What is wrong with the English and the Americans that they think they can just bomb anybody?
https://www.facebook.com/reel/694899249418946?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v
What is wrong with the English and the Americans that they think they can just bomb anybody?
https://www.facebook.com/reel/694899249418946?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004, protesting against the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The confrontation entered a new phase when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. The Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a US-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea.
The Biden administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of airstrikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The campaign did not go well. A pair of navy SEALs drowned while attempting to board a Houthi dhow, and the crew of the USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet after it took off from the USS Harry S Truman, one of America’s premier aircraft carriers, which a short time later collided with an Egyptian merchant ship.
In January this year, Donald Trump declared the Houthis a terrorist organisation and doubled down on Biden’s war. He increased the US presence in the region with another aircraft-carrier strike group, which costs $6.5m a day to operate; B-2 stealth bombers, which cost $90,000 per flight hour; and antimissile interceptors, which can cost $2.7m apiece. In March and April the US launched hundreds of airstrikes on Yemen. The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back tenaciously. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defences to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60%.
On 28 April US warplanes struck a migrant detention centre in the northern Yemeni city of Saada, then dropped more bombs on emergency workers who arrived in the aftermath. Sixty-eight people were killed. In retaliation, the Houthis launched a fusillade of ballistic missiles at the Truman, which turned tail and steamed away, causing another Super Hornet to slide off the deck into the ocean.
The loss of this second $67m fighter was evidently a tipping point for Trump. In one month, the US had used up almost all of its stockpile of guided missiles but failed to establish air superiority over a country with a per capita GDP far smaller than Haiti’s. To save face, Trump officials declared Operation Rough Rider a success and ordered US Central Command to ‘pause’ operations, effectively capitulating to the Houthis. ‘We hit them very hard. They had a great ability to withstand punishment,’ Trump conceded. ‘You could say there’s a lot of bravery there.’ The very same day, yet another $67m Super Hornet missed its landing, slipped off the deck of the Truman and sank.
Seth Harp
November 2025