The Challenge With the Deter and Degrade Approach in Yemen

Over the course of the past month, the United States and, on occasion, the United Kingdom have conducted an ongoing series of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. These strikes have two goals. First, the United States wants to deter the Houthis from carrying out future attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Second, and relatedly, the United States is seeking to compel the Houthis to cease their attacks by inflicting pain on the group – degrading the Houthis’ military capacity to the point that they are either unwilling or unable to carry out more attacks in the Red Sea.

The Houthis, as U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen Timothy Lenderking recently said, have a simple choice: “The Houthis can keep doing this or they can stop and we can go back to peace.”

But the Houthis, not surprisingly, don’t see the conflict the same way. Instead of viewing this as a discrete confrontation with the United States that began in October 2023, the Houthis see the attacks in the Red Sea as part of a broader political project that goes back decades. This means that the current U.S. approach of deter and degrade is unlikely to succeed.

First, the Houthis won’t be deterred because they want this confrontation with the United States. War is good for the Houthis for both regional and domestic reasons. On the regional side, this conflict allows the Houthis to burnish their pro-Palestinian credentials, which in turn bolsters their domestic popularity. The Houthis are also demonstrating their value to Iran by escalating with the United States in a way that gives Iran plausible deniability, shielding it from possible retaliatory strikes.

On the domestic front, the Houthis have both a political and economic reason for pursuing this war with the United States. Politically, the Houthis can use this conflict to strengthen their domestic base of support in three ways. First, as mentioned above, the Palestinian cause is extremely popular in Yemen, and by linking themselves to what is happening in Gaza the Houthis gain more supporters. Second, the conflict with the United States allows the Houthis to mute what had been growing domestic criticism from their local political rivals. No local group wants to be seen opposing the Houthis when they are ostensibly fighting on behalf of the Palestinians against the United States. Third, by engaging in a violent conflict with the United States, the Houthis can utilize a rally-around-the-flag effect, portraying themselves as the defenders of Yemen, a move the group used to its advantage during the early years of the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

But perhaps most important in the Houthis’ calculations is the economic angle. The Houthis control much of the northern Yemeni highlands, which includes the majority of Yemen’s population. What the Houthis do not have, however, is an economic base that would allow the group to rule for years to come. Yemen has, essentially, two major exports: oil and gas. These oil and gas fields are centered in Marib, Shabwa, and Hadramout – Yemen’s “triangle of power” – none of which the Houthis control.

The Houthis have been trying to take Marib for years and each time have been turned back by a combination of Saudi air power and local tribal resistance. One of the reasons the Houthis have been so determined to take Marib is that the group knows that if it fails to take at least one, and more likely two, of these governorates it will not survive in Yemen. The Houthis can’t rule without an economic base of support. With the Saudi-Houthi war nearing an end and the Houthis still not in control of Marib, the group needed another conflict to realize its economic goals. The Houthis are betting that by extending the conflict in Yemen, this time against the United States, they can eventually seize either Marib or Shabwa, or both.

The Houthis can’t be deterred from a conflict with the United States because they see a conflict with the United States as in their best interests. The Houthis are also a difficult group to degrade, at least to the point that they can no longer attack commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Part of this is the group’s history and part is support from Iran, which has leveraged a relatively low investment in the Houthis to maximize its reach in the Middle East.

The Houthis have been at war for much of the past two decades. In many ways, the group sees the fighting with the United States as simply the latest iteration of an ever-evolving conflict. From 2004-10, the Houthis fought a series of six successive wars against the Yemeni government. On several occasions, it looked as though the Houthis were about to be eradicated, but each time they rebounded and came back stronger than before. Since 2014, the Houthis have been involved in a bloody and vicious war against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Like the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have had air superiority, which they thought would compel the Houthis to retreat back into the mountains. But the Houthis withstood a yearslong bombing campaign, learning several lessons in the process. First, they learned that they needed to be mobile and dispersed, spreading military assets around the north and placing many of them in civilian areas. Second, the Houthis learned how to improvise, taking what they had on hand, what they could order off the shelf, and what Iran could provide to create a complex mix of weapons that could present a challenge to more advanced militaries. Iran has continued to supply weapons to the Houthis in recent years, giving them access to technology and reach that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. If the United States is unable to stop Iranian weapons from flowing into Yemen – something the international community has been trying and failing to do for the past decade – it can’t degrade the Houthis to the point where they can no longer threaten shipping in the Red Sea.

In the Houthi view of history, the group is undefeated. It beat the Yemeni government in 2010 and took Sanaa in 2014, winning the local war. Then it outlasted Saudi Arabia and the UAE in a regional war that lasted a decade. Now, it is involved in an open-ended international conflict with the United States.

Like their war with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Houthis don’t have to defeat the United States to declare victory. Instead, the only thing the Houthis need to do is continue to fire missiles and drones at commercial ships in the Red Sea, which they have shown they are more than capable of doing for the foreseeable future.

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