Six months into the conflict, the United States has failed to stop Houthi rebels from attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea, and Yemeni fighters continue to sink commercial vessels and disrupt global trade, posing an increasingly difficult challenge for the much larger U.S. military.
Repeated U.S. bombing raids on Houthi positions have done little to thwart the Iran-backed group, which has managed to employ more modern weaponry, including surface drones and anti-ship ballistic missiles, to confuse U.S. forces, and has kept up its pace, firing drones and missiles more than 190 times since it began its offensive in late October.
While the United States has largely prevented the Houthi rebels from attacking commercial shipping, Yemeni militants have sunk or heavily damaged at least four merchant ships and hijacked one more, killing four merchant sailors.
The most recent successful attack was on June 23, when the Houthis attacked the Greek-owned, Liberian-flagged merchant ship Trans World Navigator. The last ship to be sunk was the Greek-owned Tutor, which sank on June 12.
Bruce Bennett, a senior international defense fellow at the RAND Corporation, said the Houthis are fuelled by a religious resolve and a “political drive” willingness to make sacrifices, but their insurgency war, which has involved scattering weapons across Yemen, poses major challenges.
“The U.S. military is designed for conventional warfare, it’s designed to take the enemy off the hook and eliminate the ones that can attack,” he said. “This is the kind of military threat that is really, really difficult to control.”
As the conflict drags on, its impact on global trade will only grow. Earlier this month, the shipping industry delivered a scathing rebuke He called the Houthi attacks an “unacceptable situation” and called for greater action from the international community to ensure they “stop immediately.”
For now, the economic costs have been absorbed mainly by the shipping industry and direct sellers, but that could change.
Traffic in the Red Sea corridor has fallen by 50 percent, said Adnan Mazarei, an adjunct senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who specializes in Middle Eastern and Central Asian economies. The impact has been regional, hitting Egypt, which derives its shipping revenue mainly through the Suez Canal, and port traffic in countries such as Israel has also fallen, he added.
But if the conflict continues for a long time, the increased shipping costs could be passed on to consumers and have an impact on other parts of the world, especially Europe. The situation could worsen significantly if war were to break out between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Mazarei added.
“As long as there is no war in Lebanon, we are in a somewhat stable situation,” he said. “It’s not a good situation, but I think the situation is somewhat stable.”
The Houthis launch drones and missiles daily from their bases in Yemen, use fishing boats for radar tracking and rely on Iran for shipments of advanced weaponry and other targeting support.
Their reach extends beyond the maritime corridor: in the past few months, the Houthis have kidnapped dozens of UN aid workers. Human Rights Watch The new report said.
The U.S. Navy has been on constant alert since full-scale hostilities began in January to quickly shoot down drones and launch counterattacks on rebel assets.
But the Houthis would need just one drone or missile to slip through defenses to do any damage, and the U.S. cannot risk a single missed shot, said Adm. Eric Blomberg, commander of the USS Laboon, a destroyer engaged with the Houthis. He told the Associated Press “People may not realize how serious what we are doing is and how ships continue to be under threat.”
A U.S. Navy carrier strike group consisting of four ships and about 6,000 sailors left the Middle East this month as the United States reinforces Force Eisenhower, which has been there since October to combat the Houthis and stem regional tensions.
Washington is confident it can strike a sufficient blow against the insurgents to thwart their operations, but officials now underscore the difficulty of achieving that goal.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday that Navy vigilance has caused the Houthis to “miss many more attacks than they land.”
Kirby explained that the US is focused on “depriving them of their offensive capability,” but acknowledged that the Houthis remain determined and well-supplied despite military efforts to intercept Iranian boats heading to Yemen.
“They’ve instilled religious fervor and made it into a kind of high-profile incident, which then makes things even more difficult,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to degrade their capabilities, but they’re still being supplied and they’re still being resourced by Iran.”
Brian Clark, senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Engineering, said the United States could choose to destroy assembly and distribution centers rather than primarily targeting launch sites, but that would increase the risk of attacks on civilians.
“There’s a reason the U.S. chooses to target these sites,” he said of the launch sites, “but it means the threat never really goes away and the defense game is always on.”
The Navy has also committed significant resources to the fight, firing $4 million in surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Houthi drones, which are typically much cheaper.
The Biden administration has said the costs of not defending commercial ships would be much higher, but Clark said that strategy may not be sustainable.
“If this continues for another year and the Navy doesn’t change its tactics, it’s going to be in trouble because it’s going to start running out of the interceptor missiles that it’s using to shoot down drones,” he said.
The Houthis, who control much of war-torn Yemen after years of fighting the government, are disrupting about 12 percent of global trade that passes through the Red Sea, which sits on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Since December, commercial shipping companies have largely avoided the Red Sea, instead taking a circuitous route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, which has added days to voyages and driven up costs. Ships that pass through the Red Sea are paying higher insurance premiums, and the disruption has reduced the amount of cargo they are carrying.
by Congressional Research ServiceHouthi attacks are disrupting the flow of humanitarian aid in the Middle East and Africa, and if the conflict continues for a long time, it could lead to inflation and “become a drag on the global economy.”
Caroline Freund, dean of the School of International Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, said the impact on the global economy remains small, but the true cost of the disruption is unclear.
“It certainly does lead to higher transportation costs and higher prices,” she said, “but it’s not enough that you can see that without some data analysis.”
In other efforts, Washington has designated the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization, which restricts their funding sources but is less stringent than the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation, and the Treasury Department has Sanctions announced Attacks this month targeted several individuals and groups helping supply the Houthis, including one Chinese national.
Republicans have criticized the US for failing to rein in the Houthis and have called for an FTO designation, which could jeopardize US hopes of ending the civil war between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, which is currently in a fragile ceasefire. Yemen’s economy, one of the world’s poorest, could also be hit by an FTO designation.
But Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the US needed to issue an FTO designation to deter the Houthis and carry out more lethal attacks targeting arms depots, and accused Biden of making Americans “less safe.”
“If our enemies can attack Americans and cripple the global economy with impunity, we invite them to continue their reckless and unchecked aggression,” he wrote. Thursday Opinion.
It’s unclear how the fighting will end. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said: He told the Senate Armed Services Committee As of May, it was thought that the situation with the Houthis was unlikely to change and that there was a “possibility” that they would continue fighting even if a ceasefire was established in Gaza.
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen expert at the analytical firm Navanti Group, noted the Houthis had recently established networks in Somalia and Iraq and said they were likely to continue fighting as they seek to expand their influence.
“They now see themselves as a transnational movement. [similar to] “They are global freedom fighters. They operate far beyond Yemen,” he said. “The Houthis will continue to gain power and become a thorn in the side of the international community.”
