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The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Listen to Michael Walsh on the CutJibNewsletter podcast about the feminization of our military, and this pathetic display of military weakness will make perfect sense.

The maniacal Houthis are playing in the big leagues by limiting global trade with their ragtag military and some modern missiles and drones supplied by...you guessed it...Iran! But they aren't a big league team, and the curious inability of the American military to do much of anything against them is a searing indictment of the current crop of political cronies and fellow travelers in the upper reaches of our armed forces.

Another US Strike in Yemen But Little Evidence Military Operations Are Deterring Houthis

Major Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Monday that the strike involved 15 Houthi targets across five locations, and those targets included "offensive military capabilities, to include Houthi training and weapons storage facilities." He said "initial assessments are that we had good effects on that."

However, the strike involving Navy ships and Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles follows a year of U.S. military operations in the Red Sea aimed at fending off Houthi attacks, yet the rebels have continued to lob missiles and send drones to harass merchant ship traffic.

A year of operations against a 5th rate military that has no air force and is supplied by a single country, and we have failed. whoever planned those operations should be sacked. Whoever looked at the first strikes and didn't fire the planners should be sacked. In fact, everyone involved should be sacked and maybe the United States Military should reach back into its history and find some retired O5s who know how to kill people and break things.

At least we are burning through our stocks of stupidly expensive smart weapons so Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman can sell us some more stuff at inflated rates, far behind schedule!

Shipping data shows that the number of vessels crossing the Suez Canal, a key passage that is near the area of the Red Sea where Houthis are targeting ships, fell by about half at the end of 2023 and has yet to recover to original levels.

Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian and former merchant mariner, told Military.com on Tuesday that despite the fact that "the Houthi attacks are infrequent and seldom effective, with two ships sunk and four mariners killed, [they] have provided enough of a risk to deter shipping companies from risking their high-value ships sailing via the Red Sea."

Mecogliano said the impact has been that “the Houthis have pinched off 15% of world trade, sending the most valuable ships on a detour that has added time, cost, carbon emissions and risk in sailing in the Southern Ocean during wintertime.”

Hah...they can even drag "Global Warming" into this clusterf*ck! 15% of world trade is a very big deal, and the Houthis should have been destroyed in the first month they played their little game

"We're not seeking a full-out war with the Houthis, but we will continue to conduct strikes against the kinds of capabilities that we've seen them use against innocent mariners and maritime traffic as well as military vessels," Ryder said.

Oh good! Just a little war, with tea and scones in the afternoon and no bad guys being killed because that would be mean! let's blow up some empty warehouses and goatherd huts...that'll scare 'em!

There is no other kind of war. Either you fight to destroy the effectiveness of your enemy and cow him into submission, or you fail. Israel proved that over the last 25 years. Accepting some low level war from your enemies is a recipe for failure. There are lots of dead Israelis and many more dead Arabs because the long-term result of a titrated mess of a strategy is a bigger war down the road.

This mess has shown the bad actors of the world exactly how easy it is to disrupt trade and tie up large chunks of a nation's military with a couple of missiles, some off-the-shelf drones, and a few hundred 7th century pirates to threaten shipping. Next time maybe it will be surface-to-air missiles fired at major airports by recent "immigrants." Or maybe it will be a 40' container loaded with explosives detonated in the middle of a major bridge or tunnel in the West.

By not dealing with the Houthis, America and the West has shown that we are paper tigers, and the unintended consequences of this ridiculous, gentle war we are conducting will be far reaching.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]