Braxton Taylor
As the Biden administration nears its final days, military and government officials are starting to speak more openly about the scope of the fighting that has occurred against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, the evolving tactics of the last 15 months, and the issues with U.S. production that will need to be addressed by the incoming Trump administration.
Speaking at a Navy conference in Arlington, Virginia, the commander of the service’s surface forces, Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, told a crowd of mostly Navy officers who gathered for a panel on the lessons of the Red Sea conflict that Navy ships fired 220 missiles and 160 5-inch shells over the course of 380 separate engagements.
Those figures — a rare moment of transparency from the Navy — suggest that the service has been relying on missiles to deal with the threat of drones and other missiles from the Houthis. Yet a top U.S. official and Navy officers say that this is no longer the case.
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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told a group of reporters Wednesday that, while the Navy was “firing a lot of these interceptors against the one-way attack UAVs,” referring to drones, the tactics in the Red Sea have been “iterating and shifting.”
One key driver for that seems to be a dual concern over the cost of the missiles in question, as well as the military’s ability to replenish its supplies should a fight with China arrive.
According to McLane, the Navy fired 120 SM-2 missiles, 80 SM-6 missiles, and 20 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles and SM-3 missiles.
The SM-2 missiles alone run around $2 million a piece while the newer SM-6 missiles, capable of knocking out other ballistic missiles in flight, are double at around $4 million each. The SM-3 missile, capable of striking targets in space, ranges in cost from $9 million to nearly $28 million a piece.
These figures also don’t include the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles that have been used to strike Houthi locations on land in Yemen.
While a precise cost total for munitions expended over the last 15 months, even with the new information, is hard to arrive at, it’s clear that the Navy has expended well over $500 million just in the cost of missiles.
Meanwhile, the Houthis “can rapidly create things that are much simpler than what the United States produces,” Sullivan said. “They’re not as good, but are certainly good enough to have significant battlefield effect.”
As a result, Sullivan conceded that using missiles to down relatively inexpensive drones is “just a terrible equation for us, obviously” but said that the “equation is more realistic” when they are used against some of the more advanced Houthi missiles.
The Navy, though, seems to view the issue in a less discerning manner.
McLane told conference-goers at another address on Tuesday that warship commanders are not worried about munitions cost, “nor should they be.”
“They have other things to worry about, like what’s for breakfast,” he quipped.
However, both McLane and other Navy officials have also started to note that they are getting more inventive with how they deal with “more modest threats.”
McLane said that some of these simpler threats — one-way attack drones — are being engaged with ships’ guns and aircraft.
McLane said in one instance, the USS O’Kane used her 5-inch deck gun successfully against “hostile UAVs” while protecting a merchant convoy. The Navy’s top aviation official, Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever, also told reporters Tuesday that recently a Navy helicopter, an MH-60R Sea Hawk, also shot down a drone in a likely first for the platform.
Sullivan added that “we’ve increasingly seen fighter aircraft off our carriers” take action against Houthi anti-ship missiles.
However, even if the concerns over cost are set aside, the heavy use of missiles has also raised concerns about the Navy’s ability to replenish its stocks for what most U.S. defense experts and leaders say is the real fight — China.
In November, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said that the conflicts both in Ukraine and Israel were causing him concern and, with “some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it is now eating into [our] stocks.”
“It imposes costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because [China] is the most capable potential adversary in the world,” Adm. Samuel Paparo said.
The concerns come as some defense experts have started to raise alarms over the state of the U.S. industrial base and its ability to spin up production in the face of a sudden surge in demand.
At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government encouraged defense producers to consolidate since it had become clear there wouldn’t be enough spending to sustain all the companies that existed at the time. The result was a spate of consolidations among the top companies while the smaller firms that were often relied upon to produce components or parts dwindled.
According to the Brookings Institution think tank, in 1990, there were 13 contractors that made tactical missiles. In 2020, there were three — Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies.
“One of the reasons there’s such a long lead time for the scale up of critical munitions is because the critical munitions that we are producing are incredibly sophisticated with exquisite parts, and each of those parts has its own long lead time,” Sullivan said.
“So when you add it all up, getting double or triple the amount of production is extremely difficult and takes an extremely long time … and that’s not just true for our highest-end missiles,” he added.
Sullivan noted that the Biden administration learned some valuable lessons from its efforts to spin up Ukraine’s drone industry amid that country’s war with Russia, but he said that “at a strategic level … one element of the solution to America’s defense industrial base is high tech, but one element has to be low tech — much simpler systems, attritable systems” — even if, according to him, that will be a tough sell to both Congress and the Pentagon.
But Sullivan seems to have fewer thoughts on the Houthis themselves, who have continued to shrug off U.S. strikes in spite of an increase in tempo.
“The Houthis present a particularly difficult challenge, basically because I think they would be happy with an expanded war with the United States,” Sullivan said. “The idea of some sort of major operation with huge numbers of U.S. boots on the ground in Yemen is not a particularly appealing option.”
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