I remember a long time ago when someone allegedly put sea mines in the Red Sea and a number of commercial vessels claimed that they were damaged by mines. I'd have to look into the reality of that but I was dispatched to Jeddah to embark some mine sweeping helicopters and air crew and have a poke around to see if we could turn any mines up. We swept the sea lanes from Perim Island up to near Yanbu while a sister ship was sweeping the sea lanes from Port Said down to Yanbu. We never saw them but enough about the old days.
The tiff with Yemen is more than a tiff, it is an attack on maritime trade routes by pirates and we need to revert to form and fight these modern pirates much the way we fought them in the past. We should mine all of the harbors and approaches to Yemen on both the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea and declare a no-fly exclusion zone over Yemen. Yes, we will let them trade with all their friends over their own borders so it's not like we are cutting them off from all supply, merely choking off 100% of their access to the shipping lanes and along with that, 100% access to the sky. Let them work out just how provoking that can be.
There are not a lot of people or businesses that are willing to hazard their ships to trade with Yemen. Yemen is not like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because it has almost nothing the rest of the world wants or needs. All the world ever asked of Yemen was to stay out of the way.
The thing is though, for this to be at all effective we need to enforce both the aeronautical and maritime blockade and if you look through the records of anything or, for instance, votes in the UN over the last 20 or 40 years you won't find any of our so-called allies ever being of much use when it came to actually working the world in an attempt to make it better. When it comes to actual world peace and making a contribution they are all off sniffing bicycle seats at the train station or dreaming of invading Russia. Ask them to step up and support a nice callous bit of blockade and they go as squishy as a democrat gushing about how nice that axe murderer is...
5 comments:
Unlike the Barbary Pirates (or Somali pirates) there are a few issues to deal with.
First our NATO tiff about Russia and Ukraine is still in doubt. Our "Earstwhile Allies" in that arena are not likely to be very supportive of our efforts in Yemen.
Depending on Arab Allies has proven foolish at best. Probably because we've screwed them so many times with our promises and Israel support no matter what?
Second, we don't have much left in the minesweeping and fleet support.
Mines work BOTH WAYS. And unless you're going to stop and inspect everything floating in that area a few revenge sea mines are to be expected.
Third that "little thing" about OPERATING Well Inside the Drone and Missile envelope of Yemen. SONAR 21 says it well:
https://sonar21.com/the-limitations-of-the-us-naval-air-defense-system-will-force-the-us-to-withdraw-from-the-red-sea/
And finally, there is the real dragon in the mix. Iran. Given our Diplomatic history of perfidy (lies and worse in an honor based society) WHO'S an Idiot enough to listen to our words about Iran and Yemen.
IF we Listened to the "Demand" of the Hothi's and stopped supporting Israel's wars just maybe we could use some Jeffersonian Diplomacy on the situation.
Diplomatics?? Historically (word choice intentional) NO WAY. We got to have a nice Naval Version of Afghanistan with a lot of dead American sailors before that.
"So-called allies." And there is the crux of the problem. America has no true allies, only sporadic alignment of interests. And since we made the mistake of carrying them, both financially and militarily, for so many decades, they are more than happy to let us do the heavy lifting. Which we should never do for countries that can't seem to uphold our values domestically.
The Ukrainian mess is another prime example - though I would argue that the US really has no interest there and it should be a 100% Euro headache.
You see deeper than what was written. The similarities with the Barbary pirates is extraordinary. No country in Europe lifted a finger to stop the pirates, ever. The pirates go to for ultimate strength was the Ottoman Empire and we just flat out didn't care. We also don't care about Persia. Look at the geography. This is a quintessential seapower story.
I swept mines for a living and laugh at what has been done to our MCM capabilities but as I keep trying to make clear to John Konrad, I don't care about the fallout when the stupid sticks to the stupid people who did it. Mines come along every 50 years or so, are a menace and then fade away for some reason. I don't see them fading away anymore. Modern seamines are downright scary. The Red Sea is not really a trade highway for US anymore and if it gets jammed up/see Suez Canal incident with bad driving recently, and our traffic routes around. Europe gets hosed but then, they're Europe. Let them think about their own problems, after all, they created them all.
People only rarely take a step back and look at a POL/MIL situation and ask themselves, 'self, what would this situation look like in 10 years if I went all in and what would it look like in 20 years if I went all in and contrast with if I just put my hands in my pockets and walked away. Look at the middle east. Anything we did or nothing at all would yield the same outcome. The taliban and islamics are going to destroy the place and there is literally nothing we can do to stop it or even slow it down. It's almost another blog post really. What difference did all of WWII make to US? The continent is woeful place and getting infinitely worse every single day. All that blood and ruin was for nothing if it was thought it was all done to preserve a nation/society/way of life. All of that is gone and long gone. I need a lot more time to study Asia. It is far more complex than we know. That's one of the reasons I enjoy Spengler so much.
While the Marine Corps Hymn is neat:
SNIP The scope of corsair activity began to diminish in the latter part of the 17th century,[8] as the more powerful European navies started to compel the Barbary states to make peace and cease attacking their shipping. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective protection continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Between 1801 and 1815, occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary Wars waged by the United States, Sweden and the Kingdom of Sicily against the Barbary states. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely. The remainder of the threat was finally subdued for Europeans by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and so-called "pacification" by the French during the mid-to-late 19th century.
France finally put paid to Barbary Pirates. We just bloodied their nose.
We cannot sweep mines very well anymore (Good thing the Hothi's are not using them, eh?); the SONAR 21 article speaks well to the inability of our navy to stop massed drone and missile attack as well as total inability to resupply those vertical launch tubes at sea.
And our navy's aircraft have a shorter range than current anti-ship drones and missiles so we're deep inside their range.
I happen to agree with your reply in its Europe's problem and we should walk away.
But I'm looking too deep into this subject? I really don't want to see burning aircraft carriers after the massive failure of Afghanistan and Ukraine.
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