[LargeTomato]

Conventional military wisdom is that you cannot win a war from the air. Case in point: Vietnam. You have to put boots on the ground to secure the area and the Saudis aren't about to do that and the American people would never support dying for a Saudi war.

[TylerE]

You don't need to a win a war here, just make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up.

[Cyph0n]

Due to their histories, the Yemenis - like the Afghan - have extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers. Top it off with the mountainous terrain in the northern and eastern regions and you have a recipe for failure through attrition.

[JumpCrisscross]

> extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers

That’s fine. Let them fight their civil war. The problem is long-range precision warfare extending past their costs. Knocking out that capability doesn’t require boots on the ground.

[Cyph0n]

You underestimate how important the Palestinian cause is to the Yemeni people. I’d wager they’d be willing to “pause” the infighting for quite some time.

Also, this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now.

[JumpCrisscross]

> this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now

As I mentioned elsewhere [1], this is fine. A stable, adversarial Yemen is better than the clusterfuck it currently is. A big part of the problem with the current situation is there is nobody to negotiate with who can credibly claim to control these armed factions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917581

[dragonwriter]

Guerilla tactics don't work against shipping lanes and no one (well, not the coalition to defend shipping, at least, certain of their neighbors might have other thoughts) wants to occupy Yemen in the first place.

[hattmall]

Flying cheap drones with homemade explosives into commercial cargo ships sound pretty guerilla.

[throwaway29812]

Why can't the west use radio jammers to make any drone non-responsive once it leaves Yemen ? Russia has been doing this on its border with great success.

[hattmall]

I think it's just a very large area and jamming is far from fool proof.

[JumpCrisscross]

> make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up

You need to degrade their capability to fire long-range assets precisely. That’s doable. If it’s locals lobbing unguided rockets into the ocean, that’s commercially manageable. Guided missiles and helicopter landings are not.

[underlipton]

This is an interesting statement to make, considering Yemen's recent history.

[logicchains]

It's Yemen, have you checked their GDP per capita recently? Life there is already hard enough that it's difficult to make it significantly worse.

[TylerE]

If harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates.

[JumpCrisscross]

> harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates

The history of area bombardment is it strengthens civilian resolve. Think: the Battle of Britain, Vietnam and America’s wars in the Middle East.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

> Aren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered?

I would say that Dresden is not a counterexample. Every year on February 13, many Dresdeners gather on the Neumarkt to commemorate the destruction of the city on the Bombennacht (night of the bombings) in 1944. The spectacle polarizes German society. Right-wing revisionists like to point to the destruction of Dresden to portray Germany as a victim of the Second World War. But for many Dresdeners, this is actually a matter that is associated with personal grief because they lost family members in the bombing. As a result, the possible political implications of this culture of remembrance fade into the background for many Dresdeners. Dresden is therefore a good example of how people move closer together after extensive bombing and how this effect can last for 80 years.

[eastbound]

Aren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered?

[greedo]

Strategic bombing in Europe was a drastic failure. The only successful part of it was that it fundamentally wiped out the Luftwaffe. German military production increase annually in spite of the Allies putting so much effort into the bombing campaign.

Strategic bombing has only influenced one country to surrender.

[ceejayoz]

Nazi Germany was already fundamentally beaten by the time of Dresden.

[BoiledCabbage]

And every tough guy wants to say that because it makes them feel good, but history keeps proving them wrong.

[nulld3v]

Unfortunately, there is a small problem with this approach: Pirates have guns, villagers don't. So villagers don't get to choose whether or not they harbour pirates.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Sounds suspiciously like Israel's theory of operations for Gaza, which has little evidence for its correctness at this point.

[RugnirViking]

I see you haven't been paying attention to Iraq Afghanistan Palestine Vietnam or really anywhere this tactic has been tried. Turns out bombing villages makes piracy more popular

[quotz]

Thats straight out of the Henry Kissinger handbook.

[mhb]

Tell the Palestinians.

[m101]

They will not out fight you, they will out wait you. Just like Afghanistan.

[TylerE]

Waiting is fine, as long as they aren't fighting. Them just hiding out in a cave somewhere counts as winning here, since we only care about protecting shipping.

[dragonwriter]

Since the strategic objective here will likely be to suppress them while changing the context with regard ro Israel-Palestine and their sponsors in Iran and not regime change, that works in the US's favor.