Doing Just Less Than the Minimum in the Red Sea

...get you the exact results you would think

At the start, it is important to remember a few things:

• The best tactical leader can fail inside a poor Operational Design. Don’t blame the Field and Company Grade Officer for the failure of the General or Flag Officer.

• The best Operational Design will fail if the strategy it supports is fatally flawed. Do not blame the General or Flag Officer for the failure of their political leaders.

• A strategy is only as good as the quality of the world view of the people who design it and if the resources allocated/available are sufficient to execute it. Political leaders who lead their nations into military failure must be held accountable by the people they represent.

With that foundation set, let’s dive into the latest from the Red Sea.

We like to call ourselves the “World’s Most Capable Navy™.” We used to like to call ourselves the “World’s Largest Navy™,” but the People’s Republic of China lapped us a few years ago - not “paced” us - so we can’t use that fun phrase we enjoyed for most of the last century.

The entitled are rarely very good at stewardship, but we must live in the world our elected representatives put us in.

Since the orgy of rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping that rolled out of Gaza into Israel a little under 10 months ago, the United States Navy has led a halting international naval force, interestingly called Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG), into the Red Sea to - well - guard prosperity, I presume.

A lesser included mission in OPG, intended or not, is to demonstrate the deterrent power of Western sea power against the quasi-piratical Houthi forces attacking international shipping passing to and from the Suez Canal.

The funny thing about deterrence is that if you don’t do it properly, or worse balk at it, you create exactly the opposite conditions from what you wanted. You wind up encouraging bad actors, not only the one you targeted, but also bad actors worldwide who are deciding if the risk/reward ratio favors the bold, or signals caution.

Note how I mentioned that the Houthi - a sub-4th rate power that isn’t even a state actor, just one force of many in the MadMaxization of the nation formally known as Yemen - is “piratical.” They are simply a modern incarnation of a form of piracy thousands of years old that, in its most basic form, prevents the free flow of commerce across the world’s oceans at market prices. That was the condition of the seas for most of Earth’s history, which is why we have a few thousand years of consistent lessons learned on how to deal with pirates and those who support them.

None of this is new. All it takes is the resources, and more importantly, the will to do something about it. If you don’t have the resources or will, you either have to surrender that part of the geography to the pirates, or pay them to bother someone else. Those options are also thousands of years old as well.

This isn’t grand strategy either. It is about as basic a mission for a sea power as can be. If you can’t defeat pirates, then … well … do the math up the ladder of combat yourself.

Shall we bring back the “Salamander Hierarchy of Maritime Power™” again? Why yes, we shall.

If you make a big show of going against the pirates, then you better take your A-game, especially if you desire to maintain your reputation.

So, how are we doing here?

Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who heads the U.S. naval efforts in the Middle East, shared the blunt assessment Wednesday, saying that not only have U.S. strikes and defensive efforts done little to change the Houthis’ behavior, it now appears unlikely the group will be swayed by military force.

“The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system,” Wikoff told an audience in Washington, speaking via video from U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

“We have certainly degraded their capability. There's no doubt about that. We've degraded their ability,” he said. “However, have we stopped them? No.”

Just so we’re clear here: the world’s most capable navy (and its small band of not-so-superfriends) cannot stop a sub-4th rate, non-state piratical force sitting athwart one of the planet’s primary trade routes.

“It's very difficult to find a centralized center of gravity (CoG) that we can hold at risk over time and use that as a potential point of deterrence,” Wikoff said. “So, trying to apply a classic deterrence policy in this particular scenario is a bit challenging.”

Let me put my Operational Planner hat on for you:

• Can’t define your CoG properly? Your planning staff has failed you, Admiral. Get a new one.

• If you are constrained by Higher Direction and Guidance (D&G) and Commander’s Intent (CI), with their Rules of Engagement (ROE) from the POLMIL level, then state it. Your job is to execute the CINC’s orders, not make excuses for them.

• With regards to the Houthi CoG, if the problem isn’t that your planning staff (sorry brothers and sisters for coming off the top rope in bullet-1. I know you can only build with the material you’re provided) can’t “find” the CoG, but that you cannot attack the CoG because of D&G/CI/ROE, then it isn’t your planning staff that is not properly defining the CoG, but that they have been ordered to shape the Red CoG definition to meet higher D&G/CI/ROE. That kind of reverse engineering is a big no-no. Find out who directed that action and fire them. If you are that person, then, well, own it.

• This operation is way past the ‘deterrence’ phase. We have been exchanging fire with Houthi forces for months. You can’t ‘deter’ a conflict months after it has started. You can only force the enemy to come to terms. If you cannot apply ‘classic deterrence policy’ right now. That time has passed. You might as well discuss how birth control will be effective when your partner is already 7-months pregnant.

Again, we need new elites.

“We have very little leverage over the Houthis, and air strikes are unlikely to deter them,” according to Elisabeth Kendall, a Yemen specialist at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The inability to understand “deter” here is becoming comical.

“They have a high tolerance for casualties, they are highly adaptable, they do not need sophisticated weapons to wreak havoc, they just need to keep going — not losing is winning, and they believe they have God on their side,” she told VOA via email. “In reality, air strikes by the U.S. and U.K. benefit the Houthis by providing evidence to back up their propaganda narratives against the U.S. and its allies.”

OK, then what exactly does she propose?

But other experts, such as former British Ambassador to Yemen Edmund Fitton-Brown, are more critical of the approach taken by the U.S. and its allies in trying to degrade and dissuade the Houthi attacks.

The U.S.-led responses have been “meticulously proportionate,” said Fitton-Brown, now a senior adviser for the New York and Berlin-based Counter Extremism Project.

“We need to be more determined and creative about what to do about this,” he said. “We are looking at a de facto authority, and a de facto authority has fixed points you can attack.”

“They have military bases that were previously in the hands of the government. They have intelligence headquarters. They have security deployments in [the port city of] Hodeidah,” Fitton-Brown told VOA. “Significant escalation of targeting is possible without changing the legal status of the conflict.”

Yes, by now, all of those places should look like some of the less attractive neighborhoods of Gaza.

“Our mission remains to disrupt their ability and try to preserve some semblance of maritime order while we give an opportunity for policy to be developed against the Houthis,” Wikoff said. “The more players in the field that can get involved in a diplomatic piece of this, the better off I think we'll be.”

DOD punting to DOS. I haven’t seen that much martial spirit since the Romanian Third Army at Stalingrad.

The facts on the ground prove that the Course of Action as approved has failed. I don’t care how much the people in Foggy Bottom, Cambridge, or Brussels review their notes from their Model UN negotiations back in high school, I don’t think the Houthi, or the Iranians who hold their leash, are all that open to the ‘diplomatic piece.’

The slogan of the Houthi movement reads:

"God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam"

I don’t think that is something Secretary Blinken can say, “OK, let’s see if we can meet halfway here.”

I don’t know, maybe he does.