Monday 29 January update: This article has to get posted sometime, so I’m officially cutting it off with a target-set observation on the most recent attacks by Iran’s proxies, including the attack on Tower 22 at the border of Jordan and Syria (near the U.S. base at Al-Tanf). At least 47 Americans are now said to have been injured by the drone attack there on Sunday, and three soldiers were killed.
I’m not opposed to attacking the Iranian Qods Force commander, Esmail Qa’ani. The Qods Force directs the activities of the Iraqi militias, which presumably are behind the Tower 22 attack.
However, the cumulative and escalating attacks on U.S. interests should not be merely “retaliated” against. Iran is incapable of escalating this to an all-out regional war, and much the better course is to recognize the attacks so far as justifying a decisive, deterrent response. The U.S. should not try to imagine what would be “symmetrical” – we’re not Iran; that’s the point – but what would sit the regime’s butt down hard and prevent further provocation. Further provocation is what disrupts the whole region and makes Word War III more likely. Preventing that is absolutely what we should be doing. No boots on the ground required.
Iran’s biggest geomilitary treasures at the moment, as summarized at the very end of the article, are access to their Houthi proxies in Yemen, and access to their Iraqi militia proxies, via Iran’s land-bridge through Iraq and into Syria.
This is the time to knock Iran sideways in that regard. Cut Tehran off from the Houthis, degrade the Houthis’ operational capabilities, and take out everything Iran relies on to keep the land-bridge across Iraq in play, starting with all Iran-linked weapons stashes in Iraq and Eastern Syria. Leave it a smoking ruin so Iran’s regime can’t use it for the foreseeable future. Start by eliminating everything within rocket or drone range of U.S. bases.
There’s more in the article about that. For whether President Biden will actually respond in a useful way, see the final paragraphs (before the footnote).
Earlier:
Since this article was 95% completed, newer events have emerged that need to be noted as scene-setters. Here are two of them.
On Sunday, three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a drone attack on Tower 22, located near the U.S. base at Al-Tanf on the border of Syria with Jordan and Iraq.
CNN notes that, since attacks on U.S. forces began in October, this is the first known attack on the U.S. base area at Al-Tanf. It’s also the first direct kill of U.S. soldiers in an attack by Iran-backed Iraqi militias.
Tower 22 itself is just inside Jordan, while Al-Tanf is in Syria.
A late update: CENTCOM indicates a total of 34 Americans are wounded from the 28 January attack, and 8 have been evacuated from Jordan for medical treatment.
The escalatory nature of this event is obvious. But I want to point out an additional import it carries, one that is real and that matters.
The U.S. has two concentrations of forces in Syria, with about 900 troops allocated between them. One is the base area at Al-Tanf. The other is in the oilfields of northeastern Syria, where we maintain a close liaison with the Kurds. The two base locations flank Iran’s land-bridge from Iraq and across Syria. They are the last U.S. outposts left to exert a check on Iran’s use of the land-bridge.
In the scramble for a U.S. footprint in Syria in the last year of Trump’s term, these two outposts are what was left in place. If we believe the media narrative about what was going on at the time, Trump wanted to withdraw all of our troops from Syria, and the Pentagon, under SECDEF Mark Esper, basically mutinied and arranged to keep some forces in Syria. (That didn’t seem to change after Trump fired Esper and appointed an interim Acting SECDEF, Christopher Miller, for his final weeks in office.)
However that may have been, this profile – troops in the northeast and at Al-Tanf, flanking Iran’s line of communication to the west – was the result.
Just a few days ago, “leaked” information indicated the U.S. is eyeing the withdrawal of our troops in the oilfields northeastern Syria. (That is discussed a bit more toward the end of this article.) I agree with Foreign Policy that we should not withdraw: I was relieved in late 2020 when it became clear we were going to at least leave the small but important flanking positions occupied In Syria.
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration is reportedly contemplating a withdrawal the “permanent state” accused Trump of irresponsibly proposing – and is now pondering it at a much worse time, when it clearly signals abject weakness and precipitate retreat.
But here’s what we mustn’t miss. Biden is said to be looking at removal of the troops in the north. Nothing has been said about the troops in the south of Syria, at Al-Tanf.
So that – in the south – is where the Iran-backed militias attacked for the first time on 28 January. The attack couldn’t be more obviously intended to drive us out of the southern position as well as the one in the north.
Nothing is random here. Everything points to the longer, larger war envisioned by the Iranian regime.
It’s a war China and Russia want to benefit from. The second event I’m highlighting is a report on 25 January that China is asking Iran to tell the Houthis to stop attacking shipping.
Note at the outset who told Reuters this (emphasis added): “Chinese officials have asked their Iranian counterparts to help rein in attacks on ships in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthis, or risk harming business relations with Beijing, four Iranian sources and a diplomat familiar with the matter said.”
Iran wants the world to know China is making this request. This is a comment I made earlier in correspondence:
Everything like this is jockeying for position and credit now.
China could get a quiet agreement with Iran that the Houthis won’t target Chinese shipping. Tehran is a major client of Beijing; the liaison basis exists to execute such an agreement. China could even seek rent from other nations for being included under the agreement’s umbrella.
But China wants political credit for any general improvement in maritime security conditions. The credit would come at America’s expense. (And, the way our leadership is behaving, deservedly so.) Iran is carrying China’s water by “leaking” China’s demand to the media.
China’s gambit becomes clearer in light of this report on 24 January, also from Reuters, which says that, according to U.S. officials, the U.S. asked China to do this.
Anyone who thinks this shows the power of American requests should never be in charge of negotiating anything. What it shows is that the U.S. can’t deter Iran and the Houthis – which we’ve purportedly been trying to do with our air strikes – and has to importune China to intervene on our behalf. If, after a suitable interval of damage to America’s interests and reputation, Iran does rein in the Houthis, it will redound to China’s credit.
China wants credit for such influence. China wants to come into the emerging conflict in the Middle East as a respected, sought-after power broker. Ultimately Xi Jinping wants to assume the mantle of U.S. power – but for China’s purposes, which will be hegemonic, exclusionary, and extortionate, as the ruling CCP always demands. (This is incontrovertible. Ask India, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the other claimants to islands, reefs, and sea space in the South China Sea. China under the CCP is immoderate with its existing power. More power will not temper CCP aspirations.)
The stability situation imposed by China would bear no resemblance to America’s equal-access, freedom-of-the-seas principle. It’s not something we can “live with.”
From whatever motive or mindset, the Biden administration appears to be aiding Xi in this project.
Please don’t doubt that a world war, an earthquake in geopolitical reality, is emerging as you read this.
Now, to the original article.
The stakes
The fast-moving drama in the Middle East in January 2024 is the U.S. retreating as a war directed by Iran accelerates. It’s a hybrid war at this point, but no less effective than a more conventional one would be. It involves geography and strategy as a conventional war would, and is perfectly designed to attack U.S. interests right in the solar plexus: our profile as the global maritime power, the one that guarantees the seas in their vital chokepoints, and thereby effectively secures vast stretches of territory at efficient cost and with minimal obtrusion on precincts ashore.
Securing the chokepoints is how America has maintained dominance (see p. 14) of our two ocean bastions, Atlantic and Pacific, since the end of World War II, with a relatively light maritime footprint and two core alliance groups, at either end of the Eastern hemisphere.
Dominating the chokepoints and keeping them free of hegemonic encroachment by regional powers that would impose exclusionary schemes on them is what prevents the emergence of hegemons that could start breaking up U.S. alliances. China in Southeast Asia is the premier example of a would-be hegemon, familiar to everyone. But during the Cold War, the Soviet Union maneuvered to set up the conditions for hegemony over the Arabian Peninsula-Horn of Africa junction, and in the absence of a diligent United States, one or more Eastern hemisphere powers will always have that in view.
Iran has it in view today. And Russia and China will both be anxious to participate in whatever jockeying Iran can kick in motion, in the chokepoint belt from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and Suez Canal.
If the U.S. Navy isn’t there holding the chokepoint belt open for everyone, there’s going to be a land-power hegemon – a hegemon using the chokepoint belt for strategic military advantage and political extortion. The only question is who it will be. The fight over that, though probably mostly political and indirect, would not be pleasant for anyone.
Nations like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Egypt, and Turkey understand that. Iran would have opposition. But Iran would also have allies. And the unstable security situation for Europe, India, Japan, and South Korea – major hubs, all, of global trading – would quickly cause them to start rethinking their partnerships with a U.S. that was needier, in security matters, than strong and reliable for back-up and deterrence.
It’s an enduring reality of international relations: we don’t have allies because we need them. We have allies because they need us.
President Biden is busy turning America into the ally our allies don’t need. With each punch he pulls, each failure of stabilization or deterrence, each hint or overt sign of American retreat, he brings that outcome closer.
These are the stakes in the war that’s cranking up in the Middle East at the moment. Iran’s strategy is the catalyst. But the Biden administration is essentially agreeing to the war on these terms by retreating before Iran’s advance.
The U.S. is the only nation that could stop the war cold before it gets any bigger.
(We’ll look at a few options for that below, fully justifiable and well within our power, without any boots-on-the-ground troop deployments.)
And the U.S. isn’t stopping it.
A shrug and a hedge at the outset: something unforeseen could change to keep this train from proceeding toward its wreck. I’d love for that to happen (as long as the cure wasn’t worse than the disease). But basically everything I’ve predicted so far has happened even faster than I anticipated. No one should be sanguine about what’s going on here.
This is a world war-level scope and sequence of events unfolding before our eyes. Since the troops of Nazi Germany began retreating from the Caucasus just about 80 years ago, the “correlation of forces,” both political and military, has looked pretty much the same at the Great Crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The U.S. has held it in stasis with maritime power and alliances since then.
That security stasis of 80 years’ duration is crumbling. There’s still time to keep it from rumbling into a geopolitical earthquake. But that time is very short.
Things are moving so fast now, it’s hard to frame commentary for freshness and relevance. The story here is worth telling, however, and though there will be updates before tomorrow, I’m going to lay it out as-is anyway. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I won’t go into much depth in most of the illustrations and anecdotes. The links will have to do.
Skulduggery on the high seas
[Update – inevitably] A Houthi missile struck a chemical tanker in the Gulf of Aden on Friday, leaving it on fire and in need of immediate assistance. USS Carney (DDG 64) was among three warships responding, but it’s not clear if Carney was in position to try to intercept the Houthi missile before it hit.
Thursday saw a very disquieting event in the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. Navy is managing escort operations for U.S.-flag ships – as other nations in the security task forces are doing for their shipping – and for the first time, two U.S.-flagged merchants were turned around by their shipping company, Maersk, when they came under missile attack from the Houthis. They were being escorted by an Aegis destroyer, USS Gravely (DDG-107), when the Houthis launched three missiles at them from Yemen.
Gravely shot down two missiles, with the third going into the water several hundred meters from Maersk Detroit. It’s quite possible that Gravely could have shot that one down but didn’t, if the trajectory meant the missile wouldn’t hit the commercial ship anyway. The USN escort ships are using up a lot of Standard Missiles fending off the Houthi missile barrage; using them unnecessarily is inadvisable.
That, of course, is nevertheless unnerving for the merchants and their owners and operators. It’s important not to miss what happened here. U.S.-flagged merchants came under fire from a Houthi attack while under USN escort, and turned around to retreat instead of continuing their course under escort.
Once more: U.S.-flagged merchants under USN escort. The U.S. flag is the one that lost this encounter.
But here’s something more I want to point out, and it’s how quickly this general scenario emerged after I predicted it just over a week ago.
Before the Houthis started moving their attack resources into non-Houthi-held territory inside Yemen, the great majority of their attacks were in the Red Sea. That great of majority of attacks was mounted from the territory the Houthis have controlled for over a decade.
When I observed what a strategically provocative move it was for the Houthis to shift their assets into territory controlled by Saudi- and Emirati-backed factions in Yemen, and pointed out that more attacks would be likely in the Gulf of Aden because of where the assets were headed, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before such attacks started happening.
It was about 24 hours – and Thursday’s newer attack from that profile was on U.S. shipping. It would be hard to set up a scenario more “in your face.”
Clearly, the Houthis had no fear of acting as provocatively as possible: launching from a trespassing position in Yemen, at U.S.-flagged ships, with very little delay. That’s not just an offensive posture; it’s an aggressive one.
Each day is bringing a new alarm. Rather than enumerate them all, I am trusting readers to have an idea what’s going on or be competent to read up on it for themselves. It should be clear to everyone paying the slightest attention that we’re talking about dozens of missile and drone attempts made by the Houthis on shipping at this point. It’s a well-established problem that should need no further proof. What I want to focus on is commentary and analysis.
New York Times to the rescue
That’s why, though it may seem a bit of a non sequitur, I will shift now to an article at the New York Times, also on Thursday, which offered a fatuous but predictable packaged narrative about the Houthis and their Amazing Technological Dream Caper. In it, the Houthis are presented as scrappy and ingenious insurgent fighters, hard to beat and now toying with the U.S. and other developed-world powers as we try vainly to overcome their seemingly disadvantaged, but somehow winning, posture.
The echoes are obvious here of the equally fatuous narrative favored by Western media about insurgent fighters in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and other scenes of asymmetric confrontation since 1945. It’s a comprehensively fatuous narrative, offering a myth to explain what is actually attributable to the following manifest, unvarnished reality:
The great power is fighting with both hands tied behind its back.
It takes nothing away from the Houthis, who with Iran’s constant help are making the most of commercially available equipment, to point out that the U.S. isn’t doing even close to its best to deter the Houthis and Iran, and restore stable security to the maritime environment in the Middle East chokepoint belt. The Houthis are triumphing over an inert, barely reactive American power-projection profile. They have no means to stop our military operations. We’re just barely doing anything – which is not because our forces lack the capability to do more.
The key to doing a better job isn’t a different set of combat systems or more respect for Houthi ingenuity. The key is a different Commander in Chief. It’s the Commander in Chief who sets the power-projection profile. It’s not the Pentagon. It’s never the Pentagon, and we don’t want it to be. America’s principle of civilian control of the military is the best basis for invoking armed force, with the buck for it stopping in the Oval Office with the president we elect.
That point per se doesn’t need a lot of further development. We can address it in the comments. What I want to do here is look at the respect we already have for “Houthi ingenuity,” a respect the NYT author actually highlights in the article, though in an inverted way, disguising the respect as an afterthought lost in the implicit arrogance of U.S. military bureaucracy. The article turns its purported argument on its head, and in the process manages to render it irrelevant.
Here is the article’s proposition. The Houthis are ingeniously using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) radar to support their antiship targeting. They’re also using communications that disappear into the ambient noise – easy enough to do since cell phones are ubiquitous these days. These practices makes it harder for an opposing force to distinguish the targeting interludes from the ambient noise of commercial radar operation and comms activity in the area.
The U.S. Marine Corps, in the person of Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan, was recently struck by this circumstance. In the way of such strikings, General Donovan’s interest translated (in an effectively mysterious, undescribed manner*) into Marine Corps use of COTS radar for its targeting needs at a deployed location in 2022 in the Baltic (in fact, Norway).
The point of this NYT proposition is that it’s evidence of the Houthis’ ingenuity, and implicitly explains why the U.S. counter-moves have so far been ineffective. The NYT reader is supposed to perceive it as preternaturally clever use of simple assets to confound the U.S. military: not General Donovan and the Marine Corps, perhaps, who got clued up, but (by implication) the U.S. Navy now operating off of Yemen.
I will pause briefly to register that a Houthi use of smart phones and COTS radar for targeting coordination does present a very modern challenge for a defending force offshore trying to protect against missiles. Not much can be said about the communication side of that without getting into sources and methods. But a key effect of it, from the standpoint of both of the targeting resources, can be (and probably is) shortening the antimissile reaction time for the defenders. The missile’s trajectory isn’t affected, but the cuing time for the defender can be, if he has fewer detectable clues about where the opponent is in his targeting and launch sequence.
That said, the Houthi use of COTS radar per se isn’t the same problem for the Navy engaged in missile defense and the Marine Corps engaged in tracking traffic offshore. In particular, the Navy doesn’t have reason to develop the same fascination the Marines have with adapting COTS equipment use for Navy requirements.
It’s important to understand that the U.S. Navy is well aware of the stealth advantages from using COTS radars. Most of the world’s warships, including ours, carry COTS radars you could buy at a well-stocked marine equipment store, if not at Bass Pro. U.S. submarines have used COTS radars for surfaced operations for years, precisely because COTS radars make it harder to figure out from your radar signature what kind of vessel you are.
More importantly, the Navy has understood for a long time that it will likely face opponents seeking to confuse and obfuscate detection and identification by using COTS radars.
But the Navy doesn’t do what the Marine Corps does. Most of the time, the purpose of the Navy is to be detected and have its presence known on the seas. If you can detect the U.S. Navy’s fleet-standard, milspec surface navigation and targeting radars spinning live in your operating area, you’re too close to act out, and should just be on your best behavior.
That doesn’t mean the Navy has no appreciation of the COTS profile, or concept for using it. In fact, appreciation of the benefits for stealth of using indistinguishable COTS radars goes back so far in the Navy that this insight is received wisdom today. (Of course, particular instances can merit special discussion. And a peer competitor using COTS equipment for stealth is a different proposition from the Houthis. The peer competitor can shwack you as hard as you can shwack him, and can probably interfere electronically with the operation of your purpose-built systems. But (a) the Navy knows that too, though I am never complacent about how much it’s paying attention; and (b) that’s not the proposition the NYT article is trying to sell you. It’s trying to sell you on the narrative of Houthi ingenuity defeating U.S. counterattacks.)
The basic problem with the NYT article’s proposition is that it tries to translate a meaningful insight the Marines have had to Navy operations that are structurally different, and take place in a different environment. Not only are they structurally different – missile and air defense is not infantry operations at the littoral seam of sea and land – but trying to fit “solutions” to the missile/air problem by getting inside the Houthis’ targeting loop isn’t the most effective or appropriate approach anyway.
The Houthis are insurgents sponsored by Iran, with no acknowledged sovereignty to respect or state responsibility to be relied on. The U.S. is only laying unnecessary constraints on our options, to treat the Houthis as if we mustn’t go bigger on their challenge than they are able to go.
That’s exactly what we should do. We don’t need to live with disadvantages from potentially having less insight into their targeting loop due to its reliance on smart phones and radars sold at Bass Pro. When they’re attacking our shipping, we need to bypass that problem and just hit them where they can’t defend themselves. We don’t need to get inside an undetectable OODA loop to solve this problem. We need to keep hitting them until they stop moving.
We’re well able to do that already. There’s nothing wrong with pondering, in general, whether we need to better penetrate COTS targeting loops for a proliferating population of missiles out there. We probably do; we also already are working that problem. We could undoubtedly be doing it faster. Peer competitors, as mentioned, aren’t getting any slower or slacker. (Even Iran itself, as I’ve outlined before, is already capable of putting up scenarios in which its different maritime assets gang up to overwhelm a Navy warship and get past its defenses. The Houthis don’t have the rich assortment of assets needed for that enterprise. Iran might someday (soon) assemble them on the Yemeni coast.)
But counterattacking symmetrically, as if it’s only fair to leave the whole situation governed by the Houthis’ targeting OODA loop, is about the wrongest approach there is. No military performance should be judged by that meaningless standard. It’s badly misguided to imagine it informs us of anything decisive, if we have the means to prevail by bringing our much bigger advantages to bear.
We do have the means. So far, POTUS hasn’t had the will.
The main advantage the Houthis have is immunity from the full level of counteraction the United States could bring to this problem. That’s because the President of the United States isn’t bringing it.
What the U.S. is not doing
There are two aspects of the situation that must be understood to accurately perceive what we’re not doing. They’re very simple.
One is that Iran is behind all of this. Deterring, neutralizing, and defeating the Houthis requires cutting them off from Iran, and putting the Iranian regime in a better frame of mind.
Second, this is an international security problem with implications for the stability and future of the entire world. That does not mean the U.S. should preemptively go to war over it. It does mean that the situation warrants using a full bag of tricks to correct it, even if doing so goes beyond what’s been customary in recent years, and imposes temporary inconvenience on some bystanders.
At the outset, the first point has direct relevance to the NYT narrative about ingenious Houthis. Iran’s close involvement in the Houthis’ armed activities makes it virtually certain that, as analysts from General Donovan (see footnote) to Stephen Bryen of the Jewish Policy Center have concluded, Iranian operatives are directly participating in those activities. (Stephen Bryen’s article has an excellent summary of the Houthis’ drone capabilities, a major element of their antiship attack profile. Highly recommended reading. I concur with Bryen’s take: “By iterating AIS and radar, the Houthis or Iranians know where their target is in near real-time. (My own [Bryen’s] belief is that these complex operations are handled by Iranians.)” His Substack can be found here.)
And here’s something very important to the options for countering the Houthi attacks. Where it’s evident Iran is directly involved, as with the converted freighter Behshad – which acts as a surveillance and intelligence asset for Houthi operations from Yemen – there is no need to sneak around being coy about who sinks the ship. When the U.S. sees Behshad participating in a Houthi antiship targeting event, the Navy should have the authorization to just go over and render it non-operational, out in the open. For iron-clad justification, do this when the Houthis are targeting a U.S.-flagged ship of any type.
Update: According to Tanker Trackers, Behshad left the Gulf of Aden earlier in January, headed back for Bandar Abbas.
However, AIS tracking shows Behshad in the Gulf of Aden, just east of Djibouti, as recently as 23 January.
It’s not clear if Behshad is still in the area. Iranian ships have frequently gamed AIS to disguise their movements, so neither the earlier nor the most recent AIS update is necessarily to be trusted. However, the U.S. and coalition navies have every means to be sure where Behshad is if she is operating in the Gulf of Aden. The option of taking the ship out if she participates in targeting of U.S. shipping remains.
If the Iranian frigate Alborz is participating in targeting support for the Houthis, moreover, or if another ship is detected in such a role, taking out such ships when they are caught in mid-attack is justified.
The U.S. should also demonstrate awareness of Iranian participation by attacking locations in Yemen where we know Iranian operatives are present. Keep in mind, U.S.-flagged shipping is being attacked. The U.S. isn’t the instigating party. We have an affirmative obligation to protect ships under our flag, and it is our sovereign right to decide what our purpose is in doing that. Our purpose should be decisively squelching threats that would interfere with our peaceful use of security and freedom on the seas. Merely reacting to the threats as they happen is an anti-purpose.
Why would we get away with that? Because it’s justified and we can make it stick. If that’s not an acceptable principle (note: it is acceptable; it’s the premise of “rules-based order” and the UN’s principles of sovereignty), then no one is safe and international stability is a pipe dream.
For optimum effectiveness, and to discourage Iran from foolish escalation, the U.S. response should be a package of decisive moves – as opposed to one-offs of tentative and incremental ones. Stopping (mostly) Iran’s arms traffic to the Houthis is feasible, and if the Houthis continue to target our ships or those of anyone in the maritime-security alliances with us (Prosperity Guardian and Poseidon Archer), we should exercise the option of ordering smuggling crews to abandon ship and sinking their vessels and cargo. We can also sink Iran’s coastal transport fleet at the pier. Eliminating a chunk of those assets preemptively would be a sound move for regional security in general; if it caused Iran to stop running the ships in order to save some of them, so much the better.
If the U.S. showed we were serious, I predict we would receive a level of cooperation from the Gulf States, though probably not to the extent of attacking ships. But denying Iranian smuggling ships safe haven at the vast anchorages off the Emirates and Oman would be feasible. (That would, among other things, complicate Iranian attempts to transfer cargo at sea.) Enlisting both of the Gulf States on the Strait of Hormuz to increase vigilance and ensure the safety of third-party shipping (i.e., safety from Iranian sabotage) in their anchorages should likewise not meet with resistance.
Obtaining those nations’ help in closing gaps in intelligence would be feasible as well. If we needed to target arms convoys trying to proceed by stealth from the southeast coast of Yemen to Houthi-held territory, the UAE and Oman would have unique insight.
Although it’s hard to separate our options into neat categories, we must also, of course, consider directly addressing the Houthis’ attack assets. Besides kinetic targeting, denying the Houthis use of the targeting-support network they rely on is important.
Stephen Bryen has good ideas for neutralizing the Houthi drone fleet, including denying them GPS access and satellite links. Third-party service providers would have to cooperate in that effort, which is what diplomacy and superpower prestige are for. The nations hosting the providers would be much more inclined to cooperate if the U.S. were showing a strong hand rather than a weak one.
Jamming radars used for Houthi attacks, as suggested by Bryen, would also of course be an essential option.
Directly addressing the NYT tale of Houthi ingenuity, it would also be very effective to remove – temporarily – the electromagnetic “noise” the Houthis hide their targeting activities in. It’s hard to hide if the hiding place evaporates. Warn the most Houthi-like, third-party radar and communications users out of the area, and if they don’t comply, treat them like Houthis. Smuggling boats and fishermen would be inconvenienced for a brief period, but we’re stopping World War III here. Better that they live to fish and smuggle another day. (The inconvenience would probably be an incentive to help the U.S effort out with intelligence, for that matter.)
Of course, where Houthis are using assets on fast boats at sea to either assist targeting or directly threaten merchants, those fast boats should be attacked and left inoperable, sunk or no longer seaworthy. The boats should be taken out whenever opportune as they idle at pier or anchorage offshore.
These are examples of measures that could be taken to actually eliminate the Houthis’ assets and opportunities, separate the Houthis from the logistic tether to Iran, and daunt the Iranian regime. Acting decisively would keep Iran quieter than whining defensively as we have been doing. The mullahs know they can’t win a pitched confrontation with a determined U.S., and it’s the determination they need to see. Their purpose isn’t martyrdom. They have every intention themselves of living to fight another day.
But there is also a diplomatic imperative that only the United States is suited for, and now is the time to get it underway. The necessary enterprise is obtaining a settlement in Yemen.
A better peace
If we don’t want Iran to just creep back in and recreate the current partnership with the Houthis, settling Yemen down is what’s needed. The good news is that much of the conceptual work and the lining up of political intentions, with named parties and objectives, is already done. As described in material linked from my 17 January article, Saudi Arabia and UAE are already sponsoring claimants to governing authority in Yemen. There’s a recent history of talks as well. This isn’t new ground to plow; what it requires is a jolt of urgency and focus.
Not one U.S. boot needs to hit Yemeni soil for this. (Some State Department loafers could, at some point. Or, who knows, orthopedic-sole Oxfords. Image this mentally as you will.) UAE and Saudi Arabia should have the lead, with their Yemeni clients and a strong signal of U.S. interest.
The message to be conveyed to the Houthis is that Yemen is going to be settled one way or another, to ensure precisely that it is not in play in the current regional crisis, and the Houthis can stop throwing missiles around and participate, or get rolled.
That message will come through loud and clear if the U.S. is already moving around smacking things as described above. We should be prepared to support responsible uses of force, if they are necessary, organized by the Saudis and Emiratis. Anyone who thinks that’s worse than leaving Iran’s Qods Force and the Hezbollah Foreign Legion all over Houthi-held territory has already exposed his bias, and has no further argument worth hearing. Yemen must be taken off the playing field. Stabilizing the situation is more important than leaving Yemen to fester on principle.
Frankly, I don’t think that much kinetic force would be necessary, if the Houthis are seeing a united and determined front from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and UAE (and ideally the UK, with tacit buy-in from nations like Egypt, India, and Japan). If the Houthis can be domesticated, we will not find that out by leaving Iran free to pump them full of knock-off missiles and COTS radars. The only way to give them a chance is to offer them that chance in conditions we’re going to change whether they like it or not.
An instituted settlement may not be achievable in the short term. But having an active process would justify stifling the Houthis with the threat of force, and would shift the momentum and situational primacy to America’s regional partners – which for everyone’s sake is where those quantities should be anyway. I would not, moreover, expect the near-term stabilization of Yemen to be “the” final answer. That would be asking a lot in a notoriously unstable locale. The better peace would be for the future.
Essentials
But stopping the bleeding now is the only way to get to it in an orderly fashion. Meanwhile, there’s an essential precursor to this line of effort, and it’s plugging the black hole threatening to open in Iraq and Syria. For both countries, the Biden administration emitted signals this past week about the possibility (read: likelihood) of the U.S. pulling troops out.
The timing of these signals can’t do anything other than indicate U.S. weakness and inclination to retreat. The signals are being sent after weeks of unanswered attacks on American forces in the two countries, so the message is clear: the U.S. is preparing to run away with our tail between our legs.
The killing of three American soldiers near Al-Tanf on 28 January highlights that that is the goal Iran seeks. Again, this is not a merely incidental situation that we can run away from without consequence. The stability of the Middle East, its enticing borders, and its chokepoint belt is the key to the entire Eastern hemisphere. Everyone will get involved, and the reverberations will affect the United States instantly.
We have no strategic buffer in today’s world. A strong America has made it unnecessary for our allies to fight for less-defended frontage like Gibraltar, Suez, and Japan’s southern “island chains.” We’ve grown complacent in that regard. But a weak America will see how quickly that frontage, on which we depend for defensive depth, can be turned against our allies, and us, as liabilities.
If America were to act quickly, we could avert such disasters by doing two primary things: closing off Yemen and Iraq to Iran. I’ve spoken mostly of Yemen here, but in Iraq, we are capable of bombing every weapons cache and operating lair of the Iran-backed militias into oblivion, and we should do that forthwith. (White-flag advances could be accepted on a case basis. U.S. determination should be clear, evidenced by follow-through, but all the better if it quickly has a quieting effect that lasts as long as we need it to.)
Every asset of Iran’s in Iraq should be treated the same way. Besides interdicting any logistic flow on the ground from Iran into Iraq, the U.S. should warn Iran and Iraq that we will shoot Iranian cargo flights going through Iraq’s air space out of the sky, and then do it if necessary to convince the mullahs. The war materiel those planes are carrying is linked to attacks on U.S. forces. (Much can be achieved in an orderly manner with international warning mechanisms that would keep innocent third parties out of harm’s way, and reset the initiative for governing shared spaces to the U.S. and the responsible, status quo powers. There is simply no reason to sit passive while Iran encroaches improperly on shared and third-party spaces in order to advance the radical regime’s purposes.)
Iraq would do best to cooperate with us and not with Iran for the time being; meanwhile, we should bulk up on long-languishing diplomatic ingenuity and get on a better general footing with Iraq, one that discourages Iran’s inroads there instead of cooperating with them.
Speaking of which: one more vignette from recent events will round this off. A very peculiar report emerged on 25 January that the U.S. had warned Iran in advance of ISIS’s intention to mount a terrorist attack at Kerman, Iran, near Qasem Soleimani’s burial site (the event from 3 January 2024).
Among several significant questions, the most important one would be why that disclosure is suddenly being made. Recall that the Biden administration has spent a lot of time trying to influence events with “disclosures” about its intelligence adventures (cf. the Ukraine conflict. Scroll here to “The amazing Russia-baiting info ops maneuver”). We can expect when feats of “intelligence” are being leaked that an attempt is being made to shape expectations or events.
What would be the vision here? Likely answer: a resumption of Iran’s campaign to establish its military presence across Iraq, in the years from 2012 to 2018, with the excuse of “fighting ISIS.”
Under the command of Qasem Soleimani, Iran “fought ISIS” in those years all the way to Deir-ez-Zor in Syria, depositing an occupying, quasi-Iraqi presence at each strategic way point, from the hinterlands of Mosul in the north to Ramadi and Fallujah and westward up the Euphrates in central Iraq.
In 2024, by leaking that the U.S. had warned Iran of the impending “ISIS” terror attack, a marker would be put down that ISIS is back, ISIS is a threat to Iran, and it’s the U.S. that’s saying that. The smoke signal reads: “Open season on Iraq again. Go back, Iran, and ‘fight ISIS’ some more.”
The weird report of 25 January thus aids Iran in justifying military activities in Iraq. This wouldn’t be the first instance of such cooperation from the United States. Obama used U.S. military power to help advance Soleimani’s proxy progress across Iraq in the peak “fighting ISIS” years. The U.S. in effect certifying now that ISIS attacked Iran on 3 January 2024 would constitute more such assistance.
Of course, that’s the opposite of what we should be doing.
Get ‘er done
Go after Iran’s foothold in Iraq. Don’t leave it in place and hope to cope from the other end in Syria. If Iran can get across Iraq unimpeded, that’s more than 50% of what the radical regime needs to pose a threat from Syria.
Do I think President Joe Biden is going to do any of this? No. I’m not naïve. His pattern is established. But the legacy media are lurking with their warmed-over, plausible-seeming narratives, like the “ingenious insurgents” theme from the Vietnam era, to excuse strategic and political failures by the media’s favored administrations. The media will obfuscate the issues if they can. Their misleading patter needs countering.
There are feasible steps the U.S. could be taking right now: steps available to a superpower; steps that alter conditions for ingenious insurgents asymmetrically; steps that are fully justified because Iran is already behind more than enough belligerent acts to warrant them. They are also justified because preempting a world war is far better than letting one happen. Now no one can say that there wasn’t any option proposed, in fewer than 7,000 words, to do that.
* I weighed the matter and decided to put this background in a footnote. It’s of interest, I think, as it conveys important, ordinary realities about how the process of understanding the enemy and reacting to him works.
As a scene-setter, I’ll quote a passage from an email I sent on 16 January, before I became aware of Lt. Gen. Donovan’s interest in the Houthis’ use of COTS radar. I wasn’t speaking from that specific awareness, because I didn’t have it yet. I was speaking from my career as a Naval officer, and general knowledge of recent developments in commercial marine radar systems. I would credit every JO in the U.S. Navy with the same level of general insight.
[The Houthis’ loss of radars to coalition strikes] doesn’t mean all that much. The Houthis could actually order maritime radars from a website and get multiple copies of something usable for the purpose. There’s a thriving smuggling network across southeastern Yemen, next to Oman and open to the sea. …
I’d be especially concerned at this point about the Houthis achieving the same surveillance and fires coordination effect with less capable off-the-shelf radars and a comms network hardened against quick detection and interdiction. One of the things photographed in Hamas’s possession after 7 Oct was a set of Chinese-design next-generation comms devices, which are ingenious at hiding in even the most discrete, identifiable noise of a local comms environment. To me that was confirmation that Iran has such a capability, Iran’s proxies are being supplied with it, and rapidly parsing out the terrorists’ comms in a tactical operations area is now meaningfully harder.
Not knowing what General Donovan knew from his time as Commander of Task Force 51 in the U.S. Fifth Fleet (the U.S. numbered fleet in the CENTCOM theater), I could nevertheless think along the same lines as the Houthis he observed, because the general situation has been obvious for years.
Having read the NYT article, I was able to recover the timeline of General Donovan’s observations, their acceptance as a significant insight in the Marine Corps, and their adoption for Marine Corps operations. It’s of some interest, I think, that the timeline isn’t quite what the NYT reader would expect.
Donovan’s observations were made during his tour as Commander TF51 in CENTCOM. That timeframe was June 2016 to July 2018.
His observations were cited in a draft USMC publication dated December 2021 on using the Marines in integrated deterrence roles, sometimes innovative ones (see A Concept for Stand-in Forces; call-out pp. 19-20 of the document, “Lessons from Actions in the Red Sea: Evolution of an ‘Inside Force’ and Command and Control”). This meant the Corps was taking them seriously as a consideration for doctrine, procurement, and tactics.
The reason this is a particular concern for the Marines is that they operate in the littoral, both offshore and on, and they need to both understand the use of radar by an enemy ashore, and use surface search/targeting radars ashore themselves. (The Navy doesn’t have to do the latter for shipborne combat operations.)
General Donovan’s interest was in both sides of the shore-based anti-surface radar problem. He saw the need to understand and track an opponent like the Houthis, based on their COTS use, and to consider adapting such use for the Marine Corps in its own shoreborne operations.
The first instance I could find of such COTS radar use being tested by the Marines was the exercise event referenced in the NYT article in September 2022, which took place in Sweden. The Marines in Norway – from units of the 2nd Marine Division out of II MEF in Camp Lejeune, which has been rotating troops through Norway since January 2017 – were involved (note that the same NYT reporter was tracking the COTS story in the 2022 report). Donovan commanded 2nd MARDIV from August 2020 through the end of August 2022, and his personal interest in tactical innovation with COTS systems no doubt boosted this effort.
Also in the fall of 2022, a task-organized unit from 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), out of I MEF (Camp Pendleton), took along COTS equipment for the inaugural deployment of Marine Rotational Force Southeast Asia (MRF-SEA). The MRF-SEA operated ashore at various locations around Southeast Asia, and hitched a ride on Military Sealift Command’s (MSC) expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Brunswick (T-EPF6), on which the Marines got in some additional testing time with the hard-traveling SIMRAD. (I recall noting this at the time, when the MRF-SEA Marines embarked on Brunswick, the first such rotation and embarkation.)
During the rotation, in November 2022, MRF-SEA deployed SIMRAD COTS radar in an exercise with the Indonesians, Keris MAREX 23 in Lampung, Indonesia.
Credit: U.S. Marines with 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit utilize a SIMRAD Halo-24 radar while conducting sensing expeditionary advanced base operations during Exercise Balikatan 23 at Naval Education, Training and Doctrine Command, Philippines, April 21, 2023. Balikatan is an annual exercise between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and U.S. military designed to strengthen bilateral interoperability, capabilities, trust, and cooperation built over decades of shared experiences. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Marcus E. Melara)
Additional instances in Southeast Asia included Balikatan 2023, a recurring exercise in the Philippines. Balikatan was held in April 2023, with 13th MEU participating.
In a follow-on MRF-SEA deployment, in November 2023, the SIMRAD radar was once again on task during exercise KAMANDAG 7 in the Philippines.
The MRF-SEA Marines also tested it in coordinated use with an RQ-20B PUMA drone in exercise Sama-Sama in the Philippines in October 2023.
This tour d’horizon should clarify that we’ve been taking the COTS model seriously, and the Marines have found a legitimate and significant application for it. We can note that there’s a certain sluggishness in the reaction time here, with General Donovan’s insights emerging before July of 2018 and the institutional reaction finally going live in 2022. That’s how it very often works. It’s another perennial insight of alert JOs that it would sure be nice if the institutions reacted faster.
But that actually has little to do with U.S. preparedness to counter and deter the Houthi attacks on shipping in 2023 and early 2024. That task isn’t one we should primarily approach symmetrically against what the Houthis are doing. It’s not analogous to what the Marine Corps needs and is developing. All we achieve by symmetrical antimissile protection is defending local shipping against the attacks, which the Navy has in fact been doing. Unfortunately, occasional leak-throughs are going to be inevitable not because we don’t understand the Houthi attack model, but because no antimissile system performs 100% against the threat.
On-scene defense isn’t the right answer. The right answer is attacking the Houthis’ missile stashes, manufacturing sites, and supply line from Iran, so that their entire capability is eliminated.
The Commander in Chief isn’t taking those measures: the measures necessary to deter, neutralize, or defeat the opponent. We need to aggressively bomb storage sites and transport convoys, and interdict smuggling. We need to sink Houthi and Iranian assets at sea when they’re involved in targeting commercial shipping. We need to fry radars the Houthis could be using until such radars stop spinning, and deny satellite service to any users who could be Houthis. We can handle this without putting American boots ashore. We’re just not doing it.
Feature image: Houthis honor their SIMRAD radars in military parade. CCTV video, YouTube.
The Optimistic Conservative 
Weird the Houthis were visiting Kremlin the day they hit UK-owned, Marshall Islands flagged Marlin Luanda, carrying a cargo of Russian naphtha from Greece to Singapore, and the miss on Panama-flagged 109,000-ton tanker M/T Achilles, loaded with oil from Prmorsk, Russia, probably meant for India.
Can barely imagine the diplo-chatter on Ukraine droning Russia oil & gas refineries!
Adding, the three reservists who died at Tower22 were combat engineers with 926th Engineer Brigade, Fort Moore, Ga. And, the Pentagon has denied Monday’s Houthi claim of a missile launch on the USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3), while it sailed through the Gulf of Aden.
https://news.usni.org/2024/01/29/pentagon-denies-uss-lewis-b-puller-was-attacked-3-soldiers-killed-in-jordan-strike-identifiedAlso adding, is IRGC’s naval drone carrier and electronic warfare vessel, the Shah Mahdavi now in the Gulf of Oman? And/or the IRGC’s 95 missile-launching speedboats? They joined the IRGC Navy on March 9, 2023. More on the Shah Mahdavi at:
https://news.usni.org/2023/01/03/iran-building-drone-aircraft-carrier-from-converted-merchant-ship-photos-showFifth Fleet, and the GCC, must be wary of the Shah Mahdavi… Iranian drones seem to be highly effective.My source on Martin Luanda and Achilles tankers is:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/world/houthis-strike-tanker-carrying-russian-fuel-for-first-time-narrowly-miss-second-india-bound-tanker/cid/1996457Adding, Jan. 29, 2024 How to Kill Russia’s Oil Economy. More effective sanction measures combined with Ukrainian drone attacks could bring Russia to its knees.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-kill-russia%E2%80%99s-oil-economy-208937Author Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum. (Hope no one takes him seriously about NATO weaponizing chokepoints to cut off Russian exports or more UKR drone attacks.) Fwiw, National Interest has new focus with many posts on USNavy and Air Force technology. Pillar was disappeared.Always a delight to see you, D4x. Yes, I’m very familiar with Shah Mahdavi. I’ve been on the watch for evidence that it’s operating in the Persian Gulf, SOH, or GOO. I’m confident Iran won’t put it out where the Houthi-inflated conflict is raging, lest the US find a reason to take it out. But it’s a complexifying factor the IRGCN could deploy quickly, when the waters off Iran are ill-patrolled by US/coalition assets.
We’re in such a time at the moment. We’re not asset-heavy offshore from Iran, as I’ve noted before. That’s where I would have Ike right now, instead of near the BAM. There’s no reason why attacks on the Houthis have to come from the Red Sea, or even from a carrier, unless no one in the region will let us launch the Air Force from host-country soil. Ensuring we have that permission is a matter of looking stronger, not weaker, and looking like we won’t leave a cooperating host twisting in the wind.
The Air Force is perfectly capable of shouldering the Houthi load for targeting on land. What we need is both the Air Force and Navy in position to pound Iraqi militia positions in Iraq and Syria, and that means the carrier in the Gulf.
Naturally, I don’t foresee “Biden” doing this. But it can’t be said either now or later that he didn’t have this option, or any other option he doesn’t choose. He’s making bad decisions that nothing compels him to make.
Well, I know you understand my point on that. Regarding shutting down Russian oil (or gas), China and Europe have a common interest in not letting that happen. As long as China is keeping Russia’s oil trade pried open for business, other countries like South Korea and India are going to stay quietly in that corner. I think crippling Russia in that regard will remain a talking point that doesn’t bear inspection, for US policy.
I note also that Biden’s decision to halt processing for LNG export facilities in the US has the major strategic effect of eliminating potential competition for Russia’s gas industry. I suspect the move is being made for China’s benefit, but it benefits Russia too. “Biden” isn’t even talking a good game about deterring Russia or having a significant, real effect with economic tools.
Thanks for your reply, and for providing the only platform for a deep dive into ‘Iran and her proxies’. Interesting de-escalation?: news
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2024/01/30/Iraq-s-Kataib-Hezbollah-suspends-military-operations-on-US-forcesDan Graham reminded me of
johnhelmer.org, who I rarely read. His latest cites a NOT-opensource report the Shah Mandavi deployed into the GOO – the map shows it inside Iran’s territorial waters. When I read the USNI report, sounded like Mandavi is a carrier-killer by a swarm of lethal drones. However, am so unwell that I can not dig deeper.Guess we will have to disagree about Russia. I am not alone in believing US-led sanctions & freezing of assets is the biggest foreign policy blunder since the British thought they could regime change Afghanistan in 1838, based on same irrational paranoia that led to the other big blunder, the Crimean War, and, one can argue, Ukraine in 2022. Russia has turned away from West for good while Z’s Ukraine now uses drone-terror!
What has been weird is the sources who would agree with me on Ukraine v Russia have ALL gone pro-Hamas since Oct0723.
Anyway, best read in weeks: “Turkey’s Hamas Drift Is Dangerous. Erdogan is becoming a de facto partner with Iran and its proxies, supporting their destabilization agenda across the region. by Russell A. Berman Jan 26 2024
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/turkey%E2%80%99s-hamas-drift-dangerous-208873His description of the 2015 ‘coup’ made me think that was the template for so much ‘fortification’ in the USA since 2016. Russell A. Berman, age 73, is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.Thanks again.
for the thread, very detailed on Tower22 air defense and drone tech, both US & Iran, and more:
DoD losing the drone wars?
Interesting twist in the saga, Feb 1, 2024:
https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1753129271420502417“uncrewed surface vehicle” (Is that one of IRGC’s 95 missile-launching speedboats?) destroyed by “U.S. Forces” in Red Sea. (Perhaps UAE gave permission for USAF to use base on Socotra Island?)Best reports on Israel v Hamas negotiations have been by Hamza Hendawi, in Cairo for thenationalnews
https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/palestine-israel/2024/02/01/gaza-truce-draft-deal-us-palestinian-state/No other news reporter comes close. Reading Hendawi saves so much time. He has ‘sources’ from Egypt’s super spy chief & el-Sisi’s right hand, Abbas Kamel, who seems to be the one person Hamas listens to.https://archive.is/20240114115323/https://www.intelligenceonline.com/government-intelligence/2023/01/20/abbas-kamel-the-ubiquitous-spy-chief-consolidating-sisi-s-power,109904320-graB-Team somehow knows only CIA Chief Burns has credibility in these negotiations.I saw somewhere the administration (Biden?) was saying that we would carefully calibrate our response to this latest attack. Carefully calibrated escalation with scheduled pauses to induce the foe to moderate conduct has been the bane of every conflict we have engaged in from Vietnam to Afghanistan, to current situations in Iraq and the Red Sea. Do we never learn? Careful calibration turned the Vietnam War into an unwinnable morass. It turned Iraq into a catastrophe, and Afghanistan into a 20-year quagmire. It is the conceit of the unsure, the dithering, the cultured elite, the self-identified globalist sophisticate as much as the unprincipled fretters wringing their hands over what others than their own might think or do, when the consequences should be immediate, devastating and out of all proportion to the abilities, standing or interests of the offender. Dictate the consequences, do not calibrate them.
The response should have been immediate – the commands should be authorized to act at once and overwhelmingly without having to wait for approval. Reinstitute the time-tested concept of punitive expeditions … exact severe consequences and go home, with the explicit understanding there is more where that came from if you do it again.
There should be smoking holes wherever there is an Iranian proxy launcher, support facility, command center, supply hub, troop center – you get the idea. Houthi forces afloat? Sink them on sight. Iran supplying targeting information via a ship in the Red Sea? Sink it – OK, if you have qualms, warn them to remove it or lose it, but if they don’t – sink it right away. The Iranian frigate now in the Red Sea? Same thing – send her home or we send her to the bottom. No occupation, no gradual escalation, no pause for reflection, no wringing of hands about international comity, no inducements to join in the brotherhood of nations, no ground troops or democracy building … f**k with us and pay a price – do not dare to attack us, our national interests or those of the free world we represent. “This Government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”
Welcome, Urey Patrick, and apologies for the delay in your comment’s appearance. There’s a one-time “approval” for new commenters, but it’s one and done (unless you change something about your user info in a future comment).
I’m in so much basic agreement with you that there isn’t a lot more to say. One point I would make though is that we shouldn’t hand over the concept of careful calibration for Biden or his political allies to define.
Using force effectively and efficiently to get the RIGHT job done IS careful calibration. The right job here is deterring Iran, putting disruptive threats to bed, and preventing a world war.
Biden’s implied definition of the job — tailoring US reactions to somehow have no more effect than specific attacks by Iran’s proxies — is the wrong job. There are no valid premises behind it. (E.g., the implication that there’s some acceptable level of attacks on shipping in the GOA/BAM and Red Sea, and WE would be escalating to do what’s necessary to shut the attacks down altogether. That’s just an absurdity.)
It’s not uncalibrated or careless to hand Iran dozens of smoking holes when they kill Americans and threaten our national interests. Failing to generate the smoking holes is what’s irresponsible. That failure harms the US, AND it immediately starts to undermine the expectations that global stability depend on.
Well, we missed our chance at getting our people out of indefensible positions. What happened was inevitable and it sucks that the Beltway tyrants and financial monsters ruling us used the troops as human tripwires for so long.
Of course, we must respond. Our response will be ineffective. We haven’t transcended the tired old geopolitical paradigm we’ve grown accustomed to working under. It’s gotten too expensive, it’s unwieldy to implement, and most importantly, it’s missing the target. There’s much more that needs to be said, unfortunately it’ll take too long for comment. I’ll just leave it at this.
We’re in for a long string of very rude awakenings.
The Behshad leaving the area means Iran is listening to China.
And Biden is just doing what Obama and Obama’s masters want: to take down America a peg or three. This is very frustrating. That ship should have been surrounded, its crew given the option to surrender, taken to a neutral country’s ship (say, Qatar) and repatriated, then the vessel itself sunk.
And now on February 2nd the retaliation begins. Appropriately on Ground Hog’s day, because just like in the movie, I think I’ve seen this before. With the same ending each time. Until there’s a change in the Oval Office.
Anyone know what ridiculous name was chosen for the retaliatory strike operation this time?
JE, if you’re still in California, stay safe from the nasty storms.