The attacks have been able to disrupt shipping and keep the U.S. and its allies tied down, frustrating the Navy’s decades-old mission of keeping open the region’s critical sea lanes.
American military says it has spent about $1 billion fighting Ansar Allah to support Israel’s Gaza War. It has conducted more than 450 strikes and intercepting 200 drones and missiles.
U.S. officials worry that the conflict is simply not sustainable.
“Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive and our logistics tails are long. We are playing whack-a-mole, and they are playing a long game.”
I mean this comes from a complete misunderstanding of the objective of the Houthi attacks. Yes they have been “ineffective” at directly hitting a NATO military ship, but that’s not the primary goal here, the goal is to disrupt trade with Israel and their allies, and on that basis the attacks have been very successful. It’s always a big mistake to view the success of military operations from a military standpoint only. That kind of logic is what makes the US think they could’ve won the Vietnam war or beat the Taliban if they just fought for longer or fought differently. Wars are complex multifaceted endeavours, you can’t just look at the direct military aspect. Many have won the direct military battle but lost the actual war. Real life is not a multiplayer shooting game where having a better K/D or holding down a certain objective means that you win the war.
It’s not an innocent misunderstanding, it’s intentional propaganda. If you redefine your opponent’s goal to something it’s not, when your opponent doesn’t achieve that goal you can claim victory.
Remember all that “Kiev in 3 days” bullshit that came from a US officer and was spread all over the internet?
God I still see that regularly. Like every single usual suspect subreddit has at least one person doing the "Day 943 of the 3 day Special Military Operation
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Funny enough, as you may know, the American empire made it a priority in Vietnam to inflict as many casualties on the Vietnamese as possible. Usually this led to civilian massacres as soldiers try to keep up with demand of their superiors to kill as many people as possible.
And to this day, when you bring up that the US lost Vietnam, people cope and screech "uhhhh BUT WE KILLED 3 MILLION AND ONLY LOST 58,000 TROOPS
:smuglord:
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It’s incredible and scary how normalized casual brutality is brushed off in the West™ when “our” team does it in a war.
Disturbing that this really does apply across the board; I recall explaining to Western European players (or trying to actually) that Russia and China were necessary balancing powers against us cause otherwise the global South would look like Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, and they were seriously trying to defend the mass slaughter, thinking ‘they were run by brutal dictators’ is a defense of mass killings in the scale of millions. If the channel didn’t put a restriction on how often you post, I would’ve asked how that justifies mass slaughtering people,but honestly I don’t think I was going to change anyone’s mind who thinks what we did in Cambodia and Vietnam was defensible
As Clausewitz famously said, War is when you try to get the highest number
I don’t think “real life” is in the US’ DNA.
Stellaris’ players almost universally complain that rival nations don’t concede during wars if you defeat their fleets and space stations, but don’t take any planets and don’t knock out their allies. Its comical that people are upset that imperialism does work how they wished it worked, and instead operates somewhat realistically where nations don’t concede just because you knock out their militarized space navy. They fight to the dirty end on the ground, especially if they have friends back them up.
“We only lost because we’re too nice to use nukes!”
man I wish I were as ineffective as Ansar Allah
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