"The Recent Attack on Yemen...
And Whether The US is Starting Another War"
by David Stockman
Excerpt: "Here we go again. The "Joe Biden" thing just started another war in Yemen without a constitutionally compliant declaration by Congress. And it/they did so against a rag-tag tribe of desert insurgents who cannot possibly harm the liberty or security of the American homeland. After all, the most fearsome missile possessed by the Houthi is the Burkan-3, which has a maximum range of 750 miles. Yet the last time we checked, the distance from Yemen to Washington DC was 7,200 miles. So why is the GOP leadership branch of the Uniparty saluting Sleepy Joe with a chorus of attaboys?
GOP Senate Leader, Mitch McConnel: "I welcome the U.S. and coalition operations against the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists responsible for violently disrupting international commerce in the Red Sea and attacking American vessels. President Biden’s decision to use military force against these Iranian proxies is overdue."
GOP House Speaker Johnson: "This action by U.S. and British forces is long overdue, and we must hope these operations indicate a true shift in the Biden Administration’s approach to Iran and its proxies that are engaging in such evil and wreaking such havoc. They must understand there is a serious price to pay for their global acts of terror and their attacks on U.S. personnel and commercial vessels. America must always project strength, especially in these dangerous times."
No, Speaker Johnson, America must not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy, as our sixth president, John Qunicy Adams, stated so cogently nearly 203 years ago on Independence Day. The Red Sea is not the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound or the Gulf of Catalina -meaning that the Houthi blockade on ships heading to Israel in retaliation for the latter’s genocidal assault on Gaza is Jerusalem’s business to treat with, not Washington’s.
Moreover, the US Navy has not been hired by the UN or any other global body to safeguard every sea lane on the planet. Nor should it take the assignment if offered because the homeland security of America does not depend upon Washington functioning as the gendarmerie of the world.
In fact, there are only two ways our liberty and security could be threatened in today’s world: Either by nuclear blackmail or by a conventional military invasion and occupation of US territory. Neither are even remotely possible; and, in any event, assurance of that impossibility does not require aircraft carriers and military bases strung around the planet.
As to nuclear blackmail, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent force, and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people. After all, the US has 3,800 active nuclear warheads and they are spread under the sea, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s—all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.
For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four warheads. That’s 80 independently targetable warheads per boat and at any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles. So that’s 960 deep-sea nuclear warheads to find and neutralize before any would be blackmailer even gets started.
And then there are the roughly 1,200 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 minutemen missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground. Each missile carries 3 warheads, providing another 1,200 nuclear warheads that must be taken out by would be blackmailers.
Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer, and the best thing is that the nuclear triad costs only $65 billion per year to maintain, including allowances for periodic upgrades.
At the end of the day, the only other potential military threat to the homeland security of America is invasion by a massive conventional armada of land, air and sea-based forces many, many times larger than the military behemoth that is now funded by Washington’s $900 billion defense budget. The logistical infrastructure that would be needed to control the vast Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats surrounding North America and to sustain an invasion and occupation force on the North American continent is so mind-bogglingly vast as to be scarcely imaginable.
At the least it would take a $50 trillion GDP to support such a thing. And if obviously not the mere $2 trillion GDP of Russia or even the $18 trillion GDP of the Red Ponzi, exactly what distant interstellar domain of the known universe might we be talking about?
Moreover, it’s not as if in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets that such a massive conventional force armada could be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.
As a practical matter, Russia has only one aircraft carrier and China has just three - two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union, and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.
Likewise, neocon knuckleheads like Nikki Haley have been jabbering about China’s growing Navy, which numbers 400 hulls compared to 305 ships in the US Navy’s fleet. But what she doesn’t say is that most of these Chinese units are coastal patrol boats, which likely couldn’t even make it to the coast of California, anyway.
In terms of Naval power projection capability, the proper measure of lethality is not the number of hulls, but the total displacement tonnage. In this connection, the US Navy has 4.6 million tons of displacement, averaging 15,000 tons per ship. By contrast, China’s Navy has but 2.0 million tons of displacement, averaging only 5,000 tons per boat. That is to say, the Chinese Navy is totally visible, assessable and trackable, and is not remotely of the size and lethality that would make an invasion of America remotely plausible.
In other words, all of the Uniparty prattle offered by McConnell and Johnson in the quoted remarks above makes sense only through the false lens of a Washington-based Global Hegemon. So, yes, if Washington is obliged to keep the peace everywhere on the planet and safeguard all the sea lanes and all the air space from quarrelling local parties, as in the extant case, then let the assembled legislators call a vote and declare yet another war, as did the hapless Woodrow Wilson in April 1917 to no avail except the resulting rise of Hitler, Stalin, World War II, the holocaust and the Cold War.
But the truth is, local wars like the extant spat between Israel and its Muslim neighbors do not threaten either the peace or even the commerce of the globe. If it did, then the most immediately impacted parties would be the heaviest shippers and neighbors on the Red Sea.
For instance, Saudi Arabia lives on the Red Sea, with major ports at Jeddah, Yanbu, Jubail and the massive futuristic investment at Neom. Likewise, China sends more containership cargo through the Red Sea by far than any other nation. And, of course, Egypt collects the tolls from the Suez Canel through which the Red Sea traffic transits. So, has Saudi Arabia, China or Egypt joined Washington’s coalition to bomb the daylights out of the Houthi? Hmmmm. We thought so. No they haven’t.
But what is especially rich is all the handwringing from the Washington neocons about the 9% of global seaborne oil traffic that traverses the Red Sea/Suez route. The fact is, however, the US is now a net energy exporter. So higher oil prices would actually be a slight benefit economically.
But actually, despite the entire kerfuffle over the Houthi interdiction of Israel bound traffic, there has been no visible impact on global oil prices, even if you make use of a magnifying glass. So what in the hell, exactly, are they talking about?"
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