The army defending Yemen's key port was at 20% strength because its rosters were stuffed with ghost names collecting salaries

A Western source claims the battalions at Mocha existed mostly on paper, padded with fake soldiers drawing pay.

So when Houthi fighters came down the coast, they were met by about a fifth of an army and a lot of payroll entries.

Yemeni generals spent Thursday morning begging for air cover, and a senior military source says CENTCOM assured him Washington was watching closely and Saudi jets were on the way. Not one flew.

With minute-by-minute updates coming in.

A regional source called it a Saudi and American mess of epic proportions, which is putting it gently.

It gets worse. The UAE pulled its troops out in January when Riyadh asked them to leave, and nobody bothered filling the empty bases.

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The army defending Yemen's key port was at 20% strength because its rosters were stuffed with ghost names collecting salaries

A Western source claims the battalions at Mocha existed mostly on paper, padded with fake soldiers drawing pay.

So when Houthi fighters came down the coast, they were met by about a fifth of an army and a lot of payroll entries.

Yemeni generals spent Thursday morning begging for air cover, and a senior military source says CENTCOM assured him Washington was watching closely and Saudi jets were on the way. Not one flew.

With minute-by-minute updates coming in.

A regional source called it a Saudi and American mess of epic proportions, which is putting it gently.

It gets worse. The UAE pulled its troops out in January when Riyadh asked them to leave, and nobody bothered filling the empty bases.

🄳🄾🄾🄼🄿🤖🅂🅃🄸🄽🄶

Many years ago I ran marketing for a consumer app company.

We spent over $100 million testing ads and landing pages. We tried literally thousands of things and TWO tactics stood out:

1) Attractive women beat everything. We tested hundreds of images and the winner was always... a hot woman. Our perennial champion was Scandinavian.

2) The "buy button" can never be too big. We kept testing bigger and bigger buttons to the point of absurdity and the click rates only went up.

These two rules still apply today.

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