The Red Sea War

I have been negligent with respect to posting about the conflict (thanks, Cheryl) in the Red Sea, and now we’ve done gone and bombed something:

• In a statement, President Biden said that the strikes were directed at sites used by the Houthis to launch their attack. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the strikes were conducted by U.S. and British forces, with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.
• More than 60 sites in 16 locations in Yemen were targeted with 100 precision-guided munitions, Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, a senior Air Force commander overseeing forces in the Middle East, said in a statement. Among the targets were air defenses and munitions depots.
• Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesman, said in a video message Friday that 73 strikes hit the capital, Sanaa, and four other regions. Five of the group’s fighters had been killed and four wounded, Saree said. “The American and British enemy bears full responsibility for its criminal aggression against the Yemeni people, and it will not go unpunished or unanswered,” he said.

Nothing about this is all that surprising. Houthi leadership has almost literally been begging for airstrikes for the last month or so (key to their domestic legitimacy and to their relationship with Iran). It doesn’t seem particularly likely to me that these strikes will either prevent or deter attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, but it also doesn’t seem likely to escalate much beyond where we are right now. Why bomb if there’s not any real point? There’s more than a whiff of “something must be done, and this is something” to this, but the alternative is to confine ourselves to a defensive response that almost certainly requires a larger and more long-term military presence in the region. As for “the Houthis are heroes for trying to stop Israeli genocide” feel free to slam the door on your way out. If the Houthi leadership wants to be part of this war (and it seems that they very desperately do), then they get to be part of this war and that means strikes against the infrastructure that they’re using to randomly attack ships in the Red Sea.

Some other stuff:

• More detail on the strikes
• More detail on the weapons that the Houthis are firing at ships in the Red Sea.
• Strikes came on the heels of the biggest attack on shipping yet…
• Singapore is the latest member of the Red Sea Coalition of the Willing, which now includes some twenty members.
• An Iranian missile frigate is in the area…
• Some information on the economic impact…