircraft missiles – exactly the army the raid would have eliminated. Even at the time the US had total control of the skies over North Vietnam, and it was completely useless.

Today Yemen

For a smart adversary, hiding missile and drone launchers in civilian areas is an effective strategy when limited to airstrikes. It becomes much more difficult when units are on the ground and are able to hunt sites without razing everything to the ground.

By the early 1970s, the US Navy was able to land two full Marine Corps divisions, armed with tanks and with the ability to cross any river in Vietnam, destroying the entire ability to project power in the South.

Today, the Navy would struggle to land a single Marine Expeditionary Brigade. The Marine Corps no longer has tanks or the assault and breakthrough capability to project and sustain military operations far beyond a narrow beachhead. So the solution to the Houthis does not exist.

'Send in the Marines'

There should be a lesson for the Biden administration. If things continue like this, the only way to stop the threat of Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea is for the Iranians to convince their surrogates to stop.

The US Navy has not reached this level of humiliation since the early days of the war against the Barbary pirates in the 19th century. The power projection capability of the US Navy and Marine Corps is at its lowest since December 7, 1941.

At this point, paradoxically, the hope of a solution to the crisis lies in the benevolence of the enemies of the United States who do not understand why they should facilitate Biden's work. Today, instead of "Send the Marines", BIden can at most send the Iranians…

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The article Why the US Can't Beat the Houthis comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/perche-gli-usa-non-possono-battere-gli-houthi/ on Tue, 26 Mar 2024 07:00:27 +0000.