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The most likely explanation is that they just fucked up. There is no possible benefit to deliberately leaking the info to Goldberg that would make up for the embarrassment of him going public with how he obtained the information.
To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.
The grown man failed to win in the last fist fight. We already had the whole 'Houthis fucked around and now they're gonna find out' arc a year ago where everyone thought the combined might of NATO and the US fleet would quickly crush them. But Red Sea shipping remains 50% below what it was and we got all these articles about how the ships were firing million dollar interceptors at drones costing 100th of the price.
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Have you considered that a prayer for victory Is Just What You Do?
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To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.
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The Houthis need to be lucky only once for the US to have a massive egg on their face. People are still talking about the downed F-117 in Serbia. Also realistically I would bet that if a carrier is sunk quite a lot of the people on board would drown. There is air of invulnerability over US Capital ships so some of them being lax on evacuation procedures training is not unthinkable.
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