The Trump Administration has begun a more systematic campaign to counter Houthi strikes against commercial and military shipping in the Red Sea. Nancy A. Youssef, Saleh al-Batati, and Benoit Faucon report in the Wall Street Journal:
U.S. military officials described Saturday’s strikes as the beginning of a sustained campaign targeting the rebel group. The USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group is currently operating in the region and led the U.S. military response, a U.S. defense official said.
The operation included “precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen to defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation,” U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, posted on X.
Trump said the strikes were also a message to Iran that it needed to immediately halt support for the group. If Iran threatens the U.S., “America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!,” he said on his Truth Social platform.
Hours after the U.S. strikes in Yemen, Hossein Salami, the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, rejected Trump’s allegations that Iran was backing the Houthis. Iran plays no role in the Houthis’ strategic and operational decisions but Tehran would respond if threatened, Salami was quoted as saying by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
Tehran also publicly denies that it supplies the Houthis with weapons, but United Nations inspectors have regularly traced seized weapons shipments back to Iran.
The Houthis began targeting commercial and military ships transiting the Red Sea and other nearby waters shortly after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in what it described as support for the Palestinians. The group suspended those attacks in January, following a cease-fire deal reached by Israel and Hamas.
But in recent weeks, disputes over how to move to the next phase of that cease-fire have threatened to derail an already fragile deal.
Will these strikes be more effective than the Biden Administration’s program of retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets has been? Frankly, I doubt it. I cannot imagine that the area of Yemen in question is a target-rich environment.
The last several years has demonstrated rather conclusively that it’s much harder to maintain sufficient control of an airspace to prevent enemies from striking your commercial or military interests than it used to be. It doesn’t require a national-style air force to conduct such operations. They may be conducted by small groups or even individuals.
As I said at the outset of Houthi harassment of Red Sea shipping two years ago, actually eliminating the possibility of such attacks will require control of the territory from the Red Sea to a 100 km into the interior of the country. That’s 10% of the country or more. I suspect it would require ground operations and such operations have been avoided to date.
It’s marketing Dave. He just has to look tough for his cult.
Steve
This is not snark, or disingenuous.
Iran is of course funding all these outfits. And we swat the flies. Why not hit in a material way the Iranian oil assets. So it hurts. Its the only thing they will understand.
I can hear people: “oh, its an act of war.” They aren’t conducting acts of war?” Spare me. Are we serious about resolution or not?
There is not a single instance where air power alone defeated an enemy, especially fanatics like the Houthis. If the US wants to open the Red Sea to commercial shipping, it will have to occupy Yemen with ground forces. Probably 100,000 troops will be required, and they will face a guerrilla war as long as they are there.
Or, God forbid!, we could just force the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza, and stop their attacks on the Gazans. The Palestinian civilians are the actual targets, not Hamas. Hamas “terrorism” is an excuse for genocide, a genocide that goes back to the original Zionist invasion of Palestine.
Thought you were a realist.
Arabs only respect force, and the U S can keep the air raids up indefinitely, consider it airtime hours for training.
We keep the sea lanes open, it’s what we do.
We’ll have to see how this campaign unfolds.
The old intelligence rule of thumb is:
Threat = Intent + Capability
Military force can affect both intent and capability, but there are always limits. Geography and outside assistance to the Houthis are complicating factors for both.
I am surprised the military has time for this since they are spending so much time eliminating DEI stuff, like medal of honor winers.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/16/defense-department-black-medal-of-honor-veteran
Steve
What the navy needs is cheap (like < $20K per unit) drones with loitering munitions that can keep 24/7 watch on the Yeman coast.
Its a lot easier to pressure the Houthis if the navy response costs $20K instead of $2 million per response.
“Its a lot easier to pressure the Houthis if the navy response costs $20K instead of $2 million per response.”
We are incapable of doing that.
We are (hopefully), learning a lot about drones from Ukraine (where product iteration is on extremely short timescales), but translating that into assets on the battlefield is not something the US can do quickly. Our development timelines are measured in years and decades, not days and weeks.
It’s a systemic issue, one that DOGE, Musk, and the Trump administration are ignoring in favor of the baseball bat approach to “efficiency.”
But the bigger issue isn’t cost – everything we make is orders of magnitude more expensive – the issue is the ability to sustain and the tradeoffs from using up small stockpiles in Yemen that can’t be used elsewhere. There are meme’s going around in the national security space where PACOM (Pacific Command) is crying again at CENTCOM using all the ordnance. See for example this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1ht4p8i/centcom_is_currently_blowing_their_precious_loads/