Houthis again

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Some ships were attacked by Houthis while they were still south of Aden.

https://www.ukmto.org/indian-ocean/products/warnings/2024

Regarding geography: This means Houthis attack ships that are on the far side of their domestic Yemeni enemies. They do clearly attack without any line of sight between territory controlled by Houthis and the targeted ship.

Well, one of the Houthi targets bombed by the U.S. was a radar installation that monitored maritime traffic from onshore. It appears the Houthis can attack ships without such a station. One could argue that they could attack more easily with such a radar installation, but wasn't the purpose of the bombing to end the attacks rather than to make them just a bit more challenging to the Houthis?

Frankly, here's how I imagine the bombings came to happen:

1. Houthis commit piracy in Red Sea and send missiles towards Israel.
2. Sustained attacks on ships by Houthis, mostly defeated by naval air defences.
3. How can they be so disrespectful?
4. We need to do something!
5. What's "something"?
6. Out of the box answer is to bomb some brown people.
7. CENTCOM gets tasked to create a target list for air strikes.
8. CENTCOM cannot exactly offer a strategy with a perspective to achieve much of anything, but it creates a target list with items plausibly linked to the attacks on ships and/or Israel. 
9. Some targets of the target list get bombed.
10. CENTCOM declares success, invents a figure of by how much the Houthis' attack potential was reduced.
11. Houthis continue to attack ships.
12. More Houthis targets get bombed.
13. Houthis continue to attack ships.
    

Sounds kinda like the Kosovo Air War escalation and two decades of assassination-by-air phony war on errorists campaign.

It's almost as if the establishment was only mildly intelligent.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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