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 within range. That especially mean port infrastructure, airports, refineries (which have also been hit) and, yes, pipelines.
Whatever one thinks 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.
Mark Level
I’m no military expert, but right after October 7, Ali Abunimah made the point that the poorest, most vulnerable people will often prevail as they have relatively little to lose. They can capitulate and be slaughtered, or fight to the last person (not just man), because what choice is there? His main example was the Vietnam War. Like Bob Dylan once observed, “When you’ve got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Some bloggers I follow have recently claimed that Yemen is “the world’s poorest country” according to the metrics of the IMF, World Bank, etc. Be that as it may, like Iran it has a very mountainous environment where people can take refuge in areas that are not easy to carpet bomb, as say the cities of Europe were during World War II, developed and flat urban areas, well-mapped.
Per George Galloway in a recent discussion with Jackson Hinkel on MOATS, many in the Arab world consider Yemen the actual spiritual heartland of Islam, with a Sunni majority of 65%, Shia at 35%. But they are not, as in other areas of Asia, at war, in fact they clearly share solidarity across families and clans, and know who the actual enemy is. As in Afghanistan, they are widely respected for their martial skills.
Compare to the efete Saudi Princelings, with their Harems and thuggish servants. It’s no wonder the Saudis are a paper tiger relative to the “Houthis.” I’m not really a Muslim despite a great admiration for the Sufi tradition, and training in some branches of it, just as I have studied the Sepher Yetzirah and Qabalah. (There are some surprising similarities in practices between the two.) The Saudis are so proud (rightly to a point, at one time) of controlling Mecca, but like the Zionists aping a tradition to which demographically few of them ever belonged (the Israeli Ashkenazi population holds few actual “Semites,” thus genetic testing without a Court Order in Israel is illegal) they follow a hollow orthodoxy which does not project actual integrity.
All that said, I am amazed that neither in Egypt nor in KSA nor in Jordan has a boiling point been reached, and the archons been treated like Mussolini, which they are clearly asking for. Ian’s larger point is true and well argued, as usual. I intuit that a boiling point is coming, but I’ve had Revolutionary consciousness since around the age of 15 and was overjoyed when Vietnam drove the Empire out, more than half a century ago. So my conclusion may be projection, and skewed.
Failed Scholar
@Carborundum
Your analysis relies on believing Saudi claims. The only ‘evidence’ that the attacks came from Iraq are Saudi claims, along with the western bootlickers in the Iraqi “government”. Neither are credible, especially because for whatever reason, the Saudi’s have a pathological need to pin the blame on Iraqi actors even when it’s beyond obvious that it wasn’t. They did the same back in July with the attack on Yanbu, even though the Yemeni’s specifically and produly claimed responsibility for it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cc
Indi from Sri Lanka has a great article that relates to this one and lays it out in the larger 500 year context. Recommended.
Cannon and Fort: Iran, Yemen, and 500 Years Of Resistance
https://indi.ca/cannon-and-fort/
Yemen is seeking freedom from US (and Israeli/Saudi/UAE) control (attacks, siege/blockade, sanctions, and colonial/proxy regime forces).
The whole world is seeking freedom from the tyranny of the US Empire.
spud
Defending Most Infrastructure Is Now Impossible But No One’s Getting It
that is correct.
wait till the entitled elites with immunity and limited liability, see this spread inside the west. the panic will be immense. they think they are untouchable because most people obey, get their lives ruined, everything stolen that can be stolen, even unalived.
but we know the tables will turn someday. someone will probably figure out why shoot back in anger, when you can just drone.
that will require every cop shop, city hall and building, corporate buildings etc. massive netting. even then, that does not mean safety.
they can stop one drone, but what if 50 are launched from different locations, aimed at different locations, and maybe one or two are going where they want them to go first, and the rest are lesser targets, but none the less, targets.
mago
I’ve commented before about the House of Saud rot, so will refrain from elaborating, but a price is coming due.
I’ve also mentioned hanging out with some princelings stateside back in the 80’s. Not to be crude or anything, but their main interests were pussy and blow. They did, however, provide some interesting insights to life and dynamics back in the kingdom—the kind of insider stuff that you won’t hear about in whatever your media information sources may be.
It’s
Sometimes I think I should write a book or start a blog, which some have suggested, but nah. Commenting here is enough. I’ve got other demands on my time, not that one would know it given all the two cents I drop.
EGrise
All I know is that now is a good time to be in the missile countermeasures business. The US, Saudi Arabia, NATO, etc. is about to spend obscene amounts of money on new radars, interceptors, and untold amounts of snake oil because none of the Western powers and their allies can accept what Ian just spelled out here: unless you bury it like the Iranians do, it can’t be protected.
Carborundum
Actually, my analysis does not rely on believing the Iraqis. Even if the attack did come from Yemen, the odds are extremely good that it was a cruise missile (drone) attack. The drones look to be doing a lot more meaningful damage than ballistic missiles are. We’ve seen a number of times where drones have hit quite specific high value locations within refineries very precisely; we saw it right from the start of the conflict when they hit the downlinks at NAS Bahrain and key warning and control radars in al-Azraq, Qatar, and Kuwait. Conversely, when we’ve seen hits attributed to ballistic missiles, the locations are nowhere near as high value compared to what’s nearby.
Drones are easier to stop, but one has to be looking for them and it is absolutely possible to saturate defences even if the defender is looking.
different clue
Now here’s an interesting way to hack into a computer . . . and thence into whatever systems you can reach from your freshly hacked-into computer. . .
“TIL that in 2017, scientists successfully hacked a computer using physical DNA. They encoded malware into a synthetic biological sample. When a lab’s DNA sequencer analyzed this liquid, the genetic data executed as computer code, giving the hackers full control of the system.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1wghqol/til_that_in_2017_scientists_successfully_hacked_a/
Is it so impractical as to be not worth doing? Is that why it hasn’t been done for any non-research reasons?
vmsmith
I spent two years in Bahrain back in ’97-’98. I was in the Navy, and my job was primarily to set up and coordinate exercises with our counterparts on the Arabian peninsula and Horn of Africa. Within that context I got to know the various country mindsets and militaries pretty well.
The Yemenis and Eritreans were by far the people I considered real warriors. The Eritreans had only recently won their war of independence from Ethiopia, and they—as a society—were a sight to behold. Their military was fierce.
The Yemenis were way less organized than the Eritreans, but what they lacked in organization they made up for in fierceness. I sat next to a 15 or 16 year old guy in a restaurant who had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, and he did not look as through he’d be at all hesitant to use it if necessary. From the cradle they are fierce.
The Omanis were decent, but not even in the same universe as the Yemenis when it came to martial prowess.
The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Emiratis, and Bahrainis . . . the slightest breeze would have knocked half of them over.
I have not been following the Bab al-Mandab thing too closely, but if the Saudis and Yemenis were to seriously lock horns in ground combat, my money would be on the Yemenis for sure.