There have been a lot of condemnations of Ansar-Allah for hitting airports in Saudi Arabia. (They have hit every major airport except those in Mecca and Medina, multiple times and civilians have been killed. I think a reminder is in order.

First, that this new war started when the Sauds hit Sana’a airport, but also:

The Saudi-Emirati coalition conducted more than 227 airstrikes on Sana’a Airport between March 26, 2015, and February 2022. (The airstrikes are documented in the United Nations)

2015: 67 airstrikes

2016: 62 airstrikes

2017: 7 airstrikes

2018: 47 airstrikes

2019: 7 airstrikes

2020: 15 airstrikes

2021: 12 airstrikes

2022: 10 airstrikes

Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni were killed by the Saudi/US blockade of food. The Sauds regularly hit hospitals, weddings, funerals — all the usual. They might as well be Israelis.

So I don’t want to hear crocodile tears now. The airports that are being hit are, unlike Sana’a during the siege, military targets. The Houthis have no airforce.

In addition to airports Ansar-Allah has been hitting refineries, pipelines and other oil infrastructure, essentially at will. The Sauds CANNOT protect their infrastructure. It is impossible.

This is a military revolution. Defense against missiles and drones is very hard, even Russia can’t stop constant attacks on their oil infrastructure, and they still have a decent stock of interceptor missiles. The Sauds are basically out, because America’s stocks are terminally low and Saudi Arabia is low on the priority list for what few there are (Israel gets first pick, then America.)

But even when there are lots of interceptors, drones and missiles are had to stop, and the new offensive weapons are easier to make and cheaper than the defensive ones. This is especially the case for drones, but is also true for many missiles. In such a case, the strategy is to just to run the defenders out of missiles or overwhelm their launchers with huge strikes.

Over 10 years ago I wrote that drones would be a weapon the weak. This is half true, but it’s true enough, and it’s now been proved over the board.

Understand clearly that this IS a revolution in military affairs, and that it means that any nation which is serious and decent sized can create a missile and drone deterrent that is very hard to stop. If they have a lot of mountainous terrain, even better, but Ukraine is almost entire flat land.

Right now the US is still able to bully Latin American countries, but its clear that it’s lost the ability project power significantly bey0nd the Americas. The Iranians have picked up strikes against tankers, and it’s clear that the previous slow pace was a decision, and the decision has changed.

During the initial part of the war they effectively destroyed all US bases in the Middle East, including radars. It would take tens of billions to rebuild them, but since they can’t be defended (the US had plenty of interceptors at the time) that’s pointless. Odds are that most of the permanent US military presence in the Middle East will never return.

It is impossible to overstate just how much the calculus of force has changed: the US can no longer simply sit aircraft carriers off any prepared country’s coast and bomb the hell out of them.

Likewise this makes building up troops for ground operations very difficult. Think about trying to invade Iran. Where would you stage the troops that Iran can’t hit even as you’re trying to bring them in? There will be no major invasion of Iran, because it’s straight up impossible. In the Gulf War the Americans spent months building up forces nearby, that can’t happen any more.

Now Iran and Russia and China and Ansar-Allah were early adopters of this technology, and there are still lots of countries which have no significant drone or missile forces, but only complete incompetents haven’t noticed how effective they are, and you can be sure the technology will spread. If Ansar-Allah, in the most impoverished country in the world, can build drones and missiles (with some Iranian help) and if Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world could do so, there are few countries which couldn’t do the same if they really wanted to, and there are plenty of helpers available for them: China, Russia, Iran, even Ansar-Allah.

So this military revolution will spread, and as it does, the ability of the US to project power will be radically reduced. Further, in time, the tech for long-range missiles capable of striking the US will be developed and spread, and the US will no longer be able to go to war and think “but they can’t hit the homeland.”

All of this will come to be. It cannot be stopped, only slowed. And with Chinese sanctions on the US and Japan crippling their war industries, plus the US’s pathetic financialized military-industrial complex being ridiculously expensive and slow to manufacture anything, the US will not even be able to keep up.

Plus, a lot of countries are target poor. The US and its allies aren’t. One of the reasons Ansar-Allah is going hog wild hitting Saudi infrastructure is that after over a decade of being bombed to hell there isn’t much for them to lose. Their missiles hit targets which matter, while the Sauds mostly are reduced to terror bombing, which won’t stop the Houthis any more than it did the North Vietnamese.

The world is changing, things are happening, and the world order is changing completely.

 

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