What will be the Doctrine of the Future Yemeni Army?

Certainly, any coming or future peace process requires building a qualitative army saturated militarily and nationally. It would represent the guarantor power and the safety valve of peace trajectory as well as implementing the settlements. All its members will have to abide by absolute loyalty to the nation and not to take sides towards any party or body or component or group. This may be possible with efforts and plans implemented in the short, middle and long term. This is in case of reaching settlements among the politically fighting forces whose conflicts and congestion vanish with the end of their causes.

In case of a conflict with a sectarian and religious nature, the implementation of such solutions or settlements becomes impossible. We have similar and practical examples of this form of conflict in Lebanon and Iraq in which efforts to integrate Shiite sectarian forces into the national armies failed. They include armies and sectarian armed forces parallel to the official army and more powerful and influential than it. This is despite the political settlements in which all forces with different orientations engaged whether in Iraq or Lebanon. For example, despite the decades that has passed since the Lebanese parties signed the Taif Agreement on September 30th 1989 in which all Lebanese forces and sects were committed to integrate into a unified Lebanese national state, the armed and unofficial wing of Lebanese Hezbollah is still unilateral and parallel to the official Lebanese army.

Likewise in Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forces, Badr Organization, the Mahdi Army, Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq, Iraqi Hezbollah and Liwa Abu Al-Fadhal al-Abbas still retain their forces and structures. Despite the decision by the former Iraqi Prime Minister "Adel Abdul-Mahdi" on July 1st 2019 to integrate these Shiite-oriented factions with the Iraqi security forces and army, they just apply the financial integration in a way that allows them to receive the salaries and allocations from Iraqi Defense Ministry while they are still separated from it at both operational and leadership levels. They obey the decisions of the Shiite "Maraji” who are affiliated with Iran.

In face of this intractable condition of intellectual, cultural and doctrinal disharmony as well as the discrepancy of understandings and labels among the warring parties, the safe transit to an accepted stage of security and peace requires outright Houthi recognition of what they have caused at all levels over all the past phases reviewed in this paper. Subsequently, they should recognize the importance of achieving the principle of citizenship equality and criminalizing racial, religious, sectarian, or ethnic arrogance. They have to abide by rehabilitating their leaders and supporters as well as removing the extremist beliefs and understandings from their mind and taming their radical concepts. This won't be achieved without a broad and long-term rehabilitation process led and supervised by local, Arab and foreign experts specialized in humanitarian development in a way that achieves the needed configuration to merge these elements and formations after discarding extremism and removing extraneous and doctrinal beliefs and ideas.

However, there are a lot of controversies accompanied with several complexities and barriers which prevent the group from admitting what they caused. In the face of this inflexibility, all scenarios related to unifying and merging the forces in the proper way are like miracles. Thus, the international and regional players of the Yemeni file rely upon building fragile scenarios in this direction hoping to achieve any possible breakthrough. They believe that these scenarios will derive the factors of cohesion, resilience and durability in an ascending way accompanied with the implementation of the series of their future steps. However, all data and indications underscore that we are facing an intractable process. In any case, these scenarios are expected to collapse soon which may be experienced by the actors of the Yemeni file over the next few periods.

Accordingly, establishing a military doctrine for any future army requires reaching a consensus by all parties about the identity of a supposed enemy. While some components see that Iran should be the enemy, the Houthis see Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Arab Coalition as the enemy. They go further by describing KSA in their speeches as being the historical enemy of the Yemenis. Furthermore, there has been a division between those who consider what happened in Yemen in 2014 and seizing control over the state institutions as a Houthi coup against the legitimate government and the Houthis who believe that what happened has been a Saudi invasion of Yemen. They try to enhance this name in the curricula of history and the generational awareness.

Ultimately, all of these are considered contradictions among the components which are supposed to constitute the mixture of the state leaders after reaching the assumed peace. This reveals a deep division which paves the way for more violence and conflict. This will be the case If peace was adopted in an impromptu manner which ignores such contexts that represent a simple part of forked details which would hinder the building of state institutions in any upcoming peace process.