95% of container ships are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa
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- "Houthi involvement in the Israel–Hamas war": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_involvement_in_the_Isra... (Wikipedia)
- "Maersk ship hit by missile in the Red Sea": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821372 (HN, December 31st 2023)
Egypt has a vested interest in stabilizing the region and returning to the status quo. They are politically and economically aligned with the West and Israel and their best, and only, option is to remain a stable partner.
Egypt doesn't have the advanced anti missile cruisers. Egypt has a massive tank force.
There is already a multi national naval fleet in the Red Sea patrolling the waters. Mostly US but also UK and some others.
Edit
There's more :) Egypt can't counter the missiles better than the US can, but it could certainly get pulled into a larger conflict if it started deploying military assets outside it's borders. They can't really make their situation better but they can definitely make it worse.
The only military option to stop the attacks are drone / bomber incursions into Yemen which of course Egypt has no interest in doing since it could turn into a full hot war pretty easily.
After they withstood years of war with Saudis? Those sandal-and-skirt guys are much tougher than people think.
The history of area bombardment is it strengthens civilian resolve. Think: the Battle of Britain, Vietnam and America’s wars in the Middle East.
Strategic bombing has only influenced one country to surrender.
Japan's political environment during the war was incredibly complex, and trying to view their rationale and motivation through a Western lens is very dangerous. And I don't think the Soviets were anywhere close to an imminent invasion of the Home Islands. I don't think they had the appetite for doing more than grabbling the Kuriles and Sakhalin Island, instead preferring to let the US suffer the casualties.
While the Soviet declaration of war surely had some impact, the Emperor said there were three primary factors in his decision to accept the Potsdam conditions; his lack of confidence in Ketsu Go plans to defend Kyushu. The increasing devastation caused by the conventional and nuclear bombing campaigns, and finally, concern about the "domestic situation" meaning internal revolt. Later in private letters he referred to Nippon's deficiency in science, meaning a lack of nuclear weaponry. Hirohito and PM Suzuki realized that with nuclear weapons, the US didn't need to invade Japan.
I would say that Dresden is not a counterexample. Every year on February 13, many Dresdeners gather on the Neumarkt to commemorate the destruction of the city on the Bombennacht (night of the bombings) in 1944. The spectacle polarizes German society. Right-wing revisionists like to point to the destruction of Dresden to portray Germany as a victim of the Second World War. But for many Dresdeners, this is actually a matter that is associated with personal grief because they lost family members in the bombing. As a result, the possible political implications of this culture of remembrance fade into the background for many Dresdeners. Dresden is therefore a good example of how people move closer together after extensive bombing and how this effect can last for 80 years.
You need to degrade their capability to fire long-range assets precisely. That’s doable. If it’s locals lobbing unguided rockets into the ocean, that’s commercially manageable. Guided missiles and helicopter landings are not.
That’s fine. Let them fight their civil war. The problem is long-range precision warfare extending past their costs. Knocking out that capability doesn’t require boots on the ground.
Also, this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now.
As I mentioned elsewhere [1], this is fine. A stable, adversarial Yemen is better than the clusterfuck it currently is. A big part of the problem with the current situation is there is nobody to negotiate with who can credibly claim to control these armed factions.
Different aims. Riyadh sought to remove them from power. That’s a boots-on-the-ground operation they attempted from the air.
Egypt would just need to degrade their coastal capabilities. Taking out vessels, helicopters and arms stores could do that from the air.
Counter-battery fire is tremendously precedented and always done at standoff. You can also start hitting arms stores, port infrastructure, training and C3 facilities.
The beauty of this is it’s cruelly win-win-win. The Houthis can use the bombing to strengthen their domestic image, maybe even boost recruitment. Iran can piggyback on that. And America can claim it cleared the Strait. As long as everyone stays in their lane (literally), it’s a stable conclusion.
Training and top level command is most likely not even in Yemen. You could hit the ports, that wouldn't stop the import of these missiles - they are shipped in small boats as a kit, assembled wherever, and then kept in a cave somewhere or in a car, ready to be fired. No port or infrastructure needed.
These tactics have been used since the 80s, and no solution short of a ground invasion can stop them. Israel couldn't even stop Hamas and the PIJ from firing guided rockets from Gaza - at the end of the day when the IDF bomb houses that rockets were fired from, it's just theater: they never store more than a dozen munitions, and by the time counter battery fire arrives, they've likely fired all munitions already. This is a tiny 2.4sqm strip fully blockaded, I don't see how you can stop it in Yemen.
This is blind counter-battery. You use the shot to place loiters. That then trains your fire.
Despite much media ado about destroying the launchers, those are typically just welded pipe or wooden catapults. There's no value in them and no point in ever coming back there.
Those arms stores do not exist as such, they're most probably highly dispersed and only at the limit can one call them "stores", and if gathered in one place that place is most probably located underground, where aerial bombings would have close to no effects.
Just look at how difficult it is right now for Israel to take out Hamas's weapons cashes in Gaza, and we're talking about a much concentrated operation in terms of space and most probably Israel knows a lot more about Hamas's weapons caches than the US would be able to ever know about where the Houthis store their weapons.
See the thing is, if shipping companies don't trust the waters they simply won't send ships there - claims don't matter one whit.
What part of removing long-range precision strike capability suggests an empty claim?
Getting information on where things are stored is hard. It needs boots/spies on the ground (satellites can only get limited information and are easily fooled). As pointed out elsewhere, modern best practice is to not have a large warehouse that is easy to find and destroy, instead you scatter this stuff around in small units.
If they launched their entire stockpile, it’s no longer an issue. The question was using one launch to take out a couple missiles, maybe a launcher and those operating it. Done repeatedly, this will degrade a static force. (Additional levers would need to be pulled on resupply.)
When it comes to missile (whether drone, cruise missiles, or ballistic missiles), it's much more difficult. The US had a hard time countering the SCUD missiles in 1991. And that was with a huge military, with the best ISR the world has ever seen. A 6-pack of Shaheds can be launched from a trailer that looks all the world like a normal flatbed style semi. A cruise missile can be fired and navigate a course that obfuscates its launch point. Ballistic missiles can fire, then drive away to hide in a city.
The only way to win this fight is to blockade the country from receiving shipments from Iran. Air blockade and naval blockade, combined with strikes to hit known depots etc. This is called war. Not a presence mission, not a "response," but the literal definition of war. The US has no stomach for this entanglement, and hopes that the problem goes away. It won't, but the pain level is relatively low, and the USN is getting some great practice in fighting a LIC in the littoral regions.
So if hitting the launchers is hard, how about destroying one of those assets every time they attack shipping?
Aren't Egyptian Navy vessels much cheaper than american? They can just zerg rush and eat the damage. I don't think that Houthi have a lot of cruise missiles piled up.
The last time the StarCraft doctrine was used in a real war was over a century ago and it did not go well.
> I don't think that Houthi have a lot of cruise missiles piled up.
Are you willing to bet the lives of Egyptian sailors on that assumption? How about your own?
This isn’t a video game.
Blitzkrieg was early combined-arms warfare; its modern iteration underwrites American military supremacy.
Zerg rushing is an r-production analog that uses swarms of cheap, expendable units to overwhelm the enemy numerically. This is closer to the Soviet (and now Russian) doctrine of using humans to absorb ammunition. It fails against combined-arms armies because it lacks manoeuvre. It works when the enemy is production constrained, e.g. Ukraine.
Zerg rushing works in video games.
The Soviets in WWII used human waves against the Nazis. (EDIT: They did not, they used them against the Finns in the Winter War.) That said, the USSR was capable of combined-armed warfare.
Russia has proved incapable of combined-arms warfare. They launched human waves in Bakhmut, and are largely using numerical advantages in raw recruits to push for marginal gains. This isn’t how a modern army fights.
The Red Army definitely used them against Finland. But you are right, they weren’t used against the Nazis.
at sea, this approach took down the Russian Fleet at Tsushima Strait. The MCII exercise, contentious as it were, showed that an Iranian attempt at that might have worked.
hell, for all of their losses in Ukraine, the Russians are still gaining ground, and a lot of that came at the expense of modern Straf-Bat penal units.
that said, Egypt is a tank power, not a ship power, and flooding the area with older gear is a good way for most of it to end up at the bottom of the ocean. it's a non-starter of an idea for them.
It is in any case a full brute force approach that bellies an enemy that is unwilling or unable to train their troops.
Yes, quantity is a quality all its own, but that's why the US military is one of the biggest armed force on the planet. We do literally have the biggest air force in the world, for example.
In fact we have 4 of the top 10: #1 (airforce), #2 (Navy), 4(Army), and #5(marines).
Egypt usually doesn't have any problems with that. They're not a liberal democracy, so enduring high casualties is not a political problem for them.
The economy where consumer credit card debt just hit 5 trillion.
The economy where high skill jobs like people on this forum can’t find work.
If you think this is a healthy economy you’re either too rich to care, or being lied to by whatever news outlet you read.
That’s a 150x cost difference. Well within an order of magnitude of America versus Iran’s economies and defense budgets.
Which is irrelevant, since before this becomes a production problem it would become the diplomatic ones of bombing Houthi supplies in Yemen and intercepting IRGC vessels on the high seas.
A US interceptor of 0.000013% of US GDP.
So, yes, I know, LOTS of details (like Iran) here, but the overall point being even if our $3M missile is more than their $20K drone in absolute dollars, we can afford it more than they can.
About what a third of $3mm is to the U.S. (15x larger) or U.S. defense budget (50x larger). A 3x production-cost advantage in an economically unconstrained conflict is not an advantage. It’s at best a Twitter PR point.
Given that Iran is producing thousands to tens of thousands of these missiles every year, and is looking to expand production even more, there actually really is a risk that the stockpiles will not keep up, after which dozens of billions of dollars will have to be expended to seriously ramp up production. This dynamic is also the reason why it's been so difficult to ramp up artillery production in support of Ukraine.
Additionally, given that the expensive parts in these drones seem to be homemade in Iran (engines, fuselage, even some of the electronics), and given the sanctions, USD equiv. GDP isn't a great metric since there's no free market to convert Iranian production to USD.
Then there's the problem that these missiles are sorely needed in case of a war in China, so actually going through a significant expenditure, even if money is allocated to increase production in 2-3 years, means that the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA, should the need arise. Its' ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal.
If anyone is talking about escalation risk, production isn’t the bottleneck. We are nowhere close to being resource constrained in the Middle East.
> the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA
In a production contest it’s maximum sustainable flows, not stocks, that matter. (Stocks buy you time to get flows up.) To the extent challenging the PLA is a concern, boosting production to counter the Houthis is a net win.
> ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal
You’re arguing both ways. If their value is marginal, expending them now is fine.
Your broader point—I think—is correct. America doesn’t want to spread itself thin. But that’s a constraint at the CVN level. Once the carrier strike force is positioned, it’s immaterial whether it’s firing off missiles or guns.
Anyone positioning Iran et al v America et al is missing key pieces in the logistics of war.
The older SM-2s may have more plentiful stocks, but most of them have been deemed too dangerous to use after causing serious damage in test firings, and there are only around 180 modernized versions available, and the missile itself is no longer produced.
Defending against a saturation attack means that the value experiences a step function. Either you have enough missiles to stop most low-tech enemy missiles, and you're going to be largely fine, or you don't, and your entire fleet might sink. It's not something you can afford to. The US Navy is never going to allow stocks to go under what is necessary to stop at least a long-range Chinese attack, and that means at least 600 missiles, which is a serious chunk of what remains.
Boosting production to counter the Houthis is surely something the US will do. It will take 2-3 years to bear fruit. In the meantime, stocks are not sufficient to tank Iran's capability to produce these kinds of missiles.
I think that the most likely outcome is either more shipping companies negotiating terms to transit unharmed, like China's COSCO has all but admitted to have done, or these detours to continue.
Agree.
> stocks are not sufficient to tank Iran's capability to produce these kinds of missiles
My core point is it never gets to Iran making missiles, the Houthis firing them and the U.S. doing nothing more than intercepting. Well before it becomes a production contest, the situation is resolved diplomatically or escalated.
> the most likely outcome is either more shipping companies negotiating terms to transit unharmed
This would be difficult for a Western company to do without risking sanctions.
Given the “final warning” issued 4 days ago by the coalition, I think escalation or resolution (probably the former) is very much a “sooner rather than later" thing.
Perhaps.
We have a tightrope to walk: trying not to spark a regional war but also ensuring that warnings and redlines are taken seriously.
At the same time, if your adversary knows what the response will be, they have the option of deciding the action is still worth it (or even the response would be desirable). This can even be perverse (e.g. two level games; leaders deciding to take a punch that is a net loss for their nation to rally support around themselves).
So blurry redlines --- and the full range of responses ("in a time and manner of our choosing"), including covert and deniable ones --- are employed. Ambiguity is usually advantageous to maintain, and players employ mixed strategies.
And the production capacity can easily be ramped up if there's enough funds.
I'm basing off on : https://apps.dtic.mil/procurement/Y2014/Navy/stamped/P40_223...
Given the production numbers, it seems that stocks even of SM-2 block 3 through 4 are at most in the low four digits.
I'm sure production capability for the SM-6 can be ramped up I'd there's enough funds, my point is that it's going to be even more expensive than the figure price of the missiles used looks like, and that it's going to be 2-3 years at least before that pans out.
ESSM is cheaper at around $2M per round, and quad packs help increase the magazine depth on Navy ships. Production for it is also too low in my opinion, currently at roughly 140 year. Routine testing and missile qualifications could easily eat up 20% of that each year. Sigh.
I just find it hard to believe that increasing production totals wouldn't help decrease unit cost significantly. My USN friends won't mention inventory totals, but they do mention that a lot of ships are going to sea without full magazines. And since at-sea replenishment of VLS systems is still a fantasy, that's a huge issue.
I also would love to see why you think there's only 180 modernized versions, and what you consider modernized. My understanding is that all versions have been either upgraded or their upgrade is budgeted. If you think that the USN has only 680 SM-2 and SM-6 in inventory I don't know what to say. That would be only 10 or so Standards per Arleigh Burke. There are 73 Arleigh Burkes active with a capacity of 90 missiles. Even if they only allocate 50% of these VLS slots to SM missiles, that would require over 3K missiles. And this ignores the Ticos completely. I know the USN puts to see without filling all the VLS slots, but that would be a dangerous, ridiculous loadout that I can't see escaping Congressional scrutiny.
Raytheon says they've produced over 11k SM-2 missiles worldwide. I know that testing has consumed around 3K, leaving 8K for the USN and allies. Even being generous with FMS, I doubt Raytheon has sold more than 2K overseas. That would leave the US inventory around 6K. A far cry from 180.
I wouldn't be so sure that the parts are locally sourced.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/bizarre-theft-wave-tar...
Maybe $3M missile isn’t that costly to the US, but if you have like 1000 of them and it takes 6 months to replenish the stock, while the other side has 10000 drones that they can replenish in 3 months, you have a massive problem at your hand. (The same problem Ukraine is having re: stockpiling artillery shells that are sourced from US/NATO)
That said if they were actually 0.1% GDP each then 10000 * 0.1% GDP each = 100% of GDP for 10 years. Which would obviously not happen.
That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.
The RU missiles have killed plenty of civilians though.
If there's a level at which you don't have all three options, there exist political situations that can leave you vulnerable.
E.g. if the US has no proportionate response to a Russian tactical nuclear strike on Ukrainian soil, it may hazard towards not escalating.
Similarly, why the talking points of US response strikes for the past few decades have generally been 'this was a proportionate response.'
But after the last warning to the Houthis, I expect the next ASBM or large drone that hits a civilian ship prompts a large US/UK (and maybe France and Germany) strike.
The drones are relatively light, cheap, and can be launched with nothing but springs and wood. There's no value in the launch locations and in fact you can launch them from anywhere.
S-300 is still a very capable system today and 1990s' S-300 systems are only really a generation behind modern systems. They're about as recent as the systems on Ticonderogas and Arleigh Burkes that are very much still in service today.
S-300 (and S-400 which is really enhanced S-300) in their most modern configurations are incredibly lethal systems against 4th Gen aircraft that aren't accompanied by extensive SEAD/DEAD resources and jamming. But Ukraine has 1st generation S-300P, from the 80s. These might have been upgraded to S-300PT-1, giving them cold launch with the newer 5V55KD missiles.
6 hours from Russia and they still can’t take them out
These have very different dynamics, inherently.
At best, their weapons aren’t terribly precise and they don’t particularly care about that.
But the "echo chamber" framing you use for what's at best a nitpick/misinterpretation of what I said, that says so much more about you and your own biases than anything about me.
Something like 90% of deaths by US military are civilians, and huge chunk of that is women and children. This isn't a uniquely Russian thing.
Setting aside the numbers you've opted to pull out of your ass, there's absolutely no comparison between how the US wages war vs the Russians. Your attempt at drawing an equivalence is ignorant, at best. Just stop.
Claiming these bad things as Russian specific is flat out wrong, harmful to the discourse, and massively lacking awareness.
You also make a claim with zero support. Here's mine:
The 90% number is a pretty accurate number for modern wars in general: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/30823/qc7809568enc.pdf (ctrl F 90%)
For Iraq specifically, the number calculated by one group is 77% civilians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Iraq_W...
Google for yourself, there's tons of information to corroborate this. Other US wars have much worse figures.
Your tone is frustrating especially given the appearance of hypocrisy when calling someone ignorant when there's easily verifiable evidence if you put in any effort to look. I don't see the need to be nasty to me like that especially when your bold black and white claim is so very clearly wrong.
Given that Russia has openly talked about targeting civilian infrastructure to "freeze them out" (and then tried to pull that off last winter), I think you should be rather careful with your assertions about others' echo chambers...
There is a lot of cases of Ukrainian army to use indiscriminate and "dumb" weapons to attack civilian districts of Donetsk (and now, Belgorod) just to terrorize population.
And, sure, the Ukrainian attack on Belgorod is similarly problematic. But if you're willing to go there, how many attacks have Russia carried in the same time period?
URL? that's got to be super interesting data.
The US has built a lot more cruise missiles than just its Tomahawks [0], and the US has a less cruise missile dependent doctrine because it is heavily invested in acheiving air superiority and delivering smart glide bombs, and shorter-range missiles that are much cheaper.
[0] ~7500 Harpoons, some large number I can't readily pin down of SLAM (AGM-84E) and SLAM-ER (AGM-84H/K) developed from the Harpoon, ~2000 AGM-86, ~1600 AGM-129, 2000+ AGM-158, plus some more developed ans retired in the first half of the Cold War
What is the source for that number? The only long-range weapons Russia has launched thousands of are the Iranian-made long-range suicide drones.
They've also used lots of (mostly, IIRC, air launched) ballistic missiles and (conventional) cruise missiles. The reason there have been deep strikes by Ukraine on Russian bomber bases are because those bombers were used to fire long range missiles into Ukraine.
Though the “suicide drones”, while designed as loitering munitions, are basically used as propeller driven cruise missiles rather than in a loitering role.
By their fruits you'll know them. If Russia was able to destroy the enemy like USA did with half the number of missiles - they absolutely would. But they can't (mostly because USA has system where it takes minutes from recognizing targets to destroying them, and in Russia it takes hours - so they can only hit stationary targets reliably), so they have to go into quantity instead.
Also USA use bombs much more often (because they could - because they obliterated the air defence in the first hours which Russia still can't do).
Yemen's GDP is $21B, not $21M.
Are you saying that entire Yemen's GDP is just $20M ? Does not seem plausible.
Examined on its own, that's a bold claim.
The Houthi strategy isn't an economic strategy, it's a "hope the US isn't willing to kill us" strategy.
Yemen's already in famine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Yemen_(2016%E2%80%.... The drones are supplied by Iran.
Is there some intrinsic right that the rocket-firers are defending that warrants treating them as other than aggressors in this situation?
Why do you call it genocide? Surely if you shoot at ships in international waters, and it is not defence, then you're bringing whatever acts of defence follow on your own head. Acts of defence seem impossible to class as genocide (but I'd like to hear arguments to the contrary if you have them).
Regaeding the latter, yes, for bow I think doing nothing militarily is exactly what is needed.
Never in my wildest dream would i think that the Houthis would be one doing the first modern blockade of a strait. I always expected the US to do the first modern block in the Malacca strait, when China is forced to do a Armed reunification with Taiwan.
So, at a certain number between one and forty drones the economy stops making sense.
This is what happens here in Ukraine as well: russian drones are cheap and readily available, while interceptors are expensive af and quite scarce.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/22b-worth-of-cargo-is-now-...
the average value of goods per container ship is ~$350M per ship not including the value of the ship itself. However I think the impact to the economy from a missile hitting a ship far exceeds the value of the goods, the ship, and the cost of any missiles used to defend those goods.
It's important not to draw too many conclusions from the Ukraine war. The combatants are fighting a much different fight on both sides than what the US would do.
The problem with barrage jamming is that it's extremely locatable and your jammer just ends up getting blown up. The solution is to have many smaller jammers, but then range is decreased dramatically, and it can still be economical to just bomb them, possibly with an anti radiation munition (slapping such guidance on a drone is not expensive).
That said, the range is sufficiently small that it doesn't matter - cheap systems can just use visual odometry and inertial sensors and fly themselves the remaining 300 meters to the target. There are videos of Russian lancets operating exactly like this, flying high, locating a target, and then autonomously homing in as they get into jamming range.
The idea that neither Russia nor Ukraine tried just EW is quite ridiculous. It's well known that Russia had excellent EW, there was a report in the Texeira leaks that Ukraine could no longer use Excalibur guided shells because Russian long range jamming rendered them useless - the GPS jamming made them unable to arm, and that even US guided HIMARS missiles and JDAMs had to rely on inertial sensors for much of the trajectory with significantly reduced accuracy.
But it is the most cost-effective solution. Russia has been deploying vehicle mounted EW systems to jam drones (with some success), as well as jamming GPS. And the Ukrainians have been jamming as well. There's no wunderwaffe in any war, it's more a game of cat and mouse.
Just like APS is now becoming standard on tanks and AFVs, localized EW jammers targeting control frequencies of small drones will be the cost of having a real military. There's also been research into using APS against drones (this would require additional sensors).
And the JDAM/HIMARS jamming is a bit overrated. Even in inertial mode, JDAM has a 30m CEP, and HIMARS has a 60M CEP. Definitely not as good as with GPS, but still a serious issue for the Russians.
Excaliburs are on a much different level though. Word is, you don't need much EW at all. You merely have to give them a strong look and that's enough to drive it way off course.
Because someone else will do it for them. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and everyone based on Djibouti have a joint interest in keeping the Bab al-Mandab strait traversable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_takeover_in_Yemen
How would the Houthis respond?
Much less, what do they have that can possibly hit Egypt.
That said, bombing might not do the trick. Just create more suffering in Yemen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghadr-110
https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...
It also seems to have a new place in history. A losing place but still. . .
On November 6, 2023, a Ghadr-110 missile was launched from Yemen by the Houthis towards Israel, which was intercepted by the Arrow-2 system while it was still outside of Earth's atmosphere, in what was described as the first instance of combat in space in human history
It assumed that Houthi is a proxy of Iran so the question is how Iran would respond.
I think its more “Iran lied and has used less overt channels” than “that changed”.
They have attack helicopters: https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2..., https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2...
They have American & Soviet fighter jets (F-5 / SU-22): https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2..., https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-H4BV3xzWWXk/TnIKIQMOAFI/A...
They have tons of cruise missiles: https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R..., https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R...
And ballistic missiles: https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R...
They're being supplied by Iran and whoever else hates Saudi Arabia, so they have a ton of capability to launch pretty devastating attacks on their neighbors -- hence why we have destroyers and aircraft carriers in the region. The missiles targeting merchant ships are bad -- it'd be worse if they started targeting land-based military targets in other countries.
They have, from the accounts I’ve seen (including their own propaganda videos) a single flyable F-5 constituting their entire “fast air combat capability” of those delivered to Yemen more than 40 years ago (and the F-5 was an older cheap export fighter then.)
And... I wouldn't expect it to be flyable much longer. Mobile missile launchers may be hard to find and kill on the ground, boring conventional fixed-wing jet fighters aren't, and even though they aren't the strategic target of the coalition the US has put together, US combat doctrine very heavily favors early destruction of an enemy’s air combat capability and air defenses to maximize freedom of operation.
No. They couldn't. Yemen to either is like three times the range of the SU-22 on a shortest distance path, which would take them through Saudi Arabia and close enough for mistakes of intent to Israel, either of which—as well as Egypt—has Air Forces more than capable of intercepting and destroying them if they magically gained the range to try to pull of that kind of flight.
The Houthi Air Force is useful for their civil war, and not a whole lot else.
Their air force is a joke though. A single flying F-5 (vintage 1970), and some decrepit SU-22 Fitters with no range.
Also, those aren't "attack" helicopters. They're bog standard Mi-8 transport helicopters. You can use them to attack, but they're nothing like a Hind/Hokum/Havoc or Apache helicopter.
Putting patrol-boats out there may deter boarding by Somalia-style pirates, but in this case the risk comes from various missiles and bomb-drones launched from the shore [0]. Even if the the defender has a few fancy anti-missile warships, the attacker could choose the least-covered target from a constant stream of (big, slow) cargo-ships through a ~300km route. [1]
[0] https://www.mei.edu/publications/houthis-red-sea-missile-and...
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/12/20/map-houthi-shipping-vessel-...
And the Houthis are really in control of all most all of Yemen, so calling them insurgents etc is misplaced. They dissolved the government and replaced it with revolutionary councils.
Hypothetically, Egypt can do the same thing they did the last time Yemen fell into civil war - support the PLC.
The issue is Saudi and UAE - Egypt's primary backers - are supporting conflicting factions in the Yemeni Civil War. The Saudis are supporting the Yemeni Republican Guard (the old leadership of the Republic of Yemen) while the UAE is supporting the secessionist Southern Transitional Council which is fighting to reconstitute South Yemen.
If Egypt choses one side over they other, they are in big trouble, as the other side will start meddling in Egypt in retaliation. Egypt is already in a de facto Cold War with Turkiye and Qatar because they supported Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sisi needs as much support as possible to retain power in Egypt.
I'm not arguing they should do this, but what Israel actually wants right now is to allow Gaza residents to exit into the Sinai, not a blockade.
Both Israel and Egypt denied that this was true. They both said the warnings were of a general natural "Hamas wants to attack", nothing specific.
Where did you get the info from that it was on Israel's request and not of their own accord?
"[the] two countries almost at the brink of war with artillery guns ready to fire at Chinese tanks which were trying to storm Indian positions, a fate averted by a hotline between the two sides, reveals former Army chief Gen M.M. Naravane (Retd)" [0]
[0] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav...
No, but their mutual dependence on the US for military procurement and defense keeps them within NATO.
China and India on the other hand began the process of a hard decoupling in 2020. Major Chinese tech companies were frozen out of the Indian market, and others were "encouraged" to sell off their operations to Indian, American, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies. For example, the Foxconn factory manufacturing iPhones in India was originally built for Xiaomi before they were pushed out. So was Huawei India's assets to Cisco and Vivo India's factory to Samsung. Indian tax authorities raid Chinese run companies at such a high frequency that even China has publicly complained about this [0]. This is a stunning change for a country that 4 years before was the 2nd largest FDI investor in India after the US.
> It's hard to tell what BRICS really
It's a half assed attempt at becoming a WB, ADB, or IMF competitor, but is hemmed by mutual competition between China and India. This is why the only 4 countries added in the expansion were those that had a roughly equal dependency on China and India.
> it's not a military organization so no point comparing them to NATO anyway
Agreed! I'm just dismissing a common pop fact I've noticed regurgitated on HN and Reddit. I have a hunch that the overlap between some of the more braindead subreddits and HN is quite high.
[0] - https://m.thewire.in/article/diplomacy/enforcement-directora...
What planes do the Turkish Airforce use?
What tanks, APCs, and helicopters does the Turkish Army use?
Where is most of Turkey's naval fleet manufactured?
Turkey has been working on indigenization and diversifying it's procurement by buying from Italy, Spain, and France, but it is still heavily dependent on American weapons systems.
Relations between the US and Turkiye deteriorated severely after the US began supporting the YPG (which imo was a stupid move by the Trump admin), but there is still a mutual dependency, with the US giving Turkey protection against Russia (with whom they are fighting against in a couple proxy wars like in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, etc), and the US dependent on Turkiye for Central Asia and Middle Eastern power projection.
The real world isn't a game of Civ where you are either friends or foes. In reality there exists multiple layers of grey. Furthermore, public denouncements or displays of support don't necessarily translate to positive or negative action.
A good example is Turkiye-Israel relations. Erdogan will always denounce Israel and the "Zionists", but at the end of the day, Turkey and Israel have extremely strong defense relations as both are heavily involved in Azerbaijan (Turkey because they view Azeris as brothers, and Israel because of Iran).
It's the same for US-Turkiye relations. Erdogan has to publicly appear anti-American due to his base's memories of the American supported Turkish Armed Forces violently repressing Islam until the 90s, but in actual actions, there is a mutual dependency. There's a reason why most of the younger generation of Erdogan's family attended IU Bloomington.
It's a frenemy relationship, similar to China-India in the 2012-2019 time period or Saudi and Qatar.
Aside from the S-400 purchase, which was probably done in order to build a domestic clone similar to how TAI is attempting to build the Kaan, Russia-Turkey relations are largely economic in nature. At the NatSec or defense level, they clash directly.
For example, Turkish intelligence has supported Crimean Turkish rebel groups, has supplied Ukraine with offensive UAVs for almost a decade, has shot down Russian planes (and vice versa), and directly vies with Russia in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans.
When shit hits the fan like in 2015, the US came in to mediate, though the US-Turkey relationship isn't as strong due to the Trump admin's missteps with supporting the YPG. That said, it's still a fairly strong strategic relationship, especially when compared to similar countries the US previously supported like Thailand or Malaysia, or even Greece+Cyprus and their heavy dependence on Russian weaponry (the only country in the NATO to actively buy Russian weapons until the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 2022 started).
If Incirlik was shut down, then it would absolutely be a major pivot away from the US, but the military relationship has started to recover. For example, the Turkish Air Force has been integrated under a single command with American Air Force deployments in the Middle East since 2023.
So I do not expect them to do anything.
The extra distance around Africa looks comparatively small on the Mercator projection.
Compared to what? I.e. what projection or approach would you choose instead of Mercator?
The mercator makes Africa look comparatively small on the y-axis which is a problem if you are trying to visualise the size of Africa and the time it takes to go around the continent.
If i visually compare the distance on the mercator and an equal area projection is looks to make the trip about 20% shorter on mercator (compared to the apparent visual distance going through Suez). Non of the projections will be 100% accurate but the mercator is less accurate for this specific case.
LOL.
The Suez canal is at ~30°N, while Cape Town is ~35°S. If anything the Mercator projection is exaggerating the visual distance of going around.
That said you can preserve distance in special cases, for example any two chosen points. For example you can go to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/two-point-equidistant/ and put your points at the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. While that still won't let you measure wiggly ship routes along the coast, it does a better job than Mercator.
Failing that you can use Gall-Peters which does a better job of conveying the vastness of Africa, since it's area preserving.
You very much can. The scale of longitude and latitude is just not the same so you need to do Pythagoras (usually by approximation rules).
There are usually lines to allow for that.
And the distance is going to be distorted no matter what.
Not to be a total nit but thought it worth pointing out that 20% longer transit time for a particular transit route likely does not directly translate to a 20% reduction in annual capacity as port delays for on/offloading and other factors also determine annual capacity and they can be extremely variable as well.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/maritime-shipping-disaster-...
"Europe" doesn't have a Navy capable of projecting enough force to deal with the problem.
And, lastly, the raison d'être for today's USN is securing the free flow of global trade. So, it's very much unsurprising that USA is jumping in here (that we do not get paid for doing this service is a different matter).
That was the deal since the second world war.
1. Attack Saudi Arabia's oil infra with cheap drones and threaten 1/3 the world's energy. These drones cost 10x to 100x more to shoot down.
2. Start another Arab Spring, counting on the fact that the Houthis enjoy massive popularity in the Muslim world right now, among Sunni and Shia both, for opposing Israel.
3. Drag the US into another Afghanistan, which nobody wants.
See: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0104/Gaza-w...
To expand a little, I don't understand how the Houthis have support right now, outside of support that is specifically about destabilizing the entire region. Which is why I don't see your brief paragraph being enough to explain things. You do mention US support in there; who else is involved? And why?
The nuance is that not everyone agrees about US backed hegemony in the region. The goal isn’t to “destabilize”/whatever neutered phrase the pentagon is using, the goal is to assert a different political order. The language you’re using here takes the current state of affairs as neutral or a given when it is not.
The details are of course incredibly complicated, but the basic observation that weapons and money flow out of Tehran is straightforward.
I suspect that Iran isn't in any sense ordering the Houthis to do anything, and the idea to attack shipping is entirely germinated from the Houthis themselves (largely as a form of "showing support" for Palestinians, even if, as a few people have noted, this action only hurts them while providing them no meaningful aide). Largely, this is because it's colossally stupid for Iran to push for a provocation that is meaningfully likely to see all the major world powers (except for maybe Russia; note that China is going to be on the US's side here) create a coalition to eliminate a troublesome menace.
They've got a huge amount of popular support in the Middle East, because so many people there hate Israel, and see the Houthis as the only ones standing up to Israel (apart from Hamas and Hezbollah). I don't have a source, but if you ever happened to check the comments on Middle East TikTok videos you'd see what I mean.
It may or may not be the case that they're disrupting shipping at the direction of Iran, but it almost certainly is the case that Iran equipped them, and that Iran can effectively instruct them to stop.
It's hard to make any kind of comment on a thread here without getting pulled towards one pole or another of the ongoing argument about what's happening in MENA right now; I'm doing my best to keep this as dry as possible, and to hedge statements by saying things like "the conventional geopolitical answer". You can find alternate geopolitical answers; in fact, you can probably find any answer you're looking for. All I can do is relay what I'm reading.
I think my main question is what valid paths forward do people see here? I honestly don't know how to find news that isn't dominated by posturing, at the moment.
That said, you have to hold your own accountable for bad acts. Doesn't mean none will ever happen, of course. Nor does it mean that you cannot have legitimate concerns and claims. And your response to a terrorist act cannot legitimately be to try to minimize it. Nor is it a valid response to rapid fire old grievances, many of which are misrepresented or where the people involved were held accountable.
So, in spirit of your criticism, let's try and move past it. You don't know the best path. What are some valid paths?
Once, the Romans has Gaul problems. They used a generous application of excessive violence, and it was effective.
Once, the US has native-Americans problems. They used a generous application of excessive violence, and it was effective.
Once, the Nazis has Jews problems. They used a generous application of excessive violence, and it was effective.
Once, Israel has Palestinian problems. They use a generous application of excessive violence, and it IS effective.
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/04/asad-abukhalil-nasrall...
That article has a few quirks (e.g., derisively referencing George Soros), but I found some of the small details in it add to its overall credibility, like how a portrait of Nasrallah was visible in Soleimani's house when Soleimani's family members were mourning his death.
* I usually treat references to George Soros as antisemitic dog whistles, but the author is normally a strident opponent of antisemitism, so I don't know what to think in this instance.
> When it comes to war with Israel, Nasrallah is the ultimate decision maker.
Because they're not a nation state and you can't actually do this in any meaningful way? It's like trying to wipe "greed" off the map. Good luck.
Insure profitably? Sure. At some point, the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the thing being insured, making it pointless to insure.
Some people describe this scenario as something being "impossible to insure", but it's not meant in the literal sense. In fact I would argue that there is no insurance company that would decline to insure a $100 million cargo through a combat zone, if the premium offered was $150 million.
> Insurance industry sources said that war risk premiums had stayed firm on Monday at between 0.05% to 0.1% of the value of a ship, from around 0.03% estimated last week before the attacks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/war-risk-insurance...
Notably some already IN the red sea
If you’re talking about Yemen, sure. If you’re talking about Gaza, it’s naïve to think anything there will restore confidence in the Bab al-Mandab.
The real naivete is presuming that the "lalala can't hear you, I will do whatever I want" playbook of US/Israeli foreign policy is sustainable in any way.
The shipping cost for items that have to go around is about double $1600 to $4000 ish as seen [2].
So the cost is quite a bit extra.
[1] - https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2024/01/05/peak-season-...
[2] - https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
in this case it's pretty clearly the Houthi-let Yemeni government, which is a proxy for Iran, and all parties have been pretty vocal about it.
Meanwhile, attacks on EU vessels will likely attract sympathy for the attackers from the EU.
I suppose you could make an argument the the US should only defend US flagged ships, which might save the US money or something. (I don't think I'd believe this argument, but you can make it)
Note that the budget of the country in question is what is really being talked about, and not the entire GDP of the country. It is possible for the US navy to save money while costing the average US citizen money.
You've just described mercantillism. Post Bretton-Woods is the first time in centuries the world hasn't worked that way. The dream of free trade and globalism was that everyone had equal protection on the seas. I fear you're correct that we're returning to a darker time where autarky reigns and trade is restricted to essentials.
Unless that ship is headed to the Gaza Strip: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid .
What?
A ship can be built, owned and operated from outside the US but still be registered in the US.
You may be thinking of the Jones Act, which implements cabotage in the US, a fairly common practice among seafaring nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabotage
EW is highly overrated. The EM spectrum is large, transceivers are agile and high gain antennas are inexpensive and easy to operate. Thus, any conceivable EW countermeasure you imagine has a short expiration date: the problem is highly asymmetric.
In general, with drones proliferating, an affordable highly mobile (all in one container - radar, minimum 20mm gun, laser, vertical launch Stinger class missiles and EM countermeasures) point defense should become a pretty good selling product.
Even if you hire a PMC I doubt they can deal with anti-ship missiles or ballistic missiles. Attack is much easier than defense.
>Even if you hire a PMC I doubt they can deal with anti-ship missiles or ballistic missiles. Attack is much easier than defense.
A subsonic missile like a typical anti-ship can easily be shot down by a regular MANPAD like Stinger. Automatic - just press a button - systems like Phalanx or Skynex are similarly very easy to operate. Ballistic missiles are the hardest target, so not every system can do it, yet the modern systems which are capable to shot down ballistics do it automatically.
(Obviously it's still in the US' best interest to intervene nevertheless because no country on this rock is as dependent on free, worldwide flow of goods than the US, but still, they don't have to)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/07/houthi...
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/6/24027735/yemen-h...
A google for keywords including some of "attack ships red sea houthi" will provide some context
Disclaimer: I learnt about this 3 minutes ago.
Recently Russian media began communicating their expectations for Houthis to specifically attack British ships, after Ukraine used Storm Shadows to destroy a Russian ship loaded with Iranian drones which was docked in Crimea.
What I'm trying to ask: what is the outcome these attackers are expecting, and how does it benefit them?
It's not really that complicated. They just hate Jews (and the US), it's quite literally in their slogan.
They don't really have a goal other than "try to kill Jews", and this is the best they are currently able to do.
They are asking Israel to let humanitarian aid into Gaza to ease that blockade.
What I want to say - this kind of pressure often works, in some ways.
Shipping companies, rather than abiding by the selective blockade of Israeli bound ships, are re-routing all ships instead because they believe making this a global problem will resolve the matter with military intervention without them having to "pick" a side. Some of these companies also have deep ties to Israel (or based in countries that have de-facto signed off on Israeli aggression) so abiding by the blockade is not politically feasible. One exception is COSCO and they seem to going through the canal just fine.
You probably set a record for most false information in one post.
1) So far it can't be called a Genocide, just mass murder along with an attempt at ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion.
2) Gaza still is not occupied and hasn't been since 2006. It is under a very severe blockade instead, and now is being invaded.
3) The Houthis are attacking Israel bound ships and whatever ship that has economic ties with Israeli nationals or economic groups.
> If Israel wanted to commit genocide then the entirety of Gaza would be leveled and 99% of the people dead indiscriminately.
No, that's how it is defined. Plus, they're clearly working on it.
https://twitter.com/JerryHicksUnite/status/17440291718508259...
That is a good short primer to just how far off it is to call this war or self-defense. And it's in the West Bank, too:
https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1744466142918238591
And the ethnic cleansing on the ground matches the genocidal rhetoric by politicians. Rhetoric Israel is obliged under the convention against Genocide to prohibit and prosecute, not engage in.
"Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!! Stop with this impotence. You have ability. There is worldwide legitimacy! Flatten Gaza." -- Revital Gottlieb, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 07/10/2023
"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" -- Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, 09/10/2023
"Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating they way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023
"This [attack] is not enough, there should be more, there should be no limits to the response, I said it a million times, until we see hundreds of thousands fleeing Gaza, we, the IDF has not achieved its mission, this is a phase that should happen, I am saying this cause these are instructions that were said to the IDF" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023
"I don't care about Gaza. I literally don't care at all. They can go out and swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around gaza." -- May Golan, Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women in Israel, 13/10/2023
"There are no innocent civilians in Gaza" -- Isaac Herzog, President, 13/10/2023
“There is no humanitarian crisis.” [..] "the humanitarian crisis at the moment is in Israel." -- Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the UK, 16/10/2023
"Without hunger and thirst among the Gazan population, we will not succeed in recruiting collaborators, we will not succeed in recruiting intelligence, [or]... in bribing people with food, drink, medicine, in order to obtain intelligence." -- Revital Gotliev, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 23/10/2023
"We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness... we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah." -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 25/10/2023
"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." -- Amichai Eliyahu, Minister of Heritage, 05/11/2023
"We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 24/12/2023
When you combine that with the gleeful cruelty IDF soliders are displaying in the videos they are making of themselves, the fact that over 30000 people have already been killed, thousands of children, half a million set to starve or die of disease in the next year, the targeting of refugee camps and journalists, the videos of snipers shooting at people out of nowhere, gunning down a woman fleeing with her child, gunning down youth just standing around in the West Bank, etc. etc. etc. the picture becomes clear and "it's not genocide because it could be worse" rings very very hollow.
Palestinians are declared as non-persons and just hunted, starved, bombed. And the attempt to do this before the eyes of the world and to sanctify it is the worst attack on Western civilization, enlightenment and human rights since Hitler was on the cover of Time magazine.
To effectively accuse a party of attempting a genocide according to the Convention, you have to prove:
(1) that whatever horrible things they are doing have the effect of destroying a group; note that destruction doesn't necessarily involve killing --- for instance, Russia's kidnapping and "re-parenting" of Ukrainian children is widely viewed as a genocidal act. But either way, the outcome involved has to be the elimination of the group; displacement doesn't necessarily qualify.
(2) that the horrible things were done with the intent of destroying a group; the Convention leaves no wiggle room here, as you might find in US criminal law, for recklessness or negligence. It's genocide if you did it deliberately in order to destroy the group.
What you're going to find in these discussions is that many people acknowledge the Netanyahu war cabinet as deeply reckless, inhumane, savage, murderous, choose-your-own words --- but that at the same time what they're doing simply doesn't fit the Convention's definition.
These long lists of quotes aren't especially persuasive as rhetoric (and they're too easy to skim, and, not for nothing, and this has nothing to do with you personally, but they are also a hallmark of crank HN comments --- I'm not calling you a crank, just giving you something to avoid pattern matching with). That said:
Netanyahu's "We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" isn't genocidal on its face. You can battle things without destroying them. Churchill's "Fight them on the beaches" speech didn't promise a genocide of Germans. You could argue that it's dehumanizing. If you read it charitably as applying only to Hamas, and not to the broader population of people you could accuse of supporting Hamas, it might not even be that; you have to be human to be dehumanized, etc.
On the other hand:
"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." This is a straightforward appeal to genocide! Of course, the flip side of it is (a) Eliyahu has absolutely no power over what the IDF does, and (b) nobody seriously believes the IDF will deploy nuclear weapons against Gaza (in fact, the emerging consensus seems to be that they're going to back off on airstrikes). But, like, if you had Netanyahu or Gallant or Gantz saying this, you'd have a stronger argument.
I do not expect you to agree with any of this. There are non-legalistic conceptions of genocide that reasonable people use. If you believe someone is engaged in a genocide, it is vanishingly unlikely that an HN comment, even the greatest HN comment ever written, is going to change your mind. I only hope to illustrate one flavor of good-faith opposition you're going to find to your argument.
By picking apart pro-Palestinian rhetoric here, I'm going to come off as supportive of Israel. I'd caution you against drawing those kinds of conclusions. My personal belief is that all these discussions on HN are cursed, and that as soon as anyone openly declares for "a side" here, conversational potential basically ends. I'll go as far as saying that I believe Palestinians exist as a distinct people and deserve self-determination. I try to pick apart pro-Israel stuff here too; be aware, though, that pro-Israel seems at times to be a minority position on HN, so there are fewer examples of it.
I know it's repetitive, but I don't think of it as being pro-Israel or being pro-Palestine. Especially since this right-wing messianic stuff paints Israel into a very, very dark corner. Blind support of it is helping Netanyahu and some very cruel and ultimately sad people, maybe some arms manufacturers, but not really anyone else, not even in Israel.
> displacement doesn't necessarily qualify
Not necessarily, but possibly. E.g. from Wikipedia on genocide:
> The term Bosnian genocide is used to refer either to the killings committed by Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or to ethnic cleansing that took place elsewhere during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
Just scattering people in the world to never return, to settle their land, is destroying them as a national group in my books. But we'll see.
The bulk of the quotes I saw can basically be summarized as "we don't care, ethnic cleansing is fine, genocide is fine too, as long as Israel controls the land afterwards", and if anything beyond that is said, everything is blamed on Hamas, case closed.
That is bad enough, but that messianic stuff goes a farther than that IMO. When Netanyahu invoked Amalek, which he and others did more than once, that implies wiping out everyone, children and even animals, showing no mercy, blotting out their memory. And his reference to "fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah"..
> "Destruction has been decreed, overwhelming and righteous. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out the destruction decreed upon the whole land."
I can't tell you what exactly Netanyahu means by that, but you'd have to squint harder than I am able to to not be pretty sure it's not within international law.
> "When there is absolute evil, one must not look back, one must not express empathy. The actions of the oppressors on Black Sabbath [meaning October 7th] are tens of times worse than the actions of Sodom and Gomorrah. The war is not about territory or Economy but a war for the loss of evil from the world and the perpetuation of the absolute good." -- Avishai Levy, Lieutenant Colonel and Rabbi of the Northern command, 03/11/2023
I do think we have tacit approval of genocidal statements, combined with the atrocities we know about, which in turn are probably just the tip of the iceberg. If the stuff people proudly post on social media is so sickening, singing "Gaza is a cemetery" and all that, obviously not fearing for their military careers at all, what are people doing that they don't film? We know enough to know it needs to be stopped and investigated, of that I'm confident.
Specifically, it has a very similar structure to "the US could have won in Vietnam if they'd just used nuclear weapons".
It's less often applied to the US destruction of Korea because the US did, in fact, run out of things to bomb. However, there were elements in the US military who were very upset that they couldn't use nukes there.
In retrospect, the wholesale slaughter of, say, the peasantry of south Vietnam is a horrific crime, and the fact that more folks weren't murdered doesn't do much to make me feel like it was a moral thing to do. From a US perspective, that take has been pretty persuasive, but even a cursory look at what the US did to the people of that country is chilling. The fact that they could have simply immolated everyone in the country doesn't make it one bit less of a crime.
The fact that Nazi Germany "only" killed 13M civilians in camps
(and didn't just, say, summarily execute them on the street, but instead simply legally deported an excess non-citizen population, until they had no place to put any more "surplus" non-citizens)
doesn't make me feel any better about what they did in order to ensure a "German" majority in their nation.
I can say for sure, as I drove between the Ute and Dine "reservations" to my parent's home near a Mescalero reservation, that the fact that there are still remnants of those folks living here doesn't do a lot to make me feel better about their treatment in the past. I suppose that the US could have done even more horrific things, but I'm thoroughly mystified how that would make any of this horror less terrible.
All those actions still feel like horrifying crimes against humanity, and the fact that the people who did them could have been even more destructive and cruel doesn't do much to change my opinions on any of them.
I'd bet that the justification will probably sound just as convincing to the IDF and related folks when they run out of folks to murder. The idea that we could have done worse is often a fantastic consolation for guilty people.
The US uses the Pacific to trade with APAC.
Edit: am wrong. See below
I understand those interceptor missiles are super expensive because they're designed to shoot down everything, but surely there's a much cheaper, automated technology that destroys drones specifically?
Don't get me wrong, this approach also causes all sorts of issues, but isn't this basically what they do in other countries facing potentially threatening situations like South Africa i.e. farmers carrying guns etc.
Who will require this?
You’d also need every port that ship approaches and every nation whose waters it transits to clear active military equipment on a civilian vessel.
Do you think it could be viable to set aside commercial interests to address the deep discord among the countries and their proxies in the region?
The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see. But I am open to your point of view.
Isn't that precisely what choosing to sail around the horn of Africa is? It's commercially unfavorable and it is designed to avoid the area of conflict.
> The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see.
Sure, but do you think that automatically heightening the level of conflict is the best way to achieve that? The OP even suggested that requiring this approach through legislation would be favorable.
and both can get complicated enough that you need serious ECM and ECCM to reliably jam them, and almost certainly need systems that shoot them down; i.e. missiles and CIWS.
at that point you're just making fat warships.
I'm more curious if it is technically feasible for something like that to take out a missile traveling at 300m/s.
> 95% of container ships that would’ve transited the Red Sea are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa
> 95% of Red Sea container ship traffic now going around South Africa
Cape Town was originally founded in 1652 "as a supply station for Dutch ships sailing to the Far East." i.e. as a half-way point on this route around Africa. But then in 1869 the Suez canal opened.
So no major benefit to Cape Town.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction
It's probably worth adding that going round the cape doesn't add just more cost to fuel and time, insurance for cargo down there isn't cheap either as the weather is very changeable.
Shifts in ship availability causes waves of bankruptcy, and either gluts or shortages (whatever happens to be most inconvenient at the time).
Makes for good background listening.
I wonder when will political forces inside of the US proper start questioning the opportunity costs of maintaining 11 aircraft carriers given current events, probably not until the next big-ish war proves their futility for good.
And I'd say that even during for WW1, the naval battles didn't have that much of an effect on how the war ended, in fact after the Battle of Jutland (summer of 1916) both the British and the German navies were de facto fleets in being.
Later edit: I could make a point, and a very valid one, for the strategic importance of subs (the WW2 Japanese merchant fleet was mostly sunk by US subs, for example), but unfortunately for the US subs fleet people are not thinking about them first and foremost when the US Navy is mentioned.
Of course, all this talk ignores the nuclear thing, this discussion is entirely made while focusing on the conventional way of waging war. If nuclear were to be a real option then all prior assumptions about the next big war would dramatically change.
Probably the most notable naval moment in the European war (D-Day) was also only possible because the German navies couldn't dominate the channel. If the Germans had dominated the channel, D-Day would have been impossible. So, a lack of naval strength there was a critical factor for the Axis losing.
For comparison, the Omaha beach operation only had beteeen 2000 and 5000 losses for the US, which, while tragic for the people involved, is dwarfed by almost any big serious battle that had taken place further East.
No, the fact that a player can cause problems for a while before the US responds does not show that, and if you think it does, you never understood what the idea of that supremacy was about.
Now, if the US proves unable or unwilling to respond in a way which restores confidence in navigation in the region, that would show what you claim.
We're well past that point. This administration is clearly signalling that they are prioritizing the avoidance of an escalating regional war, and an aerial bombardment of Yemen would be an escalation against the Iran proxy. That's a legitimate policy position to be debated (I think it's the wrong position). But it seems pretty clear from both public statements and OSINT on movement of military hardware (or lack thereof) that they are unwilling to respond in a way that restores confidence in navigation in the region.
Most of the shipping through the Suez is going from China to the EU.
Is the US going to cry very much if China has problems exporting to the EU such that the EU turns to importing US products?
I'm also curious how long this route around africa is the best option, since right now, its summer in the southern hemisphere.. I seem to remember hearing that winters around the cape of Africa are pretty legendary.
By the way, military support for Ukraine runs just fine.
Main reason nobody goes to fight over this, is the avoidance of escalation. And so far, some delays in shipping is not the end of the world.
Anyway, for now geo politics mean that taking the long way around, and not intervene with force, the smart decision for everyone involved.
Although it's a worthwhile correction to say Italy's navy fields two ACs instead of one, I just don't think it's material to their point.
(Only three nations in the world have catapult-equipped aircraft carriers: the US, France and China. The latter two countries are not F-35 users.)
If that was the case Ukraine wouldn't be so worried about loss of US support. Sure Europe is giving some support, but the EU alone is enough bigger than Russia that Ukraine should have no problems getting enough support. This is true even if you eliminate a few players like Hungary that are supporting Russia. (UK of course isn't in the EU)
The major players in Europe (France, Germany, UK) don't seem to be against supporting Ukraine, but they don't have the ability to do it despite an economy that says they should be able to if they wanted. There are a lot of smaller players in Europe that likewise should have plenty of ability to provide support but somehow they can't provide it.
Yes, they can easily be shot down, but if several hundreds keep coming every day, the defences will be overwhelmed. It's already a war of attrition and Europe could easily win it, but it's mostly sitting on its ass.
That nobody is producing enough artillery shells almost 2 years later is criminal. I give Ukraine a small pass here only because evidence is post 2014 they were doing their best to build capacity, and that takes time. The rest of us didn't have the corruption and other problems that Ukraine has done internally, and so we should already have that in place. (or in place the ability to give Ukraine air supremacy so they don't need artillery - there are lots of options)
And no, military support for Ukraine is not going fine as can be easily checked in several recent articles in reputable sources such as the NYT, FT, Politico and The Economist.
This entire issue is basically Israel trying to pretend the entire global supply chains are about to collapse if no one intervenes (keeping in mind they have their own navy, but declined to participate in operation Prosperity Guardian, despite them being the main target of the Houthi blockade...)
Like how they are provoking Hezbollah with their "double-tap" strikes.
At this rate, it will take less 25 years to finish them all. And this is in the most optimistic sense ... Hospitals are destroyed, no access to food and water and houses are destroyed ... They could finish their job in 10 years
For comparison, Russian aggression on Ukraine lasted almost 2 years now. If Israel continues its genocide for "just" 2 years, this means killing 10% of the population.
It's the difference between "Atlanta Airport shut down indefinitely, all flights cancelled until further notice" and "Bad weather in Atlanta, all flights delayed". Both are newsworthy, but the latter doesn't generate as many headlines. Not to downplay the violence in the Red Sea, obviously it's a lot more serious than bad weather, but I think the analogy is ok.
that might be what parent is mentioning : this alternative route was sold to the news-viewing public as absolutely impossible and untenable when producing profit over time -- they were told that the suez canal was of vital importance and that trade must halt until it was cleared.
and now suddenly, not much time afterwards, the threat of violence has prompted the realization that there are clear and viable alternatives to the suez canal.
the 180 on the importance of the canal feels telling, but I don't know how. I presume it's an effort to keep public opinion from desiring a strong military response in the area. It feels like election-time stalling so that "Cleaning up the Red Sea" can be a political talking point during election season -- but I hate to be so cynical as to think we're ignoring a global political partner for the sake of a politician having an ace up their sleeve during debates.
> With each day that the Ever Given container ship remains stuck in the Suez Canal, the cost of the disruption grows more consequential. After days of failed efforts to move the mammoth ship, shipowners began rerouting ships bound for the Suez Canal around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to their journeys and burning additional fuel — a cost ultimately borne by consumers. When deciding whether to divert, a shipping company must consider the cost of sitting for days outside the canal versus the added time of steaming around Africa. It is not an easy choice.
Today the Red Sea crisis is front page news, and their story leads with:
> They can send their vessels through the Red Sea if they are willing to risk attacks by the Houthi militia in Yemen and to bear the cost of sharply higher insurance premiums. Or they can sail an extra 4,000 miles around Africa, adding 10 days in each direction and burning considerably more fuel. Neither option is appealing and both raise costs — expenses that analysts said could ultimately be borne by consumers through higher prices on the goods they buy.
Basically the same, even using the exact same phrase about consumers. This was just one example, but when I look at coverage of Ever Given I see a general attitude of "damn this is terrible timing, supply chains were just starting to recover from the pandemic, this will cause a lot of problems". Nobody was declaring the end of the world or that "trade must halt". Today I don't see anyone downplaying the situation, at most I see a little bit less front-page placement because of the nature of the story.
It was funny that a single ship could get stuck with such a huge impact on the global shipping industry, so people were tuned in. And you could follow day by day with the plans and attempts made to dig out the ship. Great, simple fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, and memes probably made people more engaged with the story.
With the Houthis it's a big, complex geopolitical mess, and all the oxygen in the room is being taken up by the war in Gaza. No big countermoves have been made so all there is to be done is report on the strikes when they happen, the threats made by various powers, and speculate if the US is going to intervene in some significant way.
The Ever Given was an acute issue, and acute issues are attention grabbing. The attacks in the Red Sea are a progression of a war that the average person in the west doesn't really understand that's been going on for 9 years.
One of my favorites
Not sure about what sources you follow, but the ones I am following scream about a full blown global crisis. Here is for example the explainer from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/19/red-sea-shi...
At the same time many defence analyst is astonished by the appearent dithering of the US Navy over the issue. In fact the more fringe elements are talking about that the recent incapacitation of the US SecDef might be the reason behind the inaction.
The situation here is much harder for the press to explain, has been going back and forth for a couple of weeks at least now (ie not tied to a single specific event with pictures), and is relatively new. The "omg" pieces will come out in a couple of weeks if this continues, don't worry.
I think you and I subscribe to different media sources and this is your warning sign that yours are too sensationalistic.
If it's not entertaining nobody gives a crap
I have, for example, downvoted your comment as it is not useful and is a bit snide or condescending (inclusive “or” to be clear), whereas had you posted your comment as a post, I would not have been able to do so.
The platform shouldn't be the point of a conversation. If a platform makes itself the center of attention, there's something wrong with it.
They can not have it both ways and i find it hypocritical. Don't read twitter then.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html re paywalls.
We justify this that it is better for the world overall if we do it. Maybe we are right. But that doesn't put the legs back on your children we cannot expect everyone to love us for it.
Being the world’s policeman is bad policy these days.
Even russia isn't this blatant and open with its goals.
>On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
That sure sound like something that should attract sanctions and actual military force to prevent.
The US had a really hard time on Afghanistan, what make you think that Iran would be suck a walk in the park.
And also, have you ever considered the logistic nightmare of a war against China right on their backyard?
Unless you're rooting for a global thermonuclear war, there's no way the US couldn't prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without losing a few Aircraft Carriers. The US doesn't have this capability, don't have the industrial base, the money and the raw resources for that.