The problem is that these people do it wrong:

The last thing that you do is send in the troops, because that causes all types of problems and imposes a lot of costs. Especially gven that we are super reluctant to engage in "nation building," or nation building of late tends to be very corrupt... and it doesn't work when you haven't basically flattened the country (like was done to Germany and Japan).

And troops set down in the local environment are easy targets.

Killing the foot soldiers also doesn't do much, as they are easily replaced.

What you ARE trying to do is generate personal level fear in the leadership and reduce strategic and operational capability.

That means assasssinating a lot of people in "plausibly deniable" ways where everyone knows you did it. That means destroying equipment and infrastrucre, either kinetically or through cyber attacks or financial manipulation.

You kill enough leaders, sooner or later they tend to get the message. People get reluctant to be seen as the person in charge. You destroy institutional continuity, You destroy experience and capability.

We don't do that because that would mean that our political leadership then becomes a target (oh, noes) and the precious infrastructure of the American corporates might become targets, impacting their bottom line.

We live in a world where it is okay to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of peons (for little result) but it is NOT okay to kill the people making the decisions and ordering the deaths. Which is F'd up--but it also lets you know who runs things and in whose interests they are run.

The reality is that we could probably weather regular deaths in our leadership than most of these authoritarian states. Politicians are a dime a dozen.

Killing ten thousand HAMAS fighters, or Revolutiuonary Guards (or whatever) doesn't get you much beyond an operational pause (which is useful) and the reality is that violence is not a solution to most of these problems--UNLESS you emply it to the ultimate degree... and THAT has problems of its own.

So continued careful, deniable targetted killings, careful, deniable continual destruction of theft/assets--in other words, doing the things that they are doing, only better--because they cannot afford it as well as we can, in the end. They lack strategic depth.

Because the reality is that these people do NOT want to fight a war with us. The correlation of forces is NOT in their favor... so they will continually act below the threshold of open warfare until that correlation changes or we get tired of it and give up--they are banking on the second.

Case in point, destruction of the ship being used to funnel supplies to the Houthis that we have been warned by the Iranians to not attack. Ooops, looks like there was an unfortunate accident there. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.

You use measured action to push the level of engagement down, by making too expensive and difficult for them to do it.

What we have done in the past hasn't been working, time to change gears.