A Proportional Response? American Strategy and the Red Sea
“What is the virtue of a proportional response?” asks President Jed Bartlett of his National Security Council (NSC) in one episode of The West Wing. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That’s a proportional response.” Angrily, the president cuts off the aides trying to explain and interjects: “They do that, so we do this—it’s the cost of doing business. It’s been factored in. Am I right or am I missing something here?” Exasperated by the president’s interrogation of the virtues of a proportional response, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reluctantly admits, “It isn’t virtuous, Mr. President. It’s all there is, sir.”
The opening story arc of Aaron Sorkin’s magnum opus is an extended meditation on the limitations of military power and the responsibility of command. Faced with a crisis in the Middle East, a U.S. jet shot down over Syria, which happened to be carrying a member of his staff, the newly minted commander-in-chief struggles to calibrate his response to this affront to American military power. Ultimately, after asking his national security team to devise a “disproportional response” that “doesn’t make me think we are just docking somebody’s damn allowance,” Bartlett orders the original precision strikes to go ahead out of concern for the civilian casualties and diplomatic blowback that might attend a full-bore military incursion. The president’s chief of staff reminds Bartlett—and the viewer—that this is “how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible—it’s not nothing!”
Today, the United States faces the challenge of mounting a proportional response to Houthi aggression in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthi’s drone and missile blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is now well into its ninth month. The U.S. Navy has just dispatched its fourth sequential carrier strike group (CSG)—the USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts—to protect international shipping in the region. Thus far, the Biden administration’s preferred response has been to order the Navy into harm’s way and let U.S. warships intercept missile and drone attacks directly rather than to address the root causes of the crisis, which includes the administration’s own derelict Iran policy. This has empowered Tehran to finance and arm the Houthis. The administration’s response to the crisis in the Red Sea has been “reasonable,” “responsible,” and certainly “not nothing”—but by tying up scarce strategic resources and expending irreplaceable munitions against third-tier threats, it has been anything but proportional to the interests of the United States.
For the past nine months, the United States has stepped up to the plate to defend the freedom of the seas and the global commercial system from the Houthi’s blockade. Two aircraft carrier strike groups—led by the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—were already in the region when the Houthis announced their intention to attack shipping transiting the Bab el-Mandeb in support of Hamas’ war against Israel. Since then, the Theodore Roosevelt CSG and the Abraham Lincoln CSG have been diverted from the Pacific to stanch the bleeding from the global shipping system’s open sore. In doing so, Washington has elevated the Bab el-Mandeb to an equivalent level of importance as the Euro-Atlantic, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific theaters—the three regions where the Pentagon aims to maintain a round-the-clock carrier presence. By adopting a posture of direct defense of civilian shipping, the United States has also elected to expend $1 billion of scarce, difficult-to-procure munitions shooting down Houthi missiles and drones rather than addressing the root causes of the problem.
In effect, the White House and Department of Defense (DoD) created a new, de facto “Aden Station” that must constantly be serviced by the Navy, stretching an already-too-small fleet even further. Does the Houthi threat to the 14 percent of global maritime trade that passes through the Red Sea warrant the semi-permanent allocation of one-third of America’s forward-deployed carrier force? Does the principle of freedom of navigation justify the expenditure of the very same weapons the Navy needs to deter—and possibly win—a war against China? In short, has the response been proportional to America’s strategic interests?
The answer depends on what one means by “proportional response.” A commonplace and erroneous definition of proportionality—one which The West Wing peddles—is that to be proportional, a military response must employ a similar level of force as that which was used against you. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter.” By this standard, the Biden administration’s response to the Houthi threat could be seen as proportional. Ordering the Navy to intercept incoming drones and missiles and to conduct the occasional airstrike in retaliation against a successful attack on merchant vessels certainly keeps a lid on tensions and possible escalation. “It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible—it’s not nothing!” However, proportionality as parity is a falsehood. In international law, proportionality is a measure of the acceptability of civilian casualties and collateral damage relative to the value of a military objective, not the relationship between the level of violence employed by two sides of a conflict.
On the strategic level, however, the relevant question is whether the effort we exert in the Red Sea, the resources we expend, and the opportunity costs that those represent are proportional to the value of the results they have achieved. To this, the answer is decidedly no. For all the United States’ efforts to combat the Houthi threat, the Bab el-Mandeb remains too dangerous for many shippers to use, with a nearly 50 percent year-over-year decline in traffic as vessels sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead. The Suez Canal has seen its revenue decline by $2 billion as a result. If safeguarding freedom of transit through the Red Sea is a vital U.S. interest, Biden’s strategy has proven insufficient to meet the challenge. If it is not important enough to warrant a more forceful response to solve the root problem, then it certainly does not justify tying down one-third of America’s carrier force indefinitely to poorly manage the symptoms.
In effect, the Biden administration has elected to pursue a slow, expensive, and inefficient strategy for addressing the Houthi threat in the name of keeping the U.S. response superficially proportional to the level of violence thus far brought to bear by the Houthis. In terms of proportionality to national objectives, however, the current strategy is a poor match. A much more proportional—and likely to succeed—approach would have been to escalate against the Houthis beyond their ability to reply in kind and eliminate them from the board quickly and with extreme prejudice. Or Biden could have unshackled America’s Saudi allies to do the same. Or the administration could have taken decisive steps to cut Iran off from the sources of funds Tehran funnels to the Houthis and its other proxies. Each of these options represents a major escalation in the short term. Still, over the long term, it would free the U.S. Navy from an indefinite responsibility to cover Aden Station and halt the slow draining of the nation’s critical munitions arsenal.
The Biden administration’s approach to the Red Sea is in keeping with the post-Cold War mindset epitomized by The West Wing and endemic today among many who grew up watching it. Sorkin’s overarching thesis in A Proportional Response is that restraint is the morally superior course of action for a superpower like America. The United States should be a referee of conflicts around the world but ought not to act decisively to secure its interests. Thus, when Houthi terrorists threaten to blockade a critical waterway, the U.S. Navy is dispatched to the scene—not to solve the problem, but to just keep an eye on things and make sure nothing gets out of hand. That is “how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world.” The result, however, is the failure to secure America’s interests in the region while assuming risk and opportunity costs wildly out of proportion to the value gained.
Perhaps the next president should consider the “disproportional response” instead.
Samuel Byers is the Senior National Security Advisor at the Center for Maritime Strategy. He has previously worked in the Pentagon as an advisor to two Secretaries of the Navy. He holds an MA with distinction in War Studies from King’s College London and a BA with honors in Diplomatic History and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Image: Shutterstock.com.