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Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That night well be the point:

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

“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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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