After 6 months of furious effort called “Operation Prosperity Guardian1”, the few NATO countries who can still afford to deploy ships have nothing to show for themselves in Yemen. Their usual tactics of so called “shock and awe” bombings of civilian infrastructure to terrorize a populace into submission have once again failed. The Yemeni people remain unbroken, and continue their war against enemy shipping in the Bab-el-Mandeb strait.
NATO forces are exhausting themselves, spending billions of dollars to hit drones and missiles worth a few thousand and wearing out their aircraft blasting holes into the sand. Evan as their high end stealth wunderwaffe strike the same targets in Yemen again and again, the missiles just keep coming. It seems like NATO is simply out of options, their usual strategy of bombing civilians having failed once more.
Despite, or more likely because of the constant bombing, Yemeni resistance is so ferocious that NATO’s fleets are left exhausted, mauled and traumatized. It is hard for them to even imagine a world where their enemy shoots back at them. Decades of bombing hospitals, schools, weddings, farms and other civilian targets with impunity has left them soft. When their victims fight back, it leaves them so traumatized they need psychological treatment to cope.
The first carrier battle group led by USS Eisenhower has already withdrawn from the region. It costs around 6.5 million per day in peacetime to operate a Carrier Battle Group and that cost only increases during times of war. For a 6 month deployment, the US Navy has spent a minimum of 1.2 billion dollars, and this does not count weapons and fuel, wear and tear on equipment and various other costs which come along with a combat deployment. Given as a single US Navy AA missile is around 2.5 million dollars and flying one F-35 costs $42,000 an hour, the real cost is likely many times that.
Despite all this cost and effort, the NATO forces are no closer to their goal. Yemeni attacks on enemy shipping have only intensified, growing both more numerous and more sophisticated. It seems like Yemen is showing off new weapons every day, striking ships with impunity as the US Navy tries in vain to catch it’s breath.
The Yemenis have worn down the US Navy to such an extent that even in the ideal circumstances, with only a small area to patrol and secure, they are repeatedly stymied by determined Yemeni attacks.
More than just rockets and missiles, one of the chief weapons employed by the Yemeni armed forces are kamikaze boats, in reality little more than remote controlled speedboats filled with explosives.
These weapons are cheap, but can be deployed in large numbers and be devastatingly effective. Yemen has been using these boats for years already, so the Navy cannot claim that they have been caught off guard by new developments, besides, sinking enemy ships should be one of their primary duties.
The Navy and it’s NATO allies could have stopped these attacks if they had any assets in the area. It is not difficult to destroy a speedboat, nearly any weapon the Navy has would do it easily. The reason why these attacks continue and are successful is because the Navy is simply absent when the attacks are happening. They don’t have anything in range to prevent attacks from happening in broad daylight.
With only a handful of ships, the task of patrol and interdiction will fall to the carrier’s air wing, and this is a major problem for the modern navy. The new, supersonic fighters which make up the entirety of America’s naval aviation were not designed for this job.
The problem is one of endurance. The US Navy no longer has the sort of cheap, high endurance, well armed aircraft which can patrol for hours at a time with very little maintenance and without the help of expensive and vulnerable fuel tankers.
While there are always multiple numbers for aircraft range, the most relevant of them is combat radius, or the distance which a loaded airplane can travel and still have enough fuel to return back to base, while taking into account the safety factors used for combat aircraft. There are some ways to increase range, such as wing mounted drop tanks, but they also decrease the amount of weapons the aircraft can carry, limiting it’s usefulness for patrol. Even combat radius doesn’t tell the whole story, while a supersonic jet can cover the same distance as a slower one, they cannot stay in the sky as long.
It wasn’t always like this. Until recently, they had considerable assets which would have been perfect for this sort of role. In the years after the Cold War, the “end of history” has led to a bonanza of acquisitions, mergers and restructuring in the arms industry, but this has not led to the efficiency the capitalists claim. Rather, it has increased costs and degraded capabilities as the arms industry cannibalizes itself and it’s hosts for ever increasing profit margins. The inability of the US Navy to stop these attacks is only the most recent evidence of their decline.
The Life and Death of the Intruder
Not long ago, the US Navy had assets which would have been perfect to stop these sorts of attacks. Slow, cheap, and unglamorous aircraft which could stay in the air for a long time, carry a lot of weapons and operate with very little maintenance. The last of this breed were the venerable A-6 Intruder and the S-3 Viking, both of which were retired in the early 2000s.
Although neither of them was designed with maritime combat patrols as their primary goal both of them proved adept at it.
Intruders were a versatile medium attack aircraft, they could carry a huge variety of weapons such as bombs, missiles and rockets which can be used against against anything, including ships. Most notably, in 1986 Intruders claimed 4 Libyan warships with their missiles. All of them were far more potent than a Yemeni speedboat.
The Intruder had a combat radius of nearly 900 miles and a payload of 18,000lbs, both of these numbers are better than it’s any of it’s replacements. When they needed to stay out longer, all Intruder squadrons had a KA-6D “Texaco” Tanker variant attached. This plane did not carry weapons, but it could more than double the squadron’s range through mid-air refueling. After the retirement of the A-6, the KA-6D was not replaced. The Navy lacks any carrier based aerial refueling capabilities today.
While the S-3 Viking was designed for anti-submarine warfare, by the 1990s the threat of enemy submarines was virtually nil and it was repurposed as an anti-surface combatant. While it couldn’t carry as many weapons as the Intruder, the S-3 Viking had staggering endurance. A US Navy Viking once set a record with 13 hours of non-stop flight during a mission to kidnap a Lebanese resistance fighter. This was not typical and required a tanker, but the Viking could remain aloft for 6-7 hours with no assistance and while carrying weapons.
With it’s suite of sophisticated radars, cameras and other reconnaissance technology, very little could escape the Viking. The torpedoes, rockets and bombs they carried were more than a match for the type of ships in the Yemeni navy, but if a target proved too much for it to handle, the Viking could simply radio in the co-ordinates to it’s more heavily armed comrades.
There was also a dedicated Electronic Reconnaissance (ELINT) platform called the ES-3A “Shadow”, which was entirely abandoned when the Viking was retired. Such a platform would have been invaluable for finding Yemeni launch points and stopping attacks before they happened.
After the retirement of the S-3, it was replaced with nothing. The US Navy lacks any armed, carrier based maritime patrol aircraft today. What the Viking could do by itself now requires two airplanes, a separate maritime patrol and strike aircraft.
The aircraft which came after the Intruder and Viking is the infamous trillion dollar boondoggle called the F-35. The Lightning II was supposed to replace all of the Navy’s existing tactical aviation with one plane, at least theoretically simplifying supply and maintenance. However, it is so badly designed, unreliable and totally unsuitable for the harsh conditions of the battlefield that even the US military openly despises it and wants anything else.
Despite what Lockheed and their lackeys in the Pentagon say, the F-35 simply cannot do the same jobs as cheap aircraft like the Intruder and Viking. To give an example, we can return to our scenario in the Red Sea and analyze how the F-35 failed, and how it’s cheap, effective predecessors would not.
The fact that these small boat attacks are so effective is evidence that the Navy does not have the resources to actually patrol the Red Sea, rather, they are only reacting by retaliating after Yemeni strikes either via attacks on civilian infrastructure or uselessly pounding sand to attack already abandoned launch points.
With their “obsolete” old aircraft, they could change that and prevent Yemeni attacks in the first place. The S-3 Viking can stay airborne long enough that one squadron of 10 Vikings, the standard number attached to a carrier, would have more than enough endurance for a 24/7 patrol of the Yemeni side of the strait. Combined with a squadron of 16 A-6 intruders and 4 KA-6D tankers, the Navy could have hundreds of weapons in the sky at all times, ready to immediately attack launch points, drones or mother ships.
This is another advantage which is often lost during the rivet counting on the internet. While the F-35 can carry about the same weight of ordinance as the A-6 (albeit with much less range), it can only carry 6 bombs in total. It doesn’t matter what size the bombs are, the maximum is still 6. This creates some strange scenarios. When equipped with 2000lb bombs, the F-35 can carry 1 extra bomb over the Intruder, however when equipped with 500lb bombs, the Intruder can carry 28 on it’s more versatile weapons pylons while the F-35 still carries 6.
In it’s time the Intruder could carry every weapon in US Navy service, from cruise missiles to rocket pods all the way up to nuclear bombs and sea mines. The F-35, on the other hand, is very limited on which weapons it can carry. It can only carry bombs and anti-air missiles, with the exception of the tiny Brimstone missile.
The A-6 was capable of carrying the potent Maverick missile with a 300lb warhead that has sunk ships the size of the 127-foot Soviet Osa class with a single hit, the Brimstone has a 14lb warhead which is incapable of destroying anything but the smallest ships.
While the bombs can do the job, they also have limitations. For one, the F-35 must be above the target in order to bomb it, as even smart bombs have limited capabilities to maneuver in the sky. This takes time, and even with smart bombs, hits are not guaranteed against a fast target. For some jobs, a missile is simply a better choice.
A versatile airplane like the A-6 didn’t have to pick and choose. It could have both. When on a combat air patrol, the Intruder could carry both bombs and missiles, allowing it to react to any situation. The additional crew in the Intruder meant the pilot could fly the plane while the weapons officer handled the aiming and shooting. This made both more effective, significantly reduced fatigue on long missions and allowed the Intruder to use weapons that can’t be operated by a single pilot.
While the F-35 is a fragile and expensive fighter awkwardly shoehorned into an attack role, the Intruder had the right tools for the job.
With Vikings to escort the ships and do reconnaissance, the Intruders could simply patrol the Yemeni side of the Bab-el Mandeb bombing any launch points as they were found. When a ship launch was detected, a detachment of Intruders could interdict anything the Vikings couldn’t destroy themselves.
The F-35, to put it simply, is not capable of this. It cannot stay in the air long enough, nor travel far enough to do a combat air patrol with any frequency. Because it is so colossally expensive to fly and incredibly unreliable, even if it had the range it would need to be spared to prevent mechanical breakdown.
Per Lockheed, the combat radius of the F-35, carrying 2 internal AA missiles and 2 external bombs, is around 590 nautical miles. This is nearly half of what the Intruder could do with a full 18,000lb weapons load. While this cannot be directly translated into hours of flight, it should also be pointed out that the A-6 was optimized for slow speed and low altitude, whereas the F-35 was designed to operate high and fast. It’s engines are considerably less efficient when going slowly so the combat radius will not improve.
When reliability is figured into the situation, things only get worse. Despite considerable attempts to fudge the numbers by redefining what constitutes a successful mission, the F-35 can only drop bombs on targets about 55% of the time. This is due both to extreme unreliability and a lack of maintenance, as it turns out, the US Navy is not allowed to service their own F-35 fighters. They do not even have the technical manuals they would need, as they are restricted by Lockheed to protect their intellectual property.
This means that the Navy now relies on scarce, expensive contractors to repair their aircraft, a scenario which has caused the fleet to have maintenance backlogs lasting years and parts backlogs that are even longer. Already, cannibalism of the fleet has started due to a lack of spare parts.
Cannibalism is an appropriate term for what is happening here. The arms dealers are eating their hosts, slowly killing them in exchange for profits. As arms dealers buy and bribe their way into positions of power in the government, they are increasingly the ones who dictate acquisitions. The reason why cheap, effective aircraft like the Intruder have been phased out in favor of fragile fighters with fuel tanks the size of thimbles is simple.
Profit. The F-35 program is conservatively estimated at a total value of $2 trillion dollars, and that number is only going to go up as defense contractors tighten their grip on Washington.
It’s the same reason why the US military can no longer service it’s own airplanes. The F-35 requires 5-7 hours of maintenance for every flight hour. If the military serviced their own planes, they would have an incentive to increase reliability as much as possible. With the maintenance contracted out to Lockheed, more repair hours means more profits. In essence, Lockheed has been rewarded for providing a bad product. The worse it is, the more maintenance it needs, the more money they make to fix it.
This sort of thing has become the norm in defense acquisition. Decisions are not made for rational, calculated reasons, but simply to increase the profits for the arms dealers who own our government. Congress has even forced the Army to buy tanks they didn’t want, just to keep the contractor in business. The best decisions for the arms dealers are the worst for the military.
If anyone in the Pentagon is paying attention and not on the take from the arms dealers, they should be terrified right now. Yemen is one of the poorest nations on earth, and while it’s armed forces are brave they lack the resources of America’s larger rivals. If Yemen can embarrass a Carrier Battle Group, what could Iran do?
What about China, who’s economy is almost 1000 times larger than Yemen’s? China manufactures more drones than every other nation combined, and that number is only increasing while America can’t even repair it’s own equipment without Lockheed’s permission.
This is not to say the US is helpless, they still posses a huge arsenal and they can rain death and destruction on Yemen almost with impunity.
However, it will fail.
America’s proxy force Saudi Arabia was already defeated by the Yemeni Armed Forces, their US supplied army broken and embarrassed by “primitive militias.” Despite brutal Saudi blockades which killed hundreds of thousands and reprisals that intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure so egregiously that international observers considered it genocide, Yemen did not back down. The steadfast Yemeni forces continued to fight until their victory.
The US Navy cannot even withstand 6 months of Yemeni attacks, while Yemen has survived constant bombardment for over a decade. Nothing the Navy can do hasn’t already been done to the people of Yemen, and they not only survived but emerged victorious.
Once again, the Yemeni people have risen to the occasion, but not in defense of themselves or their own land. The Yemeni Armed Forces, and the Yemeni people, are fighting back to ensure that what happened to them cannot happen again. In the truest sense of the term “Never Again” the Yemeni forces are standing against another genocide, this time carried out against the Palestinian people with full throated, unambiguous American support. The Americans can strike Yemen all they want, but the Yemeni response is clear.
It is telling that NATO doesn’t even pretend to be defending people instead of money this time.