“I think we are making a mistake,” wrote Vice President J.D. Vance in the now infamous chat group discussing plans to carry out military strikes in Yemen.
To his credit, Vance has been consistent in his skepticism about the use of American military power to solve the world’s problems.
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It is disheartening that, once attaining power, even a cadre of neoreactionary revolutionaries — who swore to remake U.S. foreign policy around a no-frills “America First” pragmatism — are blind to the fact that they are reverting to the same strategic errors that led to the U.S. bungling most of the War on Terror in the first place.
That it is a problem to allow a designated terrorist organization to indiscriminately launch anti-ship missiles against vessels navigating one of the world’s most critical trade routes is a reasonable assertion. That the United States can solve that problem with the liberal application of cruise missiles and bombs is not.
The nation’s chattering class has been largely mesmerized by the fallout from the scandal, which saw National Security Adviser Mike Waltz apparently add The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a “Houthi PC [principals committee] Small Group” chat on the Signal messaging app.
The subsequent recriminations have devolved into comical partisan gaslighting and a focus on pedantic minutiae — such as whether attack plans are “war plans,” or if obviously sensitive information qualifies as “classified” — but the focus on the chat and its attendant hubbub obscures a more basic question.
Why are we doing this?
Only two days after taking office for his second term, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14175, which directed the State Department to designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, stating that it is U.S. policy “to eliminate Ansar Allah’s capabilities and operations, deprive it of resources, and thereby end its attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians, U.S. partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea.”
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The United States is not at war with Yemen, nor even Ansar Allah, or “Partisans of God” — the official name of the group generally called “the Houthis” by Western officials and media. And yet the U.S. has been bombing the Houthis for more than a year now.
The Trump administration rightly sees Iran as a key influence on Houthi behavior, and apparently believes that a maximum pressure campaign will force Tehran to bend to its will.
Across the region, in Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories, Iran’s Axis of Resistance has been decimated and degraded. But Israel’s campaign against Hamas hasn’t eradicated Hamas, its campaign against Hezbollah didn’t eradicate Hezbollah, and the U.S. campaign against the Houthis won’t eradicate the Houthis.
The Houthis began their fight against “Israeli interests” in November 2023, targeting commercial vessels transiting through the Suez Canal. As part of the Axis of Resistance, they were nominally fighting in support of the Palestinians, who have faced an unprecedented Israeli offensive since Hamas carried out its deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. They also began launching long-range drones and missiles against Israel proper.
In response, the Biden administration — keen to demonstrate its support for Israel against Iran — began carrying out strikes against the Houthis in January 2024. Nevertheless, traffic through the Suez Canal dropped by two-thirds as a result of the conflict, erasing $2 billion in revenue for Egypt and significantly increasing costs for international shipping globally as vessels rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
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Fast forward a year since the U.S. first started bombing, and the Houthis have demonstrated both their resolve and their ability to keep fighting. Lloyd’s of London — a key player in the maritime insurance market — tracks incidents involving commercial shipping, and has cataloged 92 attacks against merchant vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since this all began.
The White House says that there have been 145 attacks on commercial shipping and 174 attacks on U.S. warships; American sailors have described the Houthi campaign as the most intense naval combat since 1945.
Because the Houthis said they would stand down their campaign in response to the ceasefire reached on Jan. 19 between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, there actually hadn’t been any documented attacks on commercial or American military vessels since Trump took office, according to a separate database maintained by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED, an independent research non-profit that tracks violent conflict.
That changed after the March 15 attack ordered by Trump, when on March 16 the USS Harry S. Truman and its strike group intercepted a “barrage” of 18 drones and missiles fired by the Houthis in response.
Since then, of course, Israel walked away from negotiations to continue the ceasefire in Gaza — and resumed the war.
Trump has pinned the inability to effectively stop the Houthis on former President Joe Biden’s “weakness,” arguing that what is needed is more bombing and bigger bombs.
“If that worked, it would’ve worked already,” observes Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy.
Since the attacks began, there have been reports of multiple airstrikes — likely U.S. in origin — in various locations across Yemen almost every day.
“This seems to me indicative of an inchoate foreign policy. It just shows how mercurial this administration is,” Clarke says, adding that with all of the negative attention, the optics now seem intended as much for a domestic audience as they are for Iran. As a result, he sees escalation as inevitable. “They just want to post a win.”
Indeed, Strategic Command has confirmed deployment of a group of B-2 stealth bombers to the region, the only aircraft capable of carrying the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a bunker buster bomb that was previously used in strikes on Yemen — in October, under Biden.
“We struck exactly what we intended,” said U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, who at the time was the Pentagon press secretary.
Indeed, the U.S. likely destroyed underground weapons storage facilities and command bunkers in those October strikes. But it didn’t stop the Houthis from continuing their attacks.
MOP-laden B-2s would be useful if the U.S. decided to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program — which is also part of the message from America.
But Iran shows little interest in bowing to the Trump administration over Yemen — a proxy is a proxy for a reason — explicitly saying, “Our policy remains to not negotiate directly under conditions of maximum pressure and military threats.”
So that strategy isn’t working.
But perhaps the U.S. can deter the Houthis through military force alone?
There’s reason to think it can’t.
Vance, like me, is a former enlisted Marine non-commissioned officer with a bit of G.I. Bill-funded education. He probably knows that despite “to the shores of Tripoli” being memorialized in the Marine Corps Hymn, the reign of plunder and mayhem of the Barbary Pirates in modern day Libya was not brought to a halt through the military prowess of Lt. Presley O’Bannon in capturing Derna during the First Barbary War.
No, America’s first foreign military adventure ended in 1805 with a negotiated peace treaty, and a payment of $60,000 in cold hard cash — about $1.7 million in today’s dollars, a paltry sum for ending a conflict. Then-President Thomas Jefferson was careful to characterize the payment as a politically palatable “ransom” for the release of American prisoners, rather than as an unacceptable “tribute” — a protection payment to an international extortion racket.
Well, that was 220 years ago, and today the U.S. does not negotiate with pirates, or terrorists, or Iranian-backed Shia Islamist politico-military movements.
What it does do is kill civilians.
There isn’t a lot of verified information about what happened on the other end of the group-chat strikes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserts in the thread that an apartment building was flattened. The Houthis claim 53 people were killed. Maybe all of this is true. Maybe none of it is.
What is true is that every sustained air campaign in modern history has killed innocents and destroyed civil infrastructure, regardless of whether that campaign achieved its strategic goals.
That reality, in connection with decades of continuous U.S. global airstrikes in the War on Terror, became a serious enough concern that in 2018 Congress at long last told the Pentagon to submit an “Annual Report on Civilian Casualties in Connection With United States Military Operations,” under a section included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
Last year, that requirement was extended to 2030, but the report on this year’s civilian casualties won’t be released until May 1, 2026. In any case, independent researchers have long asserted that there are “significant discrepancies” between the Pentagon’s accounting and their own data.
For now, the Pentagon refuses to provide specifics. Central Command, responsible for Yemen, also refuses to comment.
Certainly the current Pentagon has little interest in hand-wringing about whether America is killing civilians in its campaign to eliminate a terror group. One of Hegseth’s first moves upon confirmation was to dismantle the two Pentagon offices charged with reducing and accounting for civilian harm.
The munitions fly, administration officials send each other celebratory emojis, and the American public doesn’t know what has just been done in its name. If the chat hadn’t been leaked, it is unlikely strikes on Yemen would’ve risen anywhere near the top of the news cycle.
The grim carnage of the War on Terror rarely made the top of the news cycle after the first few years, either. Its unquestioned strategic assumptions — most evident in Afghanistan — were a replica of the flawed thinking that drove continuous escalation through nearly 20 years of involvement in Vietnam: that body counts indicate progress.
Only in total war, of the type rarely seen since World War II, can you kill your way to victory. Is that what this administration is asking of the American people? To commit to total war in Yemen? Boots on the ground? Carpet bombing of cities?
If so, then someone ought to have to make the case. For all the talk of Trump’s imaginary mandate, the American people have had no say in whether their country should be at war with Yemen. No one has even tried to enlist the thoughtless rabble of right-wing cable news to bang on the war drums and manufacture consent. Trump’s rubber-stamp legislature has not authorized military action under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives Congress — not the president, not his Cabinet secretaries, and certainly not a Signal chat group — the power “to declare war.”
But Congress continues to give the chief executive — whatever his or her party — a blank check to carry out military strikes around the world whenever and wherever he wishes, under the broad powers granted by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).
This was passed by both houses of Congress only a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, with a single dissenting vote, and has been used to justify American military action around the globe — 41 times in at least 22 countries — for more than two decades.
There are actually four AUMF laws still on the books, the oldest dating to 1957, despite multiple legislative efforts to repeal them. The most recent example was in June 2023, when then-senator J.D. Vance was one of three Republicans who added his name to the “End Endless Wars Act,” which passed in the Senate, but died in committee in the House.
Congress has also specifically tried to stop the president from going to war in Yemen. During Trump’s first term, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill prohibiting the U.S. from military action in Yemen, which managed to pass in both the Senate and the House — and was then vetoed by Trump.
And so, under both Biden and Trump, the cruise missiles fly, the bombs fall, and people die. Success is always another airstrike away.
Group chat members Vance, Hegseth, Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and National Counterterrorism Center chief nominee Joe Kent all served in the War on Terror, albeit with a range of different roles and experiences. They are the first generation of American leaders who did so, not as generals, but on the ground as junior and mid-level personnel. They have each, in their own way, been highly critical of the national security establishment that brought us the Forever Wars.
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” Alfred Tennyson writes in Idylls of the King. “And God fulfills Himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
Hegseth, especially, has tried to embrace an identity as a kind of Rambo-Galahad — a perfect warrior of pure faith and unrestrained violence — whose hypermasculine MAGA lethality is an antidote to the sprawling, effete ineptitude of woke Pentagon bureaucracy.
Now, target package in hand, the Secretary of Defense walks in the same footsteps as those before him, playing Whac-a-Mole with cruise missiles when it’s clear that regional diplomacy and a political compromise with Iran is the most viable solution.
America spent decades building an unaccountable imperial executive infrastructure to fight terrorists. Now that the revolutionaries have grasped the reins of power, they are no longer content to simply cosplay as operators, sending rounds down range for the cameras while raging against the “deep state.” Are you even a hardcore D.C. power player if you’re not ordering airstrikes against apartment buildings in an urban area on actionable intel, collateral damage be damned? Do you even drone-strike, bro?
The Who’s Pete Townshend adds an important corollary to Tennyson’s verse about the inevitably of change: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Not even “coolly intellectual” Barack Obama could resist the allure of such raw power, the sexy ruthlessness of giving the order and watching an MQ-9 Reaper take out a High-Value Target. He even executed an American citizen by Hellfire missile without due process when the chance came up, for all the former president’s expertise in constitutional law. The precedent ought to give pause, at a time when keying a Tesla is being called an act of terrorism.
“This is not about the Houthis,” Hegseth noted in the group chat. “I see it as about two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish[ing] deterrence, which Biden cratered.”
It’s the old rule of the hammer. To the man with a kill list, everything looks like a terrorist. To the man without a clear strategic goal, every casus belli is an abstraction.
Perhaps in another group chat, one not shared with a journalist — or archived for future accountability as required by law — a “Small Group” of principals can reflect on America’s actual track record in the first War on Terror, before embarking on another version of it again.
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Because that’s what America is doing in Yemen. Identify targets; confirm; execute. No further thought required.
When the president names an enemy, America goes to war on autopilot.
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