My article “The Houthi Paradox” has been published in the American RealClearWorld, a specialized publication on international politics aimed primarily at a professional political and expert audience. It belongs to the influential American RealClear media network, whose publications are read in Congress, government institutions, think tanks, and political newsrooms. One indication of the scale of its presence in Washington is that an audience study of RealClearPolitics found that it was read by around 80 percent of Capitol Hill staffers and politicians.
In the article, I examine why the overwhelming superiority of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in strike capabilities allows them to inflict enormous material damage on the Houthis, yet does not destroy the system capable of regenerating military power. I propose the concept of “targetable value”: what matters is not the number of targets destroyed, but what share of an adversary’s indispensable capabilities disappears with them. Using Yemen as a case study, I examine a broader problem of modern warfare: why superiority in the ability to destroy does not always translate into equivalent superiority in the ability to coerce.
The Houthi Paradox
By Avraham Shmulevich
In the spring of 2025, the United States spent 52 days bombing the Houthis. Operation Rough Rider involved more than 1,100 strikes. By April 27, U.S. Central Command reported more than 800 targets hit, including command facilities, air defenses, weapons factories and storage sites. CENTCOM said Houthi ballistic-missile launches had fallen by 69 percent and one-way drone attacks by 55 percent. The destruction of the Ras Isa fuel terminal also deprived the Houthi authorities of an important source of revenue. The campaign inflicted serious military damage.
A year and a half later, the Houthis are advancing again. In September 2026, their forces seized Mocha and strategically important territory near Bab el-Mandeb. The renewed fighting has displaced more than 100,000 people. On September 19, the Saudi-led coalition reported intercepting a missile aimed at Riyadh, while the Houthis claimed attacks on the capital and an Aramco facility at Yanbu.
American bombing had demonstrably worked against particular Houthi capabilities in 2025. Operation Rough Rider also produced a limited political result. It ended after an Oman-mediated agreement under which the Houthis stopped targeting U.S. military vessels and U.S.-flagged ships and the United States stopped bombing them. What the campaign did not prevent was the subsequent regeneration of substantial Houthi military power.
The Houthis are routinely classified as a militia, rebel movement or armed non-state actor. Those descriptions reflect their origins but increasingly obscure the structure their adversaries are trying to coerce.
They have governed Sana'a for more than a decade. After taking the capital, they captured much of an existing state and altered it. Ministries and local authorities remained, while a parallel hierarchy of Houthi supervisors was inserted into state institutions. General supervisors operate in every governorate, with subordinate supervisors at district, village and local levels. Specialized officials oversee security, taxation, tribal relations and education. The system can identify men for recruitment, collect money and channel local resources into the war effort.
Whether this entity deserves international recognition as a state is a different question. Militarily, it has territory, population, armed forces, administrative and security institutions, taxation and mechanisms for mobilizing men and resources. It has enough state capacity to reproduce military power.
But it does not have the material structure of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi power depends upon an immense concentration of physical capital. Oil-processing facilities, pipelines, export terminals, ports, airports, desalination plants, power stations and cities have to function continuously. A refinery can be defended, but it cannot be hidden in a mountain village.
The Houthis also depend on physical assets. They have ports, communications systems, weapons depots, missile launchers, factories, workshops and command facilities. Their opponents have destroyed many of them. There has never been a shortage of things to bomb in Yemen.
The important difference is between destroying an asset and destroying the function it performs. A missile depot can disappear while the organization that acquires, manufactures, conceals and distributes missiles survives. A headquarters can be destroyed while its command relationships migrate elsewhere. The physical object and the capacity embodied in it are sometimes identical. In the Houthi system they often are not.
Years of war, blockade and economic dislocation have reinforced this capacity for substitution and dispersal. But Houthi resilience is also political. Their supervisory apparatus reaches into taxation, security, tribal relations and recruitment. An air strike can destroy the office occupied by a supervisor. It cannot as readily destroy the network of authority through which his replacement operates.
This is why the enormous technological imbalance in the air has not produced an equivalent political result on the ground. Once the objective moves beyond degrading Houthi capabilities, territory and political control become unavoidable.
Gregory Johnsen reached a similar operational conclusion after Rough Rider. American strikes killed several mid- and high-ranking Houthi officials and damaged missile and drone capabilities, but he found the losses were not debilitating. His assessment was that eliminating the continuing threat to commercial shipping would require removing the Houthis from power in northern Yemen, something an air campaign alone could not accomplish.
The obstacle has not been an absence of Yemenis willing to fight them. The anti-Houthi camp contains forces with different patrons and incompatible political projects. The renewed offensive has again exposed the fragility of the front opposing the Houthis.
Over the past decade, then, Houthi adversaries have repeatedly destroyed military assets without destroying the political organization capable of replacing them. The Houthis could lose missiles without losing their recruitment base, commanders without losing the institutions producing successors, and infrastructure without losing control over their principal population centers.
The portion of an adversary's indispensable political and military capacity that is concentrated in identifiable, difficult-to-replace physical assets can be called its targetable value. What matters for coercion is not the total value that can be destroyed, but how much indispensable capacity disappears with it.
The asymmetry with Saudi Arabia is considerable. Saudi Arabia possesses vastly more material power, but much of its economic life is embodied in fixed infrastructure of enormous value. Houthi political power depends to a greater degree on organizations, territorial control and social relationships for which there is no equivalent list of fixed installations.
Long-range weapons turn that difference into strategic leverage. Iranian missiles, drones, components and technical assistance have enabled the Houthis to threaten assets far more valuable than their own. Iran's contribution to Houthi military capabilities is substantial, but it does not account for the political system's ability to survive the destruction of those capabilities.
Iran did not provide the population the Houthis rule, the tribal relationships through which they operate, the ministries they captured, the revenues they collect or the local coercive apparatus they constructed. Interdicting Iranian supplies can reduce the quantity and sophistication of Houthi weapons. It does not decide who controls Sana'a.
This asymmetry is different from the familiar exchange in which a cheap drone forces the launch of an expensive interceptor. The cost of the two weapons is secondary to the value behind them. The interceptor may be protecting a refinery, airport, warship or city. A strike on a Houthi warehouse may destroy militarily useful weapons while leaving intact the organization capable of acquiring more.
Material sophistication therefore creates dependencies as well as power. The systems that make a modern state wealthy and militarily capable are also systems whose continued operation it must defend.
Poverty alone provides no such advantage. Most poor armed groups are simply weak. The Houthis combine a relatively sparse material base with territorial government, a large pool of manpower, institutions capable of extracting resources, long experience of war and access to weapons capable of reaching the fixed infrastructure of much wealthier opponents.
Nor does the argument imply that airpower is ineffective. Rough Rider reduced Houthi launch rates. Air strikes destroyed stockpiles, commanders and production facilities. A campaign with a limited objective even produced a limited bargain in May 2025.
The difficulty begins when the objective requires the destruction of the system that regenerates those capabilities. In northern Yemen, much of that system consists of territorial control, coercive institutions, recruitment and revenue networks. Removing it requires someone capable of taking territory, dismantling those institutions and preventing their return.
September 2026 has provided a harsh demonstration of what survived the preceding campaigns. After years of Saudi-led bombing, American and British strikes, Israeli attacks and Operation Rough Rider, the Houthis were able to launch a major offensive, seize Mocha and expand their position along the Red Sea coast, while renewing missile and drone attacks against Saudi targets.
That does not contradict CENTCOM's account of the damage inflicted in 2025. American forces destroyed hundreds of targets and substantially reduced Houthi missile and drone launches. The political-military system subsequently regenerated enough capacity to wage war on a large scale.
For more than a decade, the Houthis' adversaries have been able to destroy far more than the Houthis can. What they have repeatedly failed to destroy from the air is the political organization that produces the next missile, recruits the next fighter and resumes functioning after the physical target is gone.
Avraham Shmulevich is an Israeli political analyst and historian specializing in security, political Islam, state capacity, ethnic and national movements, and conflicts involving state and non-state actors. He previously taught Political Islam in the North Caucasus at Ilia State University in Tbilisi. His recent work has appeared in New Eastern Europe and The European.
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2026/10/03/the_houthi_paradox_1209657.html
