This paper examines the blockade imposed on Israeli-linked shipping by Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement during the 2023-2025 Israel-Gaza War. In disrupting huge flows of global trade without a standing navy, the blockade represented a breakthrough in asymmetric warfare, using mostly domestic technologies. But this success was made possible by transformations in the logistics industry, where centralization and just-in-time scheduling have made shipping an increasingly fragile and bottle-necked business–something Ansar Allah exploited to great effect.
Ashok Kumar is an associate professor of political economy at Birkbeck university and the author of Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020)