“Over 200 packages of illegal weapons and military components bound for Yemen have been seized by the US Coast Guard, the US Central Command said in a statement on Thursday.
The shipment was seized from a vessel in the Arabian Sea on January 28, per the statement. The US Central Command said the weapons had originated in Iran and were en-route to be delivered to Houthi rebels in Yemen.
A vast assortment of weapons were found on the vessel, ranging from medium-range ballistic missile components, explosives, and anti-tank guided missile launcher assemblies.
“This is yet another example of Iran’s malign activity in the region, ” Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, CENTCOM commander, said in the statement.”
““Obviously, in some ways, deterrence has improved, because we have seen reduced attacks, but actually that’s only happened because we’ve degraded their capabilities — there will be more strikes, I’m almost certain of that,” Kearns said.”
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“The US is now attacking in real-time as militants in Yemen mobilize missiles for attacks on commercial vessels. So far, it seems the military response has only emboldened the Houthis. “It is an honor for our people to be in such a confrontation with these evil forces,” Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the head of the militant group, said in a speech on Thursday, citing the US, the UK and Israel.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-presses-ahead-least-bad-235325634.html
“A cruise missile launched by the Houthis into the Red Sea on Tuesday night came within a mile of a US destroyer before it was shot down, four US officials told CNN, the closest a Houthi attack has come to a US warship.
In the past, these missiles have been intercepted by US destroyers in the area at a range of eight miles or more, the officials said. But the USS Gravely had to use its Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) for the first time since the US began intercepting the Houthi missiles late last year, which ultimately succeeded in downing the missile, officials said.
The CIWS, an automated machine gun designed for close-range intercepts, is one of the final defensive lines the ship has to shoot down an incoming missile when other layers of defense have failed to intercept it.
The episode underscores the threat the Houthis continue to pose to US naval assets and commercial shipping in the Red Sea, despite multiple US and British strikes on Houthi infrastructure inside Yemen. The close call also comes just days after three US service members were killed in a drone attack by Iran-backed militants at a US outpost in Jordan.”
“During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the framers debated how to allocate military and war powers among the branches of government. Some, like Pierce Butler of South Carolina, thought that power should lie with the president, while most others, including Elbridge Gerry, “never expected to hear in a Republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” (Emphasis added.) Reflecting this consensus, James Madison successfully moved to change a draft sentence that empowered Congress to “make” war to language empowering it to “declare” war — the implication being that “the Executive should be able to repel and not commence, war,” in the words of Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman.”
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“Convinced that paying off the pirates was both costly and without an end in sight, Jefferson resolved to take military action. For weeks, his cabinet debated whether the president had sole authority as commander-in-chief to send naval forces to the Mediterranean in a defensive posture. Only one, Attorney General Levi Lincoln, argued that he needed congressional approval even for this limited measure. But the cabinet’s general consensus held that Jefferson enjoyed some prerogative.
Jefferson agreed. Without congressional approval, he sent an American fleet to the Mediterranean, with detailed instructions of what to do — and what not to do. Commodore Richard Dale, the officer in charge, was ordered to “sink, burn, capture, or destroy vessels attacking those of the United States.” But his men were not to initiate combat or step foot on Barbary land. Only after the Republican Congress authorized “warlike operations against the regency of Tripoli, or any other of the Barbary powers,” did Dale’s forces proactively attack the pirate states on their own land. Ultimately, American military success, particularly at the Battle of Derna in 1805, convinced the Barbary authorities that it was time to call a truce. The Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed the same year, effectively drew a close on Jefferson’s Barbary wars.”
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“Contrary to the assertions of progressives like Jayapal and conservatives like Greene, presidents since the founding have affirmed their authority and responsibility to deploy military forces defensively without congressional approval.
To date, Biden has unilaterally ordered targeted strikes against Houthi military targets to diminish the terrorists’ ability to persist in their piracy. He hasn’t ordered a ground invasion of Yemen, a wider offensive against civil and governmental assets or an initiative to depose the Houthi government. He has followed closely in Jefferson’s footsteps, even if 250 years of evolution in technology and warfare make a direct comparison complicated.”
“All of the ghosts—or perhaps zombies—of U.S. foreign policy for the past 30 years seem to be assembling into one big war. Since the Obama administration, Washington has promised to pull U.S. forces out of the Middle East, while quietly dabbling in proxy wars all over the region. That arrangement turned out to be neither stable nor sustainable. Right under everyone’s noses, and without permission from Congress, the United States has gone from proxy warfare back to direct combat in the Middle East.
The immediate cause of the crisis was unexpected: the mass Hamas-led killing and kidnapping of Israelis last October and the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response. But the underlying dynamics were there for everyone to see. American leaders believed that they could impose an unpopular order on the Middle East without putting in much effort and freeze the Middle East’s conflicts on Washington’s terms. And like an overconfident character in a horror movie, the Biden administration accidentally foreshadowed the bloody events to come.
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said a week before the war. “Now challenges remain—Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians—but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.””
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“The Trump administration was unbothered. “The biggest threat that our allies and partners in the region face is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s Iran. You’ve got to start there,” Trump administration official Brian Hook said in August 2020. As was the Biden administration. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January 2021 that “it’s hard to see near-term prospects for moving forward” on the issue.
Perhaps the United States alone could have solved the conflict; perhaps no one could have. Either way, Washington had tied itself to the outcome. Israel continued to receive U.S. military aid in greater amounts and with fewer conditions than any other country. And the Abraham Accords made Israel a key part of the entire Middle East’s security architecture.
Meanwhile, Tehran was licking its wounds. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is internationally isolated and domestically losing control, it has many cards left to play. Iranian leaders can still count on a large arsenal of missiles and drones and an array of pro-Iran guerrilla forces across the region. (The Houthis are one such group.) Saudi Arabia, once an advocate for bombing Iran, decided to cut its losses and accept a diplomatic deal with Iran last year.
“The stage was set, then, for the October war to spread all over the region. The Abraham Accords were exposed as both fragile and unpopular in the Arab world, especially after Israeli leaders began to talk about expelling Palestinians from Gaza en masse. Iran had a golden opportunity to escalate on its terms. Hezbollah, the pro-Iran party in Lebanon, immediately began firing on Israeli territory. Biden sent two aircraft carriers to the region to deter any further escalation against Israel, while also talking Israel out of a preemptive war on Lebanon.
Iraqi militias broke their truce with Americans the following week. The U.S. bases originally set up to overthrow Saddam Hussein and repurposed for the war against the Islamic State were now redoubts against Iran’s Iraqi supporters. Like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, the Biden administration cited the original Iraq War authorization to justify its newest battle.
Then the Houthis began to menace international commerce. Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare’e claimed that Israeli shipping was a “legitimate target” until the siege of Gaza was lifted. Echoing the logic of liberal American hawks, he claimed that Yemen had a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians. But the Houthi attacks also struck non-Israeli ships and drove international shipping companies out of the Red Sea, which normally carries around 10 percent of global trade.
As it turned out, the problem wouldn’t take care of itself. Despite the Abraham Accords, no Arab state except Bahrain was willing to intervene against the Houthis on behalf of Israeli shipping. (Saudi Arabia also seemed more concerned with maintaining its own truce.) Biden decided to cobble together his own fleet to fend off the Houthi assaults.”
“Al Assad Air Base in Iraq, where U.S. military personnel and contractors are based, came under a massive barrage from Iranian-aligned militant groups in the country. The attack was so big that reports state it overwhelmed Al Assad’s air defenses, with multiple projectiles landing within its permitter, causing injuries.”
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The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which is a blanket moniker for a number of groups hostile to the U.S. and Israel over the war in Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack. It caused minor injuries to U.S. personnel and seriously injured one Iraqi.
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“The U.S. has around 2,500 troops in Iraq as part of the anti-ISIS mission there. This would be the 58th attack on U.S. facilities in Iraq since the war between Israel and Gaza lit off after Hamas’s cross-border terror attacks on October 7th, according to Reuters.”
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“in and around the Red Sea, it seems clear now that the U.S. is carrying out a sustained hunt aimed at striking the Houthi’s anti-ship weapons prior to launch. Yet another round of preemptive air strikes were carried out yesterday, with three missiles being destroyed.”
“China is warning the U.S. against escalating its attacks on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, as the conflict in the Red Sea increasingly threatens both Beijing’s economic and diplomatic interests.
The Houthis’ months-long campaign to restrict maritime traffic moving through key Middle East waterways is a particular threat to China, which is heavily reliant on the Suez Canal and Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to move Chinese products to European markets. China is also more dependent than the U.S. on oil and gas imports from countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Qatar.
“China is concerned about the escalating tension in the Red Sea and calls on relevant parties to exercise calm and restraint to prevent the conflict from escalating,” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters on Friday. “China calls on relevant parties to play a constructive and responsible role in keeping the Red Sea safe and stable, which serves the common interests of the international community.”
China declined to join a U.S.-led coalition of forces, called Operation Prosperity Guardian, which began policing the Red Sea last month.
On a broader level, the growing military exchanges between the U.S. and Houthis threaten China’s Mideast diplomatic interests. Last spring, Beijing stunned Washington by brokering a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Houthis’ primary military backer. The deal was based, in part, on Iran’s commitment to China to cut off military supplies to the Yemeni militia and constrain Houthi attacks on Saudi and international targets.
But Tehran in recent weeks has praised the Houthis’ Red Sea operation, and Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has embedded personnel among the Yemeni militia’s forces, according to U.S. and Arab officials.”
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“The Pentagon announced Tuesday that they interdicted a vessel off the coast of Somalia last week that was ferrying Iranian-manufactured ballistic missile and cruise missile components to the Houthis.”