Just as President Donald Trump is finding that tariffs are not the solution to every foreign policy problem, so too is he running up against the limits of applying the blunt weapon of military force to every security challenge. Specifically, he is discovering the difficulties of irregular warfare, meaning the use of military means to counter nonstate actors. As David Ucko and Thomas Marks of the National Defense University noted several years ago, the military has been “too often seduced by its own raw strength” when confronting nonstate actors, be they terrorist organizations dispersed around the word, rebel groups in parts of the Middle East or now the drug cartels the Trump administration says it is targeting in Latin America.
And just as this isn’t the first time the U.S. military has been seduced in this way, it isn’t Trump’s first such run-in with nonstate actors either. Back in March, his administration tried to stop attacks by the Houthi rebels in Yemen against merchant shipping in the Red Sea by launching a large-scale bombardment of the group’s missile launchers and arsenal on land. The Trump team talked a big game at the time, asserting that their predecessors in Joe Biden’s administration had been “feckless” in their handling of the Houthis and that the U.S. would now use “overwhelming lethal force” to get them to back down.
But the operations were costly, in terms of both their price tag and the three multimillion-dollar aircraft the U.S. Navy lost over the course of a few weeks. The Trump administration eventually abandoned the effort to “completely annihilate” the group, with Trump acknowledging that the Houthis “had a great ability to withstand punishment.”