The Houthis are not a group that can be bombed into extinction – here’s why

jordanlund , 6 months ago

Removed, rule 3, opinion piece.

“Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.”

dragontamer , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

We don’t have to bomb them to extinction. We just need to bomb them so that they can’t threaten the Red Sea with cruise missiles or drones.

This is a group with ships, helicopters, cruise missiles, anti-air, and drones. They’re “large” enough to have legitimate military targets for us to disrupt. Every cruise missile we blow up of theirs is one fewer missile for them to launch into the Red Sea.

EDIT: In particular, all we gotta do is sit there, watch our RADAR. Whenever they launch a cruise missile at the Red Sea, we launch an attack back and kill those people. Eventually they’ll run out of missile-launchers (or people brave enough to push the launch missile button). If that’s a “never”, then I guess we keep patrolling the Red Sea from here on out, but it seems like a rather straightforward, low-risk mission to me. The main risks are the possibility that someone on board of our Destroyers / Cruisers gets complacent and lets a cruise missile through to actually take a hit. But given our anti-air capabilities and RADAR to detect enemy missiles, it seems unlikely that this would happen.

PrinceWith999Enemies , 6 months ago

I very much agree but have two points of clarification for more general audiences.

First, this is the job of these ships. They shoot down missiles. The countries that deploy these ships have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sophisticated electronics and weapons platforms so that these ships can protect other ships. The weapons platforms being deployed against them don’t represent a major threat - I mean, never say never - but there was a point in the Falklands war where navies really internalized the risks presented by land based anti-ship missiles and things started to get taken very seriously.

The only other thing I’d say is that the loitering drones are probably going to be getting more use than traditional counter battery fire. The shoot and scoot systems - as opposed to in place systems - are less vulnerable to counterattack, but can and are being attacked by simply parking some flying bombs that just continue to fly in circles until they find something that someone wants to make a hole in.