🇸🇦🇾🇪 Saudi Arabia has flown 157 airstrikes on the Houthis, and the man who counts America's weapons says the result will be a mowed lawn that grows back Mark Cancian tracks arsenals for CSIS, and the Saudi campaign looks sustainable to him for one reason: it burns the short and medium-range bombs the United States stocks deeply and sells freely. What it cannot do is the thing Riyadh needs. The Houthis have dug in the way Hezbollah and Hamas did, airpower can hamper their ports without closing them, and a third of normal traffic still moves through the Red Sea only because the Houthis choose not to hit the rest. Israel, meanwhile, has struck a mutual silence with both Yemen and Iran, and the F-35s Washington just authorized for Riyadh won't reach a Saudi runway for years. So the lawn gets mowed, the grass returns, and the port of Yanbu stays a target. The only exit that has ever worked here is a ceasefire, and the Saudis aren't asking for one. @MarkCancian @WeTheBrandon