Not extraordinarily surprising, air raids can be quite ineffective. Besides, my bet is that this is more of a show of force, a “you shoot our ships, we try to be nice and just shoot yours. You keep shooting, now we shoot your home”
Except that the only ships they’ve been attacking until US war ships showed up were ships heading in and out of Israel. I don’t know how that’s any of our business.
Most of the ships they’ve been attacking have nothing to do with Israel. The graphic in this article details all the major attacks that have occurred: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-31/ty-article-magazine/23-attacks-in-2-months-all-red-sea-ships-targeted-by-the-houthis/0000018c-5df7-d6f9-afbc-5dff7a430000
Half the time when they claim it’s Israeli owned, they do so because there’s one Israeli national employed in a senior role in a parent company or something.
The US warships showed up almost immediately after 7 October. The Houthis were not attacking any ships before then. Up until recently, the US warships have only been shooting down drones and missiles attacking trade ships. Most recently the Houthis fired directly on the US warships, so in response the US initiated a strike against them.
Apparently the Houthis still have a significant amount of mobile artillery, which is much harder to target, however the US had also targetted their radar facilities, which should go a long way to hampering their ability to use that artillery. The last missile fired landing harmlessly in the sea points to this.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The United States-led airstrikes on Thursday and Friday against sites in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia damaged or destroyed about 90 percent of the targets struck, but the group retained about three-quarters of its ability to fire missiles and drones at ships transiting the Red Sea, two U.S. officials said on Saturday.
The damage estimates are the first detailed assessments of the strikes by American and British attack planes and warships against nearly 30 locations in Yemen, and they reveal the serious challenges facing the Biden administration and its allies as they seek to deter the Iran-backed Houthis from retaliating, secure critical shipping routes between Europe and Asia, and contain the spread of regional conflict.
But the two U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.
American and other Western intelligence agencies have not spent significant time or resources in recent years collecting data on the location of Houthi air defenses, command hubs, munitions depots and storage and production facilities for drones and missiles, the officials said.
A senior Defense Department official said on Saturday that a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile strike on a radar facility in Yemen on Friday was a “reattack” of a target originally hit in Thursday’s barrage that had not been adequately degraded or destroyed.
Despite their fiery rhetoric and vows of retaliation, the Houthis’ military response to Thursday night’s attack so far has been muted: just a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel, General Sims said on Friday.
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