The aircraft carrier battle group is a legacy system going back to World War 2 that has no application in modern warfare. America's been exposed as an empty shell. It's not so much about the Red Sea. The Strait of Hormuz has just been guaranteed by the Houthi. The whole idea of the Strait of Hormuz was the perception that America could control it, but that's been exposed as a lie. So the Iranians are empowered. The Saudis in the UAEs are going ‘uh oh…’ Time to rethink strategic relationships because America can't defend anything. The whole aspect of what Americans do with carrier projection was the potential of action that creates deterrence. We don't have the potential of action. We can't defend the Red Sea against the Houthi, and we think we want to hook a jab with the Chinese in the Pacific. Are we high? America's been exposed as a nation that spends a trillion dollars a year on a military that can’t do anything!  (Scott Ritter.)

 

Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson: Yemen Exposes US, NATO Military WEAKNESS in Red Sea

 

Transcript of Scott Ritter's main contribution in Video: Scott Ritter & Larry Johnson: Yemen Exposes US, NATO Military Weakness

DANNY HAIPHONG: The ramifications of what Israel is doing has obviously spilled over well beyond the Gaza – what’s called an ‘enclave,’ but that part of Palestinian territory and now there is increasing tensions around the Red Sea with Yemen’s Ansar Allah [army][1] getting really deep in waging a blockade that's been pretty successful to this point in response to what's happening in Gaza, but of course there's more with Hezbollah. There have been - I feel like there's been more and more tensions regionally and Israel is talking about trying to get the US to help them push Hezbollah back on the border. Help us make sense of the regional ramifications and where this is going as we enter 2024.

SCOTT RITTER: Well first of all, let's reflect back on Nasrallah's [2] speech that he gave I think on October 9th [2023] two days after, and I call it the ‘escalation management speech,’ and because everybody's expecting Hezbollah to jump in and join the fight and Hezbollah have basically said, “We're in but our way. We're going to do it our way. We're not going to do it that way, because how Israel going to be strategically defeated here?

Israel set the parameters of victory being the destruction of Hamas. I think Larry [Johnson (also present in this Danny Haiphong video session)] and I agree Hamas has won. They're not going to be destroyed. So, Israel's already lost this war. Plus, if you're Hezbollah, your goal is the creation of a Palestinian state. So the war - you've got to keep the whole world's focus on that problem set and it's working against Israel.  The whole world has rallied behind it. The last thing you want to do is expand this conflict, because now, suddenly, the Palestinian issue is not the only issue.

In fact, it's going to be put on the back burner as you deal with bigger regional issues, like war with Iran. That's a bigger problem set than the Palestinian issue, so you don't want to expand this conflict.

So, you've seen a lot of escalation management, but it's been done very cleverly.  Hezbollah, for not wanting to get involved, has tied down one half of the Israeli Navy, one-third of the Israeli Air Force, one quarter of the Israeli army. They forced 70,000 people to be displaced in northern Israel, putting a huge burden on the Israeli economy, and they're just humiliating the Israelis on a daily basis on the border.

And, here's the thing: You think Hamas has tunnels? Hezbollah has tunnels - better tunnels, deeper tunnels, longer tunnels. You know that tunnel that the Israelis dug up. It's amazing right at the, I think it's the Erez Crossing,[border between north Gaza strip and Israel] [3] and suddenly 400 meters from the Crossing - How far along and we have 70 odd days of this conflict - and they go, ‘Oh my God, the biggest tunnel imaginable, that you can literally drive a car through is right here!’

Wait a minute! You guys didn't find that out until now? That tunnel is small compared to the tunnels that Hezbollah has carved into Northern Israel. When the time comes, Hezbollah will sieze northern Israel. There's nothing Israelis can do to stop it. They will take Kiryat Shmona. [4] They will take other towns. They will take the Galilee.  Israel can't stop them.

But Hezbollah doesn't want to do that right now. Hezbollah has let it be known that they can do that, and they will do that, if called upon.

And this is why you're seeing Israel hesitate. Because you've got all the chest thumping guys saying, ‘We need to go in and kick Hezbollah’s butt!’

Israel proved they can't kick Hezbollah’s butt. They tried in 2006.  It didn’t work. Hezbollah has gotten even better. They’ve become combat-hardened with a decade-plus experience in Syria.

So, there’s nothing the United States can do. You think American pilots and American airplanes dropping American bombs are going to do a better job than Israeli pilots and American airplanes dropping American bombs? No.

First of all our pilots aren't that good anymore.  We just don't train that well. Training is expensive. When was the last time we did a real honest-to-god, you know air attack against somebody with an integrated air defense, or somebody who has the potential of doing that? Not in a long time. 

Our Pilots don't know how to fight. And so, we’d be going through a learning curve that would be unreal and then we get humiliated because it's not stopping anything.  And you think Americans - when Hezbollah moves into northern Israel - you think Americans are going to drop bombs on Kiryat Shmona? You think Americans are going to drop bombs on Israel?  Ain't going to happen.

See, Hezbollah isn't going to sit in southern Lebanon and let the fight come to them. Hezbollah’s going to take the fight to northern Israel, and now the Israelis are going to have to bomb their own cities, bomb their own people.

America will stay out of that fight because we are not going to bomb Israel.

Hezbollah’s thinking. They know this. If I know this, Israel knows this, America knows this. That's why I'm not too worried about an expansion of the fight, because Israel knows they’ll just get beat up.

Now we come to the Houthi[s]. You know, this is very rude of me, but every time, when I think of the Houthi, I just think of, you know some wild dudes from Mad Max, you know, just yelling, ‘Charge!’ and ‘Go!’ Because, they just sort of, on October 19th, they just appeared. The Houthi just woke up, said, ‘Screw it! Launch!

And, everybody’s like, ‘What just happened?’

‘The Houthis just fired on Israel!’

‘That really happened?’

The Houthi: ‘Hell yeah! That happened. We’re going to do it again!’

‘Launch!

‘Launch!

‘Launch!’

And then they say:

‘Screw it! Take a ship! Fly helicopters out there!’

Then everyone goes: ‘What the hell's going on? What are the Houthi doing?'

And then the Houthi just say, ‘We’re going to shut it all down.’

And they have. They’ve effectively closed the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, that little narrow piece of water between Yemen and Djibouti. They've shut it down, the Red Sea. You can't go to the Suez Canal right now because the Houthi have shut it down.

And now America's going, ‘What do we do?’

So, we're moving a fleet down and we're realizing we can't do anything!

Now, the big news isn't that America can't beat the Houthi. I mean, we can't. Then we're not going to. To secure those straits, we'd have to put forty thousand marines on the ground. We don't have forty thousand marines to put on the ground. We can't get forty thousand Marines there. And once we get them on the ground, we can't sustain it. There's one hundred thousand-plus Houthi out there. We ain't going to beat them. Saudi Arabia's been trying since 2014, using American planes with American bombs. Using American intelligence hasn't worked.  

The Houthi can destroy Saudi Arabia's oil production capacity. That's one big thing here. That's causing everybody to hit pause on that.

Saudi Arabia is like, ‘You guys you can do what to the Houthi? Pause! Pause! Pause! Please pause! Because they're going to blow up the Aramco Oil Fields and we don't want that to happen.’

The United Arab Emirates are going, ‘Wait a minute! You’re going to do what? We don't want to have anything with that either. Pause! Pause! Pause!’ Because, they don't want to lose their oil production capacity either.

So, America’s sitting there, going, ‘Hmm.’

But here's the big story. It's not about that Strait. You know how America has been saying for decades: ‘We guarantee that the Strait of Hormuz will be open that Iran will never shut it down, that if Iran ever tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz the American 5th Fleet will keep it open.’

That's just been proven to be a lie. Because we can't beat the hoodie and we damn sure aren’t going to beat the Iranians.  What this proves is that America's fleet - all of its dozen, you know, aircraft carrier battle groups, can't do anything. It's a waste of money, a total waste of money. We have to be careful about getting sunk, losing the carrier.

As Larry said, I'm an American taxpayer. Okay, so I got the USS Carney out there, you know the Aegis class, you know, Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. It's got 90 missiles - SM2s, SM6s  - other things, out there, and each one of them runs between one point one and four million dollars each, depending on which missile you use.

The Houthi have thousands of these drones and cheap missiles. They cost them two thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, maybe ten grand for the good stuff.  And the Houthi are just sitting there - again the guy from Mad Max - and they're going to launch these things, and the Carney’s going to go, ‘Detected, launch, shot! Detected, launch, shot! Detected, launch, shot! And now they're done. They fired off 90.

And, as Larry said, they don’t have the tenders anymore. They can't bring up the ship that goes resupply in. They got to pull the Carney out. And then, who's gonna replace the Carney? Some other funky name ship? This could fire up 90 missiles and have to go. Another one and go?  There's only so many, you know, missile destroyers in a carrier battle group! And when they deplete this stuff the carrier's got to go because he can't stay there. [Because] something’s going to hit the carrier.

And now here's the other thing. What did [sic] the Ukrainians been using that’s driving the Russians crazy in the Black Sea?  The underwater drones.

Well Russia captured some of them. And, I don't know if you saw it, Larry, but Russia just published photographs saying, ‘We've just produced our own underwater drone!’

And Russia has really good relationships with the Iranians. So I guarantee you that if Russia produced an underwater drone, the Iranians are producing an underwater drone. If the Iranians produce it, the Houthi have it!

And, so we're going to be sitting there going, ‘Shoot down this and shoot down this and shoot down this! Holy S***! Twenty underwater drones coming at me!’

It’s over, ladies and gentlemen. We lost the carrier. Five thousand Americans are dead.

This is the reality of the carrier battle group. It's a legacy system going back to World War 2 that has no application in modern warfare, whatsoever.  America's been exposed as literally the empty shell that we are. It's not so much about the Red Sea. The Strait of Hormuz has just been guaranteed. We just lost the Strait of Hormuz. Because the whole idea of the Strait of Hormuz was the perception that America could do something. That's been exposed as a lie. So the Iranians are empowered. The Saudis in the UAEs are going ‘uh oh…’  

I think it's time we have to rethink our strategic relationships here because America can't defend anything. The whole aspect of what Americans do with carrier projection was the potential of action that creates deterrence. We don't have the potential of action. Where can we go Larry? Where can we go? We can't go into Europe. We've proven that. We can't defend the Red Sea against the Houthi, and we think we want to hook a jab with the Chinese in the Pacific. Are we high? America's been exposed as a nation that spends a trillion dollars a year on a military that can’t do anything!

NOTES

 [1] The Houthi movement (/ˈhuːθi/; Arabic: الحوثيون al-Ḥūthīyūn [al.ħuː.θiː.juːn]), officially known as Ansar Allah[a] (أنصار الله ʾAnṣār Allāh, lit. 'Supporters of God'), is a Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Saada Governorate, Yemen in the 1990s. It is predominantly made up of Zaidi Shias, with their namesake leadership being drawn largely from the Houthi tribe. (Wikipedia).

 [2] Lebanese Cleric and Secretary-general of Hezbollah

 [3] The Erez Crossing (Hebrew: מעבר ארז), also known as the Beit Hanoun Crossing (Arabic: معبر بيت حانون), is a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. It is located at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, between the Israeli kibbutz of Erez and the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun.  (Wikipedia).

 [4] Kiryat Shmona is a city in the Northern District of Israel on the western slopes of the Hula Valley near the Lebanese border. (Wikpedia).