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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority

Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.

If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.

But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They're not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah I guess if we're doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

More that we could switch to a smaller and more disposable shipping fleet, where any damage to a ship was negligible to the volume of trade

this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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