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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   803 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 18, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Israel strikes Yemen's Hodeidah Port twelve times after Houthi attack on Israeli airport, claiming it was used by the Houthis for weapons transfers from Iran.

This is where my ignorance shows up - how hard is it to destroy a port? I mean Israel has been bombing it repeatedly for a while, and it's way too short timeframe to build a new port, so why it's still capable to accepting any weapons transfers from anywhere?

how hard is it to destroy a port?

Fairly easy. Just sink the docked ships. They will create barriers with their hulls.

That heavily depends on what exactly is meant by "bombing" and "to destroy". A few guided missiles or bombs sent from fighters are good for destroying individual buildings but won't do a whole lot if the goal is to make the entire port area long term unusable for docking ships. Even the Beirut port is still standing just fine after a one kiloton explosion. I suspect you'd need an actual nuke to truly destroy many ports so that they couldn't be easily made ad hoc serviceable in short time again.

It's not "long term" really - they bombed it quite recently. And it's not just standing ships there - it's unloading, etc. - it must take some infrastructure? How hard it should be to destroy this infrastructure to the point it can't serve as a port anymore?

You can remove a lot of the infrastructure if you don't mind slowing down the unloading. Even oil pipelines can be replaced with tanker trucks if those are available.

Imagine bombing a large parking lot with cruise missile or two. Sure, it'd lower the capacity and temporarily halt the use but it wouldn't take all that much effort to continue operation again. A port at its basics is just a dropoff point / parking lot for ships with the most basic structures being inherently resistant to any secondary effects of bombing (ie. anything outside the literal crater).

Just for comparison I used Nukemap to simulate dropping a 20 kT nuke on the Beirut port and there's no way to position that such that it'd take out more than half of the port with heavy damage (a heavy concrete pier is probably going to shrug off 5 psi overpressure). You'd have to use a dozen precisely aimed 10 ton bombs (roughly the yield of the largest non-nuclear bomb in US arsenal, not exactly something to be fired from a normal jet) to actually destroy all the piers themselves.

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