Operation Gloves Off: How the US Navy can defeat the Houthis and re-open the Red Sea trade route

At the moment, what we’re doing is technically known as ‘losing’

If doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity, then the Western navies – led by the USN – are at that point in the Red Sea. Something has to change there or at best, we will continue to lose. At worst, there will be a disaster far greater than the sinkings, deaths, fires and pollution thus far.
The Iran-backed Houthis, currently in control of much of Yemen, started firing at ships passing through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea last October. By December they were doing so sufficiently often that the major shipping companies decided it was no longer worth the risk or the extra insurance premiums and that they would go around the Cape of Good Hope instead. 
Since then, there have been various allied defensive and offensive operations to counter this, and a few shifts in Houthi capabilities and tactics. Despite all this, 60 per cent of all ships which would normally travel via the Red Sea, and over 90 per cent of the expensive ones, are no longer using the route. 
Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG), the US led defensive effort to reassure shipping, has fluctuated between a strength of zero warships and a fleet numbering in the mid-teens, including a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for seven months earlier this year. In the early days, there were enough ships to put them in missile picket boxes to intercept Houthi weapons as they came off the coast.
More recently, as OPG numbers have dwindled, the boxes have been abandoned in favour of escorting chosen vessels. Aspides, the EU led alternative to OPG, has been steady between three and eight warships and doing sterling escort work throughout, as has the Indian Navy further east.
Operation Poseidon Archer, the US led offensive counter-strike mission (to which only the US and the UK have contributed, though various other nations formally expressed support) has struck multiple Houthi launchers, missiles and other targets. Superficially this sounds good until you realise that the Houthi strike rate of 2.5 attacks a week has barely flickered and the number of ships going around and avoiding the Bab-el-Mandeb has barely budged from 60 per cent. So not good at all, really. 
Houthi tactics have evolved over the months. The use of surface drones has increased which is troubling given the damage they can cause at the waterline. Piracy has died down after the initial high-profile successes: the recent attack on the MV Sounion, in which an initial missile strike was followed up by a boarding party placing (ineffectual) demolition charges, is a new type of event.
Despite the apparent variety in methods, recent Lloyds List analysis shows that 94 per cent of the attacks since the start have been with missiles. ‘Drone only’ is 3 per cent and ‘Hijack’, ‘armed approach’ and ‘other projectile’ make up the other 3 per cent between them. So actually, the Houthis have been mainly sticking to one tactic. Just lots and lots of missiles, often with drones as backup or distraction. The Houthis’ targeting at the start appeared to corroborate their claim that they would only go after ships connected with Israel, the US and UK: but by January, only the most blinkered still believed this.
Again, a recent Lloyds report said, “Analysis of 83 attacks on ships by Houthis over the past nine months reveals no Russia-owned tonnage targeted and just one Chinese ship linked to MSC”.
In other words, the Houthis can and do choose who to fire at: but it isn’t just the US, UK and Israel. It’s anyone other than Russia and China. 
So here we are, 11 months into this and not much has changed. Ships continue to go around the Cape which is costing more, placing strain on fleet numbers, creating congestion and degrading their engines and hulls faster. Shipping companies are making good money from it for now, but none of them want this to become the new normal. Prices are higher than they otherwise would be in the UK, Europe and other places which normally receive a lot of trade via the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Meanwhile, our warships are firing a lot of expensive missiles and running significant risks, and nothing is changing.
This is sometimes called ‘losing’. 
But it doesn’t have to be. For shipping to be reassured, the Houthis have to stop firing. This can only happen one of three ways. First, they decide to stop. Given how much prestige and influence this war has given them this seems unlikely. Regular Houthi-watchers will have known from 2014 how little they care about the suffering of the Yemeni people. Trying to blow up an oil tanker a few miles off their own fishing grounds confirms this, if such were needed.
The second option is that they are persuaded to stop, most probably by Iran. This should still form the bedrock of any effort as in the long term, it is the most likely to succeed. A holistic diplomatic solution should still be pursued full bore.
The final option would be to make them stop. This is not easy, or it would have been done already. The Houthis have learned a lot from Iran about mobility and concealment as have Hamas, Hezbollah and so on. Their missile launchers are often placed among civilian urban populations, making it very hard to knock them out by air or missile strike without causing unacceptable collateral damage. A launcher will probably move shortly after firing, meaning that a response needs to come almost instantly – probably from an aircraft already overhead, rather than a cruise missile or a jet that has to fly in from afar.
Hitting the Houthis from the air sends a message but as we’ve seen, that isn’t working. Even if the Americans brought the carrier Roosevelt round from the Gulf of Oman and turned the dial right up, I don’t think airpower would work on its own.
There is one option yet to be explored – the Navy SEALs and other US and allied special operations forces (SOF). There is precedent for them being used in this way, to preserve freedom of navigation. Operation Prime Chance, a secret op which ran from August 1987 to June 1989, came into being when a vessel being escorted as part of the already running, defensive, overt Operation Earnest Will was hit by a mine. US calculus back then was that teeth also needed to shown if Ayatollah Khomeini was to be deterred from laying more mines.
And it worked. A combination of SEAL teams, mobile sea bases (barges chartered from the offshore industry), in the region of 26 surface combatants, from frigates to amphibious ships, the US Army’s special operations aviation regiment (the ‘Night Stalkers’), EOD and special boat units, and many others contributed. For a long while the operation remained covert but anyone moving mines about or acting suspiciously would be boarded or otherwise dealt with. Eventually footage of Prime Chance elements taking down the Iranian ship Iran Ajr as it was laying mines brought the operation out into the open, immediately undermining the Iranian narrative that the mines were being laid by Iraq. Faced with this level of aggression and capability, Khomeini sought a ceasefire.
The US still has all the component parts required to do this again. There are even oil rigs and other offshore platforms that could be used as forward operating sea bases in the way that the barges Hercules and Wimbrown VII were for Prime Chance.
The major difference between this and Prime Chance is that the Houthis’ missiles and launchers are ashore, and as discussed, they are difficult to take out with air power alone. US (and probably British) SOF, largely based from the sea, would need to operate ashore.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made “boots on the ground” toxic. Nonetheless American and British SOF have carried out huge numbers of covert in-and-out operations over recent years in Syria and elsewhere: they could do so in Yemen as well. Houthi air defences would need to be suppressed – cue the carrier – so that extensive use could be made of Osprey tiltrotors and other rotary wing aviation, with forces based at sea and perhaps also in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and non-Houthi-occupied parts of Yemen.
In addition to SOF raids and observation parties, the US carrier – perhaps aided by land based aviation – could establish constant overhead air cover, reducing response times so that Houthi missile teams could be hit as soon as they made a launch.
None of this is easy, warfare never is, but imagine what it would do to the Houthi risk calculus. They don’t care if the odd launcher gets hit from the air and they certainly don’t care for the safety of the Yemeni people, but imagine if they knew that some of the US’s most serious operators, and a few from the UK, were in amongst them. It would have the same effect as the pager attack on Hezbollah, or the long SOF campaign against ISIS/Daesh – no-one and nowhere is safe. In a few weeks it would be possible to decimate Houthi capability and morale, and damage their internal political credibility whilst showing Iran and the rest of the world, in a relatively isolated area, that the US will only tolerate so much, even if that appears to be a lot more now than it was in the late 80s.  
MacDill Air Force Base in Florida is home to both Central Command – in charge of American forces and operations in the Middle East – and Special Operations Command. In ops rooms there this has all been worked through properly (not like my plan). The senior person in the group will have gone to his boss and presented it and would have finished with ‘when do we go?’ There will be many such plans from this, to interdiction operations to more conventional strikes, presenting them patiently to the Pentagon whenever possible before they brief the White House where decisions of this magnitude reside.
Navies have never been keen to fight with their hands tied, and that is how the US Navy will perceive Prosperity Guardian at this point. Either you want freedom of navigation in this important chokepoint restored or you don’t. Assuming the former, those tasked to do it need to be given the requisite tools to do so. 
Repeating yourself and expecting a different outcome is indeed the definition of insanity, especially when inside an enemy’s missile envelope. Something has to change in the Red Sea or we will continue to lose. Sadly I doubt there will really be an Operation Prime Chance II – call it Operation Gloves Off, perhaps – but you never know. Perhaps such a plan is underway already. I sincerely hope so.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer