The Yemeni-based Houthi rebel attacks on global commerce and trade finally produced a response from the Biden administration (and the United Kingdom) in the form of targeted air strikes on Houthi military facilities, such as “command and control nodes, munitions, depots, launching systems, production facilities, and air defense radar systems,” according to a CNN report. A Houthi spokesman said that the strikes killed five people and wounded six others. The same spokesman stated that the strikes “would not deter further … attacks on shipping.” On Sunday, U.S. warplanes targeted a radar site with strikes, which a Houthi spokesman described as causing no “material damages” and no injuries.
And the “pinprick” strikes are surely not going to impress China’s leaders.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a press release that the strikes are “intended to disrupt and degrade the Houthi’s capabilities to endanger mariners and threaten global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways.” Austin also claimed that the strikes will “send a clear message to the Houthis that they will bear further costs if they do not end their illegal attacks.” The Naval War College’s James Holmes, channeling the great strategic theorist Admiral J.C. Wylie, is skeptical of that approach. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The Arctic Thaw, Sino-Russian Partnership, and Control of the World-Island)
Holmes distinguishes between “cumulative” operations and “sequential” operations. Cumulative operations — like those described by Secretary Austin — involve “wearing down an opponent through pinpricks” by “inflicting small-scale damage at many places on the map.” This kind of response, as Austin admitted, is designed to send “messages” instead of inflicting decisive punishment. It is what President Bill Clinton did in Serbia and Bosnia in the mid-1990s to little strategic effect. On a larger scale, it was what Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” in the Pentagon did during much of the Vietnam War — bombing to “send signals” instead of “strategic bombing” once advocated by Giulio Douhet in The Command of the Air (1921) and practiced by General Curtis LeMay against Japan at the end of World War II.
Douhet, a pioneer air power strategist, foresaw in 1921 that with the advent of long-range bombers “the battlefield will be limited only by the boundaries of the nations at war, and all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy.” “No longer can areas exist in which life can be lived in safety and tranquility,” Douhet wrote, “nor can the battlefield any longer be limited to actual combatants.” For this reason, Douhet suggested that “command of the air” was essential for winning future wars.
Army Air Corps (and later Air Force) General Curtis LeMay was an intellectual disciple of Douhet, and near the end of World War II he put into practice Douhet’s theories with devastating results against the Japanese mainland. The firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities combined with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pummeled Japan into submission. LeMay later remarked that war was very simple — you kill enough of the enemy and they stop fighting.
Thus far the strikes carried out by the Biden administration are cumulative operations — like McNamara’s bombing campaign in Vietnam or Clinton’s in the Balkans — intended to persuade the Houthis to stop attacking shipping near and around the Red Sea. They are “pinpricks” that are unlikely to deter the Houthis from future attacks. By contrast, Douhet advocated and LeMay practiced “sequential” operations where the enemy is pummeled into submission by repeated sequential strikes. Holmes suggests that we would improve our prospects of success against the Houthis by “go[ing] big, applying maximum violence at many key places on the map at the same time, and … keep the pressure over a sustained period of time.” Sending messages to the Houthis, Holmes writes, won’t work because they are “ideologues, not dispassionate accountants of costs, benefits, and risks.” (READ MORE: Terrorists Firing Missiles at Cargo Ships Are a Geopolitical Threat)
The cumulative operation of the Biden administration that killed five Houthi rebels and wounded six others, and most recently targeted a radar site is not going to deter anyone, let alone the ideologues described by Holmes. And the “pinprick” strikes are surely not going to impress China’s leaders as they prepare to react to the “independence” candidate’s victory in Taiwan’s presidential election.
