War Is Boring

The U.S. Navy’s new strategy document, Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges, aims to describe how’s the world’s number-one navy will tackle seaborne threats including “terrorists and criminals prey[ing] on unstable and failing regions.” Problem is, the document conflates these two groups, and conflates terrorists with nationalist insurgents. In one key passage, the authors highlight the Navy’s “counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa which remove financial support to terrorists ashore and reduce instability and criminality at sea.”

There’s a great piece by Tom Cooper in the latest Combat Aircraft on the Yemeni air force and its campaign against Islamic separatists. Cooper criticizes the secretive Yemeni air service for participating in an industrial-style bombardment strategy that shows “very little understanding of classic [counter-insurgency] doctrine.”

During a panel at the New America Foundation (NAF), a respected Washington, D.C. think tank, several scholars with experience in the region questioned the Yemeni government’s ability to mount effective anti-terrorism operations within the nation’s borders.

by DAVID AXE A spokesman for the Somali Islamic group Al Shabab told reporters his forces have been bolstered by fighters from Yemen. “We have received fighters from the Arabian Peninsula — I mean in Yemen — to bolster our fighters on the ground,” Sheikh Ali Mohamoud Rage said. “There is not any other alternative [...]

by DAVID AXE As part of its escalating campaign against Islamic terrorists based in Yemen, the U.S. government has expanded efforts to crack down on terrorist financiers in the Middle Eastern country. But the counter-finance approach in Yemen is complicated by the same factors that have stymied similar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extremists operate [...]

by DAVID AXE More from War Is Boring‘s favorite cartoonist, Matt Bors. (Art: Matt Bors)