Imagine you and a colleague are tasked with fixing a critical server outage. You both agree on the main goal—get the system back online—but you deploy different, incompatible third-party scripts to do it. Suddenly, your scripts are fighting each other, the server is still down, and everyone’s asking for an ETA. Welcome to the Saudi-UAE intervention in Yemen, a geopolitical tragicomedy of misaligned objectives and outsourced chaos. It’s less a unified front and more a case of two senior VPs with conflicting KPIs and a shared, increasingly buggy, production environment.
The Initial Service Level Agreement (SLA)
On paper, the mission, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, was straightforward. The Houthi movement had taken over Sana’a, and the goal was to restore the internationally recognized government. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi signed on, committing their considerable resources. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a P1 ticket: all hands on deck for a quick rollback. The initial phase was a show of unified force, a powerful API call meant to reset the system to its previous stable state.
Diverging Deployment Strategies
The problem with any long-running project is scope creep. As the conflict dragged on, the two main stakeholders began optimizing for different outcomes. Their approaches diverged into what can only be described as two separate development branches destined for a messy merge conflict.
- Team Riyadh: Focused on the “legacy system.” Their primary goal remained supporting the Hadi government and pushing back the Houthis in the north. Think of it as maintaining the old mainframe—cumbersome, but familiar. Their success metric was a unified Yemen under a friendly administration.
- Team Abu Dhabi: Started spinning up new “microservices” in the south. They empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a group with secessionist ambitions. Their objective was pragmatic: secure crucial maritime trade routes and create a stable, pliable southern buffer state. It was a containerized approach for a distributed future.
When Your Contractors Start Fighting Each Other
The inevitable happened in places like Aden, where the UAE-backed STC turned its guns on the Saudi-backed government forces. This was the moment your security script starts actively trying to DDoS your web server. The very tools deployed to solve the problem created a new, more complex one. The alliance became a fragile partnership where both sides were funding proxies that were actively hostile to each other. It’s a classic case of what happens when you outsource key tasks to two different contractors without making them sit in the same kickoff meeting. The result is a convoluted mess, a reminder that in geopolitics, as in IT, never assume your partners have read the same documentation.