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Saudi Airstrikes in Yemen Haven't Stopped — They've Just Reached Halftime

In announcing the end of Operation Decisive Storm and start of Operation Restore Hope this week, the Saudis signaled a change in game plan — not an end to the fighting.
Photo by Trek Alshorbagy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

There's a whole lot of hard-to-follow but explosive drama going on in and around Yemen right now. Over the past month or so, Saudi and other Arab forces have been bombing the country, but with little effect.

That is, until this week, when they announced that they were stopping the airstrikes.

Or, depending on how you look at it, didn't announce that. Figuring out what actually is going on depends a lot on how you interpret words like stopping and airstrikes.

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There are a few popular yet woefully incomplete storylines people typically use to explain the multinational Middle East version of The Real Housewives of New Jersey but with Hellfire missiles that's going on right now in Yemen. One version holds that this is all about the ongoing battle between Sunni (as played by Saudi Arabia) and Shia (represented by Iran) Muslims for control of the Middle East. The main rebel faction in Yemen are the Houthis, a Shia group, and they're receiving some support from Iran.

Related: Saudi Arabia continues bombing Yemen despite announcing an end to air campaign

Another storyline is that the fighting is all about the north/south divide that persists in Yemen despite the country's unification in 1990. The Houthi (and most Yemeni Shia) are in the so-called North, which is actually more like the west of the country. The pro-Saudi forces are in the South (a.k.a., the eastern part of the country). In this formulation, the fighting is all about southern secession. Which is odd, because the south is home to the current and (mostly) legitimate president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. So really it would be the north seceding, but they don't want to leave and are none too happy about the prospect of anyone else bailing.

A third take: This is just fallout from the Arab Spring — much like what we're seeing in Libya and Syria — as the Sunni/Southern forces are led by the not terribly credible or popular president Hadi, while the Shia/Northern forces are allied with his also not extremely well-liked predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

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Basically, no matter how you slice it, Yemen has been a long-simmering mess just shy of being a failed state ever since it became a state 25 years ago.

Starting late last year, Houthi-led forces in the north made some real gains in the south, eventually catching up with Hadi and booting him out. Which was a triggering event for Saudi intervention and airstrikes. Over the last month or so, the Saudis have led a multinational Arab coalition in a campaign called Operation Decisive Storm (sometimes translated from Arabic as Operation Determined Storm). The operation has mostly involved airstrikes against forces allied with the Houthis and Saleh, and they've hardly been decisive.

"The al Houthis appear to have adapted, and the airstrikes will have a limited [tactical] effect going forward," AEI research fellow Katherine Zimmerman told me.

Limited tactical effect is much different than not working, but the idea that the airstrikes weren't working got picked up and bandied about pretty freely in the press. Some of that has to do with popular misconceptions about airpower and what it can and can't do. Some people are convinced that airstrikes never work. Others are convinced that airstrikes are almost always effective and pinpoint accurate (and that any airstrikes that fail to be those things are total failures). And there are a lot of people who somehow believe both things simultaneously — airstrikes never work except when they do, and then it's like the hand of God reaching down and surgically smiting the bad guys.

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The Saudi airstrikes seem to have been a lot more successful in hitting Army positions than Houthi forces.

But the more relevant portion of the misunderstanding has to do with the failure to distinguish between the tactical (blowing up this or that tank) and strategic (forcing leaders to act in a particular fashion). For example, when the Saudis announced the end of Operation Decisive Storm and start of Operation Restore Hope, it was interpreted by many in the West as a ceasefire. Thus, a great amount of confusion arose when the Saudis and their pals started bombing stuff all over Yemen just a day later.

This confusion stems partly from the prior misconception about the tactical effectiveness of airstrikes, but also from a simple failure to read the fine print. The statement issued by the (mostly official) Saudi Press Agency does say that Decisive Storm ended, but a close read reveals it doesn't say squat about ceasing the bombing. There is instead a line saying the Saudis continue to stop "any military movements and operations carried out by Houthi militias and their supporters and [prevent the Houthis] from using the weapons they have looted from the camps or smuggled from abroad."

A lot of commentators who took the limited tactical effects of the bombing to mean that the airstrikes were having no effect whatsoever thought the end of Decisive Storm meant they were giving up on airstrikes and going to some sort of ill-defined peacekeeping Plan B. But that's a bit like thinking a game ended at halftime because all the players went to the locker room. The new Operation Restore Hope is less an end to the fighting and more a Saudi playbook for fighting going forward.

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A handful of developments led to this. As recently as two weeks ago, there was a lot of speculation that the Saudis would need to mount a large, costly ground operation to squash the Houthis. This immediately brought up comparisons to one of Yemen's many, many civil wars. The 3-year-long edition of Yemeni Civil War launched in 1962, for instance, drew in heavy Egyptian involvement and caused much chaos.

In recent commentary about the possibility of a major ground intervention, the deadliest of all Q words — Quagmire — started cropping up. Heck, some folks were going so far as to predict that Yemen would become the Saudi Arabian equivalent of the Vietnam War. Which makes it less surprising that some observers misread the halftime break, and thought the Saudis were seeing the light of reason, declaring victory and throwing in the towel.

The second major development was that the UN slapped the Houthis with an arms embargo. The Iranians started making noises about how they didn't care and were going to challenge the embargo, but now the US has a carrier battle group nearby, floating in the general vicinity of the Saudi Navy, looking menacing and scary. The Iranian Navy doesn't have a good track record against the US, and what's likely to happen is a whole lot of Iranians having second thoughts about busting the embargo. In fact, an Iranian Navy convoy supposedly carrying weapons to the Houthis turned around yesterday and headed back to port.

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Finally, with little discussion — it's according to local news sources — the Saudis went from 35 to 80, and eventually to 120 airstrikes per day, and started hitting the Yemeni Army pretty hard. The Houthis, like most insurgencies, are difficult to hit from the air. The Yemeni Army, like most armies, has a lot of equipment, fixed installations, and other easy-to-target stuff. Accordingly, the airstrikes seem to have been a lot more successful in hitting Army positions than Houthi forces.

The upshot of all of this is that about a week or two ago, some Yemeni Army units got to thinking that discretion was the better part of valor. Units that had been sitting out the conflict or supporting Saleh and fighting alongside the Houthis threw their support behind Hadi's side. This came to a head earlier this week when the commander of the First Military District, Brigadier General Abdulrahman al-Halily, anounced his support of Hadi. That brought some 15,000 troops (out of a total army strength of maybe 60,000 to 70,000) into play.

The First Military District is in the northeast of Yemen, right along the Saudi border. Which makes it all the more intriguing that days after the al-Halily move, the Saudis called up their national guard for participation in the festivities.

Most American readers know the US National Guard as the guys who are called up by a state governor to help clean up after a disaster. The Saudi National Guard is an entirely different animal. Saudi Arabia basically has two completely separate armies (and arguably more, depending on what you count and how). The Saudi National Guard has about 100,000 soldiers (compared to almost 250,000 in the regular army), and lacks a lot of the armor, artillery, and other heavy weapons needed to slug it out with the big boys. But they are well trained, loyal, and reliable. The Saudi guard consists of all the various Bedouin tribes and other deep desert dwellers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and they act as a sort of insurance policy against unrest and insurrection — an always-on-call counterinsurgency force. This set-up has served the House of Saud quite well: Saudi National Guard troops have been effectively employed as peacekeepers in Bahrain, putting a lid on the Shia unrest there.

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Which brings us to the end of Operation Decisive Storm. Less than a day after the guard call-up, Operation Decisive Storm was declared over, and Operation Restore Hope started.

Saleh recently announced something to the effect of "Me? Work with the Houthis? Are you kidding? I've never even seen a Houthi!" He has also said he's willing to head back to the negotiating table. Taken together, that sounds an awful lot like Saleh is reading the writing on the wall and distancing himself from the Houthis.

Of course, the sequence of events as described here may be unplanned and coincidental. Yemen is where bright ideas, clever plans, and good intentions go to die. On the other hand, this is the Middle East, which is the most fertile conspiracy-theory breeding ground in the world.

Related: To win its war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia may have to split the country in two

Regardless, if you extend the trend of these events, it appears that Operation Restore Hope could be a way for the Saudis to stay nimble with regard to what actions to take. On one hand, they could just keep bombing shit. On the other hand, Saudi National Guard units (and maybe units from a theoretical Joint Arab Multinational Force) could move into Yemen at the invitation of Hadi to help provide his version of peace and stability.

For right now though, the Houthi forces are continuing to advance, even as they say they'd be willing to talk if it quits raining missiles. Oman claims that they have a magic peace plan they'll announce any day now. But it looks like the Saudis may simply continue to blow things up until all the many factions involved decide that it'll be easier to hash it out at a conference table than it will be to slug it out on the battlefield.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan