U.S. officials seek to curb the militants’ attacks on ships in the Red Sea, but the group was not deterred by strikes in the Biden era and won’t be beaten by air power alone, experts say.
The bombshell publication of a group chat involving Trump administration officials discussing U.S. battle plans revealed in unusually stark fashion what the Trump administration hopes to achieve with airstrikes this month against the Houthi militia in Yemen.
The attacks, some of the chat’s participants said, were meant to deter the Houthis from attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea and reopen shipping lanes to the Suez Canal.
“Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes,” said a participant identified as Michael Waltz, President Trump’s national security adviser.
But the high-level hopes expressed in the Signal chat, which became public after The Atlantic’s editor in chief was inadvertently added to it, could collide with reality.
Middle East experts said the Iran-backed Houthis won’t be easily beaten. Few wars have been won with air power alone, and some military experts say it will be no different with the Houthis. The biggest shipping companies also have little appetite for returning to the Red Sea. They have found a workaround that, while inconvenient and costly, allows them to avoid those lanes and deliver goods on time.
James R. Holmes, the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, said that even during the U.S. war to remove Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, when air power was at its apex, a land invasion was necessary — and defeating the Houthis might require an occupation.