Houthi rebels “kamikaze” drones and ballistic missiles are no match for a US Navy and carrier strike force. However, that doesn’t mean the war in Yemen is a walk in the park, according to an article published by The Foundation for Defense of Democracies website.
Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thinks that “Airstrikes can be a false prophet of success, especially with modern precision weapons. This perception is because the extreme precision provides operators with a sense of accomplishment, but the challenge is making the damage actually count”.
He added “ If the Houthis can hide ballistic missiles in caves and keep making them, all they have to do is wait out the campaign.
Air campaigns have worked in the past in several instances. The campaign against Serbia in 1999 worked because Serbia’s army wasn’t prepared to face a modern NATO bombing campaign. The campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked in 1991 because it also arrayed a modern US-led coalition against Saddam’s tank-heavy conventional Soviet-supplied army. Iraq’s defense made easy pickings for air power.
The Houthis don’t have thousands of tanks. They aren’t a state like Serbia. They have been under air attack for years by Western-supplied aircraft and munitions”.
Frantzman found that there is a chance the sheer firepower of the USS Harry Truman and other assets the US puts into play in the region could bring the Houthis to heel. There is a chance that the Trump administration’s threat to hold Iran accountable could get Tehran to open a backchannel.
The Trump administration’s decision to focus on the Houthis may be a way to go after low-hanging fruit. Opening the Red Sea to shipping and reducing threats can be seen as a win for US naval power, but “For all this to work, the White House needs to show it achieved something in Yemen. All eyes are thus on the USS Harry Truman and its presence in the Red Sea, along with US Central Command, to pull this operation off.