I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority
Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.
If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.
But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They’re not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.
Yeah I guess if we’re doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.