After Ansar Allah grabbed a huge chunk of territory, including coast and islands which let it control the Red Sea, and after blowing up a pumping station and pipeline which will require weeks to repair, the Sauds are doubling down with airstrikes and missile attacks.
And I’m wondering what’s going thru their heads.
Because we’re in a period where, with a few exceptions, anything can be destroyed by missiles and drones if you’re withing range. That especially mean port infrastructure, airports, refineries (which have also been hit) and, yes, pipelines.
Whatever one things of Ansar Allah, they have shown an ability to absorb massive amounts of damage, and frankly, they have almost nothing. If it comes to a tit-for-tat exchange, they can take the punishment, while Saudi Arabia has all sorts of vulnerable infrastructure.
It’ll take, supposedly, six weeks to repair the pipeline.
Then it can just be hit again, because there is no way to protect it.
This is the new calculus of missile power. It’s hard to defend against, and in the context of western interceptor stockpiles being almost depleted, it’s effectively impossible.
In Ukraine/Russia this favors Russia, because they can hit more. In Yemen/Saudi Arabia it favors Yemen because what they can hit matters much more.
As with the Iran war, the correct play here is peace. Yemen wants an end to the blockade. Give it to them.
Saudi Arabia’s army is an infamous joke. They’re flirting with the end of the House of Saud here, because if the money stops, then their population will become a serious threat. The military is weak to avoid a possible coup, but that means it can’t stop a major uprising or invasion. The secret police are scary, but they only work at stomping out small fires, they can’t stop anything major.
Everyone hates the Saudi Royals. I’ve never met anyone who dealt with them who didn’t despise them, even if they were being paid well by the Sauds, they hated them.
This is a new world. Saudi Arabia bet on America to protect them, and that worked for generations. But America can’t any more. The royal family needs to find a new way, and so far the Pakistan/Turkey alliance is a dud.
It’s not looking good for them, but the first thing they need to do if they want to survive is get real about their situation, and about how warfare has changed.
I rather hope they don’t.
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Carborundum
The attack on the east-west pipeline was a cruise missile (drone) attack (the Iraqi government announced that they seized the launchers on Saturday), not a ballistic missile attack. We will probably someday get to the point where there is a profusion of high precision ballistic missile threats from second and third tier actors, but we’re not there yet.
We do, however, seem to be at the point where there even non-state actors can achieve highly precise cruise missile attacks. The big difference is that these are much easier to defend against. However, one has to build the infrastructure needed to do this and this is not going to be cheap. The interceptors are pretty economical and the aircraft basing can actually be relatively austere provided the threat is episodic and non-enduring, but the sensor infrastructure will be non-trivia.
DMC
Substantial elements of the old Yemeni army were incorporated into Ansar Allah with the breakdown of the Sabah government. Being a relatively poor country, they could not afford to try and keep up sophisticated air forces and chose to develop relatively portable, truck based missile systems instead and became quite accomplished at their deployment and use. Hence, the Houthis being able to act with “state actor” levels of sophistication. That, and effectively being the government of Yemen.