HN comments for: 95% of container ships are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa

I'm particularly interested in how Egypt responds to this. They lose about $300,000 per vessel that diverts around the cape. In fiscal 2023, about 25,000 vessels went through the canal.

What can they do? They are the longest standing Arab security partner to the West and Israel. They gave Israel early warning about the attacks. They locked down the Palestine border at the request of Israel and are cooperating with the US and Israel on aid flowing into Palestine. They only control the Suez (north Red Sea) and the Houthis are across-the-sea from Somalia. Egypt couldn't defend against Houthi rockets if they wanted to.

Egypt has a vested interest in stabilizing the region and returning to the status quo. They are politically and economically aligned with the West and Israel and their best, and only, option is to remain a stable partner.

They're free to patrol the waters in the South Red Sea though. Doesn't Egypt have a navy? To me this situation seems like it would warrant sending nearly their entire fleet to the South Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

The danger isn't primarily from other ships that the Egyptian Navy could chase off but from land-based cruise missiles launched by the Houthis. The US Navy's most advanced weapons systems can intercept most of the missiles but not all of them, and at some considerable degree of risk to the US vessels.

The only military option to stop the attacks are drone / bomber incursions into Yemen which of course Egypt has no interest in doing since it could turn into a full hot war pretty easily.

The US interceptor missiles are something like 3 million dollars each. The Houthis drones are closer to 20 thousand. Eventually they will win on economic grounds.

To be really pedantic, a $20,000 drone out of Yemen is 0.1% of Yemen GDP.

A US interceptor of 0.000013% of US GDP.

So, yes, I know, LOTS of details (like Iran) here, but the overall point being even if our $3M missile is more than their $20K drone in absolute dollars, we can afford it more than they can.

Dollars aren't directly convertible to warmaking power. The factories and skilled labor that make weapons are a scarce resource that don't scale with mere market capitalization.

That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.

The 7500 RU launched cruise missiles haven't achieved a tenth as much as the Tomahawks the US hit Iraq with. After that, Iraq didn't have a working integrated air defence any more.

The RU missiles have killed plenty of civilians though.

Do keep in mind that Iraq had ancient SAMs (only about 75 of them) and practically zero ISR support. US coalition forces hit them hard from the get-go. Ukraine had/has several hundred modern(ish) SAMs with the ISR support of NATO. There's a reason the Russians don't fly too far into Ukraine.

The Ukrainian air defense was not even close to modern. It consisted largely of older S-300s, some Tor, Buk and Tunguska systems that were leftovers from the fall of the USSR. They had some even older systems (S-75, S-125, S-200). So this is largely 30+ years old, and not very well maintained.

S-300 is not really comparable in terms of capability to S-75 and S-125. There is a quantum leap between decentralized networked mobile IADS with a combination of radar types and missile types and Iraq's S-125 systems.

S-300 is still a very capable system today and 1990s' S-300 systems are only really a generation behind modern systems. They're about as recent as the systems on Ticonderogas and Arleigh Burkes that are very much still in service today.

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to compare S-300 to the older systems. Just that they were some of the systems Ukraine had or have brought back into service after the invasion.

S-300 (and S-400 which is really enhanced S-300) in their most modern configurations are incredibly lethal systems against 4th Gen aircraft that aren't accompanied by extensive SEAD/DEAD resources and jamming. But Ukraine has 1st generation S-300P, from the 80s. These might have been upgraded to S-300PT-1, giving them cold launch with the newer 5V55KD missiles.

Apparently the S-300s were maintained enough to spook the Russian AF. Also, there’s a variety of Western systems now.

I wouldn't be surprised if they've completely depleted their inventory of S-300 missiles (5V55KD). The Texeira leaks seemed to indicate they would run out by Summer/Fall of 2023, though with the supply of IRIS/Patriot/NASAMs etc, they might have reserved some of them.

Can’t believe the Ukrainian AF is still flying after 2 years - Wow

6 hours from Russia and they still can’t take them out

I think you might be conflating airforce with air defense. There’s not a lot of Ukrainian AF flights these days and when there is, it’s more often than not, one way (unfortunately) - and with loaned gear. It’s why they’re asking for F-16s and more AD.

It's hard to say that without having inside information. That Ukraine has managed to keep any of their aircraft flying in the face of far superior numbers is astounding. They are still managing to launch SCALP from SU-24m frequently (as frequently as the limited supply of these missiles allow). Considering they're probably outnumbered 5 to 1, that's either indicative of operational excellence on their part, or Russian inadequacy.

True, but it's possibly fair to argue that its easier to scale up cheap drone production, than production of interceptors.

At a certain point, US foreign policy tends to move from interceptors to flattening launch sites and key personnel.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

The point is to have a deterrence gradient, so you always have (1) deescalate (lower), (2) match (proportionate), and (3) escalate (higher) responses, for any level of attack.

If there's a level at which you don't have all three options, there exist political situations that can leave you vulnerable.

E.g. if the US has no proportionate response to a Russian tactical nuclear strike on Ukrainian soil, it may hazard towards not escalating.

Similarly, why the talking points of US response strikes for the past few decades have generally been 'this was a proportionate response.'

But after the last warning to the Houthis, I expect the next ASBM or large drone that hits a civilian ship prompts a large US/UK (and maybe France and Germany) strike.

Does Germany actually have any significant strike capability in the region? The German military seems to have atrophied into more of a government jobs program than something which is actually combat effective. They've started rebuilding in response to Russian aggression but that process will take years.

The point of these systems is that there's no launch site and it takes very little time to learn how to use them. The really key personnel are in Iran and very much difficult to assassinate (and easily replaced, too).

The drones are relatively light, cheap, and can be launched with nothing but springs and wood. There's no value in the launch locations and in fact you can launch them from anywhere.

With actual attacks on US warships. we’re actually past the point that usually occurs.

The US conducts war with a scalpel. Russia does it with a rusty hatchet. Those cruise missiles from Russia are (relatively speaking) very cheap and inaccurate.

This reads like propaganda. The US military does a fine job of destroying entire countries

It's actually worse. I read this as Russia accidentally hits civilians because they have no choice where as we do it with intention.

Russia hitting civilians isn’t really accidental. They’re quite happy to terrorize the population, and are quite comfortable deliberately committing atrocities (see Bucha, et al). Flattening whole cities is longstanding practice of theirs, too; it’s largely how they won Chechnya 2.

At best, their weapons aren’t terribly precise and they don’t particularly care about that.

Using cruise missiles to terrorise civilian population will be incredibly stupid move. Hits into houses are usually accidental. If you want to terrorise civilian population, it's so much cost effective to use cheaper unguided rockets from MLRS systems or artillery shells. You have this news in your echo chamber, haven't you?

It's not that more precise weapons are being used to target civilians, it's just that if they miss the target, the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it. There's plenty of examples of "precision" weapons hitting apartment buildings, train stations, hospitals, schools, etc. I don't think those are targeted specifically, just that any carelessness isn't considered a bug.

But the "echo chamber" framing you use for what's at best a nitpick/misinterpretation of what I said, that says so much more about you and your own biases than anything about me.

I advise you to educate yourself. The US killed 300 thousand civilians in the second Iraq war using their 'precision' strikes. That compares to 10 thousand civilians who died so far in the Ukrainian war. Both of these numbers are provided by the US gov itself.

Both of these numbers are provided by the US gov itself.

URL? that's got to be super interesting data.

Wikileaks. Obviously US gov wouldn't say something like that publicly so you need to look into the leaked classified material.

In all recent US wars civilian casualties vastly outnumber military ones. In the Ukrainian war civilian casualties constitute less than 10% of overall casualties. Outstanding precision for a rusty hatchet.

Most recent US wars have spent most of their time in an asymmetric counterinsurgency phase, the Russo-Ukrainian war is (in style of warfare) basically a symmetric force-on-force international war.

These have very different dynamics, inherently.

We also don't know the full extent of civilian casualties.

Mosul, Fallujah, etc were quite bloody. You can't actually take cities cleanly, you can only win the propaganda war in your own sphere of influence.

Russian cruise missiles (true ones, not Shahed drones) are not cheap. Kalibrs cost around $6 million USD, KH-101s around $13 million. And both are quite accurate. The issue the Russians are facing isn't inaccurate cruise missiles, but a lack of accurate targeting data (combined with wanting to use them in terror attacks as opposed to degrading Ukraine's military capabilities.)

Russia has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500)

What is the source for that number? The only long-range weapons Russia has launched thousands of are the Iranian-made long-range suicide drones.

The only long-range weapons Russia has launched thousands of are the Iranian-made long-range suicide drones.

They've also used lots of (mostly, IIRC, air launched) ballistic missiles and (conventional) cruise missiles. The reason there have been deep strikes by Ukraine on Russian bomber bases are because those bombers were used to fire long range missiles into Ukraine.

Though the “suicide drones”, while designed as loitering munitions, are basically used as propeller driven cruise missiles rather than in a loitering role.

I feel like your argument shows the opposite: there are significant economies of scale to making munitions. If we have to make a lot of interceptors, in the long run-- it's going to be much cheaper than it is currently.

That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.

The US has built a lot more cruise missiles than just its Tomahawks [0], and the US has a less cruise missile dependent doctrine because it is heavily invested in acheiving air superiority and delivering smart glide bombs, and shorter-range missiles that are much cheaper.

[0] ~7500 Harpoons, some large number I can't readily pin down of SLAM (AGM-84E) and SLAM-ER (AGM-84H/K) developed from the Harpoon, ~2000 AGM-86, ~1600 AGM-129, 2000+ AGM-158, plus some more developed ans retired in the first half of the Cold War

That the Russian Federation has a small fraction of US GDP but has launched more cruise missiles in a single conflict (~7500) than the US has ever produced (4000 tomahawks) is an important example of this.

By their fruits you'll know them. If Russia was able to destroy the enemy like USA did with half the number of missiles - they absolutely would. But they can't (mostly because USA has system where it takes minutes from recognizing targets to destroying them, and in Russia it takes hours - so they can only hit stationary targets reliably), so they have to go into quantity instead.

Also USA use bombs much more often (because they could - because they obliterated the air defence in the first hours which Russia still can't do).

What percent of Iran's GDP is a $20k drone?

What percent of Iran's GDP is a $20k drone?

About what a third of $3mm is to the U.S. (15x larger) or U.S. defense budget (50x larger). A 3x production-cost advantage in an economically unconstrained conflict is not an advantage. It’s at best a Twitter PR point.

The conflict is actually not far from being constrained by production, which is difficult to scale up for a 3mm$ munition, because private contractors expect lengthy contracts to justify long term amortization of increased capital expenditure.

Given that Iran is producing thousands to tens of thousands of these missiles every year, and is looking to expand production even more, there actually really is a risk that the stockpiles will not keep up, after which dozens of billions of dollars will have to be expended to seriously ramp up production. This dynamic is also the reason why it's been so difficult to ramp up artillery production in support of Ukraine.

Additionally, given that the expensive parts in these drones seem to be homemade in Iran (engines, fuselage, even some of the electronics), and given the sanctions, USD equiv. GDP isn't a great metric since there's no free market to convert Iranian production to USD.

Then there's the problem that these missiles are sorely needed in case of a war in China, so actually going through a significant expenditure, even if money is allocated to increase production in 2-3 years, means that the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA, should the need arise. Its' ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal.

conflict is actually not far from being constrained by production

If anyone is talking about escalation risk, production isn’t the bottleneck. We are nowhere close to being resource constrained in the Middle East.

the US Navy may find itself with insufficient stockpiles to defend itself against the PLA

In a production contest it’s maximum sustainable flows, not stocks, that matter. (Stocks buy you time to get flows up.) To the extent challenging the PLA is a concern, boosting production to counter the Houthis is a net win.

ability to defend against credible Chinese saturation attacks is already marginal

You’re arguing both ways. If their value is marginal, expending them now is fine.

Your broader point—I think—is correct. America doesn’t want to spread itself thin. But that’s a constraint at the CVN level. Once the carrier strike force is positioned, it’s immaterial whether it’s firing off missiles or guns.

Anyone positioning Iran et al v America et al is missing key pieces in the logistics of war.

The stocks are not sufficient to buy time to get the flows. There are only around 500 SM-6 missiles (long range, suitable to protect large numbers of vessels at various distances, 5mm$ each), and there is only capacity to produce a few hundred for the short to medium term.

The older SM-2s may have more plentiful stocks, but most of them have been deemed too dangerous to use after causing serious damage in test firings, and there are only around 180 modernized versions available, and the missile itself is no longer produced.

Defending against a saturation attack means that the value experiences a step function. Either you have enough missiles to stop most low-tech enemy missiles, and you're going to be largely fine, or you don't, and your entire fleet might sink. It's not something you can afford to. The US Navy is never going to allow stocks to go under what is necessary to stop at least a long-range Chinese attack, and that means at least 600 missiles, which is a serious chunk of what remains.

Boosting production to counter the Houthis is surely something the US will do. It will take 2-3 years to bear fruit. In the meantime, stocks are not sufficient to tank Iran's capability to produce these kinds of missiles.

I think that the most likely outcome is either more shipping companies negotiating terms to transit unharmed, like China's COSCO has all but admitted to have done, or these detours to continue.

SM-2ER are the majority of Standard missiles packed on USN ships. SM-6 is really intended to replace them since it can defend against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and serve as a hypersonic ASBM. But it's expensive, so the SM-2 will soldier on, backed up by the SM-3 in the ABM role.

And the production capacity can easily be ramped up if there's enough funds.

As far as I'm aware, new production of SM-2s has ended permanently, and all recent orders I can find are for upgrade kits, of which there's only a few hundred. Early SM-2s are limited in their ability to hit low-flying targets due to their SARH guidance.

I'm basing off on : https://apps.dtic.mil/procurement/Y2014/Navy/stamped/P40_223...

Given the production numbers, it seems that stocks even of SM-2 block 3 through 4 are at most in the low four digits.

I'm sure production capability for the SM-6 can be ramped up I'd there's enough funds, my point is that it's going to be even more expensive than the figure price of the missiles used looks like, and that it's going to be 2-3 years at least before that pans out.

SM-2 Block III and IIIA are designed to excel at low level targets. I didn't have time to go through all the secnav docs to see if all the USN stock has been upgraded, or funded for upgrades, but I believe so. Though I think the USN will eventually have mostly ESSM Block II and SM-6. The SM-6 is just too expensive at almost $5M per all up round. Even if production was ramped up (past the current 125 per annum), the cost is just too prohibitive for use against all but the most dire threats.

ESSM is cheaper at around $2M per round, and quad packs help increase the magazine depth on Navy ships. Production for it is also too low in my opinion, currently at roughly 140 year. Routine testing and missile qualifications could easily eat up 20% of that each year. Sigh.

I just find it hard to believe that increasing production totals wouldn't help decrease unit cost significantly. My USN friends won't mention inventory totals, but they do mention that a lot of ships are going to sea without full magazines. And since at-sea replenishment of VLS systems is still a fantasy, that's a huge issue.

Looks like Raytheon restarted the production line for SM-2...

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1990XP/

US Navy is never going to allow stocks to go under what is necessary to stop at least a long-range Chinese attack, and that means at least 600 missiles

Agree.

stocks are not sufficient to tank Iran's capability to produce these kinds of missiles

My core point is it never gets to Iran making missiles, the Houthis firing them and the U.S. doing nothing more than intercepting. Well before it becomes a production contest, the situation is resolved diplomatically or escalated.

the most likely outcome is either more shipping companies negotiating terms to transit unharmed

This would be difficult for a Western company to do without risking sanctions.

My core point is it never gets to the point where Iran is making missiles, the Houthis are firing them and the U.S. is doing nothing more than intercepting them. Well before it becomes a production contest, the situation is resolved diplomatically or escalated.

Given the “final warning” issued 4 days ago by the coalition, I think escalation or resolution (probably the former) is very much a “sooner rather than later" thing.

Given the “final warning” issued 4 days ago by the coalition, I think escalation or resolution (probably the former) is very much a “sooner rather than later" thing.

Perhaps.

We have a tightrope to walk: trying not to spark a regional war but also ensuring that warnings and redlines are taken seriously.

At the same time, if your adversary knows what the response will be, they have the option of deciding the action is still worth it (or even the response would be desirable). This can even be perverse (e.g. two level games; leaders deciding to take a punch that is a net loss for their nation to rally support around themselves).

So blurry redlines --- and the full range of responses ("in a time and manner of our choosing"), including covert and deniable ones --- are employed. Ambiguity is usually advantageous to maintain, and players employ mixed strategies.

I totally missed your comment about SM-2s being deemed "too dangerous" to use." That's not really accurate. There have been two incidents with the SM-2 (2015 and 2018). The USN and the German Navy decided not to do any more test firings of these missiles, but they are cleared for wartime use. And they're being used now without issue so far.

I also would love to see why you think there's only 180 modernized versions, and what you consider modernized. My understanding is that all versions have been either upgraded or their upgrade is budgeted. If you think that the USN has only 680 SM-2 and SM-6 in inventory I don't know what to say. That would be only 10 or so Standards per Arleigh Burke. There are 73 Arleigh Burkes active with a capacity of 90 missiles. Even if they only allocate 50% of these VLS slots to SM missiles, that would require over 3K missiles. And this ignores the Ticos completely. I know the USN puts to see without filling all the VLS slots, but that would be a dangerous, ridiculous loadout that I can't see escaping Congressional scrutiny.

Raytheon says they've produced over 11k SM-2 missiles worldwide. I know that testing has consumed around 3K, leaving 8K for the USN and allies. Even being generous with FMS, I doubt Raytheon has sold more than 2K overseas. That would leave the US inventory around 6K. A far cry from 180.

Additionally, given that the expensive parts in these drones seem to be homemade in Iran (engines, fuselage, even some of the electronics), and given the sanctions, USD equiv. GDP isn't a great metric since there's no free market to convert Iranian production to USD.

I wouldn't be so sure that the parts are locally sourced.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/bizarre-theft-wave-tar...

Not the same type of hardware. They might need larger engines for their reusable drones, but the ones they used for Shaheds are in-house clones (funnily enough, a Wankel engine for one of them). The Wikipedia pages for the suicide Shaheds has teardowns and sources.

huh cool. I guess the Wankel's found a niche that doesn't mind the short engine rebuild period.

But its not Yemen, its Iran that's paying for it - with money from oil smuggled past sanctions.

Shipping from Iran to Yemen is also vulnerable, however.

Most of the missiles and other weapons are being smuggled in relatively small boats. It simply isn't practical to stop and search most of them. In theory the US and other nations could declare a blockade and simply sink any vessel that enters Yemeni territorial waters, but that would be a major escalation and require a lot more naval forces to be deployed

The question isn’t how much each missile/drone costs. The question is, how many of those does each side have and how quickly can you get more?

Maybe $3M missile isn’t that costly to the US, but if you have like 1000 of them and it takes 6 months to replenish the stock, while the other side has 10000 drones that they can replenish in 3 months, you have a massive problem at your hand. (The same problem Ukraine is having re: stockpiling artillery shells that are sourced from US/NATO)

Edit: They where off by a factor of 1,000 for Yemen GDP.

That said if they were actually 0.1% GDP each then 10000 * 0.1% GDP each = 100% of GDP for 10 years. Which would obviously not happen.

The problem is also the stock value of the industrial military complex. If your artisanal rockets are out competed by smart flying sand with a stick, your actual evaluation is in for a correction, fiscally as tactically.

Not 0.1%, you are off by a factor 1000. Their GDP is 20b not 20m. Would still be relatively more costly but a lot less extreme.

Yemeni rebels don't pay for these, though. It's free 'aid' from Iran. So arguing costs doesn't make much sense. Similarly mujahedeen in Afghanistan got free Stingers MANPADs

To be really pedantic, a $20,000 drone out of Yemen is 0.1% of Yemen GDP.

Are you saying that entire Yemen's GDP is just $20M ? Does not seem plausible.

To be really pedantic, a $20,000 drone out of Yemen is 0.1% of Yemen GDP.

Yemen's GDP is $21B, not $21M.

As an engineer, saying that $20k, the price of a cheap car, is 1/1000th of a GDP of a whole country does not pass the smell test. Google says that Yemen's GDP is $21.61b, so a drone is 0.0000925% of the GDP. In other words it's about a million drones per year for Yemen, and about 7.7 million interceptors per year for the US.

You're embedded assumption is that Yemen would be paying for these drones.

Examined on its own, that's a bold claim.

That assumes the US won't fight back. US contributes ~6% of Yemen GDP in foreign aid. Yemen is a big food importer. US could shut off foreign aid and blockade Yemen and collapse their economy - they wouldn't be able to afford food, let alone 20k drones.

The Houthi strategy isn't an economic strategy, it's a "hope the US isn't willing to kill us" strategy.

Yes, of course, let's starve even more people, that will sure gain us more friends...

There is a non-zero chance we are headed for a situation where global warming and sea level rise will make hundreds of millions, mostly from equatorial regions, desperate refugees. It could be that an attitude of self-righteousness might become impossible to maintain. Friends come and go.

So, you propose to do what? Let those people drown? Or actively shooting them? Or maybe proactively let the starve? Either way, it would be genocide.

Yes, we might need to shoot at them.

What is it with you people just casually argueing for genocide? Do you think this is, I don't know, tough or edgy?

Do you propose doing nothing about the people firing rockets at shipping? What about the lives of the sailors on those ships?

Is there some intrinsic right that the rocket-firers are defending that warrants treating them as other than aggressors in this situation?

Why do you call it genocide? Surely if you shoot at ships in international waters, and it is not defence, then you're bringing whatever acts of defence follow on your own head. Acts of defence seem impossible to class as genocide (but I'd like to hear arguments to the contrary if you have them).

I think you missed who the "them" was in this later part of the thread: not Yemenis attacking civilian shipping, but rather hypothetical future climate refugees from islands that disappear due to sea level rise.

Not only that, people whose most fertile agricultural land is now under salt water.

OP talked about the millions of potential refugees from climate change we might have. Not the Hoithi rebels firing at international shipping as retaliation of what happens im Gaza.

Regaeding the latter, yes, for bow I think doing nothing militarily is exactly what is needed.

HN has always had a core of fascist affinity but it's quickly becoming more open, unfortunately.

You set up a straw man. An insincere response to an insincere question.

The Saudis with help of the US has already tried to get rid of the Houthis. That didn't exactly went well.

Never in my wildest dream would i think that the Houthis would be one doing the first modern blockade of a strait. I always expected the US to do the first modern block in the Malacca strait, when China is forced to do a Armed reunification with Taiwan.

China would never be "forced" to invade Taiwan. If that happens it will be a choice.

US could shut off foreign aid and blockade Yemen and collapse their economy - they wouldn't be able to afford food, let alone 20k drones

Yemen's already in famine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Yemen_(2016%E2%80%.... The drones are supplied by Iran.

$3M each is what DoD is charged, or maybe an export price, for low quantities. Real marginal cost of mass production is much lower.

That is the big question here. How much can/should the US scale production. We know from several current wars the cheap drones are a big issue. So we need to come up with a solution. Can we develop a new anti-drone weapon system that is cheaper? Can we mass produce these missiles and thus get them much cheaper? Some other option I'm not aware of? Whatever, the fact is every half-competent wannabe general now knows that drones are cheap to build and expensive to defend against. The US needs to respond somehow or we will lose to them.

Drones are cheap. EW is even cheaper. The US has multiple C-UAS systems in use and even better ones in development. Some are just EW systems, some are cheapo gun based systems, and other are directed energy weapons. Missile based systems are the best but also the most expensive of the currently deployed solutions. The cheapest missile system is probably the APKWS that we've shipped to Ukraine. This uses a laser to guide the missile to the drone. But for countering FPV/Mavic type drones, even those are overkill. Just jam the entire area on the frequencies in use, and deny everyone drone use.

It's important not to draw too many conclusions from the Ukraine war. The combatants are fighting a much different fight on both sides than what the US would do.

EW is very much not magic, and both Russia and Ukraine absolutely do use it.

The problem with barrage jamming is that it's extremely locatable and your jammer just ends up getting blown up. The solution is to have many smaller jammers, but then range is decreased dramatically, and it can still be economical to just bomb them, possibly with an anti radiation munition (slapping such guidance on a drone is not expensive).

That said, the range is sufficiently small that it doesn't matter - cheap systems can just use visual odometry and inertial sensors and fly themselves the remaining 300 meters to the target. There are videos of Russian lancets operating exactly like this, flying high, locating a target, and then autonomously homing in as they get into jamming range.

The idea that neither Russia nor Ukraine tried just EW is quite ridiculous. It's well known that Russia had excellent EW, there was a report in the Texeira leaks that Ukraine could no longer use Excalibur guided shells because Russian long range jamming rendered them useless - the GPS jamming made them unable to arm, and that even US guided HIMARS missiles and JDAMs had to rely on inertial sensors for much of the trajectory with significantly reduced accuracy.

Yeah, our military says HIMARS are pretty much done due to the russian EW. By dragging this war, the US gave russians the opportunity to learn and battle test their solutions against HIMARS.

Excaliburs are on a much different level though. Word is, you don't need much EW at all. You merely have to give them a strong look and that's enough to drive it way off course.

Excalibur is highly effective when not being jammed by Pole-21 systems. It's just that Ukraine currently doesn't have enough systems to counter the GPS jamming. GMLRS faces the same issues. Both systems have inertial guidance in the face of jamming, but the accuracy drops off quite a bit. Just means you need to launch more GMLRS per target, or attack when jamming is off.

Never said EW was magic, nor that neither Ukraine or Russia was using it? If they weren't, the battlefield would be even more lethal. Russia has been a leader in EW for decades.

But it is the most cost-effective solution. Russia has been deploying vehicle mounted EW systems to jam drones (with some success), as well as jamming GPS. And the Ukrainians have been jamming as well. There's no wunderwaffe in any war, it's more a game of cat and mouse.

Just like APS is now becoming standard on tanks and AFVs, localized EW jammers targeting control frequencies of small drones will be the cost of having a real military. There's also been research into using APS against drones (this would require additional sensors).

And the JDAM/HIMARS jamming is a bit overrated. Even in inertial mode, JDAM has a 30m CEP, and HIMARS has a 60M CEP. Definitely not as good as with GPS, but still a serious issue for the Russians.

In a previous similar thread, it was mentioned that directed energy weapons could be an effective & efficient response to drones, and have already been in development and testing by the US military for some time.

When has America ever backed down on spending money for war?

Right now, for Ukraine.

It was the same in Vietnam. It even caused the US to end US dollar gold standard

Fair. Though I would slightly defend my position that qualifies as aid instead of letting America pull the trigger.

While the Houthi drone itself is inexpensive, the cost to the economy of a drone hitting shipping is substantially greater than the $3M cost of the US interceptor missile.

Good.How about ten drones ($200k) and ten interceptors ($30m)? Is the cost of the economy still greater? Alright, let's up the numbers. Forty drones vs forty interceptors, $800k vs $120m. Do the numbers still work for the US? Like, would Yemen gladly pay $800k to kill an american vessel? I guess yes. Would it be economically effective to spend $120m on a protection of said vessel? Perhaps not.

So, at a certain number between one and forty drones the economy stops making sense.

This is what happens here in Ukraine as well: russian drones are cheap and readily available, while interceptors are expensive af and quite scarce.

Judging by how broken the US economy seems, I’d say that’s already here.

What economy have you been looking at?

US is in no danger of ever running out of money for missiles.

This doesn't take into account the cost of smuggling the drones from Iran to Yemen. There is a reason cocaine is an order of magnitude cheaper in Colombia than in Miami.

You're grossly underestimating the US military. Do you remember the 20T for Trillion spend in the mid east on 2 optional wars for 20 years.

No, they won't, because the immediately coming war between the US-led coalition organized to reopen the sea lanes and the Houthis is not going to be conducted by simply trying to intercept attacks.

US interceptor missiles are something like 3 million dollars each. The Houthis drones are closer to 20 thousand

That’s a 150x cost difference. Well within an order of magnitude of America versus Iran’s economies and defense budgets.

Which is irrelevant, since before this becomes a production problem it would become the diplomatic ones of bombing Houthi supplies in Yemen and intercepting IRGC vessels on the high seas.

Id imagine the marginal cost is a lot lower than that though

The only military option to stop the attacks are drone / bomber incursions into Yemen

After they withstood years of war with Saudis? Those sandal-and-skirt guys are much tougher than people think.

Conventional military wisdom is that you cannot win a war from the air. Case in point: Vietnam. You have to put boots on the ground to secure the area and the Saudis aren't about to do that and the American people would never support dying for a Saudi war.

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

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.

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.

And that involved nukes

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.

Thats straight out of the Henry Kissinger handbook.

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.

Tell the Palestinians.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

After they withstood years of war with Saudis?

Different aims. Riyadh sought to remove them from power. That’s a boots-on-the-ground operation they attempted from the air.

Egypt would just need to degrade their coastal capabilities. Taking out vessels, helicopters and arms stores could do that from the air.

Saudi Arabia also attempted to stop the Houthis from bombing Saudi industry, and failed. It's difficult to bomb guided missiles, because they are typically only stored 1-4 at a time in a highly mobile and disguised manner, for example inside a truck, and are only going to be exposed as they're being fired. It's a really difficult task, unfortunately. As far as I known it's never been successfully done without a ground invasion.

it's never been successfully done without a ground invasion

Counter-battery fire is tremendously precedented and always done at standoff. You can also start hitting arms stores, port infrastructure, training and C3 facilities.

The beauty of this is it’s cruelly win-win-win. The Houthis can use the bombing to strengthen their domestic image, maybe even boost recruitment. Iran can piggyback on that. And America can claim it cleared the Strait. As long as everyone stays in their lane (literally), it’s a stable conclusion.

Counter battery fire simply does not work. These missiles are not stored nor fired in central locations, there are only a couple at a time. You can fire at the launch spot all you want, there's going to be no one and nothing of value there. It's the same tactics the US itself copied for the HIMARS, and despite thousand of airstrikes Russia hasn't been able to destroy them.

Training and top level command is most likely not even in Yemen. You could hit the ports, that wouldn't stop the import of these missiles - they are shipped in small boats as a kit, assembled wherever, and then kept in a cave somewhere or in a car, ready to be fired. No port or infrastructure needed.

These tactics have been used since the 80s, and no solution short of a ground invasion can stop them. Israel couldn't even stop Hamas and the PIJ from firing guided rockets from Gaza - at the end of the day when the IDF bomb houses that rockets were fired from, it's just theater: they never store more than a dozen munitions, and by the time counter battery fire arrives, they've likely fired all munitions already. This is a tiny 2.4sqm strip fully blockaded, I don't see how you can stop it in Yemen.

can fire at the launch spot all you want, there's going to be no one and nothing of value there

This is blind counter-battery. You use the shot to place loiters. That then trains your fire.

They're not going to be returning to the firing spot. There's no point doing it. It's been tried, there isn't much to do short of an invasion.

Despite much media ado about destroying the launchers, those are typically just welded pipe or wooden catapults. There's no value in them and no point in ever coming back there.

Counter battery only works if you know where to fire. If your first clue is they just launched their entire storage of missiles there is nothing to do. If you are fast enough maybe you can get the now-empty launcher, but modern military practice is shoot and scout so odds are against that.

Getting information on where things are stored is hard. It needs boots/spies on the ground (satellites can only get limited information and are easily fooled). As pointed out elsewhere, modern best practice is to not have a large warehouse that is easy to find and destroy, instead you scatter this stuff around in small units.

just launched their entire storage of missiles

If they launched their entire stockpile, it’s no longer an issue. The question was using one launch to take out a couple missiles, maybe a launcher and those operating it. Done repeatedly, this will degrade a static force. (Additional levers would need to be pulled on resupply.)

They will then ro to the next stockpile and launch again

And America can claim it cleared the Strait.

See the thing is, if shipping companies don't trust the waters they simply won't send ships there - claims don't matter one whit.

if shipping companies don't trust the waters they simply won't send ships there - claims don't matter one whit

What part of removing long-range precision strike capability suggests an empty claim?

arms stores,

Those arms stores do not exist as such, they're most probably highly dispersed and only at the limit can one call them "stores", and if gathered in one place that place is most probably located underground, where aerial bombings would have close to no effects.

Just look at how difficult it is right now for Israel to take out Hamas's weapons cashes in Gaza, and we're talking about a much concentrated operation in terms of space and most probably Israel knows a lot more about Hamas's weapons caches than the US would be able to ever know about where the Houthis store their weapons.

Counter-battery fire really only applies to gun-based artillery, since it has nearby ammo (or stored ammunition on the vehicle) and the counter-battery radar is sited to detect and calculate the ballistic trajectory instantly.

When it comes to missile (whether drone, cruise missiles, or ballistic missiles), it's much more difficult. The US had a hard time countering the SCUD missiles in 1991. And that was with a huge military, with the best ISR the world has ever seen. A 6-pack of Shaheds can be launched from a trailer that looks all the world like a normal flatbed style semi. A cruise missile can be fired and navigate a course that obfuscates its launch point. Ballistic missiles can fire, then drive away to hide in a city.

The only way to win this fight is to blockade the country from receiving shipments from Iran. Air blockade and naval blockade, combined with strikes to hit known depots etc. This is called war. Not a presence mission, not a "response," but the literal definition of war. The US has no stomach for this entanglement, and hopes that the problem goes away. It won't, but the pain level is relatively low, and the USN is getting some great practice in fighting a LIC in the littoral regions.

It would be politically suicidal for any Arab ruler to fight another Muslim/Arab country in the interest of Israel and the US, not even secular el-Sisi is free of that danger.

The US Navy's most advanced weapons systems can intercept most of the missiles but not all of them, and at some considerable degree of risk to the US vessels.

Aren't Egyptian Navy vessels much cheaper than american? They can just zerg rush and eat the damage. I don't think that Houthi have a lot of cruise missiles piled up.

They can just zerg rush and eat the damage.

The last time the StarCraft doctrine was used in a real war was over a century ago and it did not go well.

I don't think that Houthi have a lot of cruise missiles piled up.

Are you willing to bet the lives of Egyptian sailors on that assumption? How about your own?

This isn’t a video game.

1939 was less than 100 years ago. Didn't go well for Poland. "Blitzkrieg" means "lightning war".

”Blitzkrieg" means "lightning war"

Blitzkrieg was early combined-arms warfare; its modern iteration underwrites American military supremacy.

Zerg rushing is an r-production analog that uses swarms of cheap, expendable units to overwhelm the enemy numerically. This is closer to the Soviet (and now Russian) doctrine of using humans to absorb ammunition. It fails against combined-arms armies because it lacks manoeuvre. It works when the enemy is production constrained, e.g. Ukraine.

The Russians, and Soviets, never did this. Their doctrine of mobile combined arms warfare, that worked really well during WW2, is called deep battle.

Zerg rushing works in video games.

Russians, and Soviets, never did this

The Soviets in WWII used human waves against the Nazis. (EDIT: They did not, they used them against the Finns in the Winter War.) That said, the USSR was capable of combined-armed warfare.

Russia has proved incapable of combined-arms warfare. They launched human waves in Bakhmut, and are largely using numerical advantages in raw recruits to push for marginal gains. This isn’t how a modern army fights.

Soviet himan waves are as much myth as are the Germans calling it Blitzkrieg. The only thing comming close to these himan wave attacks are the failed Banzai charges of desperate Japanese forces. And thoae never worked.

Soviet himan waves are as much myth

The Red Army definitely used them against Finland. But you are right, they weren’t used against the Nazis.

It's not "human waves" in Ukraine, it's advance by attrition in Ukraine, as JumpCrisscross pointed out above. The Russians have not considered themselves limited by causalities, while the Ukrainians have to conserve manpower and materiel. So the Russians can "afford" to throw a bunch of squads out along a front, and if 90% or more are casualties, they don't care, so long as they can take some ground. Then, once they do, they rinse, lather, and repeat. It's a hideous expenditure of human lives, but it has worked tactically. Whether it is a significant gain operationally or strategically, I don't know. (Russia is going to pay a price down the road for losing all those young men, but it won't be paid by the old men sending them to their deaths.)

Zerg rushes have worked since then. worked for Chinese "volunteers" in the Korean War. Iran-Iraq saw a bunch, and they mostly worked, if you don't mind elementary age kids running through mindfields.

at sea, this approach took down the Russian Fleet at Tsushima Strait. The MCII exercise, contentious as it were, showed that an Iranian attempt at that might have worked.

hell, for all of their losses in Ukraine, the Russians are still gaining ground, and a lot of that came at the expense of modern Straf-Bat penal units.

that said, Egypt is a tank power, not a ship power, and flooding the area with older gear is a good way for most of it to end up at the bottom of the ocean. it's a non-starter of an idea for them.

"Gaining ground" is not really particularly a meaningful metric if you don't take a look at its magnitude and the attrition on equipment and manpower.

It is in any case a full brute force approach that bellies an enemy that is unwilling or unable to train their troops.

Yes, quantity is a quality all its own, but that's why the US military is one of the biggest armed force on the planet. We do literally have the biggest air force in the world, for example.

We do literally have the biggest air force in the world, for example.

In fact we have 4 of the top 10: #1 (airforce), #2 (Navy), 4(Army), and #5(marines).

Who is #3? China?

russia.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-a...

Are you willing to bet the lives of Egyptian sailors on that assumption? How about your own?

Egypt usually doesn't have any problems with that. They're not a liberal democracy, so enduring high casualties is not a political problem for them.

I don’t see the connection. Liberal democracies risk the lives of their militaries all the time. Does Egypt have a history of selecting strategies that needlessly waste military strength in service of their social structure?

how much do you think zerg rushing with ships cost?

6000 vespene gas

Carrier has arrived.

Zerg rushes are maybe effective at overwhelming an enemy position. It can be considered to be acceptable for a tactically successful operation. Eating missiles without good outcome is usually not part of a tactically successful operation.

...bomber incursions into Yemen which of course Egypt has no interest in doing since it could turn into a full hot war pretty easily.

How would the Houthis respond?

Much less, what do they have that can possibly hit Egypt.

That said, bombing might not do the trick. Just create more suffering in Yemen.

This idea of the Houthis as some sort of desert people misses that they took over the military of what was formerly an ally of "The West"..

They have attack helicopters: https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2..., https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2...

They have American & Soviet fighter jets (F-5 / SU-22): https://pictures.reuters.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2..., https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-H4BV3xzWWXk/TnIKIQMOAFI/A...

They have tons of cruise missiles: https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R..., https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R...

And ballistic missiles: https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/YEMEN-SECURITY-PARADE-R...

They're being supplied by Iran and whoever else hates Saudi Arabia, so they have a ton of capability to launch pretty devastating attacks on their neighbors -- hence why we have destroyers and aircraft carriers in the region. The missiles targeting merchant ships are bad -- it'd be worse if they started targeting land-based military targets in other countries.

They have American & Soviet fighter jets (F-5 / SU-22)

They have, from the accounts I’ve seen (including their own propaganda videos) a single flyable F-5 constituting their entire “fast air combat capability” of those delivered to Yemen more than 40 years ago (and the F-5 was an older cheap export fighter then.)

And... I wouldn't expect it to be flyable much longer. Mobile missile launchers may be hard to find and kill on the ground, boring conventional fixed-wing jet fighters aren't, and even though they aren't the strategic target of the coalition the US has put together, US combat doctrine very heavily favors early destruction of an enemy’s air combat capability and air defenses to maximize freedom of operation.

True enough - but they've carried out multiple strikes with the SU-22s in their possession and can presumably restock / refit those with Iranian support -- they also have several dozen older MIGs. There's no doubt that they'd be annihilated if they tried to use those for continued offensive missions outside of the Yemeni borders but they could likely pull off a single fast attack on Cairo or Suez if they were so inspired.

I would view claims of "several dozen older MIGS" with great suspicion. There's a report of a single MIG-29, but no word of its flying condition. In the civil war, Yemen had to rely upon mercenary pilots to fly them, as well as maintain them.

but they could likely pull off a single fast attack on Cairo or Suez if they were so inspired.

No. They couldn't. Yemen to either is like three times the range of the SU-22 on a shortest distance path, which would take them through Saudi Arabia and close enough for mistakes of intent to Israel, either of which—as well as Egypt—has Air Forces more than capable of intercepting and destroying them if they magically gained the range to try to pull of that kind of flight.

The Houthi Air Force is useful for their civil war, and not a whole lot else.

They've been targeting land-based military (and industrial) targets in other countries. They've been fighting Saudi Arabia for maybe a decade, using a variety of drones/cruise missiles.

Their air force is a joke though. A single flying F-5 (vintage 1970), and some decrepit SU-22 Fitters with no range.

Also, those aren't "attack" helicopters. They're bog standard Mi-8 transport helicopters. You can use them to attack, but they're nothing like a Hind/Hokum/Havoc or Apache helicopter.

How would the Houthis respond?

It assumed that Houthi is a proxy of Iran so the question is how Iran would respond.

I thought the Houthis were no longer receiving funding from Iran with the SA-Iran deal of 2023. Did that change?

I thought the Houthis were no longer receiving funding from Iran with the SA-Iran deal of 2023. Did that change?

I think its more “Iran lied and has used less overt channels” than “that changed”.

Ghadr-110 has a claimed range up to 2000km, which is just about the distance from Sanaa to Cairo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghadr-110

https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...

Ghadr-110 has a claimed range up to 2000km

It also seems to have a new place in history. A losing place but still. . .

On November 6, 2023, a Ghadr-110 missile was launched from Yemen by the Houthis towards Israel, which was intercepted by the Arrow-2 system while it was still outside of Earth's atmosphere, in what was described as the first instance of combat in space in human history

Houthis have long range missiles (courtesy of Iran). They regularly launch them at Israel, they can launch them at Egypt too.

which of course Egypt has no interest in doing

Because someone else will do it for them. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and everyone based on Djibouti have a joint interest in keeping the Bab al-Mandab strait traversable.

Saudi Arabia pretty much triggered this whole mess by invading, excuse me, "intervening in" Yemen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi-led_intervention_in_the_...

It’s difficult to blame Riyadh exclusively without taking into account Iran’s role in the Houthis’ takeover of Yemen [1]. Saudi Arabia regionalised and intensified the conflict, but they didn’t start it. (To your credit, I don’t think the Houthis would have long-range precision weapons were Riyadh out of the picture.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_takeover_in_Yemen

Israel has a navy, and is curiously missing from 'Operation Prosperity Guardian'

I suspect after the ground invasion in Gaza and the attacks at Lebanon, the Israeli public would be even less pleased at a "third front"

Good thing there a lot of other countries willing to foot that bill.

It puzzles me that how little mention Saudi Arabia is getting here - given that they've been Yemen's war-partner against the Houthis for a while (w/ US, UK, French, etc help).

Saudi Arabia's military is staffed largely by dilettantes. The only reason they ever fought against the Houthi's was because they're Sunni and the Houthi's are Shia.

And the Houthis are really in control of all most all of Yemen, so calling them insurgents etc is misplaced. They dissolved the government and replaced it with revolutionary councils.

I love how Israel expects the US and other countries to do all the heavy lifting on a front that is actually vital for their economic needs while they're on a mission dropping a Hiroshima of bombs on their own territory.

And that's what the US calls 'their most valuable ally in the Middle East'. A country that never helped the US when a time came to return favor for the US unconditional support.

Israel can potentially benefit from the situation, as a land route Bahrain -> Haifa port is currently being considered as an alternative to Suez Channel.

That's a serious alternative to the Cape of Good Hope? That seems like a lot of expenses just to put ships into range of Iran instead of Iranian allies.

Israel’s navy is geared towards patrolling their territorial waters. They’re not really set up for expeditionary operations like suppressing shipping attacks hundreds of miles from home.

The Egyptian government is a dictatorship holding together a powder keg. The military coup of 2013 overthrew a Muslim Brotherhood government and was followed by the election of 2014 which produced the very believable and realistic result of 96% of the vote for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (he was reëlected with 97% in 2018 and 90% in 2023). A military mobilization of Egypt would jeopardize the minimal existing political infrastructure in the country and, arguably, play into the hands of the Houthis themselves, who are no friends of regional stability.

It's fairly obvious at this point that the only way to stop it is to bomb targets in Yemen...which isn't going to be politically popular. The US is even struggling to put together a coalition to secure the water ways.

It's quite painless to allocate the limited resources of others isn't it?

They also can't afford to potentially embarrass themselves militarily with much more existential grand renaissance dam drama unfolding in the background.

[Egypt is] free to patrol the waters

Putting patrol-boats out there may deter boarding by Somalia-style pirates, but in this case the risk comes from various missiles and bomb-drones launched from the shore [0]. Even if the the defender has a few fancy anti-missile warships, the attacker could choose the least-covered target from a constant stream of (big, slow) cargo-ships through a ~300km route. [1]

[0] https://www.mei.edu/publications/houthis-red-sea-missile-and...

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/12/20/map-houthi-shipping-vessel-...

Good questions!

Egypt doesn't have the advanced anti missile cruisers. Egypt has a massive tank force.

There is already a multi national naval fleet in the Red Sea patrolling the waters. Mostly US but also UK and some others.

Edit

There's more :) Egypt can't counter the missiles better than the US can, but it could certainly get pulled into a larger conflict if it started deploying military assets outside it's borders. They can't really make their situation better but they can definitely make it worse.

Not many navys can project force that far due to logistics.

They locked down the Palestine border at the request of Israel

Where did you get the info from that it was on Israel's request and not of their own accord?

Like all the neighbors of Israel, the last thing they want is the refugees on their land...

They have invaded Yemen before ...

And that did not go well.

While a large portion of the Egyptian population likely agree with the Houthi stance, the political actors they would support are in prison.

They locked down the Palestine border at the request of Israel

I'm not arguing they should do this, but what Israel actually wants right now is to allow Gaza residents to exit into the Sinai, not a blockade.

Their navy can defend the shipping routes rather than waiting for someone else to step up

They gave Israel early warning about the attacks.

Both Israel and Egypt denied that this was true. They both said the warnings were of a general natural "Hamas wants to attack", nothing specific.

What can they do?

Hypothetically, Egypt can do the same thing they did the last time Yemen fell into civil war - support the PLC.

The issue is Saudi and UAE - Egypt's primary backers - are supporting conflicting factions in the Yemeni Civil War. The Saudis are supporting the Yemeni Republican Guard (the old leadership of the Republic of Yemen) while the UAE is supporting the secessionist Southern Transitional Council which is fighting to reconstitute South Yemen.

If Egypt choses one side over they other, they are in big trouble, as the other side will start meddling in Egypt in retaliation. Egypt is already in a de facto Cold War with Turkiye and Qatar because they supported Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sisi needs as much support as possible to retain power in Egypt.

Conspiracy corner: Egypt is joining BRICS. Maybe this is deliberate pressure and this is a convenient excuse?

BRICS is not some omnipresent challenge to NATO or the WB. China and India hate each other and were literally a trigger away from war 3 years ago.

"[the] two countries almost at the brink of war with artillery guns ready to fire at Chinese tanks which were trying to storm Indian positions, a fate averted by a hotline between the two sides, reveals former Army chief Gen M.M. Naravane (Retd)" [0]

[0] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav...

Turkey and Greece hate each other but it doesn't prevent them both being in NATO. It's hard to tell what BRICS really is but it's not a military organization so no point comparing them to NATO anyway

Turkey and Greece hate each other but it doesn't prevent them both being in NATO

No, but their mutual dependence on the US for military procurement and defense keeps them within NATO.

China and India on the other hand began the process of a hard decoupling in 2020. Major Chinese tech companies were frozen out of the Indian market, and others were "encouraged" to sell off their operations to Indian, American, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies. For example, the Foxconn factory manufacturing iPhones in India was originally built for Xiaomi before they were pushed out. So was Huawei India's assets to Cisco and Vivo India's factory to Samsung. Indian tax authorities raid Chinese run companies at such a high frequency that even China has publicly complained about this [0]. This is a stunning change for a country that 4 years before was the 2nd largest FDI investor in India after the US.

It's hard to tell what BRICS really

It's a half assed attempt at becoming a WB, ADB, or IMF competitor, but is hemmed by mutual competition between China and India. This is why the only 4 countries added in the expansion were those that had a roughly equal dependency on China and India.

it's not a military organization so no point comparing them to NATO anyway

Agreed! I'm just dismissing a common pop fact I've noticed regurgitated on HN and Reddit. I have a hunch that the overlap between some of the more braindead subreddits and HN is quite high.

[0] - https://m.thewire.in/article/diplomacy/enforcement-directora...

Turkey doesn't need US for defense, it's the other way around. That's why the US gov grinds their teeth but have to deal with Erdogan

Turkey doesn't need US for defense

What planes do the Turkish Airforce use?

What tanks, APCs, and helicopters does the Turkish Army use?

Where is most of Turkey's naval fleet manufactured?

Turkey has been working on indigenization and diversifying it's procurement by buying from Italy, Spain, and France, but it is still heavily dependent on American weapons systems.

Relations between the US and Turkiye deteriorated severely after the US began supporting the YPG (which imo was a stupid move by the Trump admin), but there is still a mutual dependency, with the US giving Turkey protection against Russia (with whom they are fighting against in a couple proxy wars like in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, etc), and the US dependent on Turkiye for Central Asia and Middle Eastern power projection.

The real world isn't a game of Civ where you are either friends or foes. In reality there exists multiple layers of grey. Furthermore, public denouncements or displays of support don't necessarily translate to positive or negative action.

A good example is Turkiye-Israel relations. Erdogan will always denounce Israel and the "Zionists", but at the end of the day, Turkey and Israel have extremely strong defense relations as both are heavily involved in Azerbaijan (Turkey because they view Azeris as brothers, and Israel because of Iran).

It's the same for US-Turkiye relations. Erdogan has to publicly appear anti-American due to his base's memories of the American supported Turkish Armed Forces violently repressing Islam until the 90s, but in actual actions, there is a mutual dependency. There's a reason why most of the younger generation of Erdogan's family attended IU Bloomington.

Turkey doesn't need any protection from Russia. It has second largest army in NATO right after US and can fend off Russia just fine all on its own. During Cold War it was a different story but times have changed and in fact, these days Turkey actually has quite cozy relations with Russia when you put aside the official rhetoric and look at what is actually happening.

days Turkey actually has quite cozy relations with Russia

It's a frenemy relationship, similar to China-India in the 2012-2019 time period or Saudi and Qatar.

Aside from the S-400 purchase, which was probably done in order to build a domestic clone similar to how TAI is attempting to build the Kaan, Russia-Turkey relations are largely economic in nature. At the NatSec or defense level, they clash directly.

For example, Turkish intelligence has supported Crimean Turkish rebel groups, has supplied Ukraine with offensive UAVs for almost a decade, has shot down Russian planes (and vice versa), and directly vies with Russia in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans.

When shit hits the fan like in 2015, the US came in to mediate, though the US-Turkey relationship isn't as strong due to the Trump admin's missteps with supporting the YPG. That said, it's still a fairly strong strategic relationship, especially when compared to similar countries the US previously supported like Thailand or Malaysia, or even Greece+Cyprus and their heavy dependence on Russian weaponry (the only country in the NATO to actively buy Russian weapons until the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 2022 started).

If Incirlik was shut down, then it would absolutely be a major pivot away from the US, but the military relationship has started to recover. For example, the Turkish Air Force has been integrated under a single command with American Air Force deployments in the Middle East since 2023.

It's a big area, I believe there's US Navy and UK Navy ships there right now.

I didn't believe this comment until i found that they hit $7B record in 2022, which matches the numbers. Crazy, thanks for sharing this.

Egypt will feel some pain, but most of it will be felt by Israel and Europe. Egypt has closed the canal many times itself as a form of protest, the longest closure was from 1967 to 1975 after the 6 day war with Israel.

So I do not expect them to do anything.

GDP of Egypt in 2023 was $1.4T. $7.5B of the Canal revenue is 0.5% of total GDP.

This feels too reduced in options and reasoning, to be honest. I would be surprised if any of those three options pan out, mid term.

To expand a little, I don't understand how the Houthis have support right now, outside of support that is specifically about destabilizing the entire region. Which is why I don't see your brief paragraph being enough to explain things. You do mention US support in there; who else is involved? And why?

Easy, its all orchestrated from Iran.

I want to believe that that is too simplistic, too. It does seem to fit the evidence far too well, though.

Neither Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis would survive without the support from Iran. They don't even try to hide the origin of their weapons...

So who backs Iran? They’re not a superpower. How long does Iran survive a shooting war with the US?

Who backs Iran? Russia of course. Did you not notice the amount of Iranian drones attacking Ukraine? Other agreements between the two must be in place...This is the result of all the appeasement tactics of the last 15 years.

You have to wonder if this could all be tied back to Russia. They obviously stand to gain a lot if foreign powers are distracted. So far it's proving quite the boon to have the US interests split between Ukraine and Israel. I haven't seen evidence to suggest this is the case though. I imagine if we had that evidence it would be paraded before the US Congress to make it apparent that Ukraine's struggle is intimately tied to the unrest in the Middle East.

All they’re really doing is giving us a reason to dust off production capacity. The last thing Russia or China should want is a fully primed arsenal of democracy.

I'm afraid it really is that simple. The various big players in the Middle East have been doing it for decades. Iran also provides support for Hamas, which is why the Houthis are involved so directly.

The details are of course incredibly complicated, but the basic observation that weapons and money flow out of Tehran is straightforward.

taking out a drone with an expensive rocket is a bad choice, but taking out the drone launching crew and site with a rocket (or even better, a good size naval canon) seems like a much more cost effective choice. Its easy to launch things when nobody is shooting back at you.

Do these drones need significant infrastructure to launch? Seems like whack-a-mole. What do you do when they launch drones from school athletic fields? Or on top of hospitals?

Except when the drone was launched from a civilian apartment building. Then you get a whole lot of bad press, and people insist you stop fighting entirely.

It’s only really simplistic if you come at things from a pro US/western point of view.

The nuance is that not everyone agrees about US backed hegemony in the region. The goal isn’t to “destabilize”/whatever neutered phrase the pentagon is using, the goal is to assert a different political order. The language you’re using here takes the current state of affairs as neutral or a given when it is not.

Iran supports Iranian hegemony in the region, news at 11?

All might be to strong, but it is clear that Iran is funding, providing leadership, training, and giving vocal support (sometimes in secret channels). With out Iran this might still exist, but it would have a lot less ability.

Just because there is a loose alliance and significant military support between several organizations doesn't mean that they all do the main party's bidding, much less that they only do the main party's bidding. (To whit, note that the US can't really order NATO to do much of anything).

I suspect that Iran isn't in any sense ordering the Houthis to do anything, and the idea to attack shipping is entirely germinated from the Houthis themselves (largely as a form of "showing support" for Palestinians, even if, as a few people have noted, this action only hurts them while providing them no meaningful aide). Largely, this is because it's colossally stupid for Iran to push for a provocation that is meaningfully likely to see all the major world powers (except for maybe Russia; note that China is going to be on the US's side here) create a coalition to eliminate a troublesome menace.

This probably is the case, but I think it's worth saying that it doesn't actually change Iran's exposure here, because I presume the rest of the world believes that the IRGC can stop this (or at least drastically scale it back) any time they want. If you were the UK Secretary of State for Defence, where would you rather engage? Houthi Yemen, or anywhere that Iran has an interest?

The conventional geopolitical answer for this is: the IRGC is the principal sponsor of the Houthis; the Houthi uprising was funded originally as an Iranian proxy war against Saudi Arabia. The Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah are part of an "axis of resistance", the subtext of which is "they take their orders from the IRGC".

It may or may not be the case that they're disrupting shipping at the direction of Iran, but it almost certainly is the case that Iran equipped them, and that Iran can effectively instruct them to stop.

It's hard to make any kind of comment on a thread here without getting pulled towards one pole or another of the ongoing argument about what's happening in MENA right now; I'm doing my best to keep this as dry as possible, and to hedge statements by saying things like "the conventional geopolitical answer". You can find alternate geopolitical answers; in fact, you can probably find any answer you're looking for. All I can do is relay what I'm reading.

Perfectly fair response. I, sadly, failed and walked into a thread I should have avoided. :(

I think my main question is what valid paths forward do people see here? I honestly don't know how to find news that isn't dominated by posturing, at the moment.

I don't know about the best path, but I know an obviously wrong path: which is to reduce other people's resistance and struggle as mere terrorism and extremist. US and western world clearly have the power to rule the world, but the way they act right now will ensure many more resistance and pain for everyone.

This, I think, is a fair and well meaning criticism.

That said, you have to hold your own accountable for bad acts. Doesn't mean none will ever happen, of course. Nor does it mean that you cannot have legitimate concerns and claims. And your response to a terrorist act cannot legitimately be to try to minimize it. Nor is it a valid response to rapid fire old grievances, many of which are misrepresented or where the people involved were held accountable.

So, in spirit of your criticism, let's try and move past it. You don't know the best path. What are some valid paths?

On the other hand, if we look at all the historical precedent for piracy becoming a major disruption to trade, it seems to me that most cases were solved only by a generous application of excessive violence, not by negotiations, as global maritime trade routes simply are a so huge strategic factor that's far more important to major powers involved than any struggle that some people may have, so if someone escalates their struggle to disrupting global trade routes, that is treated as a huge unjustified escalation and they and their struggle automatically becomes the enemy of almost everyone else, something to be eliminated at any cost, not treated as a valid concern.

I've read that Hezbollah does not take orders from Iran, and that Nasrallah's thinking and decision making on strategy is given a lot of weight (just like Britain did not take orders from USA in WW2):

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/04/asad-abukhalil-nasrall...

That article has a few quirks (e.g., derisively referencing George Soros), but I found some of the small details in it add to its overall credibility, like how a portrait of Nasrallah was visible in Soleimani's house when Soleimani's family members were mourning his death.

* I usually treat references to George Soros as antisemitic dog whistles, but the author is normally a strident opponent of antisemitism, so I don't know what to think in this instance.

As I understand it, the biggest story with Hezbollah over the past decade has been their involvement in the Syrian Civil War, which apparently depleted them significantly and greatly reduced their status --- which does remain dominant --- in Lebanon. I think it's pretty widely seen as something Hezbollah did at the instruction of the IRGC, which is Syria's closest military ally.

Ah! What you are saying honestly enriches my understanding of this line in the piece I cited:

When it comes to war with Israel, Nasrallah is the ultimate decision maker.

I don't understand how the Houthis have support right now

They've got a huge amount of popular support in the Middle East, because so many people there hate Israel, and see the Houthis as the only ones standing up to Israel (apart from Hamas and Hezbollah). I don't have a source, but if you ever happened to check the comments on Middle East TikTok videos you'd see what I mean.

I don't think Houthi Yemen is the place to look for where concerted military pressure would be applied here; the Houthis are in the main a proxy for Iran, in its struggle against Saudi Arabia (that being the most salient geopolitical conflict in MENA).

So fail at another trillion dollar forever war?

Maybe? I'm just saying: Houthi Yemen isn't where you apply pressure when/if/as this reaches the point where pressure needs to be applied. I'm not predicting outcomes.

War with Iran would be apocalyptic to proportions hard to imagine. For one, they could destroy oil infrastructure, and that would be far more destructive to world economies than the current blockading of the strait. That would also mean the end of the petrodollar, a unique basis of American power.

It feels like you're trying to debate me about whether we should go to war with Iran. I'm not advocating or making predictions; I'm simply saying that a conventional framing for the the current conflict is that the Houthis are, whether they've gone "off script" or not, effectively an arm of the IRGC.

Lots of people wondering why we haven't wiped the pirates off the map yet.

Because they're not a nation state and you can't actually do this in any meaningful way? It's like trying to wipe "greed" off the map. Good luck.

The extra distance around Africa looks comparatively small on the Mercator projection.

Compared to what? I.e. what projection or approach would you choose instead of Mercator?

Many of you will be well aware that you can't have a distance-preserving "map", that is a projection from the globe to a segment to of the plane where the length of an arbitrary path is preserved. Hence you can't measure real-world distances using string and a paper map.

That said you can preserve distance in special cases, for example any two chosen points. For example you can go to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/two-point-equidistant/ and put your points at the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. While that still won't let you measure wiggly ship routes along the coast, it does a better job than Mercator.

Failing that you can use Gall-Peters which does a better job of conveying the vastness of Africa, since it's area preserving.

Is measuring distances in Google Earth misleading? Why bother with ancient flat maps?

The measuring tool is accurate. The way it appears on your screen is always misleading in some way, because your screen is flat.

They actually curve the line of the measuring tool so that it follows the geodesic.

Hence you can't measure real-world distances using string and a paper map.

You very much can. The scale of longitude and latitude is just not the same so you need to do Pythagoras (usually by approximation rules).

There are usually lines to allow for that.

If you only use rigid string and sail in strange curves that map to straight lines in 2d then that's true. Or maybe by "do Pythagoras" you meant to calculate the metric tensor for your projection and integrate that along your shipping route?

A projection that is better at showing the comparative difference in length between going through the Suez canal vs going around.

The mercator makes Africa look comparatively small on the y-axis which is a problem if you are trying to visualise the size of Africa and the time it takes to go around the continent.

If i visually compare the distance on the mercator and an equal area projection is looks to make the trip about 20% shorter on mercator (compared to the apparent visual distance going through Suez). Non of the projections will be 100% accurate but the mercator is less accurate for this specific case.

LOL.

The Suez canal is at ~30°N, while Cape Town is ~35°S. If anything the Mercator projection is exaggerating the visual distance of going around.

Hating on Mercator is just pavlovian concern trolling at this point (it's the first thing people learn in their GIS classes, whatever). People are so obsessed with conservation of area, it's cringey, Freud would have something to say about that. Maps should always neatly establish a frame of reference. Unless you need to actually take out a ruler and measure a thingie of of it, projections don't matter all that much. The mercator map is an excellent world map: land masses nicely proportioned, straight reference lines that don't clutter, north is up thank god, no weird bulges, just rectangular, you know, like a page in a book or a website. It's just a really good world map. The haters are wrong 90% of the time.

Considering that the discussion is about shipping in the southern hemisphere then maybe choose one of the many different map projections that better represent that part of the world.

such as?

Ideal would be an embedded gif (or even interactive widget) of a 3D globe rotating, with the lines drawn on it, but obviously that's a lot more work.

This is arguably where mercator shines. Note that the paths are straight lines. Otherwise you'd be scratching your head as to why they're taking long curved routes instead of straight paths.

And the distance is going to be distorted no matter what.

Except the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere is a geodesic, not a rhumb line. So a straight line on a Mercator projection (rhumb line) is not a "straight" line on the surface of the planet, and if I see a long straight line, I'm asking "why aren't they taking the shortest path?"

Straight lines on mercator are a constant bearing which is the most simple way to navigate.

Do ships still use rhumb lines? I'd have thought that modern technology was good enough to guide them along geodesics.

Ships often follow shipping lanes. Many shipping lanes are deliberately rhumb lines rather than great circle paths.

Good points. Since there are so many projections I thought there would be one for distances but the equidistant projections only work for specific points of origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection#Equidistant

Gnomonic projection shows great circles as straight lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomonic_projection

But the Mercator projection doesn't show shortest-paths as straight lines unless they're north-south or the equator.

My understanding is that it's about 20% longer for ships coming from Asia. That means a 20% reduction in annual capacity for those ships/shipping companies, which is pretty massive.

Not to be a total nit but thought it worth pointing out that 20% longer transit time for a particular transit route likely does not directly translate to a 20% reduction in annual capacity as port delays for on/offloading and other factors also determine annual capacity and they can be extremely variable as well.

A radical idea would be making the Northeast South America the Western world distribution center via the Cape -- a great circle route from Indonesia. Export to the rest of the West from there, while letting the ships go quickly back-and-forth. A bold and probably a little more expensive solution in the beginning, but far safer. That would diminish the Strategic value of the Red Sea, as far as the world commerce goes.

I ran some measurements, this would replace the Malacca Rotterdam 14,000km route with a 22,000km long route at least, increasing costs by 50%. Not realistic IMO

Good thing Ryan's tweet is about the ratio of the number of ships diverted from their normal route (orange dots vs black dots), not about the absolute distance. "Look at how much orange there is". It's implied (and well known) that the route around the tip of Africa is longer (in both time and distance), it doesn't matter how much longer to make the point that the previous route is now considered riskier and many are chosing an alternative.

Isn't this backwards? The equatorial regions including the Red Sea are compressed by Mercator while the high latitudes around the Cape are stretched.

I'm not sure how that would change anything? The US navy defends pretty much any ship on the open sea to the best of their ability, no matter who you are flagged as.

I suppose you could make an argument the the US should only defend US flagged ships, which might save the US money or something. (I don't think I'd believe this argument, but you can make it)

Peter Zeihan predicted that the US will gradually withdraw from being the global security guarantor as it doesn’t serve their interests anymore, and that we will see an increase in attacks on cargo ships on the open ocean.

Attacks on cargo ships don't happen in the middle of the ocean (for obvious reasons) but near coasts, were regional powers can provide security.

Regional powers will provide security only if its in their interests to provide security.

I'm anticipating India growing their navy.

For context, Zeihan is former Stratfor, the Zero Hedge of geopolitics.

They wouldn't save much US money. Longer routes means less shipping capacity, means higher shipping cost. That doesn't just affect europe, it's a market, a ship leaving China can equally go to Europe or the US. It affects the countries that are importing the most, at the very top of which sits the US.

Presumably most ships owners would look and discover that the US navy is the largest in the world and thus switch their flags to the US - they would then pay taxes to the US (and have to deal with a lot of other US laws that they don't now). Either that or they would pay a lot more insurance. Ships going to Europe might switch to either UK or France for flags (again paying respective taxes and laws) - both are reasonably powerful in their area, though not on US level. China's navy is up and coming and so may be worth looking at for a flag as well.

Note that the budget of the country in question is what is really being talked about, and not the entire GDP of the country. It is possible for the US navy to save money while costing the average US citizen money.

Presumably most ships owners would look and discover that the US navy is the largest in the world and thus switch their flags to the US - they would then pay taxes to the US (and have to deal with a lot of other US laws that they don't now). Either that or they would pay a lot more insurance.

You've just described mercantillism. Post Bretton-Woods is the first time in centuries the world hasn't worked that way. The dream of free trade and globalism was that everyone had equal protection on the seas. I fear you're correct that we're returning to a darker time where autarky reigns and trade is restricted to essentials.

Oh, the post-Pax Americana world situation is going to be a lot darker than that. Multilateral nuclear proliferation, here we come!

If only there were a body of water through which the ships could sail from China directly to the US...

The US navy defends pretty much any ship on the open sea to the best of their ability, no matter who you are flagged as

Unless that ship is headed to the Gaza Strip: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid .

I think the presumption is that the U.S. would (have to) respond differently to an attack on a U.S.-flagged vessel compared to an attack on anyone else. So, not a question of defense, but of the proportionality of the post hoc response.

Why?

Attacks on US flagged ships are acts of war against the US, which you would think would cause hesitation on the part of the Houthi and Iran. And having more US-flagged ships helps the US maintain a logistic capability in the face of larger wars.

Attribution for these is difficult. Many non-state actors involved. Maybe the US can launch another failed war against a concept (terror, drugs, etc)

There isn't any question that Iran proxies, including the Houthis, have been attacking American assets. No major actor disputes this. The tricky part is what to do about it. The Iranian proxies have been trying to strike a balance of harming/harassing US forces while keeping the attacks at a low enough level to avoid a major retaliation and full blown war. Calibrating the right response is not a trivial problem.

this ain't obscure APT hacking.

in this case it's pretty clearly the Houthi-let Yemeni government, which is a proxy for Iran, and all parties have been pretty vocal about it.

Attacks on US flagged ships are acts of war against the US, which you would think would cause hesitation on the part of the Houthi and Iran.

Meanwhile, attacks on EU vessels will likely attract sympathy for the attackers from the EU.

Indeed, Stockholm is in EU

The Houthis have already been firing drones at US warships; I don't imagine firing rockets at US-flagged cargo ships would be any more of an act of war than that.

Can you put a US flag on a merchant vessel built outside the US? If not, this isn't a real option, because there's no capacity to build large container ships in the US; and probably not enough capacity to crew US flagged ships with US based crews either.

The country of registration is separate from the country the ship was built in, and separate from ownership or nationality of the crewmen.

A ship can be built, owned and operated from outside the US but still be registered in the US.

You may be thinking of the Jones Act, which implements cabotage in the US, a fairly common practice among seafaring nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabotage

Confer: Operation Earnest Will 1987-1988 [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will

To print a bigger target on them?

What?

Non-US-flagged ships carry goods to/from the US and if not then the might transport goods that will be refined into some other good the US will import. The USA are #3 exporter and #1 importer in the world with a value of >1.4 and >2.4 trillion dollar respectively https://www.statista.com/topics/1308/trade-in-the-us/#topicO...

I don't undertand why the EU isn't all over this. those containerships are mostly going to them.

I'm also curious how long this route around africa is the best option, since right now, its summer in the southern hemisphere.. I seem to remember hearing that winters around the cape of Africa are pretty legendary.

I have a suspicion that it's the same reason European aid to Ukraine has so far been a tiny fraction of what was publicly pledged: western European military capabilities are much, much more degraded than anyone is publicly admitting. After the collapse of the USSR it was fine to just write off defense capabilities for a while and lean on the American security shield, but now after ~35 years of kicking that can down the road there's nothing useful they can do to to help against a bunch of unguided rockets getting fired from the desert, never mind a shooting war with Russia.

European navies can project force just fine, especially the Royal Navy, French Navy and the Italian Navy all of ehich have aircraft carriers.

By the way, military support for Ukraine runs just fine.

Main reason nobody goes to fight over this, is the avoidance of escalation. And so far, some delays in shipping is not the end of the world.

If that was the case Ukraine wouldn't be so worried about loss of US support. Sure Europe is giving some support, but the EU alone is enough bigger than Russia that Ukraine should have no problems getting enough support. This is true even if you eliminate a few players like Hungary that are supporting Russia. (UK of course isn't in the EU)

The major players in Europe (France, Germany, UK) don't seem to be against supporting Ukraine, but they don't have the ability to do it despite an economy that says they should be able to if they wanted. There are a lot of smaller players in Europe that likewise should have plenty of ability to provide support but somehow they can't provide it.

Yeah, this is a point a lot of people simply don't understand. Having billions of dollars in GDP generated by the service industry (like financial services or informational technologies) does not map one to one to generating a functioning arms industry to produce artillery ammunition for example. You need manufacturing facilities, a large pool of candidates with potential expertise in technical hardware skills to run these factories and logistical lines to keep them running. These prerequisites existed in the West during the earlier part of the 20th century which was why the transition to the war economy was relatively painless but no longer exists now. It is simply irrelevant to talk about multibillion dollar GDP economies specialized in unrelated industries if you don't have the actual physical resource and staffing requirements.

Let this be a lesson to all: you need to ensure your industrial base can actually step up and produce what you need for war. Thankfully you don't normally need it, but you are not in control of when someone will decide to attack. You are not in control of if NATO or other alliances fall apart. You have some input on both (please work for peace!), but there are factors outside your control involved.

That nobody is producing enough artillery shells almost 2 years later is criminal. I give Ukraine a small pass here only because evidence is post 2014 they were doing their best to build capacity, and that takes time. The rest of us didn't have the corruption and other problems that Ukraine has done internally, and so we should already have that in place. (or in place the ability to give Ukraine air supremacy so they don't need artillery - there are lots of options)

The idea of "If you want peace, prepare for war" is as true today as it was back then. Only risk being, that some people in power might tempted to use a strong military for all kinds of reasons.

Yes, like now for instance.

True, maintaining an industrial base in the defence sector is hard. Demand is usually, luckily, rather low. Technology is pretty advanced, making ot impossible to just repurpose existing industrial sites as was done during WW2.

The US is the largest individual contributor, but the combined contributions of the EU and its member states are larger both in absolute terms and especially as a fraction of GDP. You just hear less about it, because it's generally less newsworthy. Except for Hungary's attempts to stop some EU-level programs.

Don't they have like one aircraft carrier each. Would be absolutely embarrassing to have it melted by Houthis.

Last time I checked, Italy had two.

Anyway, for now geo politics mean that taking the long way around, and not intervene with force, the smart decision for everyone involved.

To be clear, the displacement of the aircraft carriers of the Italian navy are 30k tonnes and 14k tonnes. US carriers are about 100k tonnes, UK about 65k tonnes. I don't think they're really comparable, as US amphibious assault ships have greater displacement than the Italian carriers.

And yet, both can project force. Even using F-35s like the US Navy does. Not that any of that would help against Houthi rebels.

Boring pedantic note: the US Navy uses the heavier catapult-launched F-35. Other nations use the STOVL F-35, which has a smaller weapons payload and shorter range.

(Only three nations in the world have catapult-equipped aircraft carriers: the US, France and China. The latter two countries are not F-35 users.)

Absolutely capable of projecting force, yes. But the commenter above pointed out that it would be an big risk for a country with two (they said one, but it's two very small) ACs to send one of them into a war zone instead of trade ships simply going around. At least that's was my read of it.

Although it's a worthwhile correction to say Italy's navy fields two ACs instead of one, I just don't think it's material to their point.

Not really. European navies suffer from very similar problems to their airforces and armies. Small amounts of expensive kit, surprising unavailability of forces at any given time - very limited logistical kit, manpower available for any operation.

The Royal Navy is basically irrelevant outside their nuclear submarines, along with the rest of the UKs armed forces.

And no, military support for Ukraine is not going fine as can be easily checked in several recent articles in reputable sources such as the NYT, FT, Politico and The Economist.

French ships are still going through. CMA CGM just resumed shipping there.

This entire issue is basically Israel trying to pretend the entire global supply chains are about to collapse if no one intervenes (keeping in mind they have their own navy, but declined to participate in operation Prosperity Guardian, despite them being the main target of the Houthi blockade...)

Israel has been begging for the US to get more involved.

Like how they are provoking Hezbollah with their "double-tap" strikes.

Israel and Hezbollah have been in a low-grade state of war for over a decade. If Hezbollah hadn't diverted its energy to the Syrian Civil War, they might by now have been in a state of total war. Hezbollah has units dedicated to infiltrating and attacking targets in Israeli Galilee. My guess is, and I could be wrong, that it probably doesn't make sense to attribute a motive of "dragging the US in" to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah. In many ways, Israeli strikes on Hezbollah are far more ordinary than strikes in Gaza are.

I can’t tell if this comment is a joke or not but I agree! It’s just funny to see that on the story “95% of traffic through the Suez Canal diverted” —- seems pretty escalated!

I presume by escalation, they are referring to the entire conflict, not just the diversion of traffic.

the theory I’ve heard says that’s extremely unlikely. The US only has ~80 destroyers most of which are protecting their super carriers. They don’t want to police the worlds oceans anymore. [1] https://youtu.be/mcZPOuI-vcU?feature=shared

Did you hear about Operation Prosperity Guardian and its complete failure to address the situation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_involvement_in_the_Isra...

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/more-ships-avoid-r...

And before someone says the equivalent of "just blow them off the map" - this will likely be worse than Afganistan. North Yemen has been bombed for close to a decade already by Saudis and others, and the Saudis eventually decided to negotiate via Chinese mediation. I don't know ho likely it is to work, but splitting Yemen into recognized North Yemen and South Yemen may be a good diplomatic solution.

Or an easily thawed frozen conflict. The root problems are spelled Saudi Arabia vs Iran and almost certainly somewhere in the curtains, some Russian cheer leading.

Yeah they opened up diplomatic relations, under Chinese mediation, and so far nothing indicates a breakdown. Plus do not make the common mistake of not noticing agency - Houthi are quite effective political agents with their own agenda.

They have agency, but their force multiplier is weapons and money from Iran.

And who will do the splitting?

Yemen is currently split along mostly reasonable lines. It's just not recognized internationally (the most internationally legitimate government has de facto nothing to say in the north nor in the south).

Israel is committing a genocide in occupied Palestine. So Yemen is intervening by blockading Israel through the Red Sea and launching strikes (similar to the NATO intervention in the Kosovo genocide).

Shipping companies, rather than abiding by the selective blockade of Israeli bound ships, are re-routing all ships instead because they believe making this a global problem will resolve the matter with military intervention without them having to "pick" a side. Some of these companies also have deep ties to Israel (or based in countries that have de-facto signed off on Israeli aggression) so abiding by the blockade is not politically feasible. One exception is COSCO and they seem to going through the canal just fine.

This is incorrect. Israel is at war with Hamas and they aren't holding back, and there is a large difference between what is going on and genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide then the entirety of Gaza would be leveled and 99% of the people dead indiscriminately. There are different levels of warfare.

The Genocide convention doesn't say "you mustn't kill a whole group people all at once, at least 99% of them, everything else is okay".

If Israel wanted to commit genocide then the entirety of Gaza would be leveled and 99% of the people dead indiscriminately.

No, that's how it is defined. Plus, they're clearly working on it.

https://twitter.com/JerryHicksUnite/status/17440291718508259...

That is a good short primer to just how far off it is to call this war or self-defense. And it's in the West Bank, too:

https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1744466142918238591

And the ethnic cleansing on the ground matches the genocidal rhetoric by politicians. Rhetoric Israel is obliged under the convention against Genocide to prohibit and prosecute, not engage in.

"Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!! Stop with this impotence. You have ability. There is worldwide legitimacy! Flatten Gaza." -- Revital Gottlieb, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 07/10/2023

"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" -- Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, 09/10/2023

"Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating they way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023

"This [attack] is not enough, there should be more, there should be no limits to the response, I said it a million times, until we see hundreds of thousands fleeing Gaza, we, the IDF has not achieved its mission, this is a phase that should happen, I am saying this cause these are instructions that were said to the IDF" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023

"I don't care about Gaza. I literally don't care at all. They can go out and swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around gaza." -- May Golan, Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women in Israel, 13/10/2023

"There are no innocent civilians in Gaza" -- Isaac Herzog, President, 13/10/2023

“There is no humanitarian crisis.” [..] "the humanitarian crisis at the moment is in Israel." -- Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the UK, 16/10/2023

"Without hunger and thirst among the Gazan population, we will not succeed in recruiting collaborators, we will not succeed in recruiting intelligence, [or]... in bribing people with food, drink, medicine, in order to obtain intelligence." -- Revital Gotliev, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 23/10/2023

"We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness... we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah." -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 25/10/2023

"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." -- Amichai Eliyahu, Minister of Heritage, 05/11/2023

"We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 24/12/2023

When you combine that with the gleeful cruelty IDF soliders are displaying in the videos they are making of themselves, the fact that over 30000 people have already been killed, thousands of children, half a million set to starve or die of disease in the next year, the targeting of refugee camps and journalists, the videos of snipers shooting at people out of nowhere, gunning down a woman fleeing with her child, gunning down youth just standing around in the West Bank, etc. etc. etc. the picture becomes clear and "it's not genocide because it could be worse" rings very very hollow.

Palestinians are declared as non-persons and just hunted, starved, bombed. And the attempt to do this before the eyes of the world and to sanctify it is the worst attack on Western civilization, enlightenment and human rights since Hitler was on the cover of Time magazine.

Israel is not committing a genocide. Gaza is not occupied. Yemen is not blockading Israel. The Houthis are not attacking Israel bound ships, they are attacking all ships. Israel is not in control of shipping companies.

You probably set a record for most false information in one post.

You're kind of right in all points, yet catastrophically misleading.

1) So far it can't be called a Genocide, just mass murder along with an attempt at ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion.

2) Gaza still is not occupied and hasn't been since 2006. It is under a very severe blockade instead, and now is being invaded.

3) The Houthis are attacking Israel bound ships and whatever ship that has economic ties with Israeli nationals or economic groups.

Well its in the news, Houthis attacking due to conflict/war in Gaza to force western countries into more pressure on Israel

I don't understand this. Like, I'm some random American voter, and a Maersk chemical tanker gets attacked. Maybe I pay a higher end-consumer price for some product a few months from now, but why is that going to cause me to go out and protest something or other to do with Israel?

What I'm trying to ask: what is the outcome these attackers are expecting, and how does it benefit them?

Houthis are trying to enforce a blockade of Israel by targeting ships going to Israeli ports (or owned by Israelis).

They are asking Israel to let humanitarian aid into Gaza to ease that blockade.

It's not really that complicated. They just hate Jews (and the US), it's quite literally in their slogan.

They don't really have a goal other than "try to kill Jews", and this is the best they are currently able to do.

It seems to be due to conflicts/attacks in the Red Sea region arising from the Gaza conflict - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/03/what-is-the-re...

Disclaimer: I learnt about this 3 minutes ago.

How can you possibly have learned about this 3 minutes ago lol it's been the most significant political event in the world for months.

What is a most significant event to one person may be of little or no significance to another.

Ships are being attacked by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have declared support for Hamas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67731853

Another interesting factor is that Russia and Yemen are on good terms. For example, all this time Russian ships are not under threat from Yemen.

Recently Russian media began communicating their expectations for Houthis to specifically attack British ships, after Ukraine used Storm Shadows to destroy a Russian ship loaded with Iranian drones which was docked in Crimea.

https://nitter.net/NavyLookout/status/1740273039718428975#m

Yeah, I agree. I don't understand what the motivation for this is. People are saying the goal is piracy, but attacking a ship from as much as 1,000 miles away wouldn't enable you to board it or take ownership of the valuable cargo. Overall, I don't understand how somebody fighting a civil war would feel that it's somehow advantageous for them to attack a merchant ship with no connection to their conflict. The whole thing makes no sense to me.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/05/business/maersk-red-sea-s...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/07/houthi...

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/6/24027735/yemen-h...

A google for keywords including some of "attack ships red sea houthi" will provide some context

I guess it's the same as when the Suez canal was blocked [1] . It will result in about 2 weeks longer transportation time. Don't know about costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction

Container ships use in the region of 150 to 250 metric tons of fuel per day, so $75,000 to $125,000 in fuel alone.

Spread out over thousands of containers that doesn't seem like a huge penalty.

We'll see, if we care to look which I don't anymore since I'm not involved in sea freight for a while bow, how rates from Asia to Europe change. Because this rate change is what matters, not the additional cost for carriers.

The extra time necessary, thus lower throughout, thus availability issues, will likely be the bigger problem than fuel.

Except that back then people where drawing world end scenarios while today it sounds like “just a small detour”.

Possibly because the people shouting about world-ending scenarios from the blocking of the Suez were being hyperbolic.

Or the remaining 5% are really important.

From China to the EU it adds roughly 1/3rd to the time, which is a decent proxy for cost. There are savings in not having to pay Suez fees but these don't seem to make a huge affect to shipping costs.

It's probably worth adding that going round the cape doesn't add just more cost to fuel and time, insurance for cargo down there isn't cheap either as the weather is very changeable.

It's a great proxy for cost, but price has more to do with availability than with cost. I'd expect price to go up a lot more than 1/3rd, especially if this drags on.

Right, price is driven by supply and demand. If your ships have to travel 4/3 as far, you have ships available at 3/4 of the previous rate, so the supply of shipping went down. Demand didn't, so the price goes up.

If any Norwegians are reading, which are shipping nerds by virtue of geography, speculating in this market is essentially why John Fredriksen, the Warren Buffett of shipping, is rich.

Shifts in ship availability causes waves of bankruptcy, and either gluts or shortages (whatever happens to be most inconvenient at the time).

He estimated ~2% consumer price increase in a diff comment.

A two to three week longer transit time will increase sales prices of the imported product by 2%? I' d like to see the calculation behind that assumption...

We probably can't quickly pull enough extra ships out of our hats to make up for the extra time they're spending in transit, so total shipping capacity will decrease. That may well have a large impact on shipping prices.

The trip is about 15 or so days, with the associated fuel costs. Granted, fuel costs are distributed across tens of thousands of containers, so the delay will probably be the bigger issue.

Perun has a pretty nice long video presentation that talks about the factors involved and what they may mean for shipping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GKlKYQDDcQ

Makes for good background listening.

It's not just shipping costs and times, but also (and perhaps most importantly) shipping's total capacity. The same fleet of ships can now make substantially less trips, which means that substantially less goods will be transported between Europe and Asia. Perhaps rising costs of shipping on this route will divert some ships from other routes around the world here, but overall outcome across entire world has be to less maritime commerce, leading to increase in prices of goods.

With renewed unrest in the area (140mi 280km to Gaza), cost of sinking the entire cargo vs an extra two weeks is also a consideration.

Emissions? Bad. Really really bad.

Curious if people will demand we shop less rather than condemn the attackers.

Why not both?

I am all for consuming less, for more than one reason, but i am not keen on people taking the side of pirates. That might make me want to consume harder to be honest.

this is nonsensical.

In hindsight it is.

Shopping less is always a good idea, but it's unrelated to the situation discussed here.

That's been happening, but is that a surprise?

I understand going around Africa adds 20% to the route for a ship coming from Asia.

If the purpose of keeping emissions low is humanitarian, then there is a much bigger humanitarian concern at the center of all this.

there is a much bigger humanitarian concern at the center of all this

If you’re talking about Yemen, sure. If you’re talking about Gaza, it’s naïve to think anything there will restore confidence in the Bab al-Mandab.

The Houthi leadership have repeatedly said that they will stop the attacks if the Israeli assault & ethnic cleansing of Palestine ends.

The real naivete is presuming that the "lalala can't hear you, I will do whatever I want" playbook of US/Israeli foreign policy is sustainable in any way.

So the Houthi are admitting that they control the pirates in the Red Sea so strongly that they can order them to stop and they will obey?

Negotiating with terrorists is stupid. Giving in to their demands only empowers them to do it again.

Lots of people say lots of things. When it comes to geopolitics, actions and capability are what matter. Until someone is willing to underwrite shipping insurance on the Houthis’ word, their leadership’s promises are worthless.

Both go up.

Maersk added $500-750 USD "season surplus" which is related to this for every shipment from North/South America and Europe to start with [1].

The shipping cost for items that have to go around is about double $1600 to $4000 ish as seen [2].

So the cost is quite a bit extra.

[1] - https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2024/01/05/peak-season-...

[2] - https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...

The obvious answer is to deal with the source of the problem - better late than never. Unfortunately the US government has not even figured out that there is a really serious threat to them and have let the situation to spiral out of control for quite long time instead of dealing with it.

I honestly thought you were referring to the Israeli occupation until I read your response later in the thread

There is a funny thing about occupation in the eyes of the international law. For example Armenians have always lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, this is their ancestors land, but according to the international law they were occupying the territory of Azerbaijan because one genocidal dictator assigned that territory once to Azerbaijan. Now they have been abolished from their land with no real perspective to return. But according to the international law everything is alright.

What is the source of the problem?

Letting hostile authoritarian regimes to run uncontrolled or even worse, making deals with them. Unfortunately the effect is compounding.

I don't think the "obvious answer" is to engage in a mandatory arms race over shipping channels. The most obvious thing is to put commerce aside for a few minutes while we address these extremely serious social and political issues.

The most obvious thing is to put commerce aside for a few minutes

Do you think it could be viable to set aside commercial interests to address the deep discord among the countries and their proxies in the region?

The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see. But I am open to your point of view.

Isn't that precisely what choosing to sail around the horn of Africa is? It's commercially unfavorable and it is designed to avoid the area of conflict.

The practical approach to call for calm and protect commercial ties and robust economics is the only way forward that I can see.

Sure, but do you think that automatically heightening the level of conflict is the best way to achieve that? The OP even suggested that requiring this approach through legislation would be favorable.

obvious answer here just to require all ships passing through the red sea to equip anti-drone technology?

Who will require this?

You’d also need every port that ship approaches and every nation whose waters it transits to clear active military equipment on a civilian vessel.

Not just that, but most commercial ships are registered in places like Panama specifically because they have almost no rules.

They also have anti ship missles, plus it’s not a one size fits all approach.

drones aren't the issue, it's the anti-ship missiles.

and both can get complicated enough that you need serious ECM and ECCM to reliably jam them, and almost certainly need systems that shoot them down; i.e. missiles and CIWS.

at that point you're just making fat warships.

"Can't we just Nuke em'?"

I don't remember the catastrophic tones, but I would guess there was heavier coverage for the Ever Given incident because several hundred container ships were effectively stuck until that was resolved. In this case nothing is stuck, ships are just taking a slower route.

It's the difference between "Atlanta Airport shut down indefinitely, all flights cancelled until further notice" and "Bad weather in Atlanta, all flights delayed". Both are newsworthy, but the latter doesn't generate as many headlines. Not to downplay the violence in the Red Sea, obviously it's a lot more serious than bad weather, but I think the analogy is ok.

In this case nothing is stuck, ships are just taking a slower route.

that might be what parent is mentioning : this alternative route was sold to the news-viewing public as absolutely impossible and untenable when producing profit over time -- they were told that the suez canal was of vital importance and that trade must halt until it was cleared.

and now suddenly, not much time afterwards, the threat of violence has prompted the realization that there are clear and viable alternatives to the suez canal.

the 180 on the importance of the canal feels telling, but I don't know how. I presume it's an effort to keep public opinion from desiring a strong military response in the area. It feels like election-time stalling so that "Cleaning up the Red Sea" can be a political talking point during election season -- but I hate to be so cynical as to think we're ignoring a global political partner for the sake of a politician having an ace up their sleeve during debates.

I really have to disagree, I'm not sure your memory is representative of the coverage most people saw. I'm looking at the New York Times, which I think is a good example of mainstream US news. While the Ever Given was stuck, they reported stuff like:

With each day that the Ever Given container ship remains stuck in the Suez Canal, the cost of the disruption grows more consequential. After days of failed efforts to move the mammoth ship, shipowners began rerouting ships bound for the Suez Canal around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to their journeys and burning additional fuel — a cost ultimately borne by consumers. When deciding whether to divert, a shipping company must consider the cost of sitting for days outside the canal versus the added time of steaming around Africa. It is not an easy choice.

Today the Red Sea crisis is front page news, and their story leads with:

They can send their vessels through the Red Sea if they are willing to risk attacks by the Houthi militia in Yemen and to bear the cost of sharply higher insurance premiums. Or they can sail an extra 4,000 miles around Africa, adding 10 days in each direction and burning considerably more fuel. Neither option is appealing and both raise costs — expenses that analysts said could ultimately be borne by consumers through higher prices on the goods they buy.

Basically the same, even using the exact same phrase about consumers. This was just one example, but when I look at coverage of Ever Given I see a general attitude of "damn this is terrible timing, supply chains were just starting to recover from the pandemic, this will cause a lot of problems". Nobody was declaring the end of the world or that "trade must halt". Today I don't see anyone downplaying the situation, at most I see a little bit less front-page placement because of the nature of the story.

It was an entertaining story that could be followed minute-by-minute.

It was funny that a single ship could get stuck with such a huge impact on the global shipping industry, so people were tuned in. And you could follow day by day with the plans and attempts made to dig out the ship. Great, simple fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, and memes probably made people more engaged with the story.

With the Houthis it's a big, complex geopolitical mess, and all the oxygen in the room is being taken up by the war in Gaza. No big countermoves have been made so all there is to be done is report on the strikes when they happen, the threats made by various powers, and speculate if the US is going to intervene in some significant way.

The Ever Given was an acute issue, and acute issues are attention grabbing. The attacks in the Red Sea are a progression of a war that the average person in the west doesn't really understand that's been going on for 9 years.

https://defector.com/big-boat-stuck-a-story

One of my favorites

Maybe the realization that it didn't lead to End Times back then, so such hystrionics this time around would be met with great rolling of eyes?

"Big Boat blocked lanes, so many shipz waiting, lolz, oh noes!" vs "Shipping transit rerouted around African cape, prices might increase in a few months"

If it's not entertaining nobody gives a crap

The hook with the Evergiven was that the ship had run aground and couldn't get out. That was fun and relatable, it was a single event, there were pictures. It was reported on by everyone when the event happened and the rest of the coverage was followup coverage. The "omg is global trade ending" pieces didn't happen right away.

The situation here is much harder for the press to explain, has been going back and forth for a couple of weeks at least now (ie not tied to a single specific event with pictures), and is relatively new. The "omg" pieces will come out in a couple of weeks if this continues, don't worry.

Have you been reading the new for the last 3 months? There is nothing but "GLOBAL CRISIS" splashed all over the front page.

but now that the canal is effectively blocked by Iran-backed forces nobody screams about a global crisis

Not sure about what sources you follow, but the ones I am following scream about a full blown global crisis. Here is for example the explainer from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/19/red-sea-shi...

At the same time many defence analyst is astonished by the appearent dithering of the US Navy over the issue. In fact the more fringe elements are talking about that the recent incapacitation of the US SecDef might be the reason behind the inaction.

Because the Suez canal is not actually blocked this time. Many ships of all types (container, cargo, tankers, etc.) are going through.

I don't recall catastrophic tones, nor do I think the current houthi situation is being underplayed.

I think you and I subscribe to different media sources and this is your warning sign that yours are too sensationalistic.

People are already horrified with the Israeli state actions in Gaza, linking this to rising prices would not contribute to the political goals of the current administration on this conflict.

Sure you can. However it costs a lot more money and so most lines find it cheaper to go around war zones.

Can you provide source of your outlandish claim?

On the contrary, the outlandish claim seems to be that anything could be impossible to insure.

Insure profitably? Sure. At some point, the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the thing being insured, making it pointless to insure.

Some people describe this scenario as something being "impossible to insure", but it's not meant in the literal sense. In fact I would argue that there is no insurance company that would decline to insure a $100 million cargo through a combat zone, if the premium offered was $150 million.

So no actual source?

Do you have a source for your extraordinary claim that such insurance cannot be bought? Surely such a divergence from the status quo would be written somewhere more official than a social media comment.

The article from flexport states that insurance rates through there are 3.5x of what they were in the beginning of december

War risk insurance absolutely exists.

Insurance industry sources said that war risk premiums had stayed firm on Monday at between 0.05% to 0.1% of the value of a ship, from around 0.03% estimated last week before the attacks.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/war-risk-insurance...

The original claim was about 'sailing in a conflict zone', a.k.a. getting fire insurance for a house that is already on fire.

The original claim is "You cant get insurance for sailing in a conflict zone." Which we have clearly shown is false by showing current insurance rates for sailing in this conflict zone.

https://youtu.be/8GKlKYQDDcQ Someplace in that hour long video he give the current insurance rates for this route, and how the cost of insurance compares to going around.

This ain’t cheap tho

this is a voting-based site

Nitter allows people to see the context of a thread without having to log in to Twitter. By posting a nitter link, you're enriching the conversation instead of either annoying people or doing marketing for x/twitter.

The platform shouldn't be the point of a conversation. If a platform makes itself the center of attention, there's something wrong with it.

Why involving another website? Twitter links should be ok. Just create an account, its free.

Some of us don’t want to provide material support to Elon Musk in any way, including providing Twitter a recorded history of our browsing habits related to the site which could later be used to monetize our individual behavior.

That is correct. But those people on HN want to be able to read content, or lets say, to spy on a site they despise, from the, huuuh, evil enemy.

They can not have it both ways and i find it hypocritical. Don't read twitter then.

We did have it both ways -- for over a decade -- until Elon Musk bought the company.

It is not easy to change habits. But once in a while, one has to.

If it were possible to downvote posts on HN, I'd have been downvoting every Twitter link for the past decade. Please post somewhere that's actually readable.

One cannot downvote submissions, only comments. This seems to be largely a non-sequitur as one can only not vote up something.

I have, for example, downvoted your comment as it is not useful and is a bit snide or condescending (inclusive “or” to be clear), whereas had you posted your comment as a post, I would not have been able to do so.

You might prefer this: https://www.flexport.com/blog/global-ocean-carriers-halt-red...

It's fine to post workaround links in the comments, but top level URLs need to point to the original source.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html re paywalls.

Navies have always been crucial for traditional wars. That’s not going to change so long as war with China or Russia is still (a distant) possibility.

They haven't been crucial vs. Germany during WW2, which arguably was where all the big powers were concentrated on.

And I'd say that even during for WW1, the naval battles didn't have that much of an effect on how the war ended, in fact after the Battle of Jutland (summer of 1916) both the British and the German navies were de facto fleets in being.

Later edit: I could make a point, and a very valid one, for the strategic importance of subs (the WW2 Japanese merchant fleet was mostly sunk by US subs, for example), but unfortunately for the US subs fleet people are not thinking about them first and foremost when the US Navy is mentioned.

Of course, all this talk ignores the nuclear thing, this discussion is entirely made while focusing on the conventional way of waging war. If nuclear were to be a real option then all prior assumptions about the next big war would dramatically change.

Navies were certainly crucial in the European theater of WW2. Britain was supplied by sea, and that was only possible with navies and merchant marines protecting the shipping lanes and hunting U-boats. It might not have been as dramatic as the Pacific theater with their big battles at sea, but the resilience of the Allied navies to keeping those shipping lanes limping along allowed them to eventually win the war. War is hugely about logistics.

Probably the most notable naval moment in the European war (D-Day) was also only possible because the German navies couldn't dominate the channel. If the Germans had dominated the channel, D-Day would have been impossible. So, a lack of naval strength there was a critical factor for the Axis losing.

The most notable moment on the European front took place somewhere on the Eastern Front (choose your pick between Moscow December 1941, Stalingrad ‘42-‘43, Kursk in July of ‘43, Operation Bragaton the following summer), in fact it was on the Eastern Front where the Germans lost 80% of their men and hence where they were defeated for good.

For comparison, the Omaha beach operation only had beteeen 2000 and 5000 losses for the US, which, while tragic for the people involved, is dwarfed by almost any big serious battle that had taken place further East.

This proves that world-wide sea supremacy by the US is now de facto gone

No, the fact that a player can cause problems for a while before the US responds does not show that, and if you think it does, you never understood what the idea of that supremacy was about.

Now, if the US proves unable or unwilling to respond in a way which restores confidence in navigation in the region, that would show what you claim.

or unwilling

We're well past that point. This administration is clearly signalling that they are prioritizing the avoidance of an escalating regional war, and an aerial bombardment of Yemen would be an escalation against the Iran proxy. That's a legitimate policy position to be debated (I think it's the wrong position). But it seems pretty clear from both public statements and OSINT on movement of military hardware (or lack thereof) that they are unwilling to respond in a way that restores confidence in navigation in the region.

The Houthis started attacking ships in the Red Sea in the middle of November of last year [1]. The US failing to neutralise that threat for close to two months, in one of busiest and most sensitive places on Earth when to comes to sea traffic (only the Malacca Strait comes close to Bab-el-Mandeb in terms of importance), for sure does not mean that they're still waiting "for a while".

[1] https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-774066

You also have to consider whether the US cares.

Most of the shipping through the Suez is going from China to the EU.

Is the US going to cry very much if China has problems exporting to the EU such that the EU turns to importing US products?

Not in the know, but would seem plausible that some of ships have itinerary China->Eu->Us->Eu (i.e. ship being late to EU will make it also late to US )

they want it to end? thats the goal? do you support them? do you support their official slogan "God is the Greatest Death to America Death to Israel A Curse Upon the Jews Victory to Islam"? does that sound like a bunch of people who just want peace in the middle east? do you understand that they are a genocidal force on their own? stated very clearly in their official slogan

They’ve been at the sharp end of Uncle Sam’s finest munitions for a decade, they have earned the right to hate America. They haven’t attacked any other countries, they haven’t even killed anyone in any of their ship attacks.

Yeah something that is really hard to see in these US and Europe focused HN comment sections is that the united states is the legitimate enemy of a great many people. They have not imagined or misunderstood the situation. We will, and in many cases have, destabilized their countries, armed despots and helped execute coups, routinely killed civilians including children, blockaded regions causing famine and preventable death by the millions.

We justify this that it is better for the world overall if we do it. Maybe we are right. But that doesn't put the legs back on your children we cannot expect everyone to love us for it.

A good reading about this is of course Noam Chomsky.

Their demands are clearly communicated and reasonable in this case. It is that israel stop bombing gaza and that food, medicine, and aid be allowed into gaza unimpeded.

It's in China's best interests to have USN stretched across multiple theaters (three - SCS, the Eastern Med, Persian Gulf/Red Sea) for reasons that should be obvious. Counting the containers' points of origin would make one think China would like to see this wrapped up quickly, but they think on longer timelines than quarterly earnings reports.

"Europe" doesn't have a Navy capable of projecting enough force to deal with the problem.

And, lastly, the raison d'être for today's USN is securing the free flow of global trade. So, it's very much unsurprising that USA is jumping in here (that we do not get paid for doing this service is a different matter).

The US gets paid by the "exorbitant privilege" of having the global reserve currency.

That was the deal since the second world war.

That's easy to explain. Europe simply can't, and China has absolutely nothing to gain from getting itself entangled in the Middle Eastern mess. Because whatever it would do it would anger somebody there.

China is winning by having its ships still go through, after they have clarified with Houthis they will not work with Israeli ports.

Only if ships still stop halfway for supplies.

Not really... the container ships will be steaming right by, they don't need to take on supplies like 3 centuries ago.

They may need to stop to refuel. That said Durban had the bigger port these days. The bigger issue would be if Transnet has enough capacity to be able to handle the extra demand since it has had trouble with it's day to day operations lately.

Given that the ships primarily being diverted are freighters / container ships travelling from the east to the west (and vice versa), it's not obvious why they should stop in Cape Town (since they don't need to refuel, and it makes no sense to unload at Cape Town).

So no major benefit to Cape Town.

Except US is not at peacetime, it’s engaged in one of the biggest wars in recent history. Something people don’t realize is that US has been struggling to coerce partners into delivering more air defense systems into Ukraine. Now, fighting off missiles in Red Sea is a cherry on top.

Nice 'partners', that you casually coerce into compliance

No, it’s a sign of strategy.

Being the world’s policeman is bad policy these days.

The vast majority of carriers will not carry weapons on their ships. Either they don’t want to deal with workers’ compensation when security personnel are hurt, their insurance doesn’t allow it, or the endpoint countries prohibit armed crew members so they’d have to get off in international waters.

Even if you hire a PMC I doubt they can deal with anti-ship missiles or ballistic missiles. Attack is much easier than defense.

Back at the time of Somali pirates the armed PMC were present on the board of many of those ships while passing off the Somali. Yes, they usually were there only while in international waters. For a PMC in the current situation, to avoid loading/unloading, it may make sense to get an own ship and load Skynex or similar system on it and to just escort the client ship though the danger zone.

A subsonic missile like a typical anti-ship can easily be shot down by a regular MANPAD like Stinger. Automatic - just press a button - systems like Phalanx or Skynex are similarly very easy to operate. Ballistic missiles are the hardest target, so not every system can do it, yet the modern systems which are capable to shot down ballistics do it automatically.

That is helpful context which disambiguates an otherwise confusing title but I also suspect that the submitter ran into a character-length limit on the title. It would be hard to fit that statement into a certain length without omitting some relevant detail.

95% of container ships are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa

95% of Red Sea container ship traffic now going around South Africa

For Europe maybe.

The US uses the Pacific to trade with APAC.

Edit: am wrong. See below

Another response in the linked twitter thread seems to indicate this is directly affecting US shipping prices: https://x.com/typesfast/status/1743657342280098135?s=20

would this system, its deployment, replenishment, and upkeep cost less than simply avoiding the area?

Note sure. Each Roadrunner is "Low six figures" and claims to be completely reusable if it doesn't hit it's target. Since you only need them over a certain area, they can move from ship to ship so you wouldn't need say a dozen per ship. But maybe 200 total.

I'm more curious if it is technically feasible for something like that to take out a missile traveling at 300m/s.

Why? I thought economic sanctions through the threats of armed action is fine, especially when it is to "sanction" a state that is killing thousands and thousands of civilians. I'm sure you don't think sanctioning states who are actively and openly wiping out civilians is bad?

Even russia isn't this blatant and open with its goals.

On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

That sure sound like something that should attract sanctions and actual military force to prevent.

This is the real world. Not a Braddock movie from the 80's.

The US had a really hard time on Afghanistan, what make you think that Iran would be suck a walk in the park.

And also, have you ever considered the logistic nightmare of a war against China right on their backyard?

Unless you're rooting for a global thermonuclear war, there's no way the US couldn't prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without losing a few Aircraft Carriers. The US doesn't have this capability, don't have the industrial base, the money and the raw resources for that.

Why has EW countermeasures not effectively

EW is highly overrated. The EM spectrum is large, transceivers are agile and high gain antennas are inexpensive and easy to operate. Thus, any conceivable EW countermeasure you imagine has a short expiration date: the problem is highly asymmetric.