The Pirates Are Winning – Defeat In The Red Sea

Over two hundred years ago the United States went to war against the Barbary Pirates, a collection of Arab emirates on the North African coast that made a living from piracy. They considered our ships easy marks. They were wrong.

We had no real Navy or any actual armed forces for that matter. What we did have were men with guts, brains, and a complete dedication to the safety and security of these United States. President Jefferson cobbled together the necessary force.  The Barbary Pirates learned the hard way that America was not to be trifled with.

The situation today is dramatically different. Modern-day pirates known as the Houthis have largely closed one of the world’s most strategic waterways, the Red Sea, to commercial shipping. Our response to date has been at best ineffectual. We are losing the war.

The state of play in brief is as follows. The Houthis, armed, trained, and directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fire cheap drones and missiles at commercial vessels. They also employ equally cheap and easy-to-manufacture drone suicide boats. We and our coalition partners respond by deploying handfuls of very expensive warships offshore. These ships destroy the cheap Houthi missiles, drones, and boats using incredibly expensive missiles and aircraft. On a good day, the Houthis hit nothing and expend little in the way of resources.

We, and our coalition allies, on the other hand run through multi-million dollar interceptor missiles at a furious pace. Our ships cannot be reloaded at sea. When they finish firing all the missiles they have on board they have to sail to some distant port to reload. We don’t have enough ships. We don’t have enough men. Gaps in our coverage appear. Commercial vessels continue to be hit.

Shippers have absorbed the point. We cannot protect them. Increasingly, ships are sailing all the way around Africa to avoid being hit.

There is an obvious solution to the problem. Act with a sense of purpose. Design a strategy that would prevent the Houthis from continuing with their current activities.

Much of what the Houthis use to attack commercial shipping comes by boat or ship from Iran to Yemen. Intercept those vessels. Send every one of them found to be carrying support to the Houthis to the bottom. Hand their crews over to the Saudis to be held until the end of hostilities.

Target the known locations in Yemen where the Houthis build missiles, drones, and boats. Stop shooting things down after they have been launched. Destroy them before they can be used.

Adopt a policy of firm, overwhelming response. Every time a Houthi crew fires a drone at a vessel in the Red Sea that crew and its launching site or facility should be obliterated. The command and control element that directed the launch should be obliterated. The truck park from which the vehicles came that moved the drone or missile that was fired should be obliterated. Everyone and everything connected in any way to the launching of an attack on a vessel at sea should cease to exist.

That will rapidly take the fun out of attacking commercial ships at sea.

Unfortunately, this administration is filled with individuals who not only lack moral courage but sympathize more with the Houthis than with those nations under attack. We lack resolve. Our armed forces are fighting subject to constraints that make it impossible to win.

The Houthis understand this. They are emboldened. They are already crowing about victory. They recently staged a dance party complete with fireworks on a captured vessel just to make sure everyone understood they were having a good time and knew they were winning.

The impact on global trade from Houthi attacks has been enormous. The movement of commercial ships through the Red Sea is now down by 50%. The effect of our failure will be even more far-reaching.

All over the world our adversaries are eyeing us carefully and calculating when and if to move against us. That is true in the Middle East more generally where Iran and its proxies are poised to begin a true regional war against Israel and the West. It is also true in Asia, where China is locked in a confrontation with both Taiwan and the Philippines which could explode into open warfare on little or no notice.

What these enemies see is a superpower that no longer has the will to do what is required to defend itself. What they see is a complete absence of any plan designed to successfully navigate the challenges ahead. The size of our navy continues to decline. We can no longer recruit enough people to fill the ranks of our armed forces. The Navy recently announced it was considering docking seventeen badly needed support vessels because it no longer had sufficient personnel to man them.

Joe and Kamala lost the war in Afghanistan. They aren’t done yet. We are losing the war in the Red Sea. The pirates are winning.