If The Houthis Can Shut Down Naval Traffic In The Red Sea, Iran Can Close The Persian Gulf

Credit to Scott Ritter for this salient observation. We made a joint appearance on Danny Haiphong’s podcast tonight and were discussing the remarkable accomplishment of the Houthis in Yemen in shutting down commercial maritime traffic in the Red Sea. Yemen has never been known as a naval power, but it has succeeded in hurting Israel by preventing cargo container ships and oil tankers from sailing to Israel’s ports.

Although the United States has assembled a motley international armada to deal with the Yemeni threat (e.g., Canada sent three naval officers, no ship, and the Seychelles fields a small fleet of coast guard vessels that are one-fourth the size of a U.S. destroyer), there are several obstacles that will hinder the effectiveness of this hodgepodge collection of ships. I discussed these in my previous article (THE U.S. NAVY IS UNPREPARED FOR A PROLONGED WAR WITH YEMEN). These include:

Yemen’s ability to launch $2000 drones against ships that fire $2 million dollar missiles.

Yemen’s ability to launch a swarm attack of more than 30 drones/anti-ship missiles at one time is likely to overwhelm the Aegis capability to rapidly reload and take out inbound threats.

The limited supply of the Aegis missiles on board the U.S. destroyers that can be quickly exhausted if Yemen launches more than 100 drones against each destroyer.

Lack of adequate stockpiles of Aegis missiles in the U.S. inventory.

Each U.S. destroyer must sail to a U.S. or coalition base to refit (this assumes that the U.S. has been able to forward deploy an adequate supply of replacement air defense missiles).

Deploying adequate ISR assets to locate mobile missile sites in Yemen without having those assets shot down by Houthi air defense systems.

If tiny Yemen, with its limited military capability, can do this, why would any sane analyst assume that Iran could not do the same thing? Iran has a navy and a bounteous supply of anti-ship missiles and a large contingent of more lethal drones.

Take a moment to consider the composition of a carrier strike group in light of the limitations outlined above:

A U.S. carrier strike group (CSG) is a type of carrier battle group of the United States Navy.^[1] It is an operational formation composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, usually an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a destroyer squadron of at least two destroyers or frigates,^[2] and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft.s

If each destroyer carries a compliment of 100 Aegis missiles, that means the CSG would be out of its principal air defense capability if Yemen (or Iran or China) fired 200 drones or anti-ship missiles over three or four days. Once those screening ships have shot their load the CSG would have to withdraw to a nearby friendly port to obtain more missiles. This fact may explain why the Pentagon is moving so slowly to carry out strikes inside Yemen.

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