You don't need to a win a war here, just make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up.

Due to their histories, the Yemenis - like the Afghan - have extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers. Top it off with the mountainous terrain in the northern and eastern regions and you have a recipe for failure through attrition.

Guerilla tactics don't work against shipping lanes and no one (well, not the coalition to defend shipping, at least, certain of their neighbors might have other thoughts) wants to occupy Yemen in the first place.

Flying cheap drones with homemade explosives into commercial cargo ships sound pretty guerilla.

Why can't the west use radio jammers to make any drone non-responsive once it leaves Yemen ? Russia has been doing this on its border with great success.

I think it's just a very large area and jamming is far from fool proof.

> extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers

That’s fine. Let them fight their civil war. The problem is long-range precision warfare extending past their costs. Knocking out that capability doesn’t require boots on the ground.

You underestimate how important the Palestinian cause is to the Yemeni people. I’d wager they’d be willing to “pause” the infighting for quite some time.

Also, this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now.

> this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now

As I mentioned elsewhere [1], this is fine. A stable, adversarial Yemen is better than the clusterfuck it currently is. A big part of the problem with the current situation is there is nobody to negotiate with who can credibly claim to control these armed factions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917581

> make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up

You need to degrade their capability to fire long-range assets precisely. That’s doable. If it’s locals lobbing unguided rockets into the ocean, that’s commercially manageable. Guided missiles and helicopter landings are not.

It's Yemen, have you checked their GDP per capita recently? Life there is already hard enough that it's difficult to make it significantly worse.

If harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates.

> harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates

The history of area bombardment is it strengthens civilian resolve. Think: the Battle of Britain, Vietnam and America’s wars in the Middle East.

Aren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered?

Strategic bombing in Europe was a drastic failure. The only successful part of it was that it fundamentally wiped out the Luftwaffe. German military production increase annually in spite of the Allies putting so much effort into the bombing campaign.

Strategic bombing has only influenced one country to surrender.

And that involved nukes

There's an argument that it didn't influence Japan to surrender: instead, the declaration of war by and imminent invasion of the Soviet Union is what finally caused them to surrender.

Yeah, that's the other main argument that we'll never have a definitive answer to. Maybe in 300 years we'll have enough distance to evaluate the evidence without all the cultural biases and baggage, but I doubt it. Every time I read more info about the Manhattan Project and US nuclear policy in the 1950s, my opinion changes. And then when you read about how Truman acted AFTER the war in regards to nuclear weapons employment, I can easily understand that he was going to use nukes no matter what.

Japan's political environment during the war was incredibly complex, and trying to view their rationale and motivation through a Western lens is very dangerous. And I don't think the Soviets were anywhere close to an imminent invasion of the Home Islands. I don't think they had the appetite for doing more than grabbling the Kuriles and Sakhalin Island, instead preferring to let the US suffer the casualties.

While the Soviet declaration of war surely had some impact, the Emperor said there were three primary factors in his decision to accept the Potsdam conditions; his lack of confidence in Ketsu Go plans to defend Kyushu. The increasing devastation caused by the conventional and nuclear bombing campaigns, and finally, concern about the "domestic situation" meaning internal revolt. Later in private letters he referred to Nippon's deficiency in science, meaning a lack of nuclear weaponry. Hirohito and PM Suzuki realized that with nuclear weapons, the US didn't need to invade Japan.

Nazi Germany was already fundamentally beaten by the time of Dresden.

But it definitely didn't strengthen civilian resolve.

There wasn’t much left to strengthen.

> Aren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered?

I would say that Dresden is not a counterexample. Every year on February 13, many Dresdeners gather on the Neumarkt to commemorate the destruction of the city on the Bombennacht (night of the bombings) in 1944. The spectacle polarizes German society. Right-wing revisionists like to point to the destruction of Dresden to portray Germany as a victim of the Second World War. But for many Dresdeners, this is actually a matter that is associated with personal grief because they lost family members in the bombing. As a result, the possible political implications of this culture of remembrance fade into the background for many Dresdeners. Dresden is therefore a good example of how people move closer together after extensive bombing and how this effect can last for 80 years.

And every tough guy wants to say that because it makes them feel good, but history keeps proving them wrong.

Thats straight out of the Henry Kissinger handbook.

Tell the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, there is a small problem with this approach: Pirates have guns, villagers don't. So villagers don't get to choose whether or not they harbour pirates.

Sounds suspiciously like Israel's theory of operations for Gaza, which has little evidence for its correctness at this point.

I see you haven't been paying attention to Iraq Afghanistan Palestine Vietnam or really anywhere this tactic has been tried. Turns out bombing villages makes piracy more popular

This is an interesting statement to make, considering Yemen's recent history.

They will not out fight you, they will out wait you. Just like Afghanistan.

Since the strategic objective here will likely be to suppress them while changing the context with regard ro Israel-Palestine and their sponsors in Iran and not regime change, that works in the US's favor.

Waiting is fine, as long as they aren't fighting. Them just hiding out in a cave somewhere counts as winning here, since we only care about protecting shipping.