James Holmes
In a narrow, partial sense, air power unaccompanied by a ground offensive may have nudged Houthi calculations toward an outcome agreeable to Washington.
In light of the Houthis’ much-touted agreement to stop assailing shipping traversing the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Gulf of Aden, an aviator friend writes to ask whether air power proved decisive in the irregular naval war against the Yemeni rebels.
To which I boldly say: maybe.
Prompting this exchange, of course, was my late March TNI column siding with Admiral J. C. Wylie, who proclaimed that air power and other “cumulative,” scattershot forms of warfare never decide armed strife on their own. Wylie opines that control—generally speaking, control of key terrain or something on the Earth’s surface—is the purpose of military strategy. Bombarding something from the air is not the same as controlling it. Ground forces, on the other hand, can impose permanent, suffocating control. Ergo, air and missile forces are the “supporting” arm of ground might in any campaign. They’re an enabler, not an end in themselves.
Wylie’s proverbial “man on the scene with a gun”—a soldier or Marine bestriding terra firma while toting heavy firepower—is the “supported” arm. The soldier is the agent of physical control, and thus the final arbiter of martial success. In other words, air power is important, but insufficient to yield victory and enforce the postwar peace. No land power, no durable results.
The Houthi Ceasefire Is Not Peace
Two points. First, to gauge whether some operation or campaign was decisive, it’s helpful to define what decisive means. As with so many terms in the realm of warlike affairs, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the word. The definition we commonly use in the hallowed halls of Newport comes from Carl von Clausewitz, the military sage of nineteenth-century Prussia. Reading between the lines a tad, Clausewitz defines a strategic attack that leads “directly to peace” as a decisive undertaking.
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