These technologies aren’t just aerial surveillance devices. The Houthis understand and readily apply what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley explained in 2016, “on the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or three hours, you will be dead.” General Milley made his comments in light of the widespread use of drones and other rapidly developing battlefield technologies. These forces include Yemen’s internationally recognized government-in-exile, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which is allied with Saudi Arabia, and a panoply of militias and armed groups supported by the UAE. As he observes, they’ve even seemingly thought about what the future of warfare will look like:įorce mobility has been-and remains-fundamental to the Houthis’ success in battling elements of the Saudi and Emirati militaries as well as those forces they support.
And Michael Horton of the Jamestown Foundation observed the ways that in order to reach these advantages, their tactics have had to differentiate from the tactics used by guerrillas in previous eras. Two years ago, it was already apparent that the Houthis were on their way to victory. The Houthis: a case study in irregular warfare against a modern conventional military Such is the assessment that can be gleaned from studying recent successes in irregular warfare, such as the victory of the Houthis in Yemen over the Saudi coalition. His strategic ideas are still broadly correct, but if he were to write Guerrilla Warfare today, he would need to alter its tactical details.
Since Che Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare, his findings on how an irregular army can wage war against a conventional army, military technologies (as well as civilian technologies) have changed in ways that render his conclusions in need of being updated.
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