Frankly this should have happened weeks ago. Sure, as I described a couple of months ago (The New Geo-politics Sparked From the Middle East) the US Navy shoot-downs of Houthi drones and missiles aimed at it, civilian ships and Israel, was impressive stuff (see map above).
But you can’t play defence forever, even if your systems are as formidable as those of the US Navy. Unless strikes were carried out against the Yemen sites for launching, command and control, and ammo dumps, this crap would just continue forever given that Iran is backing them and supplying them. Not doing so also means you’re at the mercy of their decision-making and war tempo, which they can ratchet up and down as politics requires.
It appears the Yanks finally took that option.
Having said that, as I pointed out in that post, this is not just about the Houthis, Yemen or even the Middle East. There are military writers who think this is all part of a dangerous global, geo-political dance between China, Russia and Iran against the Western powers, primarily the USA, who they see as being weakened by internal dissension, polarisation and rot in both political and cultural dimensions, as well as economic and financial problems, plus badly depleted military logistics systems:
But a Center for Strategic and International Studies report found replacing inventories for ammunitions such as 155 mm shells could take between four and seven years. Replacing Javelins could take up to eight years and Stingers up to as many as 18 years. I’m confident that US manufacturing can do it all a lot faster than that, but when you consider that Defence is getting about $800 billion per year things should never have been allowed to get to this point.
The specific idea being to bleed the USA of weapons in the war in Ukraine and the Middle East while preparing future blows in South Korea and Taiwan where the local forces dependent on American arms and ammunition will find themselves running short of fancy missiles and possibly ordinary artillery ammunition.
Also note that the statement above in that X-Tweet, which explicitly ties the Houthis to Iran, is not from the President but the Middle East US command, CENTCOM. “President” Biden has not said this and it should be noted that when became President in 2021 he delisted the Houthis from the US list of terrorist groups. Obviously that did nothing to encourage them to be better and likely did the opposite. Here’s hoping the Administration puts them back on the list where they belong.
OMG. You gormless moron. So why did you take them off the list? Was it to make Iran happy?
OMG II. Follow-up question later in the day… Look at the face of this cretin and understand how many people still defend him.
It’s irrelevant to list them as terrorists? Well, then why did you go to the effort of delisting them? Because Orange Man Bad. And as it happens there are a bunch of serious consequences when they’re designated a terrorist group.
No Minister 