One would think that 40 years into the “smart munitions” era of American warfare the United States would have learned something. Apparently not.
American strikes had hit more than 1,000 targets, including multiple command and control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons manufacturing facilities and advanced weapons storage locations, the Pentagon reported. In addition, more than a dozen senior Houthi leaders had been killed, the military said.
But the cost of the operation was staggering. The Pentagon had deployed two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses, to the Middle East, officials acknowledged privately. By the end of the first 30 days of the campaign, the cost had exceeded $1 billion, the officials said.
So many precision munitions were being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners were growing increasingly concerned about overall stocks and the implications for any situation in which the United States might have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.
And through it all, the Houthis were still shooting at vessels and drones, fortifying their bunkers and moving weapons stockpiles underground.
The White House began pressing Central Command for metrics of success in the campaign. The command responded by providing data showing the number of munitions dropped. The intelligence community said that there was “some degradation” of Houthi capability, but argued that the group could easily reconstitute, officials said.
As a quick review, CENTCOM wanted a sustained campaign during the Biden Administration, which was rejected in favor of limited strikes that were ineffective. Now-President Trump wanted to “do something” about the Houthis shooting up Red Sea shipping and CENTCOM pitched a sustained campaign to systematically destroy the Houthi defenses and key personnel. This was to take the better part of a year. Trump gave them 30 days. Then Signal-gate happened. Then the USS Truman started losing F/A-18s to accidents, mishaps, and sharp turns and such. Then there were reports that those expensive American munitions were doing a bang-up job knocking down buildings but not doing much to dampen the bloodthirsty Houthis desire to wreak havoc on the wider world. By the time the Houthi’s sent a missile into Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport causing minor damage and the Israelis responded by causing major damage to Yemen’s Sanaa International Airport, President Trump’s attention had turned elsewhere. Thus, victory is declared, next item please.
Victory because America crushed the enemy, saw them driven before us, and heard the lamentations of their assorted next-of-kin? No, victory because X amount of munitions dropped, Y number of buildings hit, Z number of whos-its and whas-its “estimated” to be killed, the President doesn’t want to hear about it anymore, and everyone up and down the chain of command can fill in the blanks of their performance reviews with those handy dandy stats now.
Puffery, one could call it. “They said please don’t bomb us anymore and we’re not going to attack your ships… And I will accept their word, and we are going to stop the bombing of the Houthis effective immediately,” the President said from the Oval Office. The “accepting their word” thing is a particularly egregious bit of rhetoric even by Trumpian standards, and a far cry from braggadocios sharing of bombing clips on Truth social and blowhard promises to “completely annihilate” the Houthis from the long, long ago of… last month.
Declaring victory and moving on when there clearly wasn’t victory and leaving a mess that will definitely flare up even worse later is not an American invention, but America has just about perfected it. Post-WW2 victory against Germany and Japan — and the truly historic win of rebuilding both countries into not only economic titans but staunch allies — seems even further away than the 80 Year anniversary that was just celebrated. While American greatness coasted economically post-WW2 for decades, the US military has had its ups and down. Vietnam introduced warfighting for a television audience, and political peril, and Americans learned all the wrong lessons about both.
After the disasterpiece that was Vietnam, American arms did some soul searching and reinvented itself into the most dominant military the world had ever seen. It is past time for the American military and the civilian government that runs it to once again do some of that soul searching, if one can find a soul in the incestuous mess that is the government-military-contractor menage-a-trois. The threat of US military intervention only deters if believed, and decades of blowharding from Washington with little victory to back it up has taken a toll. The failures in the Global War on Terror and in Afghanistan specifically were the results of years of issues papered over and excused to keep up political appearances, budgets, and contractor billables.
For an administration that has done a lot of crowing about “warfighting,” being deterred from winning a fight because of optics, attention span, self-induced errors, and the dollar signs on the PowerPoint briefing stands testament to the same old, same old reluctance to see through anything that isn’t politically perfect and risk free. Which in warfare, is pretty much never.
America bringing an over-budget Bluetooth sledgehammer to fight a swarm of gnats is not only an old problem in world affairs, but a growing one. Blowing stuff up in high definition looks good, but in the Rub’ al-Khali the actual, on-the-ground gains of viral clips don’t change the situation much. All the technological wonderment that the DOD has on call for the president to activate failed to change the situation on the ground in the jungles of Vietnam, the rugged landscape of Afghanistan, or to deter the Houthis from their perch along the Red Sea. Add in a paralyzing fear of American casualties and an overbearing treatment of foreign policy as just the b-story for the domestic political tv show, and you have a recipe for momentary tactical wins that will inevitably become strategic losses. The Houthi terrorists are the most legitimate of military targets, posing a clear and present danger by any measurable standard. But threatening to bomb their corner of the desert into glass, only to barely disturb the Houthi-Yemen civil war sandcastle, is worse than doing nothing for all parties involved.
The world isn’t just a more dangerous place because the bad guys don’t fear the American military; it is a more dangerous place because the bad guys know all they have to do is outlast an increasingly impatient and disinterested American leadership and populace that will keep the American military on the shortest of leashes. For the Houthis, staying proxies for Iran as a means to your end goal of taking over Yemen at least comes with the consistent commitment of Tehran to keep your terror machine stocked up if you can outlast America’s attention.
American military projection as an over glorified global drive-by for domestic political purposes is never going to work. But that appears to be exactly the standing policy of the United States of America at the moment. The latest Houthi episode breaks down to spending a billion dollars to make things go boom and buy a few weeks/months of declaring “victory.” A victory that will only last until the Houthis hit another ship, or Israel, or something else important, since that “victory” was made for tv and not measured in diminished capacity for future bad headlines. When that happens, the American leadership that caused the mess with a premature victory-gasm will just hope everyone forgot about the previous episode. Which will probably work. Blowhards usually win the news cycle, and everyone else loses.
As with so much of this administrations work, performative war works for people with short attention spans.