It Could Happen Here - Irregular Naval Warfare And You (Houthi Edition)

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Robert and James talk about the new realities of irregular naval warfare, and particularly how the Houthis have fought the U.S. Navy to a standstill in the waters around the Gulf of Aden.See omnystudi...o.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:00:36 Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
Starting point is 00:01:25 It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. CallZone Media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and also about militant resistance, which is an aspect of things falling apart.
Starting point is 00:01:56 As things fall apart, any country, you get people who crawl out of the woodwork to either accelerate that process or try to reverse it in their own lives. And some of those people use weapons to do that. Now, we've talked a bunch on this show about the various forms that militant resistance can take. We've chatted extensively on this network about Rojava. We've talked a fair amount, James Stout and I.
Starting point is 00:02:22 James is on the show today, by the way. Hello, James. Hi, Robert. We've talked a lot about Myanmar and the Jinzi revolution there, 3D printing of firearms and kind of this war that these people have been waging in the jungle successfully in order to overthrow the military dictatorship of their country. But we haven't talked a whole lot about naval warfare. And this is because for most of history, for most of at least our recent history, naval warfare was not really a thing insurgents could engage in, right? You know, you could every now and then,
Starting point is 00:02:58 if a ship was docked or something, you might be able to get off a bombing, right? Like what happened to USS Cole. And I'm not expressing general sympathy for everybody who does a militant insurgent act, but I am talking about like the overall kind of like tactics and strategy that underline how that stuff works.
Starting point is 00:03:14 And one of the things that's really changed in the last couple of years, since 2022, you could really mark it out, is that irregular non-state groups can now to an extent never before possible, challenge the sea power of nations like the United States, which has an unquestioned, previously at least, unquestioned level of dominance in sort of conventional naval power.
Starting point is 00:03:37 And when we talk about conventional naval power in the 21st century, that means aircraft carrier groups, right? The U.S. has 11 of them them, which if I'm not mistaken, is more than the rest of the world. We have a lot of fucking aircraft carriers. And previously that was believed to be, you know, a guarantor of both dominance on sea. And if a carrier group or two is in the area,
Starting point is 00:03:57 you generally, we generally, the United States, generally could count on having air supremacy. You certainly wouldn't expect it to be countered. You could expect, for example, if we were to have a conflict over Taiwan, the Chinese Navy or the Chinese Army could potentially interdict a carrier group using ground-based ground to see anti-ship missiles or something like that. But we're increasingly in an era in which these kind of irregular non-state groups have access to similar technology and have access to kind of even more bespoke technology like drone swarms that poses a unique threat to the naval dominance of the United States. And I wanted to start, you know, we've got a two-parter here.
Starting point is 00:04:37 We're going to be talking about the Houthis in Yemen. We're going to be talking about the Ukrainian Navy, which does not really have much in the way of boats, but it's still challenging the Russian Navy. And we're going to be talking about rebels in Myanmar. We're going to start today, we'll be talking about the Houthi. And to understand Houthi resistance to the United States and why a militant group has had such success challenging US naval power, you first have to understand how they got to the point that they're at right now, where they are kind of in a lot of ways a near-state actor, you know, not a world power actor, but near-state actor. You know, they're probably more capable in some ways than the state of Yemen, which they are at war with. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:16 And to get how they got to that point, you have to understand what happened with their fight against the Saudis. happened with their fight against the Saudis. So the Houthi movement, or Ansar Allah, which means supporters of God, is a Zaydi Shia Islamist movement run primarily by members of the Houthi tribe. Zaydi Islam is a bit of an odd duck. You'll hear it described as, yeah, like a Shia segment. It's really probably more accurate to look at it as like it's kind of in between Shia and Sunni. Of like the Shia kind of denominations, it's kind of closest to being Sunni. I'm not an expert on any of this, but it comes out of a guy named Zaid ibn Ali's rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate, which did not succeed, but we still have the Zaydi. What matters for our purposes today is that the Houthi as a movement came out of opposition to the Yemen's president
Starting point is 00:06:06 Abiy Abdullah Saleh, who was corrupt as hell. He was seen as corrupt and he was in fact corrupt as hell. And it was specifically they were accusing him of basically being bribed by the Saudis. That's where the Houthis started the rebellion in around 2003. So they began as a resistance movement to this corrupt president salah uh they adopted the slogan god is the greatest death to america death to israel and a curse upon the jews which is still their slogan so they are not what you would call unproblematic again but now that they're not they're not hiding it you don't have to dig for this stuff. They're not using the triple parentheses. They just say the thing.
Starting point is 00:06:49 Yeah. And it's, you know, part of why we're talking about irregular naval warfare is that who knows what the next few years are going to include. It's always a long shot, but there's not a 0% chance that people listening to this will wind up engaged in some sort of irregular conflict. listening to this will wind up engaged in some sort of a regular conflict. And it's important to understand how modern technology has changed the dimensions of how that works from like a naval perspective. So that's why we're talking about this. Now, Houthi armed activities against the Saudis really kicked off and hit a major level after the Yemeni civil war, which officially started in 2014. The new president of Yemen, who is not Saleh at this point, asked for military support from the international community, which in this case
Starting point is 00:07:30 meant the Saudis, right? So the Saudis, it's called a coalition. There's technically some other people involved, but it's the Saudis, right? And the president of Yemen calls in the Saudis when his forces are kicked out of the capital of Yemen, Sana'a, by Houthi fighters. By the way, when the Houthi take Sana'a is when they get their first cruise missiles, largely just like a bunch of scuds and stuff. So like old Soviet shit, right? Operation Decisive Storm is the name that Saudi Arabia gives to their intervention in Yemen. And a lot of people will say this is basically Saudi Arabia's Vietnam not a an inappropriate comparison to make so the Saudis start bombing the shit out of the Houthi and then they send in ground forces because bombing the shit out of people who are motivated never really
Starting point is 00:08:14 works as well as you want it to right yeah a lot of people have been bombing a lot of people with I mean you can destroy a lot of shit you can kill a lot of shit. You can kill a lot of civilians. And kill a shitload of civilians, yeah. But many, many such cases if you're looking around the world right now. But yeah, one thing it doesn't tend to do is really to get rid of motivated fighters. Yeah, when you've got an air force, everything looks like Dresden. So the Saudis try that for a while. They send in ground forces. They carry out naval blockades.
Starting point is 00:08:44 None of this does much but make the Houthis more determined. They send in ground forces. They carry out naval blockades. None of this does much but make the Houthis more determined. And they exit this conflict. I mean, they're not, it's not like you wouldn't say completely done, but they exit this conflict with the Saudis a lot stronger, right? A lot more organized with a lot better weapons, right? And a lot of this, you know, so by the way, I should also state that like now the Houthis are on the side of former President Saleh. It's a complicated conflict, right? But at the end of this all,
Starting point is 00:09:06 they have a shitload of Iranian weapons because Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Saudi Arabia and they see the Houthis as allies. And so they spend a lot of time this during this conflict, shipping in a GTMs, which are wire guided missiles that are just aces and blasting holes in Saudi Arabia's tanks, which are us supplieds supplied if i'm not mistaken as a general yeah a lot of saudi arabia stuff is u.s and like yeah basic most of
Starting point is 00:09:30 it right much of it yeah yeah there are a lot of contractors over there yeah and yeah the the houthis they make a lot in like waves and kind of people who are following irregular conflicts during this period in the late aughts because they're so successful at taking out these tanks that had previously been pretty hard to fuck up. And it's kind of, you know, now AGTMs in Ukraine are like one of the dominant weapon systems that has shaped the battlefield environment. But this is kind of when people start to realize, oh, fuck, you know, Syria as well. These are this is really going to change a lot about how armor gets used. And this is also where we start to see the first Houthi deployments of ballistic missiles, which were used sort of, they initially used them not dissimilarly to how
Starting point is 00:10:11 the Germans used V2s, right, in World War II. They were terror weapons, and they're used in retaliation for Saudi Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is US jets and missiles, right? So Saudi Arabia is terror bombing Yemen, and Yemen starts firing missiles back at Saudi Arabia because, you know, that's what you do, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote here from an article in the National News. Quote, Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic,
Starting point is 00:10:36 and this is from 2022. Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic missiles at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on Monday in the latest attack on neighboring states. Two missiles were destroyed in mid-flight during the attempted terrorist attack on Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on Monday in the latest attack on neighboring states. Two missiles were destroyed in mid-flight during the attempted terrorist attack on Abu Dhabi, while in Saudi Arabia, one was shot down and another missile wounded two civilians in an industrial area. So that gives you an idea of where they are a couple of years ago. And these are not super advanced cruise missiles, as you can see by that kind of like casualty rate, right?
Starting point is 00:11:03 They're not doing massive amounts of damage, but they cause terror, right? It's scary to know that a missile could come out of the sky and kill some of you. And it's, you know, from their perspective, how else are they going to strike back? They don't have an air force in the conventional sense. But what we do see here is by being able to carry out these attacks back on Saudi Arabia, who's bombing them, despite not having an air force of their own, you already see how new technology and cruise missiles aren't new technology, but them being available to a non-state actor is fairly new. You see how that has already changed the game in terms of like, you can't really say the Saudis don't have this air supremacy. You can still say they have air supremacy because again, the Houthis don't have much in the way of air power at this point.
Starting point is 00:11:47 But they can't stop missiles from hitting their cities entirely, which is a different game than when, you know, that's not really a possibility. The Houthi arsenal today includes a dizzying array of different Iranian, Soviet, Syrian, and indigenously produced rockets, including the Burkhan-3 missiles. These are for long-range strikes up to 1,200 kilometers, and the Batur P-1 rockets, which have a 120 to 160 kilometer range. They also have old Soviet Frog-7s, which are useful to about 65 kilometers. None of these are accurate in cruise missile terms, you know, but they work well enough for the Houthis' purposes. The Batur P is indigenously produced. work well enough for the Houthis purposes. The Bater P is indigenously produced.
Starting point is 00:12:27 It's made by the Houthis. It's thought to be based on the Syrian Kaibar rocket. It is unguided, and experts will say it's closer to being functioning as just like dumb artillery than an actual cruise missile. UN inspectors claim, quote, it is produced locally from steel tubing, very likely sourced from the oil industry. You hear this a lot in a regular conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Mosul covering the fighting with ISIS, their mortars were made off out of tubing that was like part of construction projects.
Starting point is 00:12:56 I think that traced back to the oil industry, at least some of it. Now, there are several variants of this rocket, like the Botter F and the P-1. It's not really useful going through all of them. You can find some interesting studies on this, but it's not necessary to understand their capabilities. Their most accurate missile, as far as I can tell, is the OTR-21 Tochka, which has a range of about 70 to 120 kilometers and a 480 kilogram payload. They only are believed to have a few dozen of these, although that's an estimate from an earlier report. And these were the ones they would use most regularly on ground targets during the Saudi intervention when they needed a precise strike. And I'm going to quote from an article in an analysis of their missile capability. The Houthis first fired a Tachka
Starting point is 00:13:38 missile in September 2015, targeting the coalition's, that's the Saudis, Safar military base in Marib, Yemen. The strike hit a weapons storage depot and killed 60 coalition soldiers. The Houthis fired another Tachka on December 14, 2015, targeting a coalition base south of Taiz City in Taiz, Yemen. The strike reportedly killed over 120 coalition soldiers. The most recently recorded Tachka fire took place on November 19, 2016, landing in a desert in eastern Marib province. The target was unclear, but was likely the Arab coalition's Al Ruik military camp.
Starting point is 00:14:10 So those are significant casualties. These are very effective weapons that do a lot of damage, right? Yeah. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,
Starting point is 00:14:57 inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Starting point is 00:15:38 Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished
Starting point is 00:16:07 and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
Starting point is 00:16:24 Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,
Starting point is 00:16:43 Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Now, international experts, and especially if you read just kind of like think tank analysis of what the Houthis are doing, we generally say all of this is only possible because of aid from Hezbollah and Iran, right? That's the only reason the Houthis have these weapons, right? Now, there is an arms embargo on Yemen. This has not stopped anyone from getting weapons to Yemen. It also, to be very fair here, didn't stop us from selling arms to the Saudis, even though
Starting point is 00:17:22 they're bringing those arms to Yemen, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a farcical, ridiculous notion. Yeah, I don't know who you want to get angrier at here. I'm not really convinced either side is, you know, better than the other. Certainly the Saudis are not better, right? Right.
Starting point is 00:17:38 Yeah, it seems like that. To what extent that matters, I don't know. Yeah, it's just a shit situation for people who are trying to get on with being alive in Yemen. Yes, to not get blown up, yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a shit situation for people who are trying to get on with being alive in Yemen. But at this point, they are making a significant chunk of these cruise missiles, specifically some of the less advanced ones, indigenously. So because of the state things, I think it is accurate to say that Iran was crucial to them getting to that state. But even without Iranian aid, there's probably a significant degree of time to which they could continue to produce some of these weapons because they are making them themselves. Yeah, they make 358 missiles right like loitering yeah anti-aircraft yeah yes even if iran is not supplying these it's
Starting point is 00:18:30 probably worth noting that like this is a like an iranian design or a concept at least and it allows for a lot of testing a lot of like a real world kind of versus the NATO or US type assets. It lets the Iranians, yeah, test their weaponry. And again, I'm not trying to undersell how important they are. No, of course not. You get a lot of like, well, if we can just cut off Iranian trade, the Houthis will collapse. Not anymore. I don't really think that's accurate anymore.
Starting point is 00:18:58 Yeah, me. You know, I can't say that to a point of certainty. But yeah, I think that that's kind of wishful thinking on behalf of some people. So these are great weapons for a non-state militant group. Again, this stuff, if you think back 10, 15 years, the idea of a non-state insurgent group having access to a cruise missile library like this, you know, not to say about like the other weapons they have, the drones and stuff they have, it would have been kind of unprecedented. That said, these are not good weapons in the modern military sense of the word. By which I mean they are not very accurate for the most part. And compared to more advanced missiles like the kind the United States, Russia, and China have, they are easy to shoot down with the kind of weapons systems aboard, say, U.S. aircraft carriers.
Starting point is 00:19:41 We will discuss that more later. carriers we will discuss that more later this is largely inconsequential to what's been happening in the red sea because the vast majority of naval traffic that passes by houthi territory does not have access to say phalanx phalanx systems yeah yeah you don't have much in the way of anti-missile systems on a normal container yeah no you uh you have anti-bridge uh anti-ramming devices but like yeah it doesn't matter if your missile is not super accurate, if it can't defeat these expensive systems, if you're just yeeting them into a narrow channel at anything that goes past. Right, right.
Starting point is 00:20:13 Yeah. And the Houthis are aware of that. And this is, again, an intelligent strategy on their part. Sometimes people get angry when you say that because they point out horrible things the Houthis have done, which I don't want to deny. But we're not talking about the overall morality of this conflict. We're talking about how these tactics work, right?
Starting point is 00:20:28 Right. Like the Nazis had intelligent strategies as well. They were terrible fucking people, and I'm glad they lost and are mostly dead. But like, yeah, we would be unwise to just dismiss everything that they've been about. No, and likewise, the fact that the Houthis right now, that this interdiction of the Red Sea
Starting point is 00:20:43 is based on an attempt to stop the genocide in Gaza, which I don't think it's going to work, but I would like it if somehow it did. That also does not have an impact on how this is working strategically, right? You are kind of setting all of that aside to just talk about how this is functioning, you know? Yeah, yeah. So in recent years, the Houthis have expanded their stock of anti-ship missiles. In an article for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a guy named Fabian Hins writes, quote, The parades, these are Houthi military parades, also featured a variety of anti-ship ballistic missiles, ASBMs, and guided rockets employing Iranian infrared or imaging infrared seeker technology. imaging infrared seeker technology. The 450-kilometer range ASEF appears to be a rebranded ASBM version of Iran's Fatah 313 missile, while the Tangkil represents a previously unseen anti-ship version of the IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, developed 500-kilometer
Starting point is 00:21:37 range Zohair. The two designs constitute the heaviest Houthi anti-ship missiles, both with warheads of more than 300 kilograms and are of Iranian origin. Three smaller ASBMs, the 140-kilometer-range Falak, the Mayun, and the Bar al-Amar strongly resemble Iranian design philosophy and seeker technology,
Starting point is 00:21:55 but do not precisely match known Iranian systems. They could either be Iranian systems not observed before and smuggled to Yemen, or Houthi-produced rockets combined using Iranian guidance kits, not unlike developments made by another Iran proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and its precision-guided surface-to-air missile program. Finally, the Houthis have presented an S-75 SA-2 surface-to-air missile,
Starting point is 00:22:16 likely from pre-war Yemeni army stocks, modified for an anti-ship role using an Iranian guidance kit. So that's a potent, and it's probably in some ways more advanced than their general cruise missile stockpile arsenal for taking out ships. Now, the Houthis are still a non-state force. When people say online that like, the US is fighting Yemen, not quite accurate,
Starting point is 00:22:38 because the Houthis are fighting Yemen too, right? Like the government, if you're saying the government, you're talking about the people, well, people in Yemen are fighting each other, right? Yeah, that is the situation. They are at war with the government of Yemen, right? That is still the case.
Starting point is 00:22:51 We're shooting missiles at Yemen, but as a geographical area rather than as a state. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the Houthis did not survive years of intense bombing by Saudi Arabia, a nation with an on-paper extremely modern military, by making a lot of stupid mistakes. So when they decided to attack shipping in the Red Sea after Israel launched their genocidal campaign against Gaza, they did so with a competent plan, which was to make civilian freight travel in the area too dangerous to continue. Their stated goal here is to force damage on Israel and the Western nations who support it by hitting the only thing they care about, commerce. And their actions here have done real damage to international
Starting point is 00:23:29 trade, not exclusively Western international trade, I should note. The latest several months have seen them capture or sink a couple of merchant vessels. They've sunk one. They've hit at least 16 vessels with drones and missiles. I found a Bloomberg report with the telling title, Houthi missiles do far more damage to trade than to actual ships, which is an interesting way to frame it. Yeah. And they're kind of trying to minimize what's going on here. While 16 strikes is a large number for the industry to withstand, there have been even more failed attempts. there have been even more failed attempts. Since the Houthis began their attacks,
Starting point is 00:24:05 there have been more than 60 incidents of some kind in and around the waterway, including everything from near misses to hijackings and harassment by armed militants in small boats. If you look at the damage that's occurred in most of these incidents, it has not been significant, said Marcus Baker, head of the Marine and Cargo at Marsh, one of the world's top insurance brokers.
Starting point is 00:24:19 So far, we haven't seen a total loss caused by a missile strike. That changed in March, when the Houthis successfully sank the Ruby Mar. Despite more than a month of U.S. strikes to degrade their capability, the vessel was initially wounded and drifted unmanned for almost two weeks before sinking. While it listed, a Houthi representative promised the ship could be salvaged if aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza.
Starting point is 00:24:41 The Ruby Mar wound up sinking. Now, Houthi strikes have also hit at least one ship bound for Iran and another that was going to be delivering aid supplies to Yemen. At least three civilian sailors have been killed thus far and a strike on a bulk carrier named the True Confidence. Now, how you kind of interpret this as a success by the Houthi stated goals, which is right to inflict enough pain on the West and on Israel economically that it forces an earlier end to what Israel is doing in Gaza, right? If that's their goal, well, it hasn't happened yet, right?
Starting point is 00:25:15 That's one thing we can say, right? It has not yet. There's no evidence that I have seen that it has affected the tempo of Israeli operations substantially, you know? Yeah, it would seem there's no difference. And obviously there's an incentive for the United States and other international actors to not let this tactic succeed because you do not want a world in which...
Starting point is 00:25:39 I think it's not unreasonable. There's a thing called the right to protect in international law, which is probably what the Houthis are claiming they're of the acting under and that's not look like on the face of it unreasonable but yes i think the u.s has this very like strong incentive to not let it become a thing that keeps happening yeah yeah i'm not surprised we sent a carrier group into the area i'm also not surprised that that does not seem to be working either right if you were judging how the u.s is acting and how the houthis are acting based on their stated goals, the Houthis have not yet accomplished their stated goal with these strikes. And the U.S. airstrikes do not seem to have stopped
Starting point is 00:26:13 the Houthis from being able to interdict naval traffic in the Red Sea, right? I've heard some argument that the tempo is reduced since the U.S. got there, but it's also unclear to me is like, well, they only have a limited amount of these missiles, right? Has the tempo is reduced since the U.S. got there, but it's also unclear to me is like, well, they only have a limited amount of these missiles, right? Has the tempo changed because they need to marshal their ammunition effectively, or has it changed because there's been damage done to their infrastructure? I don't know that we'll ever really get
Starting point is 00:26:36 a perfect answer on that, right? I know the U.S. claims that it has. We claim that our strikes have weakened them, but we always claim that, right? Yeah, yeah. That's what but we always claim that, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what we're going to say, right? We all live through Afghanistan, right? You're aware of what the U.S. says about shit like this.
Starting point is 00:26:54 Yeah, I mean, it would look pretty bad if we were like, no, dude, we just yeeted billions of dollars of munitions into the desert. Didn't do shit! Massive L for us. It's unclear how much damage the Houthis have actually done to the global economy as a consequence of all this. Traffic has dropped to the Red Sea by about 35%. And since the sea carries about 20% of global trade, that's a major hit. But it hasn't stopped trade through the Red Sea either. Again, most trade is still, you know, most of the pre-war level is still occurring.
Starting point is 00:27:25 35% is a substantial drop. That is a hit. And it's hurt a lot of people, right? It also has not wholly blocked, like there's a longer route you can take around Africa to get into the Red Sea, but that makes everything more expensive too. The country hurt most is actually Egypt, because Egypt depends on the Suez Canal for about a quarter of its currency earnings. And you go through the Red Sea to get to the Suez Canal for reasons that are obvious if you look at a map, right? Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High,
Starting point is 00:28:13 is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.
Starting point is 00:28:48 Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,
Starting point is 00:29:16 from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.
Starting point is 00:29:34 Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Starting point is 00:30:01 Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. People who rightly see what's happening in Gaza as a crime against humanity are unlikely to care too much about the Egyptian economy, nor should they necessarily. But the bigger questions here are, can the Houthis actually force an end to what Israel's doing? And how long can they keep this up? The answer to the first question, can the Houthis force an Indo-Israeli aggression, is not yet. And the answer to the second question is, how long can they keep this up? I don't know. They might be able to eventually bring about international pressure through economic damage. But given the state of the U.S. presidential election,
Starting point is 00:30:58 I don't see that as particularly likely a method for changing Netanyahu's behavior. The answer to the second question is, you know, how long can they keep this up? Probably forever, right? U.S. strikes have been lauded by the U.S. as damaging infrastructure, but we don't know that that's true. Our airstrikes in the region have been launched by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the head of the carrier strike group in the Red Sea at present. And again, when you look at kind of like leftists analyzing this, because they don't often know much about the military, you'll get a mix of like people being like, oh, the Houthis
Starting point is 00:31:29 are going to kill a carrier because they put out a video of like a carrier in their sites and shit. And like, I don't think so, guys. Doesn't seem likely. These are very well defended ships and they are very competently led. Look, I have looked into the captain of the ship. I've looked into how they have handled the considerable tempo of attacks against them. I think that these guys are operationally competent, as the U.S. tends to be.
Starting point is 00:31:52 Now, that doesn't mean they're going to win. The U.S. soldiers tend to be operationally competent most of the time. And we also lose a lot, right? Because operational competence doesn't matter if the operations you're being asked to undertake have no chance of victory. And that is more or less the situation I think that these sailors are in, right? Where they're pretty good at sailing around in an aircraft carrier and not getting killed, but that doesn't mean they're going to defeat the Houthis in a meaningful way, right? Right. And the Houthis are aware of this. They're in a holding pattern. They understand that the primary thing that all of strategy really hinges around, stopping and denying terrain to the enemy. And all the Houthis have to do to deny a significant amount of terrain to the entire West is keep lobbing missiles, often blindly, in the sea.
Starting point is 00:32:44 And it will make everything more expensive for everybody. Keep them in the news, and that's a win. And it's unlikely, if not basically impossible, that using current methods, the U.S. Navy and U.S. air power in this area, based in this carrier group, is going to be able to do anything but spend a shitload of money. Now, U.S. Navy officers in recent weeks have reported attacks by both anti-ship missiles, regular cruise missiles, swarms of unmanned aerial drones, which has led to a general conclusion among people who analyze this stuff that drone swarms are going to be a significant
Starting point is 00:33:17 part of naval warfare in the immediate future, right? You can overwhelm, you know, the Houthis, you know, as impressive as their drone swarms are for a non-state actor, cannot put together the kind of a swarm that a state actor like China, for example, could. But people are looking at how close some hits have gotten to the carriers and being like, well, shit, if you had a lot more of these things, you could really cause some fucking problems for these boats, right? Yeah. They have also used unmanned boats and unmanned underwater vessels. These are basically unmanned drone boats with explosives in them, right? And again, significantly more of these could potentially do some damage. This is by any account the most direct combat US naval forces have seen since World War II.
Starting point is 00:34:00 And one thing, a fun thing I've learned reading articles about the operation is that our jets now get kill markers for the bombs they drop yeah yeah you can be a drone ace or a by a not a drone a missile downing ace yeah yeah it's like i i don't know may i guess it makes sense whatever uh it just it doesn't look as impressive yeah i did some googling uh and i guess you could become an ace shooting down barrage balloons in world war one. Yeah, but there was AK-AX shooting back. Yeah, they were very strongly defended. Yeah, it's a little different. Or V2 rockets, I guess, in World War II.
Starting point is 00:34:32 I did also find out that some of the unmanned underwater vehicles are replacing, more as a pity, the seals and dolphins that were previously in U.S. Navy service. I don't mean seals like... No, no, no no literal seals yeah like literal seals heartbreaking yeah very sad they live in san diego i uh i often go past them uh you know what the seals don't want to do war they well but again the other the marine mammals the other seals very much the dolphins might i i remember from the documentary sea quest
Starting point is 00:35:02 that they that they enjoy naval service um i think you watch sea quest james i've not watched i've not watched sea quest i'm afraid i'm afraid it's star trek the next generation underwater but the role of picard is played by the sheriff from jaws it's actually fantastic great yeah i'm looking i'm looking forward to being exposed to more of this universe yeah look i I'm hoping that the dolphins join force with the orcas and take on the super rich with using the skills given to them by the US military. Yeah. Inshallah, James.
Starting point is 00:35:33 So when it comes to the economics of this conflict, and a lot of this does come down to economics, right? What the Houthi are doing is an incredibly efficient, good ass deal for them. These drones, specifically a lot of what they've done, they fired missiles, but those are expensive. They don't have a lot of them. I think that at this point, they would prefer to use those on ships that cannot defend against them. They have sent some manned boats, which the US has fucking murked immediately, and they don't seem to be doing that anymore because it's dumb, and the Houthis didn't get
Starting point is 00:36:04 where they did by repeatedly doing dumb shit. What they seem to have settled on is sending out drone swarms, both of these boats, these underwater drones and of aerial drones. And these things can cost just a few thousand dollars each. Some of the biggest ones are probably more like tens of thousands of dollars. But the Navy missiles that we use to interdict this shit and some of these, they also have some dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap. The missiles we use to interdict this shit are $ some of these, they also have some dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap. The missiles we use to interdict this shit are $2.1 million a shot, right? This is all in addition to the insane cost
Starting point is 00:36:31 of keeping a carrier battle group in the field and fighting. It's not at all cheap. I found one Politico article that quotes a DOD official admitting, the cost offset is not on our side. Now, we have some cheaper systems that can work really well on particularly
Starting point is 00:36:45 drones. They can work on missiles too. We've used them in that. These are airburst shells fired from the conventional guns on destroyers. These have worked really well, especially against drones in tests, but they're only effective from about 10 miles or less away. In ballistic missile terms,
Starting point is 00:37:01 that's extremely close. You don't want to rely on these for a ballistic missile. And it's extremely close. You don't want to rely on these for a ballistic missile. And it's not even all that far away in drone terms, right? As a result, the US has expanded research into more efficient anti-drone and anti-missile weapons, including what amounts to laser and microwave weapons that could be fired indefinitely for the cost of electricity. Given the nature of these weapons, that's not insignificant either, but it's a lot less than 2.1 million is shot. As is always the case, the kind of fight the Houthis are waging right now has an expiration date.
Starting point is 00:37:30 Right now, any group that can put together a few million dollars to make hundreds and hundreds of explosive drones, right, which a number of groups are capable of, could at least exact a substantial toll on a U.S. carrier battle group, make it spend a shitload of money, potentially even do some damage. And again, even if this stuff hits an aircraft carrier, you're very unlikely to see that thing sink. There's a story that's worth knowing that when we decommissioned one of our aircraft carriers 15 or 20 years ago, they shot it a bunch just to like how well it would hold up. And like, they couldn't sink it. It's such a great American tradition, man.
Starting point is 00:38:07 They couldn't sink the fucker. Like, you could do that. You could kill sailors. It would be a big deal. If they hit a fucking aircraft carrier and killed some sailors, even if the carrier doesn't go down, that's a huge fucking deal. I don't know that they're capable of doing that, but it's unlikely they're going to kill one, right? Right. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:22 They're not going to send one to the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. It's hard to do, right? They're made not to sink and they're pretty fucking big. But one can imagine kind of a future in which the war the Houthis are waging right now is rendered kind of impossible because weapons like that are positioned permanently around, say, the Red Sea, blanketing it in a defense grid that basically kill anything fired into the sea. That's something that might happen in the future if this continues. But that's also just the way war works, right? You know, the Houthis 10, 15 years ago wouldn't have been able to wage a war like this against the US Navy. They fought the Navy to a standstill. That's the only way to analyze this, right? And again,
Starting point is 00:38:59 that doesn't mean either side is achieving their operational goals, right? The Houthis have not ended the genocide in Gaza and the US doesn't seem to be capable of ending the Houthis. So they fought each other to a standstill in this matter. And that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. So, right, 20 years from now, what's going on will be different. You know, the fact that the US seems to be pretty close
Starting point is 00:39:18 to developing more efficient anti-drone and anti-missile weapons that are a lot cheaper to use doesn't mean that non-state actors will not find a way around those but that is the situation we're in right now with the hoothies uh and that is the end of this episode we're going to get back to you tomorrow for part two we're going to talk about irregular naval warfare in ukraine and myanmar uh james you got anything else to say no no i didn't i didn't think so you know a bad day to be a boat i guess bad day to be a boat bad day to be a drone they're really suffering in this yeah it's a great day to be
Starting point is 00:39:52 a military contractor which is oh my god such a good time to be a military contractor whether you're doing it for iran or the united states you are hat you are you are in clover right now which is a massive change from the entirety of this century so far so that's nice yeah it's nice to see the military contractors finally pick up a win yeah yeah rare one for them that's been it could happen here we'll be back tomorrow it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at
Starting point is 00:40:37 coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for listening. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Starting point is 00:41:56 Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.