Posted on 03/06/2024 6:11:10 PM PST by hardspunned
Three sailors have died and others have been injured after a Houthi missile attack on a ship in the Gulf of Aden, US officials have said – the first fatalities of crew of commercial shipping since the Houthis began launching strikes at ships in waters off Yemen last year.
The officials told US news agencies that the crew of the MV True Confidence had abandoned ship after the attack, which was claimed by the Houthis.
The British embassy in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, posted on X: “At least two innocent sailors have died. This was the sad but inevitable consequence of the Houthis recklessly firing missiles at international shipping. They must stop.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
sure he can
Back when we had competent and responsible leaders.
Biden is not in charge.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the cost of being US flagged and taxed is ridiculously high for all circumstances except these. No?
India has been in that area a lot (Gulf of Aden), mainly to support ships with Indians on board as part of the crew, and doing a fine job within their capabilities. But, India does not have anything close to a US Arleigh-Burke destroyer, in terms of AD capability defending against missiles.
The US is probably loath to send any more destroyers, since the South China Sea is heating up further:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JrhaZrpKBc
Plus an unending mission to keep shooting missiles down is not very practical. Drones we can generally now take down with Harriers off Marines’ ships, but we have little such capacity in the region. Theoretically the Euro’s should be able to help out, although the Germans pretty well embarrassed themselves at trying to shoot down one of our big drones...
I suppose the shippers are gonna say - hey, you don’t have the ships to protect a lot of civilian ships, so why should we pay for inadequate protection? It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem, perhaps.
Yes, US regulations and taxes can be very burdensome to a ship owner. Hence the flags of convenience.
We need a large and vibrant merchant fleet. The US merchant fleet helped win WW2. It’s gone now. If we can pare back those regulations, perhaps we can rebuild that fleet for the next emergency.
On the other hand, registering a ship in the US should be like buying insurance. Decline if you wish. But then don’t assume you’ll be protected.
How about Major General John H. Lejeune?
Yep. Same thing is happening right here at home, the border and every blue city.
We dropped several Billions of dollars worth of bombs on empty jungle in Vietnam, all part of the plan Gator.
I’m not a fan of our plan.
Playing defense in a football game only works because there is an absolute ending time but that doesn't work in war. The only thing that stops some one from attacking you is to remove the attacker or remove his ability/desire to attack you, nothing else will work.
We are broke and the world wants us to continue spending our blood and treasure. How about other countries step up and defend the area.
The amount of traffic diverted up until now depends on the type of ship. Bulk carriers, not so much. LNG and LPG ships, almost all have diverted. That’s a really big deal because most of those LNG ship are on the ME to Europe route. So, you have delivery times increased by sometimes 3x or 4x. If there are not a bunch of unused ships around, then your delivery quantities decrease roughly inversely proportionately.
Luckily for Europe, they’ve had a mild winter (much to the chagrin of the pro-Pooty crowd). But if this goes on, next winter, who knows? This has the potential to create an economic disaster in Europe, which, while some number of FReepers are too stupid to realize it, would bite us hard too. If Biden type energy policies stay in place, that bite will be harder yet.
As for Europe, the history of real economic calamity in Europe and it’s eventual results is really, really bad. Those eventualities tend to catch up with us in violent ways too. Add modern weaponry and nukes... :-(
You are preaching to the choir. I could not have said it better.
Thanks for the informative post.
MV True Confidence is a Barbados-flagged bulk carrier operated by Third January Maritime and owned by True Confidence Shipping.
The crew was made up of one Indian, four Vietnamese and 15 Filipinos, and the armed guards were made of up two Sri Lankans and one Nepali.
Actually the Indians have been doing quite a lot to help, within their capabilities. So at least there is a good example!
The problem is 3 words: “within their capabilities”. Only the US has significant anti-missile capability, in our Arleigh-Burke destroyers. Those are built for carrier task force air defense (particularly including robust missile defense), and they are good. Really good: SFAIK, not one ship in an immediate area being defended by one of our A-B destroyers has been hit.
The Germans have, IIRC, 6 ships theoretically capable, but the one they have in the area failed to even shoot down a big slow US drone, recently. (Trying to do so was itself an obvious boo-boo, but if they did and failed? I’m not impressed. And if you have 6, at any given time maybe 2 are in for maintenance or whatever, and, Germany does have other worries (like Pooty), so, ya’ gotta figure at best they could send 2 and hope they get their problems resolved. Knowing German bureaucracy, that’ll probably take 4 years...
The Brits have 3 very good AD destroyers, and one is on station. That’s likely the most they can risk sending, and if active obviously some times needs to go to port to be reloaded, etc. (SFAIK nobody tries to load those missile tubes at sea?)
The French have a ship in the region - my impression is that it’s good but not quite as capable as an A-B destroyer. I probably should research...
It’s highly doubtful the Chinese will lend a hand.
Maybe the Japanese can continue to contribute a ship or two out of their 8 pretty capable AD destroyers, but, obviously they have China to worry about.
And... well, SFAIK, that’s about it. Ships take years to build, and I’m not sure any “Ally” even has any more in the pipeline?
Most analysis I’ve seen indicates a need for 15-20 A-B class ships to do a good job of defense, and I’m not even sure that includes all of the Red Sea and all of the Gulf of Aden. Some ships have been hit pretty far out in the Gulf of Aden.
The best solution I can come up with is to add a large fleet of modest ships from our allies, etc., blockading Yemen, letting through only food and humanitarian aid. (We don’t want to starve the Yemenis who are friendly to us, who still control about half the country’s land area.) Then keep pounding the Houthis until they run out of drones & missiles and parts for them.
A possible alternative would be to send a good size land force in to assist the friendly Yemenis into essentially partitioning the country, reducing the coastline to be blockaded considerably. This is problematic in multiple ways, of course, including a real patchwork of friendlies, Houthis, AQ, and other unfriendlies, in some areas of Yemen.
Keep in mind ALL this is being driven by Iran and to some extent Russia. (Just look at the obvious benefits to Russia!!)
I’m open to other solutions, as long as they are not the chest thumping “nuke-em” sort of silliness...
How? See my analysis just above.
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