An Enduring Strategic Challenge
On 24 May 2024, the Australian Government quietly designated Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) as a terrorist organisation.[1] The Australian terrorist designation was made long after the Houthis initiated attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Hamas following the 7 October 2023 attacks, and long after the Houthis became the de facto government for northern Yemen (circa 2014), emulating the governance models of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. When the Houthis threatened maritime shipping in October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas and the ‘Axis of Resistance’, they became a hostile actor to the global system that could no longer be ignored.
Understanding the Houthis is important for several reasons. First, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is now engaged under Operation Hydranth in supporting the US’s and the UK’s defensive actions, targeting the capabilities used in Houthi rebel attacks in the Red Sea.[2] Second, an insurgency wins by not losing; to date this principle is playing out for the Houthis. US and UK efforts have failed to prevent continuing attacks against Red Sea shipping. Understanding how the Houthis have resiliently withstood the Saudis, British and Americans is imperative, given the ADF’s similar methodologies for waging war. Third, the Houthis have demonstrated asymmetric capabilities with strategic effect in their campaign of littoral strike. Analysing how this has occurred is particularly relevant to understanding how a much weaker power can persevere in imposing costs on sea lines of communication despite the seemingly overwhelming ubiquitous technical surveillance capabilities of its stronger opponents. Fourth, support for insurgency creates a proliferating proxy warfare dynamic as regional and global powers seek to impose costs upon their competitors. In this context, the Houthis are just as much a nationalist insurgency as they are a manifestation of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ or the Iranian Threat Network (ITN). This proxy dynamic threatens retaliation against Israeli or American interests in the Middle East. It also represents a form of strategic asymmetry relevant to ADF preparedness in a period of strategic competition against a broad range of threats.
This Houthi campaign of strikes and attempted strikes against maritime shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is highly asymmetric. In 2024, the targeting of just 5 per cent of maritime traffic transiting the Red Sea (some 134 vessels from October 2023 to December 2024) had resulted in the re-routing (or other forms of disruption) of 20 per cent of global maritime traffic.[3] Many of these attacks were conducted with Iranian-supplied military equipment.
The way that the West is currently embroiled in the Houthi insurgency has parallels in the engagement of Western interests in the conflict in Yemen in the mid-Cold War period of the 1960s. This proxy conflict grew in scope over time, metastasising with broader regional tensions, eventually contributing to the causes of major conventional conflict during the Six-Day War. Proxy competition also spread laterally to undermine British interests in Oman during the Dhofar War. There are lessons that might be drawn from this period of history that could help mitigate the risk of vertical escalation into regional war today.
This article explores the implications and dimensions of proxy wars involving Yemen in recent history. In doing so, it seeks to familiarise Australian policymakers with the roots of the Houthi insurgency and to inform ADF decision-makers tasked with prosecuting operations against Ansar Allah’s maritime strike capabilities under Operation Hydranth.
This article builds upon themes concerning the nature of strategic competition which will be further explained in my forthcoming book Riding Tigers: The Strategic Logic of Proxy War. The case studies examined in this article, complement and reinforce the book’s key findings—most importantly, that proxy wars emerge during periods of strategic competition. The implications of this understanding are profound for their relevance to ADF efforts to ‘shape’ and ultimately ‘deter’ confrontations that occur between state and non-state powers from escalating into open conflict—thus avoiding the need for the ADF to ‘respond’ to such conflict. In this regard, it is critical to acknowledge that Australia is not, and will never be, the only party wishing to ‘shape’ the outcomes of strategic competition. Thus we need to understand how other competitors will shape the strategic environment toward their desired ends.
Cold War Competition: The Egyptian–Saudi Cold War
Be sure to tell [Saudi King] Faisal that we will not be dragged into his little war in the Yemen.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s guidance to Ellsworth Bunker[4]
During the 1950s, President Nasser of Egypt sought to challenge British influence in the Middle East and exploited the unstable environment of Yemen to do so. At this time, Nasser used confrontation with the British as a foil to justify his legitimacy as the leader of the Arab world. Britain was vulnerable to subversion due to having recently faced simultaneous crises in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Borneo, begetting a perception of the end of the British colonial period. Conversely, these overlapping crises sharpened London’s perception that its strategic interests were under threat and that it needed to generate cost-effective response options.[5] The Soviet Union was the other key player. Having built upon the Comintern of the 1920s and 1930s, by the 1950s it had codified a pattern of ‘economic penetration, propaganda, subversion and, if necessary, revolution’.[6] In the post-World War II environment, particularly in the post-1956 Suez crisis period, Moscow began to weaponise Arab nationalism as a component of strategic competition.
In light of the rising threat of Arab nationalism, by June of 1955 British strategic thinking had extended to the use of proxy methods to clear up ‘the present troubles in the Aden Protectorate’.[7] Limited provision of arms to Yemeni tribesmen had begun by May 1958, with the stated purpose being to enable cross-border raids into Yemen against military posts and lines of communication.[8] The British also sought to unify the tribes in the Aden hinterland under a ‘Federation of Arab Emirates of the South’.[9]
Yemen’s leader, Imam Ahmed, believed that the concept of the Federation was a challenge to his power base, the Zaydhi Shi’a. This was because the predominantly Sunni tribes of the Federation shared a fraternal tie with the two-thirds of Yemenis who followed the Sunni branch of Islam. Imam Ahmed thus believed that the ‘Free Yemeni’ movement was supported by the British administration in Aden.[10] Consequently, he replied in kind by seeking to foster dissent between the tribes that constituted the Federation, exacerbated by the provision of arms.[11] Ahmed also courted Eastern Europe, Russia and China, while accepting Nasser’s proposal for a United Arab Republic (UAR) between Egypt, Syria and the Yemeni Imamate.
In 1956, Soviet Ambassador Evgenii Kiselev consulted with Nasser about the provision of Soviet support to Yemen.[12] This outreach was partly driven by Egypt’s resistance to the British, French and Israelis during the Suez crisis.[13] Moscow was thus presented with a wedge against NATO solidarity, with President Eisenhower siding publicly against British and French policy. Soviet arms shipments began to flow to Egypt and Yemen, closely followed by Soviet and Egyptian military missions to Sana’a. The Soviet advisers were ‘responsible for weapons maintenance and training and the Egyptians providing instruction on strategy and tactics at the new military college in Sana’a’.[14] Soviet ‘volunteers’ were also deployed to Egypt, with as many as 1,000 technicians and instructors deployed by November 1956.[15]
A Soviet interest-free loan to Yemen facilitated the construction of a port at al-Hudaydah, inaugurated in January 1962, followed by a TU-16-capable airport near Sana’a.[16] This ‘dual-use infrastructure’ overshadowed the Bab el-Mandeb straits at the eastern exit of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and exacerbated Western fears of Soviet intention to dominate the northern Indian Ocean region and thus hold Middle Eastern petroleum exports at risk.
In 1961, Nasser’s UAR project started to collapse. Imam Ahmed, fearing the level of Egyptian influence that had been created during the UAR era, sought to balance it by accepting American aid.[17] From a Soviet point of view, they risked ‘losing Yemen’ in a manner akin to the later Politburo concerns about losing Afghanistan in 1979. Nasser, furious at Ahmed’s affront to his socialist project, called for the Imam’s overthrow.[18]
On 26 September 1962, ‘free officers’ led a coup that overthrew the centuries-old Yemeni Imamate and established the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR).[19] Egyptian support for the Republican government in Sana’a followed so closely thereafter that observers saw Egyptian influence driving the Yemeni revolutionaries.[20] The Egyptian plan was to ‘use “nationalism” and republicanism to undermine’ and ‘thus to overthrow the present regime’ that, in turn, might ‘make the British position and the military base in Aden untenable’.[21] A Soviet-supported air-bridge began almost immediately after the coup—indeed, suspiciously soon after the coup—between Cairo and Sana’a, alongside the Egyptian merchant marine beginning 1 October.[22]
These logistic support efforts occurred concurrently with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a context that highlights the need for a global view of strategic competition. Rapid Soviet decision-making following the coup manifested in Khrushchev’s support for the dispatch of Soviet pilots and planes. It is notable that China’s limited incursion into India—the Sino-Indian War—also occurred at the same time, and the combination of these events undoubtedly left US policymakers with limited capacity to also consider strategic developments in Yemen. It is unclear, but these concurrent crises may have been the basis of a deliberate strategic calculus by the Soviets to exploit the West’s distraction in order to achieve a fait accompli in Yemen.
The Aden Emergency
Less than a year after the coup d’état in Sana’a, in October 1963 a tribal uprising began in the Radfan—the mountainous region north of Aden.[23] By December, the British were forced to declare a state of emergency in Aden due to escalating political violence. This declaration was significant as Aden was, at this time, the home of Britain’s Middle East Command—the headquarters for the region which could also base a rapid-reaction force.[24] In other words, it fulfilled a position of strategic importance commensurate with that held by Royal Air Force Base Akrotiri in Cyprus today.
The British counterinsurgency efforts that began in October 1963 were soon losing ground against the Egyptian-supported National Liberation Front in the Radfan area of the Federation of South Arabia territory (i.e. present-day southern Yemen) and in Aden itself.[25] Egypt supported multiple ‘horses’, its influence extending to the Organisation (later Front) for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen, which mounted mass demonstrations to discredit colonial authority.[26] The British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) summarised:
The Yemeni Republicans will continue to try to undermine the authority of the Federal regime, especially that of the Sherif of Beihan, by encouraging disorders and revolts, by actively supporting tribal dissidents in the Protectorate and … by using Sana’a Radio for inflammatory broadcasts.[27]
In response to this threat, commencing in the summer of 1964, the British responded in kind by supplying arms and money to Royalist Yemeni tribesmen (i.e., supporters of the Zaydi Shi’a Imamate) under Operation Rancour.[28] The impetus for this operation was a British view of Egyptian complicity in sponsoring an ‘organised campaign of terrorism’ in Aden.[29] By 1964, the British had concluded that the Egyptians had assumed ‘complete direction’ over the insurgency.[30]
Over time, British support escalated to include the covert supply of weapons and active organisation of small-scale retaliatory operations carried out by royalist Yemeni tribesmen.[31] British and French mercenaries (66 British and 24 French, who were financed by Saudi Arabia and logistically supported by Israeli military aircraft) were reportedly used to aid these rebel groups—seemingly demonstrating a discreet policy position of containment without confrontation.[32] The British mindset of retaliating by sponsoring proxy warfare as a ‘punishment’ was evident through Joint Action Committee deliberations that carefully and discreetly calibrated such operations through British-sponsored tribes against Egyptian-sponsored attacks in the Federation of South Arabia and in Aden.[33]
British efforts at proxy warfare were amplified by the use of ‘unattributable propaganda’ to highlight ‘Egyptian brutality, imperialism, and subversion’.[34] British policymakers saw Egyptian influence as destabilising their plans for an orderly transition to local governance when they withdrew from Aden in November 1967.[35] This sense of threat led to the establishment of the South Arabian Action Group (SAAG), whose stated purpose was to ‘weaken the Egyptian position in Yemen’.[36]
Proxy Warfare as a Form of Strategic Competition
Egyptian interests in the YAR (North Yemen) were ultimately thwarted by the Royalist Yemeni insurgency against the Republican government. The support required from Egypt grew from several hundred commandos in October 1962 to roughly 70,000 men by the summer of 1965 as the insurgency matured.[37] Former Egyptian General Muhammad Fawzi, Minister of Defence during the 1960s, subsequently confirmed that such heightened Egyptian expenditure of resources was never intended—it was always meant to be a limited action.[38] Yemeni Royalists were creating a quagmire for the Egyptian military, much as Afghan mujahedeen would do for the Soviets two decades later. In the summer of 1965, the Yemeni Republican effort seemingly culminated, suggesting that the British efforts at proxy warfare had been effective.[39]
The Egyptians withdrew from Yemen by 15 December 1967, with the country divided. Generally speaking, most of the countryside was in the hands of the Royalists while the cities were held by the Republican government. The Egyptian withdrawal was likely influenced by the attainment of their (and their Soviet sponsor’s) strategic objective of removing British influence from Aden and, therefore, the region.[40] It is also notable that, at the time of the commencement of the Six-Day War in June 1967, Egypt had approximately half its ground forces still bogged down in Yemen, dislocated from where they were needed in the Sinai.[41] Egypt’s attention and resolve were also diminished by its concurrent support to Somalia, southern Sudanese forces, and the Eritrean Liberation Front during the 1960s.[42] While the Egyptians were undoubtedly influenced in their decision to withdraw from Yemen by the significant losses they had incurred during these conflicts, it was not the sole determinative factor.
Absent the context of competition, the Saudi government sought to end the Yemeni civil war by recognising the YAR and abandoning its Royalist proxy. The Soviets filled the gap that the Egyptian withdrawal created, using their pilots to directly intervene in supporting the YAR, an approach that emulated their strategic behaviour in the Korean War (Soviet aviators likewise supported the North Korean war effort a decade earlier).[43] Ultimately, however, Soviet focus shifted alongside Egyptian priorities to the War of Attrition over the Sinai (1967–1973). The Yemeni civil war thus came to an end in December 1970 absent support from the patron states: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union and Britain.
Lessons
An Arab ‘Cold War’ emerged for the leadership of the Arab Middle East. This regional competition existed within the context of the global Cold War, in this case, placing the Soviets and British in competition over the strategic terrain of the Bab al-Mandab Straits and the Red Sea.
The US understood the significance of this emergent competition. This is evidenced by President Kennedy’s National Security Memorandum 227 of 27 February 1963, which offered to base a US Air Defence squadron in Saudi Arabia with the purpose to ‘deter UAR air operations’ and thus contain the competition in Yemen.[44] The Soviet Union backed Egypt as its regional proxy in order to further its strategic interests in the Middle East, including Yemen.[45] Perhaps sensing success in Yemen, Russia commenced support to Somalia in 1964, thus underscoring the strategic interests that had inspired its Yemen adventure—controlling the Bab el-Mandeb straits.[46] Soviet policy was borne by a sense of a new ‘correlation of forces’ in the Middle East at the commencement of the 1960s.[47] Rather than achieving its objectives, however, the Soviet Union was dragged into the Yemen conflict by Egypt, a situation that paralleled the experience of the US in South Vietnam over the same period.
Underlying such dynamics is another facet of this Arab ‘Cold War’: the financial and ideological support provided by Saudi Arabia to the Muslim Brotherhood from the mid-1950s through to 1990.[48] This subtle support most sharply manifested itself in the failed uprising of the Arab Nationalist Movement in Egypt in June 1969. In other words, it is important to recognise that a sub-competition also existed, beyond that between the major powers—the Soviet Union, the UK and the US.
The Yemeni civil war left the YAR (North Yemen) in a state of disrepair with limited resources to rebuild. As a consequence, it remained closely tied to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia faced a new competition with the nascent Marxist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, or ‘South Yemen’), which had won the Aden insurgency on 29–30 November 1967.[49] Riyadh cultivated an army of ex-Royalist Yemeni from the north and ex-sultans from the former southern protectorates of the Federation as its proxies in the PDRY. Thus, Riyadh imposed costs upon the PDRY and kept its options open.[50] In its efforts to maintain influence over the Bab el-Mandeb straits, the Soviet Union directly supported the PDRY. In doing so it proved how fickle it could be as a patron by its switching support from the YAR to the PDRY and thereby demonstrating how its actions were guided by its evolving national interests rather than its former allegiances. It is to the proxy warfare dynamics employed by South Yemen that we shall now turn.
Late-Cold War Competition over Oman
An outcome of the Aden Emergency was the emergence of the Communist government in PDRY (South Yemen). Almost immediately, in 1965 the Communist government in Aden established a front organisation—the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF, later the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, PFLOAG)—to wage an insurgency that pursued the secession of Dhofar from Oman.[51] The DLF was also quickly supported by other revolutionary regimes in the region: Iraq, for example, trained some 140 fighters in guerrilla warfare in the winter of 1965.[52]
Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War served to radicalise Arab opinion across the Middle East. The ignominious British withdrawal from Aden in November 1967 further amplified Arab nationalist sentiment and the perceived benefit of using irregular warfare methods. This was the first example of the British having been militarily defeated in the region by ‘Communist Revolutionary Warfare’ doctrine, which was exploited to its full by Communist propagandists. Smarting from the humiliating experience of withdrawal from Aden, Britain refused to allow itself a second defeat in Oman, coming so soon after its Aden fiasco.[53]
Capitalising on the burgeoning nationalist sentiment, the DLF insurgency soon came to dominate large swathes of the Dhofar countryside. This included the Jebel highlands region, which accounted for some 80 per cent of the Dhofar region.[54] From 1968–70, the DLF campaign was supported by South Yemen, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Importantly, this backing was hardly fraternal; the Soviet Union and PRC were then in competition for influence globally. It was this dynamic that saw Dhofari leadership training in both China and the Soviet Union, the PRC establishing guerrilla training camps in South Yemen, Cuban guerrilla warfare instructors schooling Dhofari rebels in South Yemen, and even the provision of Chinese combat advisers in Oman (until January 1968 when an adviser was killed in an ambush).[55] In other words, a local competition for influence in Arabia drew major powers already locked in strategic competition.
The writ of the Sultan of Oman was, by 1970, contained to the immediate surrounds of Salalah on the coast and South Yemen, such was the success of the Dhofari insurgency. The PDRY unsuccessfully sought to spread the rebellion to other regions of Oman. The DLF, now known as the PFLOAG, was capable of fielding 2,000 fighters in the field for offensive operations and was supported by another 3,000 militia members in the Jebel, capable of defensive operations.[56] A competing insurgent organisation, the National Democratic Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf (NDFLOAG), attempted a ‘focoist’ insurrection in northern Oman on 12 June 1970, which proved a spectacular failure.[57]
In 1970 a palace coup—with UK Chiefs of Staff backing—led to Sandhurst graduate Prince Qaboos bin Said becoming Sultan.[58] British counterinsurgency support to the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) followed, as did eventual support from Iran in 1973.
British support proved particularly consequential in rolling back PFLOAG influence in Dhofar. The trust placed in the British advisers by Sultan Qaboos enabled a collaborative and ultimately war-winning ‘hearts and minds’ approach to counterinsurgency efforts against FPLOAG. This had been impossible under his stubborn father, who preferred more repressive (and counterproductive) methods. This counterinsurgency effort was reinforced by the establishment of a minor British footprint operating from Salalah alongside the SAF and would soon involve the use of irregular tribal militia—the firqa, firaq or firqat. Britain once again found itself fighting fire with fire, waging cross-border raids and fomenting proxy warfare into South Yemen in a covert action that was strongly supported by the Chief of General Staff, Sir Michael Carver (April 1971 through October 1973).[59]
At Sultan Qaboos’s request, the British began to train a firqa for ‘unattributable small-scale guerrilla operations’, known as Operation Dhib.[60] The British rationale for supporting this request was that the agreement was intended to aid the British to resist requests for direct intervention in support of the SAF, a situation that would have risked escalating the conflict. This risk was acutely felt in May 1972, when cross-border artillery and air-strikes were exchanged.[61] The proxy effort proliferated; the Jaysh al-‘Asifa (‘army of the storm’) firqa was recruited by MI6 with Saudi Arabian funding to conduct raids into South Yemen, and Sultan Qaboos also directly mobilised a 250-man firqa independently of the British.[62]
Ultimately, the British-backed campaign was able to roll back the PFLOAG towards the Omani border with South Yemen. This followed the flawed decision by the PFLOAG’s leadership to fight conventionally from December 1974 until March 1975 to defend its logistics bases just inside the Omani border.[63] Becoming fixed to its logistics bases removed the advantages of guerrilla warfare, making British-provided firepower decisive. The insurgency thus concluded in January 1976, albeit with the final PFLOAG operation attempted on 9 May 1979.[64]
Concurrently to the Dhofar insurgency, a minor war broke out between North and South Yemen in September–October 1972. Hostilities were initiated by the North, preceded by incursions of Saudi-supported rebels in February, involving the mounting of attacks in South Yemen, in addition to an assassination attempt against Prime Minister Ali Nasir Muhammad in May.
In both the YAR (North Yemen) and PDRY (South Yemen), Soviet and Chinese competition for influence continued apace throughout the 1970s. Beijing’s efforts were ultimately frustrated by an atmosphere of instability and a gradually radicalising regime in Aden.[65] Of course, both the YAR and PDRY regimes played the foreign powers off against each other, with Soviet largesse ultimately winning out. It must be noted that this competition for influence in Yemen occurred during the period of Soviet reversal in Somalia, in which Moscow lost access to the port of Berbera (which had been cultivated through the 1960s, with port visits beginning from 1972).[66] The Soviet Union scrambled to pivot support to the revolutionary Ethiopian state (led by the Derg) following the 1974 revolution and thus to retain its influence over the Bab-el Mandeb straits. It is therefore unsurprising that it had a low risk appetite for the potential loss of port facilities at Aden (PDRY) and Hudaydah (YAR).
Lessons
Following the PDRY’s success in Aden and South Yemen, Marxist-Leninist theory, accentuated by the interests of its major power sponsors, urged expansion of the conflict into Oman. This strategy was initially successful and, had British will not been so resolute, it very well may have succeeded. It is important to recognise that multiple subversive organisations may themselves be competing for influence, and that the manner in which such influence is created is important. The PFLOAG employed a slow and deliberate expansion that was proving successful; the NDFLOAG attempted a rapid insurrection which proved unsuccessful.
While there are abundant lessons for counterinsurgency practice demonstrated by the British in the Dhofar campaign, of particular relevance to this paper is the British proclivity to engage in proxy warfare. It did so with the support of Saudi Arabia, which unsurprisingly had negative second-order effects. Saudi Arabia’s interests in its near abroad lay behind its support to North Yemen, much as British interests in Oman lent MI6 support for the raising of these tribal militias in South Yemen. The cautionary lesson is the potential for any proxy warfare action to be reciprocated and, in turn, to expand the conflict horizontally, even though its ascribed purpose is to constrain escalation vertically. In the case of this Cold War example of competition over Eastern Arabia, the conduct of proxy warfare also had the effect of fomenting divisions within South Yemen’s own borders—divisions that manifested in a brief civil war in January 1986.[67]
A New Competition—the Shi’a-Sunni Cold War
In 1990, North and South Yemen merged into today’s state of Yemen. The loss of external patronage from the major powers likely contributed to this reconciliation, albeit with ongoing distinctions between the north and south that continued to re-emerge in Yemeni politics. Saudi support pivoted to the Yemeni forces, despite its history of suspicion, driven by the markedly changed context in the post-9/11 era. Salafi-jihadism, in the form of the al-Qaeda presence in Yemen (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)), manifested in the USS Cole and French super-tanker Limburg attacks in 2000.
Home-grown discontent against Riyadh initially flared during the siege of Mecca (1979) and was channelled by AQAP into a regional insurgency against Riyadh in the spring of 2003.[68] Containing the AQAP threat was the foremost consideration behind Saudi policy to support Sana’a. The second driving factor was the growing importance of the Shi’a al-Houthi tribe, which challenged Sana’a’s dominance over Yemeni politics.[69]
The Houthi movement has its origins in the fall of the Zaydi Imamate following the Egyptian-supported coup d’état of 1962. The roots of today’s conflict thus lie with the long-term repercussions from Nasser’s ill-considered interference in Yemeni politics. As radical Sunnism proliferated (including the teachings of Wahhabi doctrine with Saudi backing), the Zaydis perceived their culture to be at risk. What emerged was ‘resistance’ to the ‘Sunnisation’ of Zaydism, exacerbated by the marginalisation of the Zaydi community from its former role in leading the Imamate.[70] Thus, the term ‘resistance’ resonates at the core of Houthi grievances, a grievance routinely refreshed by external interference in Yemeni affairs.
Houthi rebels scrawled graffiti on government buildings in Sada’a in 2003 in opposition to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s support for the US-led invasion of Iraq.[71] Wide-scale repression, involving hundreds of arrests, attempted to disrupt and crush the movement. In response, Husayn al-Huthi ‘exhorted his followers to stop paying taxes’ and to ‘take up positions in the mountains in preparation for a guerrilla war’.[72] From these origins, the First Sada’a War began. Husayn was martyred in 2004, with his martyrdom serving as a ‘noble bandit’ or ‘Robin Hood’ mobilising narrative for the Zaydis, as historian Eric Hobsbawm would have described it.[73]
By 2006, thousands of men were fighting for the Houthis, drawn toward ‘coasting the wave’ of rebellion against their rival tribes or the government.[74] With the sixth surge in fighting in 2009, it was clear that with each confrontation the intensity of fighting increased as new grievances were provoked.[75] In the words of anthropologist Marieke Brandt, these wars were ‘neither a power struggle of local tribes, nor a social revolution of the economically and politically marginalised, nor a sectarian war. Rather they were all three at once’.[76]
In short, President Saleh’s repressive response to the Houthi insurgency only inflamed broader social grievances, and thus provoked a cycle of self-defeating behaviour. The Houthi insurgency became more capable year by year. Worse, government spending—even with American military support—exacerbated economic fragilities in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. Between 1999 and 2008, youth unemployment doubled, and overall unemployment grew to approximately 35 per cent.[77] In such an environment, some corrupt government officials had an interest in perpetuating the war as a means of generating personal wealth.[78]
Concurrently, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) fuelled a growing American interest in the fragile state of Yemen. Efforts to partner with the Saleh government to fight AQAP while minimising ‘boots on the ground’ gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘by, with and through’, ‘remote warfare’ or ‘light footprint’ models of counterterrorism.[79] This approach quickly became fraught with divergent interests: the US focused on AQAP, while President Saleh increasingly focused on countering competition to government rule. At times these interests aligned, but they often did not, giving rise to American frustrations in implementing the proxy strategy.
While it might be argued that the US proxy strategy was ultimately successful (AQAP was markedly degraded and contained during the GWOT era), it clearly contributed to the ongoing political fragility of the Yemeni state. This fragility was markedly demonstrated with the arrival of the Arab Spring. As protests swept across the Middle East and North Africa, Sana’a saw widespread protests against Saleh’s authoritarian governance style. With these protests—termed the ‘Change Revolution’ in Yemen—Saleh lost control of the north-western periphery, leading to an enormous expansion and empowerment of the Houthis.[80] On 18 March 2011, government snipers were employed to kill some 52 protestors (with hundreds more injured) in ‘Taghair’ or ‘Change’ square, which resulted in Saleh losing the support of his military and his ousting from government on 23 April 2011.[81]
The Saudi-Led Intervention
In 2009 the Saudis erected a 1,600 kilometre fence line to contain the threat posed by the growing capacity of the Houthi rebels.[82] The apprehension that led to this preventive action grew to alarm as the Houthis secured power in September 2014 and expanded their area of control from some 30,000 square kilometres in 2014 fourfold to some 120,000 square kilometres in 2015.[83] The view from Riyadh was that the Houthis were the ‘new Hezbollah’, a view reinforced by Iranian member of parliament Ali Reza Zakani. Zakani claimed that Sana’a was the fourth Arab capital to fall under a growing Iranian influence, behind Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus, reinforcing the notion of a ‘Shi’a crescent’ forming across the Middle East.[84] Thus, Iranian commentary intimated Iranian sponsorship and some level of influence over the Houthis as a proxy. This assertion resonated throughout the Middle East, given the context of broader regional Saudi–Iranian confrontation and competition.
A multifaceted competition for influence thus evolved. Within the Sunni world, this competition was between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on one hand and Qatar, supporting Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, on the other. This competition manifested through proxy conflicts in Syria, Libya and Sudan, alongside a direct Saudi–Qatari confrontation in 2017.[85] At a wider level, there was competition between the Sunni world and the Shi’a, a competition viewed from Tehran as leaning toward its interests during the GWOT era. This dynamic lay behind increasingly assertive Saudi foreign policy from 2011 onward, markedly demonstrated by the Saudi intervention to quell the Arab Spring protests in Bahrain. At the global level, this competition was viewed by the US as manifesting the divide between the nascent stages of the democracy that it sought to support, and the autocratic influence of Russia, Iran and China.
These factors precipitated the Saudi-led and US-backed intervention into Yemen to oust the Houthis from power beginning on 26 March 2015. Ironically, this intervention was initially termed Operation Decisive Storm but was renamed Operation Restoring Hope after the military effort proved to be indecisive. As part of the Saudi-led coalition, Emirati forces partnered with southern militias from Aden; up to 14,000 mercenaries were drawn from the Janjaweed militia of southern Sudan.[86] This Saudi-led military intervention employed some 23,000 airstrikes between March 2015 and July 2021. Of note, few counterinsurgency measures were taken to better the governance, economic outlook or welfare of Yemen’s population.[87] As a consequence, the Saudi-led interventions unsurprisingly failed to contain growing Houthi influence in Yemen.
In 2018, Emirati proxy warfare efforts with the southern militias (now termed the National Resistance Forces) successfully rolled back Houthi control of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, culminating in a division of control that endures today.[88] As the conflict stabilised in 2018–19, much of the violence began to abate, but it did not entirely subside. By mid-2022, the war against the Houthis had resulted in some 150,000 Yemenis being killed.[89]
Tempering of the Houthis through Conflict
Iranian proxy support to the Houthis was absent until 2011 and minimal prior to 2014. Given the organic growth of the Houthi movement, Tehran arguably had no reason for providing greater support, and there were no guarantees that the Houthis would show deference to Tehran even if they did.[90] In other words, the Houthis’ success in capturing territory within Yemen owes much to their own resilience and their methods of mobilising tribes into a broad coalition. This recognition is key to dispelling the simplistic narrative of a Saudi–Iranian proxy war in Yemen that ignores Houthi agency. Deep-seated grievances with Saudi Arabia are present within Yemeni politics, undoubtedly exacerbated by Riyadh’s support to Saleh throughout the 2000s.
Iran purportedly advised against the Houthis seizing power. Its position was likely based on its understanding that reciprocal Saudi pressure would follow, and an underestimation of its client’s capacity to endure.[91] Nevertheless, Iranian support markedly escalated following the 21 September 2014 Houthi capture of Sana’a, reinforcing the Houthis’ success, albeit discretely.[92] This support slowly but surely grew Houthi resilience in the face of Saudi military efforts. The Houthis’ capacity for asymmetric strike also increased gradually as drone capability emerged in 2016, before undertaking a step-change in 2018 and another in 2021.[93] This new technology, combined with growing missile capabilities, enabled the Houthis to achieve some 100 claimed attacks against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and its Yemeni adversaries, ranging missiles to 2,000 kilometres and drones to a claimed 2,500 kilometres. The range of these capabilities was seemingly proven on 19 July 2024 with a Houthi strike against Tel Aviv that involved a transit of 2,600 kilometres.[94]
The Houthis seem to have effectively leveraged Iranian and Hezbollah advice to grow a centralised proto-state capability that now dominates much of Yemen. The current leader of the Houthi movement, Abdalmalik al-Huthi, engages in a style of public speaking that closely resembles that of former Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.[95] Abdalmalik surrounds himself with a cadre of commanders who learned the art of war through the six Yemeni wars of the 2000s and may well have been radicalised by the experience and grateful for any tactical advice provided by Iran or Hezbollah during this period. It seems no coincidence that the Houthi Jihad Council is structured in a way that closely resembles Hezbollah’s centralisation of functions.[96] It also employs a similar model of media propaganda to that of Hezbollah and is correspondingly effective in painting its case as that of an oppressed group resisting an illegitimate government.[97] Furthermore, the Houthis have developed a Basij Logistics and Support Brigade akin to that of Iran, which is similarly backed by a mass indoctrination program that militarises society.[98]
With longevity of support to the Houthis, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force (IRGC-QF) and Hezbollah are able to employ a small advisory staff—‘measured in the tens, not the hundreds’.[99] This ‘light footprint’ approach emphasises the agency of the Houthis, ensuring local solutions fit local governance problems. Further, Tehran has deployed to Yemen elements of IRGC-QF Unit 340, which is the technical department ‘whose remit is to enable the transfer of military capabilities to partner forces’.[100] This provision of specialist technical support has connected branches of the ITN—Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis—and underlies the proliferation risk posed today of transfers of advanced military capabilities to non-state actors.
Yemen Today
On 10 October 2023, Abdalmalik al-Huthi announced that the Houthis would join the conflict initiated by Hamas on 7 October ‘to shield Hezbollah and Iran from direct U.S. pressure’.[101] This language is significant as it intimates two broad strategic possibilities. The first is that Iran sought this support from its client as an unorthodox form of ‘deterrence by punishment’, the threatened shifting of costs from the area under contention (Gaza). The second possibility is that the Houthis decided (of their own accord) to support their patron, presumably with the motive of attaining military resources. This option is backed by long-term terrorism analyst Michael Knights, who argues that the Houthis sought to become the:
leading player in the axis of resistance, which may help explain Houthi over-performance and above-average risk-taking (by the standards of non-Palestinian axis members) since October 2023.[102]
In joining Hamas against the US, it is possible that Abdalmalik was motivated by a combination of these two strategic aims. Further, it is important to note that the militarisation of society needs an adversarial ‘other’ against whom society must be militarised. This dynamic was likely to have also been an influencing factor.
The Houthis commenced their military attacks on Israel following the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital on 17 October 2023. The Houthis were the first of the ITN proxies to employ a medium-range ballistic missile against Israel, on 31 October 2023.[103] Within six months (by 24 April 2024), the Houthis had launched some 135 anti-ship ballistic missiles, 87 anti-ship cruise missiles, 263 one-way attack or larger surveillance drones, and some 38 unmanned surface vessels.[104] These statistics are important as they can be understood to be ‘enemy-initiated attacks’ against which the Houthis controlled their ‘loss rate’. This means that this tempo of asymmetric strike (notably a tempo that is beyond the current capacity of the ADF) was believed to be sustainable by Houthi leadership. While many of these attacks were not militarily successful, the fact that they forced the deployment of Western naval platforms and the diversion of shipping suggests that they were politically successful. In this way, it can be said that the Houthis conducted a form of littoral guerrilla warfare.
The Houthi conduct of asymmetric strike operations against Israel risked escalating the contained conflict in Gaza to a regional war with significant ramifications for the global economy. Indeed, Israel’s sequencing of action against Hamas and then Hezbollah, alongside occasional strikes against Houthi infrastructure (20 July 2024 and 29 September 2024), demonstrates Israel’s astute management of this escalation risk, albeit strongly supported by Western-led aerial interdiction efforts against Iranian-launched missiles and one-way systems.
Today, the Houthis have proved resilient to the Western targeting efforts that began after following the Houthi-initiated strikes against commercial shipping. This success is likely due, in part, to resilient support networks that transcend Sunni extremist (AQAP and al-Shabaab) and Shi’a ideological divides.[105] These networks have been enabled by Horn of Africa based smugglers, Iranian state sponsorship, and the creation of symbiotic benefits.[106]
Lessons
Houthi networks of support demonstrate the risk that drone and missile technologies can proliferate from state to non-state actors.[107] Arguably, the genie is already out of the bottle on these capabilities. If such transfers can occur in a tightly controlled part of the globe, where existing pressure against Iran and al-Shabaab already exists, just how effective will other forms of blockade and preventive interdiction be? If the Houthis can develop such asymmetric strike capabilities, what happens if these capabilities proliferate to al-Shabaab?
The Houthis’ attainment of potent military capabilities, with the pragmatic sponsorship of Iran, shows that economic and capability-development interests can transcend ideological divides. These factors warrant concern that Iran could rebuild its network of proxies beyond its traditional Shi’a affiliation (as it broached with Hamas) to a much more capable network of Shi’a and Sunni extremists. The rationale for Iran to provide such support might be simply to impose costs on its opponents, reconciling what presently seems an unrealistic policy option of retaining the Shi’a crescent of influence from Beirut to Baluchistan.
The potential for aggrieved non-state actors to emerge is acute in the Horn of Africa. In 2011, Yemen was one of the most food-insecure populations in the world while being awash with some 6 million tribally-held small arms.[108] Sudan was facing the world’s largest displacement crisis in 2024, and between 2020 and 2023 the Horn of Africa suffered five failed rainy seasons.[109] Due to climate-induced displacement, rebellion, and the proxy effects of strategic competition given the strategic importance of the Red Sea, the trajectory of Yemen becomes a cautionary lesson as to the potential emergence of insurgencies that might transpire elsewhere in the region.
The case of the Houthis further represents the proxy dynamics that have generated novel asymmetric strike and littoral guerrilla warfare concepts. From November 2023 to February 2024 (in the three months following the Houthis’ commencement of hostilities against Red Sea shipping), the volume of transiting shipping dropped by 46 per cent.[110] The second-order economic effects of diverted shipping, or increased maritime insurance rates, are almost impossible to calculate. But they evidently cannot be described as inconsequential to a global economy already detrimentally affected by cost-of-living crises. The ability for a patron to empower a non-state actor to impose costs against maritime choke points as a component of conflict should now be readily apparent.
These lessons are of significant concern given the expansion of Houthi presence into Iraq (a senior Houthi missileer was killed by a US strike on 30 June 2024), which suggests a possible conceptual and technological proliferation risk across the ITN.[111] Furthermore, the emergence of a Russian–Houthi relationship expands this risk through either Russian-supplied military equipment to the Houthis (such as a reported transfer of Yakhont/P-800 Onik anti-ship cruise missiles) or the application of Houthi concepts in the Russo-Ukraine War (or as a possible escalation risk against Baltic shipping).[112]
Conclusions
The war in Yemen is the region’s main engine of unpredictability.[113]
An echo of history borne by the case study of proxy warfare in Yemen is that of state-supported terrorism. In the 1960s it was Egypt’s support to the National Liberation Front in Aden, which used grenade attacks to terrorise the British population. In the 1970s it was the DLF that used terrorism as a tactic augmenting the broader campaign in Dhofar, based on the PDRY and its Soviet and Chinese backers. From the 2010s to today it is Iranian sponsorship of the Houthis and the Houthi use of advanced conventional weapons to terrorise maritime shipping. Strategic competition begets sponsorship of unsavoury methods, and the emergence of such dynamics needs to be expected. Our models for understanding ‘terrorism’ and for orchestrating counterterrorism responses therefore need to adapt.
The Houthis emerged from this 1960s era competition through long-simmering grievances exacerbated by ineffective governance and the region-wide Arab Spring protest movements. American and Saudi support to the Saleh government throughout the GWOT era arguably exacerbated the Houthi problem by protecting the Saleh government from a need to reform. Today, the web of competing interests has created a mess of proxy support relationships. These interests have broader ripple effects, as a piece in Foreign Affairs ably recognised in July 2024:
The political violence and state fragmentation that fuelled the Houthis’ rise in Yemen is now wreaking havoc across the broader Horn of Africa. A metastasising web of intrastate and interstate conflicts stretching from Sudan to Somalia could bring unprecedented chaos across the Horn, creating space for extremist militant networks and countries hostile to Western interests and a free and open Red Sea …
Multiple wars are causing deep instability in the Horn of Africa and contributing to the crisis in the Red Sea. From 2018 to 2019, popular revolts toppled long-standing authoritarian regimes in Ethiopia and Sudan, but both states have since descended into astonishing levels of violence. A two-year war between Ethiopia’s federal authorities and forces from the Tigray region killed over 500,000 people and displaced millions more.[114]
These ripple effects are not yet registering on the agenda in Australian foreign policy debates, despite the designation of the Houthis and the commencement of Operation Hydranth. Yet, as this paper has outlined, there is much to learn from the manifestation of proxy conflicts as a component of strategic competition. First, we should expect proxy conflicts to break out. This realisation increases the importance of identifying the emergence of support relationships and the broader influence that such proxy wars seek to achieve. Second, strategic competition will continue to require land forces to engage in counterinsurgency and capacity-building operations that we erroneously associate only with the GWOT era. Third, our models of understanding ‘terrorism’ (shorthand for Salafi-jihadist terrorism of the GWOT-era) must evolve. Terrorism as a tactic is employed by a range of non-state actors, and in times of strategic competition short of war, and it is often state-supported. Fourth, the Houthis have shown that even a ‘cheap’ form of littoral asymmetric strike can exert strategic influence. The Houthis offer an instructional model for the development of such capability.
The lessons outlined in this paper demonstrate that localised competition may prove to be the incubator for highly effective operational concepts, such as the Marxist Dhofar insurgency in the late 1960s, through to the Houthis’ demonstration of asymmetric strike or littoral guerrilla warfare today. The case of Yemen helps to demonstrate how even obscure geographic locations need to inform our understanding of what strategic competition means in practice, helping to inform the ADF’s ability to ‘shape’ and ‘deter’.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Ansar Allah’, Australian National Security (website), at: https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/what-australia-is-doing/terrorist-organisations/listed-terrorist-organisations/ansar-allah (accessed 26 May 2024).
[2] ‘Operation Hydranth’, Department of Defence (website), at: https://www.defence.gov.au/defence-activities/operations/global-operations/hydranth (accessed 3 March 2025).
[3] Michael Horton, ‘Looking West: The Houthis’ Expanding Footprint in the Horn of Africa’, CTC Sentinel 17, no. 11 (2024): 15; Michael Knights, ‘A Draw Is a Win: The Houthis After One Year of War’, CTC Sentinel 17, no. 9 (2024): 22.
[4] Quoted by Asher Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68 (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 54.
[5] S Mawby, ‘The Clandestine Defence of Empire: British Special Operations in Yemen 1951–64’, Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 3 (2002): 120. Importantly, these operations were expressly intended to be deniable. Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 166.
[6] ‘Russian Designs in the Middle East’, JIC(56)117, CAB158/26 (9 November 1956), p. 1.
[7] Mawby, ‘The Clandestine Defence of Empire’, p. 113.
[8] Ibid., p. 113.
[9] Jonathan Walker, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962–67 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2005), p. 22.
[10] Ibid., p. 10.
[11] Ibid., p. 24.
[12] J Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen, 1962–1963’, Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 4 (2008): 9; Richard E Bissell, ‘Soviet Use of Proxies in the Third World: The Case of Yemen’, Soviet Studies 30, no. 1 (1978): 90.
[13] Raymond L Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), pp. 21–22.
[14] Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention’, p. 10.
[15] ‘Russian Designs in the Middle East’, JIC(56)117, CAB158/26 (9 November 1956), p. 2.
[16] Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention’, p. 12; Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War, p. 46.
[17] Walker, Aden Insurgency, pp. 44–45.
[18] Ibid., p. 45.
[19] Rory Cormac, ‘Coordinating Covert Action: The Case of the Yemen Civil War and the South Arabian Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 36, no. 5 (2013).
[20] Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention’, p. 12.
[21] ‘The Threat to South Arabia’, JIC(64)77, CAB158/54 (8 March 1965), p. 11.
[22] Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention’, pp. 17–18.
[23] Victoria Clark, Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
[24] Rob Johnson, ‘Out of Arabia: British Strategy and the Fate of Local Forces in Aden, South Yemen, and Oman, 1967–76’, The International History Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 146.
[25] Jonathan Walker, ‘Red Wolves and British Lions: The Conflict in Aden’, in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (eds), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2008); ‘The Threat to South Arabia’, JIC(64)77, CAB158/54 (8 March 1965). The British also recognised in this insurgency the use of terrorism as a form of proxy warfare.
[26] Johnson, ‘Out of Arabia’, p. 147.
[27] ‘The Threat to Aden’, JIC(63)80, CAB158/50, (3 January 1964), p. 2. This threat description was expanded upon in ‘Minutes: Counter Subversion Committee’, SV(64)1, CAB134/2543 (10 January 1964), which noted Cairo’s involvement in subversive activities.
[28] Cormac, ‘Coordinating Covert Action’, p. 696.
[29] Ibid., p. 702.
[30] ‘The Threat to South Arabia’, JIC(64)77, CAB158/54 (8 March 1965), p. 11.
[31] Cormac, ‘Coordinating Covert Action’, p. 705.
[32] Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War, pp. 163–173.
[33] Cormac, ‘Coordinating Covert Action’, pp. 706–707.
[34] Ibid., p. 712; K Barclay to T Brenchley, ‘South Arabia Action Group: Terms of Reference and Activities: Annex, Some Results of SAAG Activity: 1 October 1966 – 1 March 1967’, CAB164/340 (17 February 1967). The use of unattributable propaganda was argued to pose excessive risk. ‘Minutes: Counter Subversion Committee’, SV(64)2, CAB134/2543, (5 February 1964).
[35] CFR Barclay and Brigadier N St G Gribbon, ‘South Arabia Action Group: Report by Chairman and Deputy Chairman on Their Visit to South Arabia from 31 October to 12 November 1966’, CAB164/340 (14 December 1966); Cormac, ‘Coordinating Covert Action’, p. 694.
[36] K Barclay to T Brenchley, ‘South Arabia Action Group: Terms of Reference and Activities: Annex, Some Results of SAAG Activity: 1 October 1966 – 1 March 1967’, CAB164/340, (17 February 1967).
[37] Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention’, p. 7.
[38] Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War, p. 37.
[39] Bissell, ‘Soviet Use of Proxies in the Third World’, p. 93.
[40] Ibid., p. 99.
[41] Clark, Yemen.
[42] Anoushiavan Ehteshami and Emma C Murphy, The International Politics of the Red Sea (London and New York NY: Routledge, 2011), pp. 47–48.
[43] Direct involvement was revealed when an MiG fighter was downed by Royalists. This episode demonstrates a risk of covert action using direct involvement of military forces in combat. Wynfred Joshua and Stephen P Gibert, Arms for the Third World: Soviet Military Aid Diplomacy (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 27.
[44] National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 227, ‘Decisions Taken at President’s Meeting on Yemen Crisis’, 25 February 1963, JFKNSF-340-013-p0004.
[45] Forty-three per cent of Soviet aid to the Third World between 1954 and 1961 was allocated to Egypt. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York NY: Basic Books, 2005), p. 151.
[46] Bissell, ‘Soviet Use of Proxies in the Third World’, p. 105; ‘Soviet Military Aid to the Somali Republic’, JIC(63)95, CAB158/50, (20 March 1964).
[47] Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way.
[48] Dilip Hiro, Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (London: Hurst, 2018).
[49] Walter C Ladwig III, ‘Supporting Allies in Counterinsurgency: Britain and the Dhofar Rebellion’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 19, no. 1 (2008): 63; Clark, Yemen.
[50] Clark, Yemen.
[51] The PDRY also supported guerrillas in Eritrea, highlighting the broad regional view the new state immediately moved towards. Ehteshami and Murphy, The International Politics of the Red Sea, p. 50.
[52] Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 1.
[53] Ladwig, ‘Supporting Allies in Counterinsurgency’, p. 63.
[54] Marc R DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory: Revisiting the Dhofar Counterinsurgency, 1963–1975’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 1 (2012): 149.
[55] Ibid., p. 148.
[56] Ladwig, ‘Supporting Allies in Counterinsurgency’, p. 67.
[57] Takriti, Monsoon Revolution, pp. 164–170.
[58] DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory’, p. 151.
[59] Geraint Hughes, ‘A Proxy War in Arabia: The Dhofar Insurgency and Cross-Border Raids into South Yemen’, Middle East Journal 69, no. 1 (2015), p. 95.
[60] Ibid., pp. 97–98.
[61] DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory’, p. 156.
[62] Hughes, ‘A Proxy War in Arabia’, p. 99; DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory’, p. 159.
[63] DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory’, pp. 163–164.
[64] Takriti, Monsoon Revolution, p. 310.
[65] John Calabrese, ‘From Flyswatters to Silkworms: The Evolution of China’s Role in West Asia’, Asian Survey 30, no. 9 (1990): 870–872.
[66] Central Intelligence Agency, The Soviet Military Presence in Somalia (3 September 1974), declassified 23 November 2005.
[67] Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 18.
[68] Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[69] Ehteshami and Murphy, The International Politics of the Red Sea, p. 73.
[70] Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 37.
[71] Clark, Yemen.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969, 2000).
[74] Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, p. 199.
[75] Clark, Yemen.
[76] Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, p. 37.
[77] Stark, The Yemen Model, p. 25.
[78] Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, p. 203.
[79] Stark, The Yemen Model, p. 2.
[80] Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, p. 90.
[81] Sarah Phillips, Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011), pp. 125–126.
[82] Ehteshami and Murphy, The International Politics of the Red Sea, p. 77.
[83] Michael Knights, ‘Assessing the Houthi War Effort Since October 2023’, CTC Sentinel 17, no. 4 (2023): 2.
[84] Stark, The Yemen Model, p. 66.
[85] Stark, The Yemen Model, p. 63. The wider dynamic of this competition is examined by Alexandra Stark, The Monarchs’ Pawns? Gulf State Proxy Warfare 2011–Today (New America, 2020).
[86] Stark, The Yemen Model, pp. 78–79.
[87] Ibid., p. 81.
[88] Ibid., p. 93.
[89] ‘Country Hub: Yemen’, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) (website), at: https://acleddata.com/middle-east/yemen/ (accessed 10 March 2024).
[90] Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen, p. 203.
[91] Caroline F Tynan, Saudi Interventions in Yemen: A Historical Comparison of Ontological Insecurity (New York NY: Routledge, 2021), p. 20.
[92] Stark, The Yemen Model, pp. 89–90.
[93] Lucas Nevola and Valentin d’Hauthuille, ‘Six Houthi Drone Warfare Strategies: How Innovation Is Shifting the Regional Balance of Power’, ACLED (website), 6 August 2024, at: https://acleddata.com/2024/08/06/six-houthi-drone-warfare-strategies-how-innovation-is-shifting-the-regional-balance-of-power/.
[94] ‘Houthi Arsenal’, Wilson Center (website), 26 July 2024, at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/houthi-arsenal.
[95] Michael Knights, Adnan al-Gabarni and Casey Coombs, ‘The Houthi Jihad Council: Command and Control in ‘the Other Hezbollah’, CTC Sentinel 15, no. 10 (2022): 5.
[96] Ibid., ‘The Houthi Jihad Council’, pp. 5–6.
[97] Tynan, Saudi Interventions in Yemen, p. 106.
[98] Knights, ‘Assessing the Houthi War Effort’, p. 3.
[99] Ibid.
[100] Knights et al., ‘The Houthi Jihad Council’, pp. 10, 17.
[101] Knights, ‘Assessing the Houthi War Effort’, p. 4.
[102] Ibid., p. 5 (emphasis added).
[103] Knights, ‘A Draw Is a Win’, p. 17.
[104] Knights, ‘Assessing the Houthi War Effort’, p. 14. These numbers correlate with ACLED data for a similar period.
[105] Horton, ‘Looking West’, p. 15.
[106] Ibid., p. 17.
[107] Ibid., p. 20.
[108] Phillips, Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, pp. 30, 52.
[109] Johnnie Carson, Alex Rondos, Susan Stigant and Michael Woldemariam, ‘The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis’, Foreign Affairs, 19 July 2024.
[110] Knights, ‘A Draw Is a Win’, p. 19.
[111] Ibid., p. 28.
[112] Ibid., p. 29.
[113] Catrina Doxsee, Alexander Palmer and Riley McCabe, Global Terrorism Threat Assessment 2024 (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024), p. 85.
[114] Carson et al., ‘The Red Sea Crisis’.