Paul Poast identifies one of the many flaws in Trump’s military campaigns:
Both the drug cartels in Venezuela and the Houthis in Yemen point to a broader lesson about the limits of wielding the military as an instrument that, in the words of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “kills people and breaks things” as its primary purpose. The problem is that, while using the military to kill people and break things may be effective in conventional wars against the armed forces of other states, it doesn’t work well against the much smaller-scale operations of nonstate groups.
Poast is right that there are limits to what military action can do, but for this administration I fear that the destruction is the point. That is, Trump and Hegseth want the military to kill people and break things for the sake of the killing and breaking. As the boat attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific prove, the more senseless and unnecessary the violence is the more that the president and his allies like it.
Military action untethered from any discernible or achievable political goal is just mayhem. U.S. military interventions have repeatedly failed because their goals were either unachievable from the start or because the goals kept changing and growing as the conflicts wore on. Past interventions with limited goals succeeded on their own terms whether they were worth doing or not, but in most cases U.S. policymakers couldn’t help but set extremely ambitious goals that were beyond the means of any nation’s military.
The bombing campaign in Yemen stands out for being a relatively limited intervention that still had a wildly unrealistic goal. It was a campaign aimed at compellence that our leaders said was supposed to “restore deterrence.” It managed to do neither of those things. As Poast notes at the end of his column, Trump eventually just gave up.
Bombing Yemen was useless, but that was because the U.S. was trying to bomb the Houthis into submission. Washington wanted the Houthis to abandon their campaign in support of Gaza, and this was something that the Houthi leadership was resolved to continue. Indeed, Houthi strikes on Israel and the occasional ship in the Red Sea have continued throughout this year, and once again it was only a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza that made the difference. Trump’s campaign was a total failure by any standard.
The problem for the U.S. wasn’t so much that the Houthis are “nonstate actors.” They have been the de facto government of the Republic of Yemen in the north for ten years, so I’m not sure how “nonstate” they really are at this point. The reason why the bombing campaign couldn’t succeed was that the Houthis were never going to be compelled to abandon their position on Gaza through airstrikes. It didn’t help matters that direct conflict with the U.S. was a political windfall for the Houthis and actually strengthened their position inside Yemen.
Was bombing Yemen ever likely to produce the results that the administration said they wanted? No, and that was obvious from the start. The president’s reason for resuming and intensifying the bombing of Yemen wasn’t really to achieve anything. It was to put on a show that he was “tougher” than Biden, whose own sporadic bombing campaign was deemed too “weak” by Trump’s moronic hawkish advisers. So U.S. forces spent a few months killing Yemenis, including hundreds of civilians, and then stopped when the president got bored with it.
The murder spree in the Caribbean and the Pacific is more appealing to the president because it is easy and not nearly as politically risky. Bombing Yemen carried with it some risk that the Houthis might succeed in hitting U.S. ships and possibly even killing American sailors. There is absolutely no danger of U.S. casualties in a one-sided slaughter when no one is fighting back. The campaign in Yemen was somewhat challenging for U.S. forces, and according to the Navy it was the most intense combat U.S. ships had faced at sea since WWII. Blowing up speedboats full of civilians poses no challenge, and Trump doesn’t seem likely to get tired of doing it.
One of the many other problems with defining the military’s role as simply that of killing people and breaking things is that it allows leaders to pretend that they are succeeding as long as they are killing lots of people and breaking lots of things. It is the same mentality we see among supporters of broad sanctions: if there is extensive devastation, the policy must be “working.” It is the body count approach. The higher the death toll is, the more “successful” the operation must be. Of course, this incentivizes more reckless and indiscriminate killing to show results.
In the case of the boat attacks, all of the victims are guaranteed to be civilians because all of the targets are civilians. Instead of hiding their atrocities as most administrations would, this one posts their snuff videos online for all the world to see. “Look at us as we kill people and break things” might as well be their motto. The comparison has probably already been made, but this behavior is more akin to a serial killer taunting the police than it is to the leaders of a government waging a war.