Houthi Fighters board a ship in the Red Sea

Keith Johnson – Foreign Policy Magazine July1, 2024

More than six months after the Houthi insurgent group in Yemen started seriously disrupting maritime traffic in the Red Sea, global shipping has had to come to terms with a new normal where delays, derangements, and higher costs are only getting worse.

That is despite the efforts of the U.S., British, and European navies that have been on station the whole time attempting, without success, to neuter the Houthi threat and restore security for the commercial shipping.

That the world’s premier navies appear to be struggling to subdue a band of insurgents raises painful questions about both the utility of sea power and the proficiency of the Western navies that are meant to carry the burden in any future showdown with a major rival such as China. The U.S. Navy admits that it has been in the sharpest fight it has faced since World War II.

“The Houthis have proven to be quite the formidable force. This is a nonstate actor that fields a larger arsenal and is really able to give a headache to the Western coalition,” said Sebastian Bruns, a naval expert at the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security and the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University in Germany. “This is as high-end as it gets for now, and when navies are having a problem with sustainment at this level, it is really worrisome.”

From its deadly perch on the shipping chokepoint of the Bab el-Mandeb, the gateway to the Suez Canal, the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, now Yemen’s nominal ruler, has been attacking civilian and naval ships since late last year, ostensibly as part of a campaign to pressure Israel over its war with Hamas. Commercial ships, including big container ships, bulk carriers, and oil and gas tankers, quickly fled the Red Sea, preferring the longer but safer voyage around the bottom of Africa.

But those disruptions were not expected to last long, especially after the arrival on the scene of Western navies to restore security; insurance premiums for shippers actually fell slightly when the joint U.S.-British deployment was announced. And costs for shipping settled down in the spring, despite the ongoing campaign.

Yet eight months on, the disruption to shipping has suddenly gotten a lot worse. In late June, Houthi attacks sank a ship—the second since they began their attacks—and damaged another. The list of attempted and successful attacks is a year-to-date litany; U.S. Central Command’s public messaging is a near-daily drumbeat of reports of U.S. vessels swatting away drones, missiles, and uncrewed surface vessels. The Houthis, who’ve used anti-ship missiles to great effect, are now increasingly resorting to those surface drones, including the so-called Houthi’s Blowfish.

Not all the impacts are quite so visible as the explosions that damaged the Transworld Navigator late last month, but they are painful all the same. Transits of the Suez Canal, an important source of earnings for Egypt, are down by at least half, with tonnage down even more. Ships going the long way around add time and money and end up costing everybody by tying up hulls in the meantime.

As a result, the costs for a shipping container have soared from around $1,600 or so on average to well over $5,000, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Rates are now higher than they were at the peak of the Red Sea panic earlier this year. Big shipping companies that were warning a few months ago that the usual glut of ships would hamper earnings are now rolling in dough; Maersk has increased its profit outlook thanks to the Houthi-assisted tightness in the market.

When a container ship diverts around Africa, it increases the direct cost of shipping by adding 10 days, a lot of miles, and a lot of fuel to the trip, said Chris Rogers, the head of supply chain research at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “But the big issue is that it effectively reduces the available capacity on the entire system” by about 6 percent, he said.

And the Houthis aren’t the only problem. The Panama Canal ran out water for a while. Ports from Asia to Europe to the U.S. West Coast have been unduly congested, leading to huge backlogs for waiting ships. Freight forwarders and retailers are inadvertently making things worse by front-loading bigger orders for the holiday season to make sure they get their goods, further hurting an already strained shipping market.

“Supply chains heal over time, but the events don’t disappear overnight. That bullwhip effect could take six months to a year to play out,” Rogers said.

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But how has a band of maritime terrorists in the small, impoverished country of Yemen managed to spook the global economy and befuddle some of the world’s biggest navies? Fighting bandits who threatened merchant shipping was literally the reason the U.S. Navy was born.

The navies—the U.S., the British, and a rotating group of European ships—have been trying to restore normal shipping since almost the start of the Houthi campaign with little success, as evidenced by the fact that war-cover insurance rates for vessels risking the dangerous passage are apparently still up nearly 1,000 percent on preconflict levels. One insurer even launched a special, first-of-its-kind war insurance this spring for shippers that couldn’t get coverage otherwise, a sure sign that the Western naval presence hasn’t brought calm to the markets.

Those higher premiums add up to about 1 percent of the value of the huge cargo ships for the risky transit, said Audun Halvorsen, the director of security and contingency planning for the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association and a former deputy foreign minister of Norway. But the ships that are really in the crosshairs are those linked to Israel, the United States, or other countries seen as supporting Israel. “What we’re seeing is that shipping associated with China, Iran, Russia, and India to a much lesser extent has been targeted,” Halvorsen said.

Part of the problem is that the two naval forces—the U.S. and British “Prosperity Guardian” on the one hand and the European Union’s “Aspides” on the other—have two different missions. The Anglo-American force aims to intercept threats and strike at their origin on land; the Europeans have stuck closer to a straight escort mission to protect merchant shipping without taking the fight to the Houthis. Neither is working.

The U.S.-U.K. effort to “degrade” the Houthi ability to target shipping has ended up an expensive game of whack-a-mole. The Houthis have proved to be more mobile, and better supplied by Iran, than initially hoped, making incidental wins by the U.S. Navy—such as the destruction of a Houthi radar site last week—a drop in the bucket.

“The Houthis have a truly astonishing level of depth in their magazines, of missiles and rockets and ballistic anti-ship missiles. It is truly something,” said Bruns, the naval expert. As long as the Israel-Hamas war continues, “the Houthis have a reason and an opportunity to be a nuisance.”

The deployments, and constant interceptions, have eaten into the U.S. Navy’s own magazines. Congressional aides said the United States isn’t producing nearly enough of the standard air defense missiles used by U.S. escort ships in the Red Sea to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles. “As long as the burn rate remains as precipitously high as it’s been over there, we’re in a bit more of a precarious position,” one aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about U.S. munitions shortfalls.

It’s expensive, too. The Navy, and suppliers such as Raytheon, are looking to older, cheaper substitutes to use against the Houthis’ low-tech weapons while keeping the high-end missiles for use in a possible future war with China.

“With some cruise and ballistic missiles or hypersonics, you’re going to want sophisticated capabilities,” said Seth Jones, a senior vice president and the director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But for drones, you’re not going to want to waste a million-plus-dollar U.S. munition on it.” (Some European ships in the Red Sea are doing just that, using inexpensive naval guns rather than pricey air defense missiles to down Houthi drones and missiles on the cheap.)

To judge by results—ships keep diverting, and insurance premiums remain high—the U.S. approach has not achieved what it set out to do. “After months of doing that, if the Houthis haven’t changed their behavior and their stockpiles are still there and they’re mobile and they have support from Iran, it is time to ask, ‘Should we really be doing this?’” said Alessio Patalano, a naval expert at King’s College London.

That mission wasn’t helped by the departure last week of the one U.S. fleet carrier, the USS Eisenhower, which was due to head home after a twice-extended deployment. Its place will be taken at some point by the USS Theodore Roosevelt—but only at the cost of pulling that aircraft carrier out of the South China Sea, where it was showing U.S. power in the middle of a very serious showdown between China and the Philippines, a U.S. ally.

“Insisting on a mission we can’t define, how does that justify pulling out a carrier from a place where there is genuine maritime tension?” Patalano said.

But that kind of maneuver speaks to the second problem, one felt especially by the European navies that have tried explicitly to defend the freedom of navigation in and around the Red Sea: They don’t have enough ships to do even the limited mission they set out to do. Germany’s “gold-standard” frigate spent a few months in the Red Sea before limping away, trying (and failing) to shoot down a U.S. drone while it was there. Other European ships have performed better, but there simply aren’t enough of them to maintain the kind of constant cover from the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal that would be needed to make the shipping escort feasible.

“There is a real-time problem of not enough ships for the Europeans to deploy on a truly rotational basis, so you have these gaps” in the escort mission, Bruns said.

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The apparent failure of the U.S. and European mission to secure the Red Sea doesn’t necessarily call into question the utility of naval power for the high-end missions, like great-power fights, that worry policymakers globally today. Despite a relentless operational tempo, U.S., British, and European ships have intercepted and destroyed a huge number of Houthi projectiles and haven’t taken any hits themselves. They just haven’t managed to coax commercial ships back to those dangerous waters.

“This isn’t a failure of maritime security or sea power or naval power. The Eisenhower and its strike group escorts have performed brilliantly. This is about a disconnect between the policy and how you use that naval power,” Patalano said. “If we are trying to secure freedom of navigation, we are not achieving it.”

But the whole affair reinforces the degree to which Europe and much of the world have taken for granted the security of the seas that made globalization possible but which did not appear out of thin air.

“Collectively, we take maritime security for granted. But maritime insecurity is the norm, and security is only underwritten by Western navies patrolling the seas,” Bruns said. “We always think things will work out, and it is a unique kind of sea blindness.”

To wrest back that kind of security at sea, as the Europeans have found, requires a sustained investment in naval capacity that simply hasn’t been made in recent decades and can’t be made good anytime soon. Underwriting security, Bruns said, comes at a clear cost in higher defense budgets. So does the alternative, if situations like the monthslong disruption in the Red Sea become the new normal.

“We have to ask ourselves: What level of maritime insecurity can we live with, and who is going to pick up the cost?”

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