The actual hidden truth about UFOs, CNN.com

Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen and Erik German
7 minute read
Published 9:21 AM EST, Fri January 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Erik German is the senior producer of “In the Room.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
A former Pentagon official — driven, he says, by his duty to the truth — goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a scrum of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims that the US government has been keeping crashed alien spaceships under wraps for decades.

It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood movie. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. The former Pentagon official, David Grusch, had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”

That’s right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn’t the wildest thing ever broadcasted on C-SPAN, it must’ve been close. Someone should look into this, right?

It turns out that someone already had. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to set up a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office by the US Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who said they had knowledge about encounters with UFOs.

Kirkpatrick recently retired from his job at the Pentagon and spoke with us for the Audible podcast “In the Room.” Kirkpatrick and his team investigated every US government UFO sighting going back to Roswell in the 1940s, putting the findings in a report that’s likely to be made public this month.

In the most extensive media interview he’s given, Kirkpatrick laid out a convincing case that the stories swirling for decades about the alleged government cover-up of alien-related UFOs may well have been fueled largely by true believers inside the US government or with close ties to it.

Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined, much of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs has been spawned by people catching glimpses of highly secret US aircraft and wanting answers. And when the government doesn’t provide answers, the public imagination takes over.

But, in fact, Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the US government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the US or of benign civilian drones and balloons.

“There’s about two to five percent of all the (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth.

The Roswell incident

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That’s because, in 1947, a US military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico.

A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the US government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret.

The U.S. Air Force released this photo June 24 of an aeroshell of a NASA Voyager Mars space probe prior to launch at Walker AFB, New Mexico (formerly Roswell AAF) as part of its report on the so called “Roswell Incident” of 1947. The Air Force reported June 24 that “space aliens” who supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert 50 years ago were only military dummies and that descriptions of research projects involving low altitude tethered objects such as this may have become part of the incident. The 231-page report is aimed at ending longstanding speculation over the incident and denies that the military had recovered bodies from damaged flying saucers in 1947 and had been covering up the incident ever since.

At the same time, the US military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft.

Kirkpatrick also lays out a convincing case that something similar is happening today. He says new technology taking flight now could help explain a lot of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s on. It’s not just secret government technology, either. Lots of observers get flummoxed when they catch sight of cutting-edge drones and even odd-looking balloons.

“What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”

Nevertheless, UFOs remain a genuine national security concern mainly because they are flight hazards. As Kirkpatrick put it, “military pilots that are flying at greater than Mach 1; if they run into a balloon with a tether on it, it’s going to rip a wing off.”

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the US military. Kirkpatrick says that’s the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the US government’s policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.

The true believers

So in the face of the actual evidence, why are people in and around government promoting the unsupported idea of alien invaders being covered up by the US government?

“True believers are not just outside of government; many of them are inside government,” Kirkpatrick told us, including the late US Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was Senate Majority leader. Another key player was Reid’s longtime friend Robert Bigelow, a Nevada billionaire and the owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace, both of whom shared a long-running interest in UFOs. Kirkpatrick says, “Senator Harry Reid was a true believer and thought that ‘Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.’”

In 2007, Senator Reid got funding for a US Defense Intelligence Agency program that paid $22 million to his buddy Bigelow’s aerospace company — money the company spent on investigations into paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow’s team looked into sightings of UFOs by US military personnel and proposed setting up laboratories to study the purported physical remains of alien spacecraft. (On “60 Minutes” in May 2017, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.)

Reid told a reporter in Nevada in 2021 that even though this was a secret program to look into UFOs, Bigelow didn’t benefit from “some sweetheart deal … it was put out to bid.” Reid also told The New York Times, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going…I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service.”

Yet, Kirkpatrick points out, “none of that actually manifested in any evidence” of alien spacecraft. But stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who’d heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft.

And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people.

“It all goes back to the same core set of people,” Kirkpatrick said. This is both deeply weird and richly ironic. Because, for decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there’s a US government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government.

Sadly, for all the UFO lovers out there, that may be the biggest takeaway from Kirkpatrick’s report to Congress, which is expected to be published later this month. Plenty of outsiders have long speculated about whether the Pentagon’s alien-focused programs were coming up empty and perhaps were suspiciously self-perpetuating.

But now, highly credible people inside the Pentagon — with really high-level security clearances — are finally saying, we looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.

Although Kirkpatrick concedes that for those who truly believe that there are alien visitations here on Earth, little will convince them otherwise: “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary that is going to make the true believers convert … It is a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought.”

Is The Pentagon Really Hiding Crashed Alien Spaceships?

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 23 2024
Length: 40 mins
Podcast

Sean Kirkpatrick is one of the best guys on earth to answer that question. He set up the Pentagon’s new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. But he rarely gives interviews. Until now. You’ll hear what his investigators found out about sightings going back to Roswell, and what he thinks is the biggest UFO conspiracy of all.

Go to audible.com/news where you’ll find Peter Bergen’s recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.

The absurdity of the return-to-office movement, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen
4 minute read
Updated 12:27 PM EST, Mon January 22, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify and was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
I host a podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” which focuses on national security issues. Every day, I see the merits of being part of an entirely remote workforce
We have a production team, around half of whom live in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the others live in places like Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco. We have met in person only twice in the year that the production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through many rounds of edits.

In my four decades of working in media, I have never worked somewhere with a better esprit de corps, creative energy and a collective willingness to help everyone else out.

And yet, some corporate titans are still pushing for their employees to return to their offices. Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week.

Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.

Typical of this view is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who claimed in 2021 that working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation.” There is no empirical evidence for this claim, and the desire for employers to see their employees working in their offices seems to be more about the need for control and an attachment to the old ways of doing things.

The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth. If working from home suppressed innovation, productivity and creativity, you would expect quite different economic results.

Further, working from home saves Americans an average daily commute of 72 minutes a day, to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters, according to a 2023 University of Chicago study.

Working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time, money and flexibility commuting to an office. A 2023 Bankrate survey found that 74% of working women with children are in favor of remote work, while 64% of all working Americans support it.

I have some insight into this as a parent who now works mostly from home. This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids, and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.

The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo.

During the office era, so many workers spent so much time at their desks that workplaces often tried to present themselves as some kind of alternative family. You had your “work husbands” and mandatory “team building” events. Of course, this all came at the expense of your loved ones at home, as you had to spend time away from them while doing all your office-based events and tasks.

I am writing this column in Washington, DC, but work with editors in New York, London or Atlanta. In fact, I have written several hundred of these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive relationship with them.

To be sure, a Starbucks cappuccino is not going to make itself, and certain kinds of work environments — such as hospitals, restaurants, film sets or government offices where classified material is handled in a secure environment — require employees to be in person.

But for much of the economy where work doesn’t need to be in person, the demand to “return to office” is not rooted in any concern for employees, a large majority of whom want to work from home — not because they are lazy or don’t want to be productive, but because it gives them more freedom and control over their own lives.

So why do some bosses still feel it necessary to prolong the slow and necessary death of The Office? Beats me.

As the Arctic Ice Melts, Could a New Kind of Cold War Be Coming?

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 16 2024

Summary
Until recently, the eight nations whose borders creep into the icy Arctic haven’t had much of a reason to fight over this forbidding landscape. But as climate change melts the ice and opens up access to all kinds of precious resources, the United States is preparing for the possibility of conflict. So how will the U.S. defend its interests in a place where most of us have never set foot?

SOF Week, Tampa

MONDAY, 6 MAY 2024
Industry Sessions

There will be a variety of Industry-focused sessions, to include a SOF AT&L Intro, SBIR and CRADA 101s, SOFWERX briefings, and more.

Sessions will run from 0900 – 1630.

More details will be available via the full agenda soon.

SOF for Life Transition Seminar

The SOF for Life Transition Seminar hosted by the Honor Foundation is open to SOF and SOF enablers who are transitioning or recently transitioned from Active Duty Service.

Seminars will be held May 6, 2024 from 0900 – 1600.

Retired Senior SOF Leader Sessions (RSSL)

As in previous years, the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) will host the RSSL.

Sessions will run from 0800 – 1600.

**This event is by invitation only.

Global SOF 10th Anniversary Reception

The SOF Week co-sponsors at the Global SOF Foundation will host their 10th Anniversary Reception on May 6, 2024, at Sparkman Wharf from 1800 – 2100.

Global Security Forum, Doha

War is a way of life for the Houthis, CNN.com

Peter Bergen
Opinion By Peter Bergen, CNN
11 minute read
Published 2:21 PM EST, Tue January 16, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
“We think of war as a last resort. They think of it as a way of life.” That’s the way Elisabeth Kendall describes the Houthis, a Yemeni militant group that has attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea in nominal support of Hamas, becoming the target of missile and air strikes by the US and UK last week.

Kendall, the head of Girton College at Cambridge University, is an expert on Yemen, a country where she has done extensive fieldwork for more than a decade. Kendall’s expertise in Arabic poetry piqued her interest in the country, which she first visited in 2012.

The Houthis are Zaydis, a minority Shiite Muslim sect that makes up around a third of Yemen’s overall population. They have long felt marginalized in the majority Sunni country. In 2014, the Houthis captured the Yemeni capital Sanaa, sparking a civil war with the government, which was backed by the US and Saudi Arabia. The Houthis today control essential parts of Yemen, including Sanaa, the populous north of the country, and the critical port of Hudaydah, which sits on the Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal.

I spoke to Kendall on Sunday to get her take on who the Houthis are and what motivates them. Kendall thinks last week’s US and UK strikes on Houthi targets will not do much to deter the Houthis. She also explained how and why Iran and the Houthis have grown closer in recent years. Kendall also suggested that any future conflict with the Houthis would likely be long-lasting.

Our discussion was edited for clarity.

PETER BERGEN: What did you make of the US and UK strikes in Yemen last week against multiple Houthi targets?

ELISABETH KENDALL: I could understand why they happened and the rationale behind them. I think they’re probably ill-advised because I don’t think they’re going to do what they are intended to do. I don’t think they’ll deter the Houthis. They will have the opposite effect.

This is such an unequal war because the whole character of war has changed. It’s not about the biggest military. It’s more about who has the biggest appetite to just keep going. The Houthis know we’re not going to launch a land war because not only would it be unbelievably unpopular with all our allies in the Arab world, but it would be immensely unpopular back home as well with voters who don’t want to see us mire ourselves in another Afghanistan or another Iraq. And we’ve seen from both of those countries that it doesn’t matter if you have a stronger military. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win.

The Houthis have been fighting in civil wars in Yemen on and off since 2004. Let’s say you’re 22 years old, and you’re in the Houthi territories, particularly those up in the north, which is very populous. You will barely remember anything other than war. And that’s really important because we think of war as a last resort. They think of it as a way of life.

The Houthis have been fighting in civil wars in Yemen on and off since 2004.

BERGEN: The US and UK aim is to try and restore deterrence so that the Houthis stop attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Are you saying that the deterrence won’t necessarily be restored?

KENDALL: I would have favored building up legitimate institutions inside Yemen to undermine the Houthis. I think having strikes on Arab soil by the US and the UK at a time when we’re already pretty unpopular around the Arab world just plays into their hands.

So, I think it plays into their narratives of the US and its allies as the aggressors, and at a time when Israel’s already bombing mercilessly in Gaza — this just makes it seem as though this really is a war against Muslims. Of course, we know better than that, but it’s very easy to frame it like that on their part.

The Houthis have this massive advantage, which is that they don’t care about casualties, and they also don’t have to be accurate, as we have to be accurate when we’re operating in these theatres because we don’t want to kill civilians. All they have to do is lob missiles and drones into the Red Sea to have the effect that they want, which is to disrupt global shipping, rattle financial markets, create fear and look heroic at the same time. So, by taking out some of their launch sites, we have probably taken out some of their capability, but they will have expected that. They will have hidden some of their military assets.

BERGEN: What do the Houthis believe?

KENDALL: Their slogan is “God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam,” a slogan adopted in the early 2000s. So, it’s been with them for about 20 years, but it’s not something that they’ve lived with since the foundation of Israel.

BERGEN: The Houthis practice a particular form of Shi’ism that is fairly distinct from the clerics in Iran and also, obviously, very distinct from the Sunni Islam practiced by Hamas. My impression was always that the Houthis were kind of a ragtag militia that didn’t have much of a relationship with Iran a decade ago, but when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia entered the civil war in Yemen in 2015, dropping bombs on Houthi targets, Iran got much more involved, and they’ve been arming the Houthis with armed drones and ballistic missiles and other kinds of more advanced weaponry.

KENDALL: They have been getting ever closer to Iran. Now, when I first started really looking at the relationship between Iran and the Houthis with a paper that I did for the Atlantic Council in 2017 called “Iran’s Fingerprints in Yemen,” there really wasn’t that much evidence of Iran’s influence on the Houthis.

Now, as the civil war in Yemen proceeded, the Houthis needed their weapons replenished, and what they were being replenished with was increasingly sophisticated in terms of attack drones and missiles, and it was very clear that that was coming from Iran. And some of it was definitely being smuggled overland from the east of Yemen, where I was working. And it was a cheap option for Iran.

Saudi Arabia had three publicly stated war aims. One was to support the so-called internationally recognized government. Another was to prevent Yemen from fragmenting and, of course, to safeguard its own southern border. And number three was to contain the influence of Iran.

You could argue it didn’t really achieve any of those. In fact, it achieved the opposite. But I think we also need to be aware that we don’t know what would have happened had the Saudis not entered the war in 2015. It could be that the Houthis could have taken over all of Yemen.

This image provided by the U.S. Navy shows the USS Carney in the Mediterranean Sea on Oct. 23, 2018.
Opinion: How a Biden move to drop terrorist designation on Iran-backed militia backfired
The Saudis have flown 25,000 airstrikes over the Houthis. There’s nothing left to bomb. They’re bombing things for the second or third time, though there has now been a truce for more than a year, and the bombings have stopped.

BERGEN: So, the Houthis have obviously sustained a tremendous beating from the Saudis from the air for more than seven years. You mentioned a figure of 25,000 bombings. That would seem to suggest that they can weather the kind of strikes that the US and the UK have undertaken?

KENDALL: Yes.

Not only have the Iranians been supplying weapons, but there have been some insidious cultural influences. The Houthis have had religious indoctrination, and they seem much more Iranian-Shi’i than they do Zaydi now. (Zaydi Shi’ism, practiced by the Houthis, differs from the orthodox Shi’ism practiced by the clerics running Iran.) And when the Houthi leader speaks, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, it’s almost like he’s the mouthpiece of God. And that really wasn’t the case previously. We also see the Houthis carrying a lot of green banners. These weren’t parts of their natural Zaydi roots. So, they have become increasingly “Iranian-ized,” if that’s a word.

BERGEN: How did that happen?

KENDALL: Well, by intention on the part of Iran and also by necessity, because the Houthis didn’t have other allies.

BERGEN: Is there evidence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard trainers training the Houthis? Or Houthis going to Iran for training?

KENDALL: Well, we know that the Houthis’ leadership goes to Iran, and the training that IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) have come to Yemen to assist, and Hezbollah trainers have been in Yemen.

A still from a video shows multiple explosions in Saada province, north of Sanaa, Yemen, on January 12, local time.
Opinion: How did we get to this point in Yemen?

BERGEN: So, how do the Houthis get their funding?

KENDALL: Well, they get some from Iran. But, of course, they also control a lot of coastline and ports and imports and aid, and they can weaponize aid and food that’s coming in. They can impose taxes. And, of course, the leadership has got very well-lined pockets because there’s a war economy. Smuggling is a massive business, and a lot of people have gotten rich on the back of it.

BERGEN: The UN did say, until maybe Gaza replaced Yemen, that Yemen was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Is that accurate as far as you’re concerned?

KENDALL: I think it has been an absolute catastrophe. I’m not in a position to judge it against other catastrophes, and I do think the UN has a slight tendency to exaggerate whatever it is raising money for in the moment. But there’s no doubt that millions of people have been suffering very badly. At one point, more than a million cases of cholera, and things like measles, came back as killer diseases.

The Houthis have not been brilliant at governing; there is rubbish in the streets, and there has been hunger, very severe hunger. It’s like slowly boiling a frog in Yemen. Because it’s such a community, you don’t go hungry immediately. Whole communities gradually go hungry because they share, and then they share until they’ve got nothing left. And so you sort of starve gradually, and that has been what’s happening.

The Houthis consider that to be something quite useful for organizing journalists’ trips to hospitals, getting lots of photo opportunities and then blaming Saudi Arabia and the West.

BERGEN: There’s a lively debate in Washington about whether or not to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization, which former President Donald Trump did and then President Joe Biden revoked and now is reconsidering. What do you think of that debate?

KENDALL: I think it’s a bit of a red herring. I don’t think it would make the slightest bit of difference whether the US designated them or not. The only people who would suffer would be the Yemeni people, and that was why the designation was removed by Biden because it’s going to be very awkward for aid organizations to get in to do their work once the Houthi-controlled ports and the Houthi companies are designated. The other issue with it is that people forget that Trump only did this during his last days in office. It was a parting gift to the Saudis and something to hamstring Biden. So, it wasn’t as though this was anything that Trump considered a really good idea. He left it as a mess for Biden, who then had to revoke it and therefore look weak.

The other thing that’s really important here is that if the Houthis were designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, that would make this Yemeni peace process that the United Nations Special Envoy announced on December 23 very difficult because, on the one hand, you’d have America seeing them as a terrorist organization, and the United Nations trying to mediate a power-sharing government recognized by the international community with this group of terrorists. So, probably, the domestic peace talks would fall through, and America would be blamed.

BERGEN: Hezbollah in the early 1980s was just a small rag-tag militia in southern Beirut with some Iranian support. Today, they effectively control the government of Lebanon, are very well armed, and are a more effective military force than the Lebanese army.

I use the phrase “ragtag militia” to describe the Houthis in the pre-2014 time period. Are they on the way to becoming a Hezbollah-like entity? They obviously control the capital of Yemen. They obviously are well-armed. They can strike neighboring countries, not only Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but even trying to target Israel.

KENDALL: Yes, I think it’s a good analogy. I think they’re on the way to becoming Hezbollah.

BERGEN: Proxy relationships can vary from fully cooperative to somewhat fraught, and Hezbollah is fully cooperative with Iran. How would you define the relationship with the Houthis and Iran? Are the Houthis a fully blown proxy of Iran, or do they follow their own path?

KENDALL: Yeah, I think it is slightly different from Hezbollah. They’re not joined at the hip with Iran in the way that Hezbollah are, and I don’t also think — so quite an important point here too — is that I don’t think there’s a great sense of brotherhood and loyalty between Hezbollah and the Houthis.

The Houthis are really a bit of a wild card in the Arab world. People don’t quite know what to make of them, and they’re quite hot-headed. They’re fine to collaborate when it suits them, and they have no problem stabbing you in the back when it doesn’t which is what happened to Ali Abdullah Saleh. (In 2015, Saleh, the longtime Yemeni dictator, joined the Houthi rebels, only to be later murdered by the Houthis when Saleh seemed to be trying to make peace with the Saudis.)

They’re not a direct proxy, and Iran has no command and control directly. Of course, it would hamper their cause significantly if Iran stopped supplying them with weapons, but it wouldn’t stop them.

The Challenges to Security in 2024, New America/ASU Online

The Challenges to Security in 2024
Wednesday, January 24
6:00-7:00pm Eastern Time / 4:00-5:00pm Arizona Time
Online, via Zoom Webinar

Join FSI co-directors Peter Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg for a discussion about key global security challenges in 2024.

This is part of a series of events featuring faculty from the ASU Online M.A. in Global Security (MAGS) and the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies.

Peter Bergen, Professor of Practice and Co-Director, Future Security Initiative, School of Politics and Global Studies, Vice President and Director of Future Security at New America, award winning journalist and author of multiple best-selling books including The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World and The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden: The Biography.

Daniel Rothenberg, Professor of Practice and Co-Director, Future Security Initiative, School of Politics and Global Studies, Senior Fellow, New America, author/editor of With These Hands, Memory of Silence, Drone Wars, and Understanding the New Proxy Wars.

Yes, the United States has a Space Force. Stop Laughing.

Episode 36: Yes, the United States has a Space Force. Stop Laughing.
By: Peter L. Bergen
Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 9 2024
Length: 38 mins
Podcast
5.0 out of 5 stars5.0 (2 ratings)

Meet the newest branch of the American military and learn how life as you know it could stop if it fails to do its job.

How did we get to this point in Yemen? CNN.com

Opinion By Peter Bergen, CNN

Published 1:27 PM EST, Fri January 12, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
President Joe Biden has launched arguably the most consequential military attack of this administration, striking multiple Houthi targets in Yemen and widening the conflict in the Middle East — something his administration has tried to avoid since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

So how did we get here? The immediate reason, of course, is that the Houthis have launched 27 attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in the approaches to the Suez Canal, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, in nominal support of Hamas. (Not a great time to have had an initially incommunicado, and still-hospitalized, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who authorized the strikes in Yemen from his hospital bed on Thursday.)

The Houthis, who were once a ragtag militia with the purely local aim of trying to overthrow the Yemen government, are now projecting Iranian power, not only in the Red Sea but across the region. In other words, just as Hezbollah in Lebanon, 1,500 miles to the north of Yemen, is effectively an arm of the Iranian government, so too now are the Houthis.

The Houthis practice a form of Zaydi Shiism that is theologically distinct from the orthodox Shia clerics who run Iran, and while the Houthis have been sympathetic to Iran in the past, it is only in recent years that they have become close allies.

Here is how that happened: In 2015, in what would turn out to be a spectacular act of strategic folly, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, then the Saudi minister of defense, launched a war in neighboring Yemen to prevent the rebel Houthis from taking over the country.

The Saudis used considerable airpower in Yemen, killing an estimated 24,000 people, including 9,000 civilians, and leveling schools and hospitals with US intelligence and support, causing what the United Nations at the time called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Sound familiar? It was particularly ironic then that the Saudi crown prince convened a conference of Arab leaders last November in Riyadh who issued public statements condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Of course, a key difference in the conflicts is that the war in Gaza was touched off by Hamas’ attack on Israel.)

During the Saudi war in Yemen, Iran, which views Saudi Arabia as a critical regional enemy, supplied the Houthis with a steady supply of armed drones and advanced ballistic missiles, the same weapons that the Houthis are now deploying against commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Those weapons have also been used to attack oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Saudi-allied United Arab Emirates, and, more recently, have targeted Israel as well.

After more than seven years of war and not achieving its aim of halting the Houthis from controlling much of Yemen, the Saudis are now trying to negotiate a peace deal with the Houthis, so Saudi Arabia was not one of the named participants on Thursday night’s strikes on Houthi targets. Yet, Saudi Arabia is a key reason that the Houthis are now so closely allied to Iran and so well armed.

In a richly ironic statement, Saudi Arabia expressed concern over the US-led strikes against the Houthi targets, saying, “While the Kingdom stresses the importance of maintaining the security and stability of the Red Sea region, in which freedom of navigation is an international demand because it harms the interests of the entire world, it calls for restraint and avoiding escalation in light of the events the region is witnessing.”

Let’s hope that the US-led strikes restore deterrence against the Houthis launching more strikes in the Red Sea. But already the regional conflict that the Biden administration was hoping to contain has spread to Yemen, to Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah and to Iraq, where a recent US strike on the leader of an Iranian-backed militia has amplified calls for the removal of all US troops that remain in Iraq.

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