Peloni: The focus of the US led presence in the region is clearly not intended to deter Iran.
“The reluctance of the Biden administration to put U.S. carriers in the Gulf reflects the low priority deterring Iran is for Team Biden. A credible deterrent presence vis-à-vis Iran is the “hack” needed to lock the gates on regional escalation, and Biden isn’t putting the most obvious asset behind that. Instead, he’s got it hundreds of miles away, acting like an escort ship without the escort-ship agility and sea-combat superiority, while prevented by policy from doing what it was born for: mangling Houthi – or Iranian – stash ashore.”
How NOT to deter a rogue nation like radical Iran.
J.E. Dyer, Optimistic Conservative January 9, 2024
It doesn’t help that the U.S. military chain of command was basically, as far as we can see right now, in Status Unknown around the New Year. It’s being reported that neither the National Security Council nor Congress was informed on New Year’s Day when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was put in intensive care following an “elective procedure” performed sometime before (probably Christmas week). Austin was in the ICU for four days before the NSC was told.
At the same time, his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico. Apparently this information wasn’t conveyed to the NSC or Congress either.
Keep in mind, President Biden was in St. Croix acquiring a sunburn from 27 December 2023 to 2 January 2024. The retinue that travels with POTUS to keep him functional, including the strategic weapons “football” and its custodian, would have been with him. But it’s not clear if POTUS knew SECDEF was out of the loop (or for that matter what exact status SECDEF was in, and what DEPSECDEF was handling – or not – from Puerto Rico).
This is very peculiar. The NSC and its watchstanders, along with those at the Pentagon, are supposed to know the exact same thing about the status of the National Command Authority principals; i.e., POTUS and SECDEF. In my experience, if the Pentagon watch gets emerging information about SECDEF, it would require affirmative intervention to keep that from being conveyed to the White House.
It’s important to wait to see how this all shakes out, including reading between the lines of how the story and the explanations develop. But it’s unnerving at all times, and when U.S. troops are in constant danger from Iran-backed attacks in the Middle East, it’s even more so.
Update: OK, it’s later, we’ve seen some of how it has shaken out, and it’s even worse than it appeared at first. (Subsequent updates to those updates have only dug the hole deeper.)
The record of what happened versus who knew or didn’t know anything just doesn’t add up. There’s something very wrong here.
Comment posted today:
D- [Fence] !
Meanwhile, to step through this update without piling on too much background and commentary, here’s the source of the “totally defensive” reference. This past week, White House spokesman John Kirby made a big point of the U.S. military posture for countering the Houthis at sea being “totally defensive.”
The practical meaning of this is that Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) – the counter-Houthi maritime operation with the multi-party coalition – will confine itself to countering the Houthi attackers on-scene in each specific situation. Perhaps more Houthi small boats will be sunk by U.S. Navy helicopters, but in terms of the style of Houthi attack so far, the totally-defensive countering would involve shooting down drones and missiles coming at commercial shipping, and warning off small boats.
It will be entirely about waiting for the arrow instead of taking out the archer, or his stash ashore.
We can correctly deduce that this posture is being justified by the preferences of the OPG coalition. For reasons we’ll see below, there’s also reason to suppose it’s the actual preference of the Biden administration.
A number of diligent researchers have pointed out that commercial maritime traffic is now avoiding the Red Sea in droves.
This isn’t just a problem of longer, more expensive maritime transits for commercial goods. It will certainly affect the world that way, as it did from 1967 to 1975 when the Suez Canal was shut down.
But 50 years later, in a more economically diversified and trade-dependent world, it will have adverse effects for the local economies, especially Egypt’s, which draws important revenues from operating the ports around the Suez Canal. It will also affect shipping and port operations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Eritrea, and Sudan.
With the Canal being bypassed, other countries with major ports in the Eastern Mediterranean – Greece, Turkey, Israel – can expect to take shipping-industry hits as well.
That won’t be good for regional stability. It will, however, benefit Iran, China, and radical extremists as regional governments have to scramble for new or temporary arrangements and address discontent from their domestic constituencies.
The role that only the U.S. can play is the sorely-needed one of maritime superpower: guarantor of free, safe navigation, unextorted and available to all, on the seas. No other nation has the comprehensive package of national power to play that role, nor does the next “navally” powerful nation, China, have the will or intention to do it. China will never waste more than the shortest possible period – days or maybe weeks – pretending to enforce free and safe navigation even-handedly. With the CCP in charge, the hegemonic extortion in the chokepoints would begin almost immediately. (If you actually doubt that, just ask the other reasonable claimants to islands and shoals in the South China Sea – and the trading nations aware of China’s excessive claims there, and intent to demand special vetoes over the navigation practices of all shipping.)
On land and sea
The maritime realm isn’t the only one in which there’s no serious deterrence at work. Americans are, of course, acutely aware of the long list of uncountered attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three months.
A couple of recent developments are both interesting and illustrative of the implications and consequences of continuing this feckless course.
One is the recent attack on the Iraqi base at Al-Harir, an airfield northeast of Erbil, in northern Iraq, being used by the U.S. 82nd Airborne for helicopter operations. The special interest of this attack on Christmas Day is that an Army helicopter pilot, CW4 Garrett Illerbrunn, was badly injured in it and had to be evacuated to Germany for treatment.
My tweet/X-post thread on the situation at Harir:
The essentially undefended condition of U.S. arrangements at Harir is inexcusable at this point. It’s not the only remote, ill-defended base we use; others include the air base at Al-Asad in Anbar Province, and Al-Tanf in southern Syria, on the border with Iraq and Jordan. We’ve been attacked with rockets, missiles, and drones at these and other bases, and are doing little to nothing about it.
The Biden administration has conducted a handful of meaningless air strikes on ground targets, but the strikes and targets have had no relevance to the attacks being made on U.S. forces. The strikes have been merely punitive – with no actual punishment resulting – rather than having operational significance to the Iran-backed forces attacking our troops. As with our “totally defensive” maritime posture, our approach to date is leaving Iran’s proxies in the driver’s seat, and American forces in reactionary mode.
Naturally, this is not producing any deterrent effect.
As long as Iran keeps the stash of arrows full, the game will continue, but instead of dealing harshly with Iran once and for all, the Us keeps providing them with cash. Will we ever hear the true reasons?
It’s also possible that the US doesn’t want to send carriers into the Persian Gulf because of the danger. They can accomplish the same thing by sitting in the Gulf of Oman or even the Arabian Sea.