The Pentagon’s view of the Saudi war in Yemen is mixed. Some officials have been openly enthusiastic: For the first time, a regional ally is taking the lead in a military campaign, a scenario one senior Pentagon official described as “something we’ve dreamed of.” But among the top brass, there’s uncertainty as to what, exactly, is at stake in Yemen. Shortly after the United States announced its support for the Saudis, Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Gulf, told lawmakers that he didn’t “know the specific goals and objectives of the Saudi campaign.”

Realism, or Obama’s version of it, perhaps still wins the day. Stephen Seche is the executive vice president of Washington’s Arab Gulf States Institute and a veteran U.S. diplomat who worked on the Gulf states. He served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 2007 to 2010. “I don’t think we went into this enthusiastically at all, but Saudis were in such a lather,” over the Iran deal, Seche said.

The Saudis’ long-term plan for Yemen also remains unclear. Speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, officials from both the State and Defense Departments questioned how well the Saudis had thought through their war in Yemen, and how skilled they were at executing airstrikes while avoiding unnecessary collateral damage. According to the UN, more than 2,200 civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes since the beginning of their war in Yemen. Bombs dropped by Saudi coalition planes have hit schools, markets, factories, and hospitals. A CENTCOM spokesperson said that U.S. tankers offload fuel regardless of what a jet’s target is, or whether the mission has been preplanned and extensively vetted. A recent project to track all Saudi airstrikes since the war began estimated that a full third have hit civilian sites. Accused of violating international law in Yemen, the Saudis have blocked efforts at the UN to establish an independent human-rights investigation. When they were listed on a UN annex for killing children in airstrikes, Riyadh threatened to cut funding to the UN.

Some in the Obama administration are unsettled by its position on Yemen. In August, after Saudi jets bombed a bridge that brought nearly all UN aid to Sanaa, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power tweeted out a picture of the rubble, and wrote “Strikes on hospital/school/infrastructure in #Yemen devastating for ppl already facing unbearable suffering&must end.” According to U.S. officials, the Pentagon had put the bridge on a no-strike list, reflecting its importance to the humanitarian response there, only to be ignored. Their plight worsened by a suffocating Saudi blockade, more than 21 million Yemenis are in need of some kind of humanitarian assistance and people in many areas are verging on starvation, as the BBC has shown. A few days after the bridge strike, a spokesperson for CENTCOM said that the United States continued to refuel Saudi jets like the ones that hit the bridge. If the Saudis decided on more bombing missions, the spokesperson said, they would refuel more.