It doesn’t help that the U.S. military chain of command was basically, as far as we can see right now, in Status Unknown around the New Year. It’s being reported that neither the National Security Council nor Congress was informed on New Year’s Day when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was put in intensive care following an “elective procedure” performed sometime before (probably Christmas week). Austin was in the ICU for four days before the NSC was told.
At the same time, his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico. Apparently this information wasn’t conveyed to the NSC or Congress either.
Keep in mind, President Biden was in St. Croix acquiring a sunburn from 27 December 2023 to 2 January 2024. The retinue that travels with POTUS to keep him functional, including the strategic weapons “football” and its custodian, would have been with him. But it’s not clear if POTUS knew SECDEF was out of the loop (or for that matter what exact status SECDEF was in, and what DEPSECDEF was handling – or not – from Puerto Rico).
This is very peculiar. The NSC and its watchstanders, along with those at the Pentagon, are supposed to know the exact same thing about the status of the National Command Authority principals; i.e., POTUS and SECDEF. In my experience, if the Pentagon watch gets emerging information about SECDEF, it would require affirmative intervention to keep that from being conveyed to the White House.
It’s important to wait to see how this all shakes out, including reading between the lines of how the story and the explanations develop. But it’s unnerving at all times, and when U.S. troops are in constant danger from Iran-backed attacks in the Middle East, it’s even more so.
Update: OK, it’s later, we’ve seen some of how it has shaken out, and it’s even worse than it appeared at first. (Subsequent updates to those updates have only dug the hole deeper.)
The record of what happened versus who knew or didn’t know anything just doesn’t add up. There’s something very wrong here.
Comment posted today:
D- [Fence] !
Meanwhile, to step through this update without piling on too much background and commentary, here’s the source of the “totally defensive” reference. This past week, White House spokesman John Kirby made a big point of the U.S. military posture for countering the Houthis at sea being “totally defensive.”
The practical meaning of this is that Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) – the counter-Houthi maritime operation with the multi-party coalition – will confine itself to countering the Houthi attackers on-scene in each specific situation. Perhaps more Houthi small boats will be sunk by U.S. Navy helicopters, but in terms of the style of Houthi attack so far, the totally-defensive countering would involve shooting down drones and missiles coming at commercial shipping, and warning off small boats.
It will be entirely about waiting for the arrow instead of taking out the archer, or his stash ashore.
We can correctly deduce that this posture is being justified by the preferences of the OPG coalition. For reasons we’ll see below, there’s also reason to suppose it’s the actual preference of the Biden administration.
A number of diligent researchers have pointed out that commercial maritime traffic is now avoiding the Red Sea in droves.
This isn’t just a problem of longer, more expensive maritime transits for commercial goods. It will certainly affect the world that way, as it did from 1967 to 1975 when the Suez Canal was shut down.
But 50 years later, in a more economically diversified and trade-dependent world, it will have adverse effects for the local economies, especially Egypt’s, which draws important revenues from operating the ports around the Suez Canal. It will also affect shipping and port operations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Eritrea, and Sudan.
With the Canal being bypassed, other countries with major ports in the Eastern Mediterranean – Greece, Turkey, Israel – can expect to take shipping-industry hits as well.
That won’t be good for regional stability. It will, however, benefit Iran, China, and radical extremists as regional governments have to scramble for new or temporary arrangements and address discontent from their domestic constituencies.
The role that only the U.S. can play is the sorely-needed one of maritime superpower: guarantor of free, safe navigation, unextorted and available to all, on the seas. No other nation has the comprehensive package of national power to play that role, nor does the next “navally” powerful nation, China, have the will or intention to do it. China will never waste more than the shortest possible period – days or maybe weeks – pretending to enforce free and safe navigation even-handedly. With the CCP in charge, the hegemonic extortion in the chokepoints would begin almost immediately. (If you actually doubt that, just ask the other reasonable claimants to islands and shoals in the South China Sea – and the trading nations aware of China’s excessive claims there, and intent to demand special vetoes over the navigation practices of all shipping.)
On land and sea
The maritime realm isn’t the only one in which there’s no serious deterrence at work. Americans are, of course, acutely aware of the long list of uncountered attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three months.
A couple of recent developments are both interesting and illustrative of the implications and consequences of continuing this feckless course.
One is the recent attack on the Iraqi base at Al-Harir, an airfield northeast of Erbil, in northern Iraq, being used by the U.S. 82nd Airborne for helicopter operations. The special interest of this attack on Christmas Day is that an Army helicopter pilot, CW4 Garrett Illerbrunn, was badly injured in it and had to be evacuated to Germany for treatment.
My tweet/X-post thread on the situation at Harir:
The essentially undefended condition of U.S. arrangements at Harir is inexcusable at this point. It’s not the only remote, ill-defended base we use; others include the air base at Al-Asad in Anbar Province, and Al-Tanf in southern Syria, on the border with Iraq and Jordan. We’ve been attacked with rockets, missiles, and drones at these and other bases, and are doing little to nothing about it.
The Biden administration has conducted a handful of meaningless air strikes on ground targets, but the strikes and targets have had no relevance to the attacks being made on U.S. forces. The strikes have been merely punitive – with no actual punishment resulting – rather than having operational significance to the Iran-backed forces attacking our troops. As with our “totally defensive” maritime posture, our approach to date is leaving Iran’s proxies in the driver’s seat, and American forces in reactionary mode.
Naturally, this is not producing any deterrent effect.
There is an interesting twist in the most recent American strike, however, which reportedly killed a leader of Iran-backed Iraqi militia forces on 4 January 2024. The individual was Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari, or Abu Taqwa, a leader and operations planner for the Hezbollah- and Iran-backed group Harakat-al-Nujaba (HAN).
In the Pentagon briefing that followed, Major General Pat Ryder (USAF) declined to say what attack(s) HAN, the Iraqi militia, had been responsible for. HAN was attacked by the U.S. in the vicinity of Kirkuk back in early December, and five other operatives were reportedly killed. At the time, the Islamic Resistance in Iran (IRI, an umbrella group of Shia PMFs) implied a connection with HAN, although HAN had reportedly dissociated itself from IRI some years before. (This will briefly matter below.)
It’s noteworthy that HAN’s history goes back to at least 2012, and involves Iran-backed operations (at the time under the direction of Qasem Soleimani) in eastern Iraq, including Diyala Province and military routes to Baghdad (and points west along the Euphrates) and Tikrit.
Iran’s method of infiltrating and taking control of territory in that period was, precisely, to move Qods Force cadre through the Zahab pass from Iran into Iraq, connecting with the Iraqi militias, and proceeding westward on the pretext of “fighting ISIS.” Fighting ISIS was a tremendous convenience for Iran in the period 2011-2017, justifying the Iraqi militias in seizing Iran-backed control of a vast swaths of territory stretching throughout most of the country.
I wrote it up in a number of articles at the time, with this one being canonical (sorry about the loss of graphics and images over time). The point now, in January 2024, is that the pattern looks to be coming back. During the Trump years, although Iranian influence was never driven out of eastern Iraq or the Euphrates Corridor into Syria, Tehran was still effectively deterred from doing more with it. I wasn’t fond of the minimal nature of U.S. presence flanking Iran’s Euphrates-hugging “land-bridge” into Syria, but while Trump was in office it sufficed to keep Iran quiet – especially after ISIS was pushed out of Mosul, and U.S. forces rocked Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries on their heels in eastern Syria. The drubbing ISIS took in northern Iraq and Syria removed Iran’s pretext for a more active “fighting ISIS” profile in both countries.
This is a key reason I’m leery of ISIS’s claim of responsibility for the blast that killed dozens of Iranians in Kerman in the last week. The old “fighting ISIS” band, with HAN going active and ISIS suddenly handing Iran a reason to counterattack, looks like it may be getting back together.
If it is, what’s making that enticing for Tehran is the unabated passivity of the U.S. posture in Mesopotamia. We clearly have no plan to defend more robustly the positions we occupy. The debacle in Afghanistan in 2021 would be Iran’s biggest indicator of what Biden will do if the IRGC can make push come to shove.
The HAN militia group isn’t relevant solely to U.S. forces, for that matter. It may have been behind a still-mysterious attack on Eilat (Israel) on 14 November 2023. Houthi missiles were also launched toward Eilat at the time, accompanied by drone activity. But at least one apparently missile-involved event was recorded as generating an impact in Eilat, and HAN claimed responsibility for it afterward.
The recurrence of the aforementioned IRI in a similar incident – or at least the report of an incident – brings us full circle on the HAN/PMFs/IRI slice. On Sunday 7 January, IRI claimed it had launched “cruise missiles” at Haifa from Iraq. There is apparently nothing to substantiate this, and HAN would probably disavow any link to it. But the type of incident, with a Shia PMF group claiming long-range air attacks on Israel, fits the same profile.
The whole area is a powder keg, which makes it especially disappointing to see the void the Biden administration has opened up with its naval profile across the region.
The void
For this last major point, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Most readers will be aware that the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) strike group has left the Mediterranean and is heading for home on the U.S. East coast.
USS Bataan [LHD-5] and its amphibious ready group ships, with 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) embarked, are in the Med now, having crossed through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea in late December.
The USS Dwight D Eisenhower (CVN-69) is reportedly in the Red Sea (social media reports suggest the carrier transited the Bab-el-Mandeb (BAM) Strait a couple of days ago after operating for some time in the Gulf of Aden).
This satellite imagery update, posted on 7 January, shows Ike in the central Red Sea.
Ike and most of the Ike strike group’s Aegis ships, along with the OPG coalition warships, are in this area around the BAM countering the Houthi projectiles and small boats menacing commercial shipping, but being very careful not to inconvenience the Houthis by attacking their combat infrastructure ashore.
The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have rarely been so well populated with premier navy warships. And Djibouti remains stocked to support local operations by the coalition, from resupply to supporting reconnaissance flights and helicopters.
But there’s a major void left entirely unfilled in the region. It’s in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. naval force would have to operate to deter Iran.
By the most recent count, the only capital USN surface warship in the Persian Gulf is the Arleigh Burke destroyer USS Carney (DDG-64). USS Indianapolis (LCS-17) makes a second, if we stipulate to her being a capital warship.
The cruise missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN-728) is still in CENTCOM too, and probably near the Persian Gulf, after entering the theater back on 5 November 2023 – but Carney and Florida are not the platforms to deter Iran-backed militia ops in Iraq and Syria. Together they could make a dent in Iran’s own high-value bases and infrastructure, including a limited number of nuclear program targets. But it would be only a dent; a Tomahawk barrage, while formidable, wouldn’t put Iran at risk comprehensively and sufficiently to daunt the radical regime.
For credible deterrence of Iran in its homebase, and in Iraq and Syria (where U.S. troops are, as well as being the land pathway to Israel), the Persian Gulf is where the Eisenhower needs to be, her 50 strike-fighters bristling on the flight deck.
There are U.S. Air Force assets in the Gulf, of course. For the most effective possible deterrence effort against Iran, they would be essential. But when the carrier is not in the Gulf, there’s another “essential” that can be yanked out from under U.S. operations at any time, and that’s permission by Gulf host nations (principally Qatar) to launch combat sorties against Iran, or against Iran’s known interests in Iraq or Syria.
With little fanfare, only a short time ago, the U.S. and Qatar renewed the host agreement for Al Udeid Air Base in Doha, where our Air Force aircraft deploy and are maintained, and from which they routinely operate. But renewing the host agreement doesn’t guarantee that Qatar will agree to all the purposes the U.S. may have for launching combat aircraft.
Qatar in the past has quietly announced that it will not allow the use of its facilities for attacks on Iran. And Iran, of course, is always maneuvering to extract such policy concessions from Doha, as well as other U.S. hosts in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman.
The U.S. has recently shifted some air operations back to Prince Sultan Air Base (PSAB) in Saudi Arabia. The 378th Expeditionary Air wing operates a squadron of F-16Cs there, along with the E-3G Sentry airborne early warning/command and control aircraft, KC135 tankers, and E-11A electronic warfare aircraft. It remains to be seen, however, how much latitude for U.S. operations the Saudis want to put themselves on the hook for.
The more passive, tentative, and incrementalist the U.S. deterrence posture is, the less interested Gulf nations will be in exposing themselves to Iranian retaliation on its behalf. A pick-up game with no carrier in it isn’t likely to seem like the best bet to them.
A key point in all this is that what Eisenhower and her airwing bring to the Houthi-maritime problem – as we’re now addressing it, with no power projection ashore – isn’t actually needed. The Aegis escort ships (cruisers, destroyers) and their helos are better suited to the problem, and would continue to be ably assisted by the surveillance and combat capabilities of P-8 maritime patrol aircraft.
The reason to have Ike and an airwing off Yemen would be to attack Houthi targets on dry beach or inland from the closest launch points. But that’s exactly what our OPG coalition is committed to not do.
And if we did decide to do it, the Air Force coming in through Saudi air space would be a good solution to much of that problem. We are privileged to have an Air Force that can walk, chew gum, and tune a turbofan engine one-handed all at the same time. The Air Force at the theater air ops center in Doha would be running the air campaign anyway, and could put sorties on both the Houthi problem and an Iran-deterrence package across the northern landscape without mussing its hair.
The carrier could participate from the Gulf, for that matter, just as the Air Force could participate from Qatar. The same flight profile would work for both.
In spite of appearances, U.S. military resources are stretched in CENTCOM. The Air Force has had to backfill its theater strike-fighter bullpen with A-10 ground attack aircraft, which are the baddest tactical ground support platform known to man, but not the aircraft of choice for scaring Tehran about Iranian air defense infrastructure, missile-program survivability, navy targets on or offshore, or nuclear sites. For those applications you want strike-fighters, and plenty of them, ready to roar in with your Tomahawks, big bombers, and armed drones.
For deterrence, the visible and operationally daunting presence of the aircraft carrier needs to be not wandering around the BAM launching helos (and using F/A-18 Super Hornets to shoot down drones), but in the Persian Gulf.
It’s not there. And Iran knows that. The fact that it’s not there, when, if we wanted to deter Iran, it so obviously should be – that’s the loudest statement being made by the Biden administration’s posture in the region. There’s hardly any naval presence capable of power projection in the Gulf. Tomahawks and drones are great, but they can’t do everything. We’re tending the theory of deterrence with insufficient box-checking, keeping some platforms there but not enough to actually be convincing to the select audience in Khamenei’s inner circle.
The reluctance of the Biden administration to put U.S. carriers in the Gulf reflects the low priority deterring Iran is for Team Biden. A credible deterrent presence vis-à-vis Iran is the “hack” needed to lock the gates on regional escalation, and Biden isn’t putting the most obvious asset behind that. Instead, he’s got it hundreds of miles away, acting like an escort ship without the escort-ship agility and sea-combat superiority, while prevented by policy from doing what it was born for: mangling Houthi – or Iranian – stash ashore.
Feature image: Houthi boats operate off Yemen. Houthi video via Hindustan Times, YuTube.
The Optimistic Conservative 
Happy New Year.
Nothing we do, or not do, will “help”. Driving Russia into the camp of the East was the mother of all blunders.
There is no vaunted western naval force that can enforce supremacy any longer. There is no western societal cohesion necessary to build a force to fight a real war. The people that fight our wars are unwilling to fight and die for the billionaires or their politicians, our foreign ‘allies’, or our so-called ‘values’.
The shadow of evil over the West shall be dispelled by the rise of Eurasia. I suspect many in the West are ready to join them. Maybe then, the light will shine again in the West.
In the meantime, it might be a good idea to watch the southern US border and keep the lid on South America. I fear that whatever good is left in us — may be too late there as well.
-jg
Happy New Year, JG.
I wouldn’t be too confident about that lack of Western “force.” What’s lacking isn’t force, but will.
I don’t think elections are telling us anything about Western attitudes other than that the great majority of people are afraid of being mocked and censored for pointing out the obvious: that the elections, especially in the US, lack integrity, are being exploited because that’s convenient for a collapsing leadership class, and don’t reflect the will of the people anymore.
We can’t attribute anything that’s going on politically now to the will of the people.
We’ll see where it goes. All conventional analyses are invalid. We have no idea what global conditions will look like by November, or what they’ll make people prefer. You’d think people would have learned that by now, but most still haven’t.
Wishing you and yours a good year in spite of it all.
You are right, the world will be a very different place by November. It is going to be a very eventful year for the entire world, then the world will spend many long, bloody years trying to recreate some semblance of the civilization we have let the left destroy.
Your post was worth waiting for. I assume you saw the news later on Jan 11:
https://news.usni.org/2024/01/11/us-strikes-houthi-targets-in-yemen-from-air-surface-and-subsurfaceimho, DoD was waiting for Blinken’s ME tour, to make certain the Saudis and Emiratis were ok with this plan, and perhaps for the Jan 9 UNSC Res on Houthis.Unlike his other ME visits since Oct 7, Blinken started in Turkiye, meeting the FM, and Erdogan. One other part of the puzzle was this:
And then there is the Jan 10 Iran seizure:
I think tangled in all this is a ‘protest’ against USA-led sanctions, which have greatly impeded Russia’s ‘freedom of navigation’ in the Baltic and Black Sea, including grain shipments…
Always good to see Erdogan get some scrutiny. He is still using F-16s to bomb Kurds in NE Syria, but only Kurds protest that.
2024 is still a tangled web.
I don’t believe the latest US/UK strikes will deter the Houthi from targeting commercial shipping.
We’ll see if we continue with ineffective follow up strikes whose only tangible result is expending ordnance already in short supply. Putting (lots of ) troops on the ground in Houthiland is the only step that’s actually effective, I doubt we’ll do that (I don’t know if we even ‘can’ do that anymore) — but, we’ve done dumber stuff before. As I’ve pointed out before, if we get stuck in that MENA sh*thole again, we can kiss the current status in East Europe and East Asia goodbye.
Operation Profligate Gomer continues. . . 🙂
Playing whack-a-mole is not going to deter the Houthis, not even blowing up abandoned tents. It will take ground pounders, which I’ve heard from the left and right demands Congressional authorization. Not sure if Jefferson got that before taking on the Barbary pirates.
As for the complete breakdown in the chain of command, this is not merely a signal to our allies and adversaries of the Biden regime’s weakness, it is dangerous. Suppose either the Russian or Chinese defense minister wants to get in touch with Austin, only to be told he’s unavailable for unknown reasons. Easy to see that taken the wrong way.