Behold the Red Sea Clown Show
Behold the Red Sea Clown Show
nothing is shocking
I’m still not quite sure what to say about this gobsmackingly amazing quote from Axios:
Houthi rebels are brandishing increasingly sophisticated weapons, including missiles that "can do things that are just amazing," the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer said at an Axios event.
The big picture: The militant group has for a year used drones and missiles to strangle waters off Yemen, disrupting international shipping.
Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante on Wednesday said the Houthis "are getting scary."
"I'm an engineer and a physicist, and I've been around missiles my whole career," he said at the Future of Defense summit in Washington, DC. "What I've seen of what the Houthis have done in the last six months is something that — I'm just shocked."
The Houthi?
In 2024, the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) budget was $842 billion. The entire nation of Yemen’s GDP in 2023 was somewhere around $21 billion depending on your source. The Houthi are a rebel group in Yemen, so only a portion of that is in the control of the Houthi. A significant percentage of that is directly or indirectly related to foreign aid.
How do they get their supplies? Well, they are a proxy of Iran. That is where they are getting their weapons from—and they are getting them by sea.
Iran’s entire GDP is $402 billion, less than half of the USA’s defense budget.
Shocked?
Let’s see, the budget for the USA’s intelligence services is via ChatGPT:
In Fiscal Year 2024, the U.S. intelligence budget includes the following key components:
National Intelligence Program (NIP): The budget for the NIP, which funds civilian intelligence activities like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), is $67.2 billion. This figure is managed under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) (Defense.gov Director of National Intelligence).
Military Intelligence Program (MIP): The MIP, which supports intelligence activities directly tied to the Department of Defense, has a budget of $29.8 billion. This includes tactical, operational, and strategic military intelligence initiatives (Defense.gov, Wikipedia).
The aggregate total of these programs for FY2024 is $97 billion.
Just read all the above again and wonder—what exactly is being done with your tax dollars and money borrowed in the name of children yet unborn such that the nation that claims to be the world’s premier power is vexed by a dirt poor group of rebels against an equally dirt poor nation, supported by overextended religious fanatics.
The Houthi get their weapons via ships such as the top of the post.
Our supply ships look like this,
Having the most advanced intelligence capabilities—I think, maybe like our Navy, we’re second best now—is useless if our most senior leaders cannot understand a threat that has been fighting us for over a year. I’m not sure what is worse, the failure to push information to senior leaders, or the senior leaders not pulling it to them.
Either way, another example of systemic institutional malfunction.
Yet I am told to fear Orange Man’s incoming cadre when the “smartest people in the room” continue to drop the ball at every turn. Aggressive common sense defeats exquisite CV’s every. Single. Time.
I bet the Undersecretary would be shocked at what a US high school could accomplish.