Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd to avoid Red Sea after surge in missile and drone attacks | Hacker News Reader

Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd to avoid Red Sea after surge in missile and drone attacks

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100 pointsNavinF103 comments

Blocking the way to the Suez seems like a good way to get a visit from your friendly neighborhood carrier strike group.

That night well be the point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Why Johnny can't win wars: After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory.

Mostly, war games are scripted. When your strategy fails this badly in a less scripted event, you still want to get the personnel in the fleet their training. Do you think they should have just let half the fleet sit doing nothing for two weeks? That’d be a bad idea.

Sure, but restarting was adequate opportunity for that. Or one could have a backup plan.

This was the backup, they re-floated the ships and reduced the enemy capabilities for the rest of the war-game, to ensure that the personnel got the desired training. You don't train sailors and soldiers to successfully die, or even to kill the enemy, you train them to successfully perform a series of steps under pressure. Goal achieved in 2002. Since then, they took the lessons learned from the first part and figured out how to fight small boats better. I know when I was in the Navy in the decade after 2002 that there was much more focus on small boat defense and a bunch of new weapons and tactics to fight against small boat swarms. That was the purpose of the war-game, and to all accounts it was wildly successful since we learned a big lesson!

Don't be an armchair Admiral if you aren't sure why things are done in a certain way in the Navy. This was very publicized as a "failure", but the whole purpose of war-games is to learn new lessons. I would be embarrassed that you mistook this as a failure, and claimed we lost wars because of failures such as this one. The reason we lost recent wars is because there was no goal for those wars, so there was no way to win it. It was a political failure most of all. Vietnam, too. Without a goal, the most well trained militaries can't claim victory.

Because you don't arrange for a large force to perform training exercises, and then cancel that training because the force was destroyed before it could engage. You still do the training, and if you have to hand the red team a script to follow after they've made their point, you do it.

“The first thing to understand is that a big exercise is not the military equivalent of a sports game. You don’t throw a bunch of men and equipment into an exercise area, then say “right, let’s see who’s best”. Millennium Challenge 2002 was intended primarily to test a set of operational concepts that the Rumsfeld DoD was pushing.1 Other exercises are intended more as full-scale training for the relevant forces, to teach people how the whole system works together at the same time. This is also a secondary goal of exercises like MC02. In no case are we simply trying to see who wins, so if one side does something unexpected that would bring a real operation to a premature end, as Van Riper did, it makes sense to learn lessons from it, reset, and continue on.”

https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002

So in other words, the US military stand-in failed the first iteration of a war game. In real life, there's really going to be only one iteration, and you don't get do-overs because the the enemy does something "unexpected." The US military doesn't have a monopoly on doing unexpected things. I would fully expect the Houthis to do things that are very unexpected; it has very much been their track record.

It's not a “do over”, it's a “do the rest, because maybe there are other lessons we need to learn as well”.

The US military has run 2 exercises back in the day, seeing how vulnerable Pearl Harbour was to an air attack. The answer was very.

The US wrote the reports both times as “well done guys but this is not realistic for the following reasons”.

The Japanese proved them wrong some years later.

It’s not possible for the US to lose a conventional war they are ready for, just as it wasn’t possible for hamas to invade Israel.

But if either party takes their eyes of the ball and starts to listen to only what they want to hear, then anything is possible.

Well the Houthis/Iran doesn't have the ability to block the way to the Suez, and the decision by Maersk shows they don't need to. With just a few missile attacks, most of them failed, the Houthis have disrupted global trade. Incredibly effective. But yes, it's probably gonna lead to more ships being sent to defend against the attacks. I wonder why we don't see Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's navy sending ships to the coast of Yemen.

Saudi Arabia seemly is trying to have peace with Yemen and there are rumors that US is not bombing Yemen because of this too. Seemly is better to ignore Yemen despite their attacks than risk Yemen bombing Saudi oil operations again.

> With just a few missile attacks, most of them failed, the Houthis have disrupted global trade.

The Houthis have repeatedly stated they are only targeting ships heading to/from Israeli ports. Everyone else SHOULD be able to proceed on their merry way, but I understand the rationale of risk avoidance by simply avoiding the whole region.

> I wonder why we don't see Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's navy sending ships to the coast of Yemen.

Hmmmm, Saudi Arabia is in an awkward position. They've been at war with the Houthis partly because they are Iranian proxies. But now they are starting to repair relations with Iran. Also the Saudis need to maintain credibility with the Islamic world as a whole, and it would be a very bad look if they were interdicting Yemeni efforts to support the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Egypt might be similarly passive, but more for domestic reasons. Western-leaning government prefers relatively normal relations with Israel (and booming Suez Canal traffic), but likely large portions of their population doesn't. "Do nothing" is an easy middle ground.

> The Houthis have repeatedly stated they are only targeting ships heading to/from Israeli ports. Everyone else SHOULD be able to proceed on their merry way.

Would you go on a cruise through the Suez? Mistakes happen.

No but I wouldn't have gone on a cruise through the Suez (and presumably down the length of the Red Sea) for the past two decades anyway: Somali piracy has long been a scourge in the region.

Somali piracy has been cleaned up.

The same navies that did that should do the same to the Yemenis

> But now they are starting to repair relations with Iran.

I wouldn't draw this conclusion just because they had a few meetings. The Saudis are facing the same dilemma as Egypt, where the leaders have to manage optics with non-committal signals. Once this war ends, the Saudis will be facing the same security reality as prior to the war, therefore the Saudis will have the same reasons for opposing Iran and seeking out alliance with the US. Nothing substantive will change in this calculation, assuming the war is contained in Gaza.

> The Houthis have repeatedly stated they are only targeting ships heading to/from Israeli ports.

Then they expanded this to any ships with some connection to Israel but already attacked a ship headed to Italy which has no (publicly) known connection to Israel. IMHO attacks on unrelated ships will continue to happen because: 1. they have poor intelligence 2. why should they care about mistakes if they meet zero pushback.

The Houthis have cleverly tied their struggle to the Israel/Hamas conflict. So Egypt and Saudi Arabia have to worry about appearing pro-Israel if they intervene.

Besides the political issues that others have mentioned, the Egyptian and Saudi navies have very limited inventories of surface ships with significant missile defense capabilities that go beyond just point defense. The Egyptians have about 17 and the Saudis about 13. Only a subset of those are available to deploy at any given time. Their SAMs and air search radars are generally relatively short range which means they can't provide very effective area air defense; instead they would have to escort convoys which adds some complexity. The quality of the crews and materiel condition of the ships is somewhat ... questionable.

Carrier strike group has to be careful not to repeat what happened to Moskva. Red Sea is small and it’s questionable if AA systems are up to the task with modern saturation threats from air, sea and sub water drones.

Era of impunity for US is frankly over and in addition I am not sure what carrier strike group can do that Saudi Arabia could not do during their unsuccessful war with Yemen.

From what I understand, as a layman, comparing the capabilities of a US Carrier strike group and the Moskva isn't exactly apples and oranges, but it's quite close.

US warships are generally better maintained than Russian ones, they'd probably stay on the other side of the straits. It's also several ships vs a single one.

> I am not sure what carrier strike group can do that Saudi Arabia could not do during their unsuccessful war with Yemen.

Fight effectively. They might buy our weapons, but the Saudi military is ass at every level.

> Carrier strike group has to be careful not to repeat what happened to Moskva.

Remember to keep their radars and CIWS running? Moskwa was sunken by two antiship missiles, hardly modern saturation threats.

We are talking about a US navy that’s got a solid reputation for unnecessarily ramming ships into each other. It doesn’t beggar belief that the ball could get dropped.

Really makes me wonder if the crews around the Gulf are better than the Seventh(?) Fleet in the Pacific that keeps playing bumper cars. Maybe they're all inept, who knows.

CIWS is not very effective against fast sea skimming missiles, you'd have to expend expensive interceptors in a way that could threaten your magazine capacity.

And that's why the US Navy is gradually phasing out CIWS and replacing them with SeaRAM plus upgraded EW systems.

Sure, but it's not like the rest of the world is standing still. Iran and China are starting to pump out cheap ballistic antiship missiles, and they're also demonstrating combined low-cost EO/IR/Radar seekers to defeat EW. Russia has deployed semi-autonomous EO seekers on their low-cost Lancet drones (image recognition detects a target, the operator confirms it, and then the drone navigates itself), and China even has EO/Radar fusion in their latest generation of air-to-air missiles.

Also, SeaRAM only has 12 missiles worth of depth.

Increasingly, it just seems like large surface ships are not very survivable at close ranges.

A single US destroyer has successfully shot down dozens of Houthi missiles in the Red Sea already. A carrier strike group has many destroyers. You have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.

So did Russian destroyers in the Black Sea - it only takes one missile to get through, and so far the US didn't even confirm that US ships were the target.

US ships being the target would make it easier, not harder, to intercept the missiles.

If US ships were targeted the Houthis/Iran would aim to deplete interceptors.

They are betting that US is not going to interfere, at least not too much.

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-...

This isn't piracy so much as a naval blockade. It is interesting to see the conflict expand to the maritime sector though. Crimping an opponent's supply lines is the classic strategic move.

Edit to add that the video put out by the Houthis of a helicopter dropping a combat team onto a ship and seizing control of it was a propaganda masterstroke - exciting, surprising, apparently perfect execution, zero bloodshed.

https://news.usni.org/2023/01/05/destroyer-makes-first-u-s-w...

> “Chung-Hoon’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” she said in the statement. “The United States military flies, sails and operates anywhere international law allows.”

Not clear on the relevance of this? I'm aware the US Navy operates worldwide but I'm not sure what bearing this has on the Red Sea situation.

As opposed to flotilla raid ?

Just in case it’s not obvious yet, The End of the World [order] Is Just Beginning.

The ships are only stopped until Monday. Don't talk this up into something that it isn't.

Lot of people seem really eager to cheer on the end of the world, pandemics, runaway inflation, carnage etc. Really tedious.

Same as during the early days of the Ukraine war there was so much misinformation posted about grain, grain yields, etc, making it seem like a permanent quadrupling in grain prices would occur. It didn't. The misinformation was called out.

Odd that some people seem so eager to see others suffering. Really odd.

Odd? No. It’s basically every form of popular fiction. (There are tons of fiction that can be written without the suffering, but it is not in fashion right now).

> Ukraine war there was so much misinformation posted about grain, grain yields, etc, making it seem like a permanent quadrupling in grain prices would occur.

Prices didn’t quadrupled but they stayed very high for a few months in 2022 and recovered to pre-war prices very slow. It was not a problem for rich countries but affected many developing ones, especially in Africa.

"U.S. Officials have stated that Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin is preparing to Announce a Major Multinational Mission named “Operation Prosperity Guardian” during his Visit to the Middle East this coming week, with the Goal of the Operation being to Counter the ongoing Drone and Missile Threat by the Houthi Terrorist Group against Commercial Shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden."

This is just another deepening crack. Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Guyana, Armenia, Taiwan.

https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1736141595026538795

The mark for the end of the British empire was said to have happen when they lost control of the Suez canal. Iran is testing if this is the end of the U.S hegemony.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the inevitable fall of the US hegemony will be at the hands of present-day Iran.

The fall of US hegemony is much more likely going to be the result of the US government abdicating its responsibilities to the world than the result of some other hegemon materially overcoming the US. This is as good an opportunity as any for that to happen.

If that risk begins to materialize, there is more than sufficient strength among the allied western nations to ensure that the situation proceeds to the “find out” phase.

As it stands western NATO nations are too timid to shoot down an Iranian unmanned loitering munition fired by russia and flying across NATO country to bomb Odessa. According to dpa (German news agency):

>russian drones violated Romanian (NATO ) airspace tonight. German interceptors approached the drones, “visually confirmed contact but have not received an order to destroy drones”. So the drones flew further towards Ukraine to kill Ukrainians. One drone exploded in @NATO airspace.

https://news.yahoo.com/russian-drone-attack-ukraine-violates...

only NATO response was this pathetic:

"The ministry strongly condemns the attacks by the Russian Federation on individual objects and elements of civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian ports on the Danube,”

In case you think shooting it down would be bad here is some contrast from Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shoo... russia understands only violence, nothing else matters.

This makes it sound like the US is doing its 'allies' a service. I must be mistaken in thinking that the US has been wrecking a havoc in the middle east for its own benefit and then letting its allies in the EU deal with the resulting inflows of refugees. Or how the US monopolized the tech sector and didn't allow any of its allies to foster their own tech industry. Thanks so much USA. Thank you so much for oppressing us and corrupting our politicians.

Sincerely,

Your allies

P.S. We're really going to miss this US-led world order because we love you guys so much! xoxo!

How did the US monopolize tech (other than by providing an economic backdrop where it could flourish without being strangled)?

If another country doesn’t have a vibrant tech industry, it’s not obvious to me that the problem is something bad the US did.

Our European allies did a fine job of handicapping their own tech sector. They obviously don't consider it a strategic priority and aren't trying very hard.

The US strategic pivot towards Asia is well underway. Now that we're effectively energy independent there's no longer an existential need to wreak havoc in the Middle East. Instead I expect the UK and France to resume wreaking havoc there as they did prior to Pax Americana. They don't really have another option to maintain critical fossil fuel supplies.

> We're really going to miss this US-led world order

You will miss it. Just because it's bad doesn't mean the alternative is better. The alternative will be worse. Many of the reasons that deaths from conflicts is at a historic low is because of the US-led world order. This is regardless of which school of geopolitics you subscribe to. If you believe in democratic peace theory, or the liberalism idea that trade reduces conflict, or the realist idea that we have less war only because we're in a unipolar hegemony, the US-led world order has caused less conflict deaths. I don't have to downplay the atrocities and contradictions of the US and their allies when accepting this reality.

I'm not sure about that. An invasion of Iran could cause significant budgetary and institutional harm, as well as destroying trust in the US's leadership position in the world and in the rules-based international order on which international US power depends.

Iran would be the most powerful foe since WWII (perhaps not counting China's involvement in the Korean War, but afaik China's only power then was masses of soldiers). They are more wealthy, more populous, and more politically, economically, and militarily capable than Iraq and Afghanistan combined - possibly more than all foes since WWII combined. Geographically, they are mostly mountains, especially along their coast [0]. They have been preparing for generations to fight off the US.

After Vietnam the US military was a mess for many years, arguably until the Gulf War. Also, weakness creates a negative reinforcement loop: When enemies and competitors see the US weakened or just consumed with a problem, they will make moves that worsen the US's situation.

(Just look at this map of Iranian topography:)

[0] https://www.glimpsefromtheglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

Invasion isn’t required. The current regime has managed to survive and make strategic gains via proxies to emerge as a regional power despite crippling sanctions for decades. They are supplying drones to Russians. If they formalize a military-economic bloc with Russia and China, it would be a far more dangerous (but likely) outcome.

There won't be any invasion. No one has any appetite for that.

If a conflict with Iran comes it will be something like Operation Praying Mantis again plus strikes against key economic targets such as oil refineries. The Iranian navy and air force are largely defenseless against stand-off strikes. They would still be able to cause trouble by sponsoring terrorist groups, but all of their forces capable of projecting regional conventional power could be wrecked in a few weeks of sustained strikes.

(I am not suggesting that this should be done. Obviously everyone should look for ways to deescalate the situation.)

>They would still be able to cause trouble by sponsoring terrorist groups,

The US country hasn't experienced 'real terrorism' (IRA, Baader Meinhoff, Red Brigade etc), especially on a sustained scale. It would indeed be a terrible thing for just a few lone wolves to pop over the border. Being such a vast continent the damage could be horrifying, not least of all for brown people. (Big nod to George Carlin).

There is no Iranian navy or air force to speak of. It's an irrelevant force. Iran projects power using proxies and using missiles, none of which are easily disabled by stand-off strikes.

The Suez canal is a trade route for Europe and Asia for the most part. If this is a test of US hegemony, if anything that is a reminder of just how much Europe and China rely on the US.

China has good enough relations with Iran that they aren't really going to be threatened durably here.

No, China seems to have issues with transitting through the Suez canal all on their own.

Do they? As far as I am aware, the Houthis/Iranians have never messed with Chinese vessels.

The OP is making an Evergrande Evergiven joke

The Evergiven was Taiwanese, not Chinese. Evergrande is a Chinese real estate company with financial troubles, which is unrelated to the Evergiven, unlike Evergreen, the Taiwanese company that owned and operated the Evergiven.

Taiwan, China, same thing. Mainland China is just a renegade province of Taiwan and will be brought to heel sooner or later.

> "Ensuring the safety of our employees is of the utmost importance and our number one priority ..."

What is Maersk's reputation for crew safety in other situations, such as regular operations?

Pretty good considering the rest of the industry.

The bad ships are typically going to be older and owned by a layer cake of shell companies instead of a famous shipping line.

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