Donald Trump’s Anti-Houthi Campaign Comes Up Short
Control represents the prime goal of military strategy, and air bombardment—no matter how relentless—cannot replace the power of boots on the ground.
What is the Trump administration’s strategy in the Red Sea, and will operations against Houthi militants prove decisive? The White House has certainly stepped up the air and missile campaign. U.S. Navy warships and carrier fighter/attack jets are pummeling key sites in Yemen with help from Air Force fighters—and, on occasion, bombers—and they are doing so more or less constantly. They are playing offense. Hammering away from aloft marks a departure from the more defensive posture favored by the Biden administration, under which Navy task forces defended themselves while striving to shield mercantile shipping from Houthi missiles and drones. But under the previous presidency, only intermittently did U.S. and coalition forces go on offense, sending warplanes and cruise missiles downrange to smite shore targets. The current strategy views a good offense as the best defense of the sea lanes.
Shock and Awe 2.0
Call the Trump approach Shock and Awe 2.0.
That’s a tribute to Shock and Awe 1.0, the Bush administration’s concept for air warfare against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 2003. The logic propelling the Trump and Bush approaches is much the same. Air forces tend to disperse their efforts in space in order to strike a multitude of military and industrial targets. The scattershot approach divides up the firepower available to hit any one target—blunting the matériel and human impact of aerial raids. Moreover, there is often an intermittent, come-and-go rhythm to air campaigns. Aircraft cannot remain constantly overhead, since they run out of fuel and ordnance. Lulls in bombardment permit an antagonist time to adapt and recover from damage while muffling the psychological shock that comes from being under an aerial barrage.
To circumvent these shortcomings, shock-and-awe advocates reason that an amply resourced, well-coordinated air force might be able to strike its full slate of targets hard and at once. By concentrating attacks in time—even if their targets are dispersed in space—commanders aspire to stun the enemy into submission. Violence all across the map will do that to you.
Hence the metaphor shock and awe. Rather than concentrate aerial attacks in time to land a single heavy blow, Shock and Awe 2.0 envisions concentrating offensive actions in time while protracting the time indefinitely. The goal is to produce a relentless, long-lasting shock-and-awe effect.
Cumulative Versus Sequential Operations
Yet there is a problem intrinsic to air power. History shows that bombing is indecisive when it is divorced from ground operations. Humanity lives on land, and wars are settled on land—not in the sky or at sea.
Martial theorist J. C. Wylie pronounces control—of key terrain, of some physical object or objects, or of enemy forces—the paramount goal of military strategy. Control means deploying combat power sufficient to seize and hold something long enough to accomplish strategic and political aims. Accordingly, Admiral Wylie regards the “man on the scene with a gun”—the soldier or Marine bestriding dry earth and packing heat—as the final arbiter of victory in war. All other arms of military might, including air and naval forces, ultimately exist to support him.
Whereas shock and awe tries to bypass the limitations of air power, achieving decisive effects, Wylie classifies air power as a “cumulative,” as opposed to “sequential,” mode of warmaking. He considered sequential operations straightforward in nature, and decisive if prosecuted with power, skill, and zeal. As his phrase makes clear, forces waging sequential campaigns proceed from tactical engagement to tactical engagement, one after the other, until they wrest the necessary measure of control from the foe—at which point they emerge the victor.
Sequential operations are easy to understand because you can plot them on the map or nautical chart as a continuous line or curve undulating toward the final objective. Each tactical encounter depends on the one that came before, and shapes the one to come. Changing any encounter deflects the entire sequence—altering the larger pattern of combat. Conventional ground operations, of course, are sequential in nature: you must capture Point A before you can capture Point B.
But cumulative operations—and Wylie includes not just air power, but sea power and insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare in this—are different. A cumulative campaign is made up of many tactical engagements unrelated to one another in time or geographic space. The visual effect from plotting such a scattershot campaign on the map or chart isn’t a line or curve. It’s a paintsplatter.
That’s because the combatant pursuing a cumulative campaign executes small-scale attacks all over the place, and individual efforts need not coincide in time. One attack does not depend on the last or lead to the next. No tactical action—bombing a factory, for instance, or sinking a freighter—inflicts a single decisive blow on the enemy. In the aggregate, though, many pinprick actions can add up to something big. This is war by statistics. Cumulative operations wear down an enemy, and in the process can make a decisive difference in a closely matched contest of arms. They complement—but are no substitute for—sequential operations.
Trump’s Yemen Bombing Campaign Is Purely Cumulative
Will Shock and Awe 2.0 prove decisive in the Red Sea? It is too soon to tell, of course. But Admiral Wylie would deride aviators’ longstanding claim that air power constitutes a decisive implement of warfare. In particular, he mocks aviators’ assumption that the ability to destroy something from the air equates to the ability to control it. Control represents the prime goal of military strategy, and air bombardment—no matter how relentless—cannot replace the power of boots on the ground. Wylie would deem the air and missile campaign in the Red Sea—even pursued forcefully under Shock and Awe 2.0—a cumulative campaign aimed at degrading and disheartening the Houthis. In turn, he would express doubt that the offensive will achieve those goals—unless undertaken in concert with ground operations.
Any successful military campaign will have to deprive Houthis of warmaking matériel, as Houthi resolve to use such armaments as they possess appears unbreakable. But Wylie would remind us that destruction is not control—and without control, military strategy falls short. So the short answer is no. Even though the Trump strategy improves on the fitful Biden one, in all likelihood it too will prove indecisive. That would be J. C. Wylie’s verdict judging from his reading of military history.
And it’s one I share.
This is not reflexive naysaying, by the way. Skepticism represents the most prudent attitude to take toward any martial endeavor, not just counter-Houthi operations. Doubt is the soul of the scientific mindset. After all, a theory of military victory is only a theory, and a theory only warrants acceptance if it withstands efforts to “falsify,” or refute, it. In that sense, the Red Sea is a laboratory for what does and doesn’t work in contemporary sea and air warfare. Let’s regard the air campaign as an experiment—and put our findings to use plotting strategy and operations for more pressing theaters.
Theaters like the Western Pacific.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: Shutterstock.