SUBSCRIBER+ INTERVIEW — Almost from the first volley fired last fall by Houthi rebels at vessels in the Red Sea, the group has surprised observers with its outsized impact as a destabilizing force in the region. The fact that the Houthis joined other Iran-backed proxies in lashing out in response to Israel’s war in Gaza was expected; the scale of their impact was not. And while the Houthis - a political movement and a heavily armed militia group based in Yemen - said they were fighting in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, their strikes have done little to punish Israel and much to damage global commerce.
Between November 2023 and March 2024, the Houthis attacked commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea more than 60 times. On February 18, Houthis launched missiles and a submarine drone at the British-owned, Belize-flagged ship Rubymar. The crew abandoned the vessel, which sank 11 days later, making it the first ship attacked by the Houthis to be abandoned and sunk. On March 6, a Houthi missile hit the Barbados-flagged, Liberian-owned True Confidence. Three crew members were killed, making it the first fatal attack in the Houthis' campaign.
Cargo vessels have been forced to avoid the Red Sea and sail around southern Africa. The number of vessels in the southern Red Sea has fallen by roughly 70% since early December. Container shipping is down about 90% and gas tankers have mostly stopped transit.
The Houthis’ success has also sparked a vigorous debate about how to respond, in particular between those who support attacks against Houthi targets in Yemen and others who advocate broader strikes against the Houthis’ main backers in Iran.
On Thursday, Cipher Brief publisher and CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke with Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan, a former Commander of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet and Commander of the 32-Nation Combined Maritime Forces in the Middle East. He also served as Director of Operations (J3) for U.S. Central Command. Adm. Donegan is also a Cipher Brief expert.
THE CONTEXT
- In the wake of the Houthi attacks, the U.S. is leading the multinational military coalition Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect shipping in the Red Sea. The E.U. has its own Red Sea mission, Operation Aspides.
- The U.S. and U.K. have launched retaliatory trikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, targeting Houthi missiles and drones. The Houthis have warned Saudi Arabia of retaliation if the kingdom helps the U.S. launch air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.
- The Houthis have promised not to attack Russian and Chinese ships, in exchange for “political support” from Moscow and Beijing. However, CENTCOM said the Houthis launched five ballistic missiles at the Chinese-owned oil tanker Huang Pu on March 23. One of the missiles hit the ship, causing a fire. Ship tracking data shows the tanker continued on to India.
- Iran continues to back the Houthis with weapons transfers (both overland and by dhow ships) and by sending specialists to train and guide Houthi fighters.
THE BRIEFING
The Cipher Brief spoke with Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan, USN (Ret.) about the global impact of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and how to stop them.
This excerpt of the full interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Nothing seems to have stopped these strikes by the Houthis. How are you looking at the situation today?
Adm. Donegan: The first thing I'll say is that when you look at this situation, there’s a core (U.S.) national interest. And that's the free flow of commerce. To be honest, it's why we have a Navy. Even as recently as the current administration's national security strategy, it was called out very clearly: the importance of the free flow of commerce. Specifically, it said we won't allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardize the freedom of navigation through critical waterways.
So where do we sit today? In stark contrast to that, we have a terrorist organization holding the global supply chain hostage, if you will, with the justification that it's tied to the Palestinian cause, when we all know that the attacks have not necessarily been on anything that's been disrupted to those that are involved in that conflict.
There's 40 (nations) now in the coalition, founded on the free flow of commerce. Those nations come together because of the importance of that. It's not just a U.S. national interest, it's a global interest to keep that supply chain open.
What's happening is real and there's real economic impact. The Bab-el-Mandeb (between Yemen and the Horn of Africa) is not just a strait but the gateway to the Suez Canal, and we've had flows through the Suez Canal reduced 70 or 80 percent from where they were in December. That means that the traffic is flowing around Africa, and what that means is over a million dollars more for a transit of a large container ship or a tanker, and 10 to 14 days more in time.
We're seeing the impact on European nations, but you're also seeing it in other nations that are more impoverished. We know there's a crisis in Sudan. Well, there's no way that the humanitarian assistance that needs to get in there can get there as much as it needs to. If you look at Egypt - which gets one third of their cash that they get each year through profits from the Suez Canal - Egypt is already hit with problems getting the wheat they need to feed their population because of the crisis in Ukraine, and now it's compounded by this. You can imagine the impact there, or in Sri Lanka, which can't get ships to export textiles, because these ships have been diverted elsewhere and aren't freed up to deliver the things they want. It is rippling through the supply chain.
It’s not yet as impactful to the United States, but that will come in time. In some cases you're seeing four times the cost to go from the Middle Eastern region around to Europe, and we're already seeing costs increase in some cases up to two times just to get shipments of cargo to the west coast of the United States.
So we'll start to see an impact on goods on the shelves in places like Target and Walmarts and such. The dilemma we face is that the Houthis have a low bar to achieve. All they have to do is launch a weapon and continue to declare victory against the rest of the world.
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The Cipher Brief: There have been a number of U.S. and allied airstrikes against the Houthis in strategic areas inside Yemen. Why has it been so difficult to have a greater impact on their ability to carry out these operations?
Adm. Donegan: When you see that the US has postured the forces they have in the region from a military standpoint, why are the Houthis still able to hold this global supply chain hostage? Because if you are the major container shipping companies and oil companies, there's the risk of losing crew members. It's a simple equation. They want the expectation when they transport goods in this global supply network that the crew isn't going to be threatened with their lives by traveling this route.
The Houthis, since the (2011) Arab Spring, have been supported by Iran with weapons for different reasons, and they've built up this capacity over time. Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, they've even mined the waters. And it's always difficult to take out all these individual places and ways and methods and do that without impacting the population.
I call it “defend and degrade.” What we're trying to do is defend against all these missiles that come in, and when they pop up we attack them, in a whack-a-mole fashion. That's a difficult problem set if that's the only way you're going after it.
And the cost curve is not in favor of the large coalition that we have there, because these missiles they're launching are so much less expensive and easier to get and shoot than the missiles we're shooting at them to defend.
Now in the grand scheme of things, (the Houthis) haven't been that effective at causing direct damage. We've had loss of life, several crew members, and we've had a ship that went under water, but for all the hundreds and hundreds of missiles they've launched, they have not been effective in that regard. What they have been effective in is causing the ships to divert. There's a thought now that if we keep defending and degrading, when the Gaza conflict is over, that the Houthis have said this will stop. It's not necessarily true. Maybe the Houthis will stop for some period of time, but do we want to leave a terrorist group with the capacity and will to shut down the global supply chain whenever they want, for whatever cause they want?
The Cipher Brief: The phrase you use - “defend and degrade” - you talked about the defense mode, but what about the degrade mode? What is needed to make sure that the Houthis don't have the ability to continue to carry out these attacks after the war? And how much should the U.S. be going after Iran's backing of this situation?
Adm. Donegan: You're getting to the million-dollar question. “Defend” can't last forever. You have to be on the game all the time. The enemy gets a vote in the timing of this, which means anytime a vessel is sailing there, you can't travel any place in the Red Sea and not be under one of these threats. And so that is a really tough mission in and of itself. At some point what happened in Jordan [the attack that killed 3 American soldiers in January] could happen to a vessel. Think of the chaos if that would happen. So that's the defense side.
The degrade side is super important because you want to eliminate this capacity and capability of the Houthis to strike into the Red Sea. That's a tough problem set, and it can't just be done by waiting for them to show themselves and then knocking them down, because there's too many different places they can launch from and too many different methods they can use to do that. But there also has to be a way to inflict pain on both the Houthis and on Iran.
And the reason I say “both” is because the Houthis are not able to sustain this forever unless their supply chain continues to resupply them with the critical elements.
So what do we want to do? Well, we've fought networks before, and we're really good at it. We know how to take a network down. A prior example would be the network of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is now a mere shell of what it was, because the United States resourced the team that was responsible for that. That includes not just the military arm, but the economic, the diplomatic lines to engage other partners in ensuring that we can neuter that threat that exists. We have not resourced this threat in that way. And it doesn't matter if we keep degrading what they bring if we're not going to go all in, ensuring that they can't be resupplied and getting after other elements that exist when you start to take a network down.
That includes leadership, it includes that supply network, it includes how they get their money. It slowly takes away the capability to keep putting these missiles and drones on the table to launch against us. That will force the Houthis to go in another direction. To me this is absolutely winnable, and we can deter.
The Cipher Brief: You were a co-author of a piece called “A Strategy for Countering the Houthis’ Threat at Sea.” I'm assuming you got into the nitty-gritty of the key things that the administration could be doing right now that would have a more immediate impact.
Adm. Donegan: It's along the lines of what I was just talking about. (Other Iranian proxies) attacked our troops, what, 160 times (since October 7th)? Maybe we responded to 18 of them. But when we finally decided a month or so ago to respond because we had our soldiers killed in Jordan, we launched some 85 attacks. And what did that do? It raised the stakes for Iran and Iran decided, OK, we're going to roll this back for a period of time.
Because what they (Iran) held in value started to become jeopardized. We killed a leader in Baghdad of one of the militias that Iran was using to launch those attacks. We have not raised the stakes like that for the Houthi problem, another group that's backed by Iran and doing damage and has killed sailors at sea. And we don't want to allow it to get to the point where it kills U.S. people at sea or anywhere. So now is the time for us to similarly work to deter both the Houthis and Iran, because without Iran, the Houthis can't continue to sustain this.
And let's talk about the intelligence. As you know, the Behshad is a vessel people have talked about and it's one of the vessels that was always in the Red Sea, but now it's down south. It's been providing intelligence to the Houthis on who's traveling when, so that they can try to be more specific in their targeting.
Why is that vessel not completely disabled, and why are we still allowing that to happen? The reason is this fear of escalation, and another war in the Middle East.
I'll take you back to when (former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qassem) Soleimani was killed (by a U.S. air strike). It didn't lead to another war in the Middle East. It didn't lead to escalation. The Iranians understand that deterrence. It won't deter them forever, but we can at least maybe have them desist on their supply chain to the Houthis for some period of time, while we are able to dismantle them in other ways.
We don't want to do that alone. We want to take this coalition of nations that's there now. They need to see the U.S. stand up in a leadership role, just like the 60-plus nation coalition that went after ISIS. Every nation will contribute in the way that they can, but we need to make this an imperative that's not just a United States issue, it's a global issue. We've got to reopen this critical waterway and bring back the comfort level for shipping.
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The Cipher Brief: Let's talk about the uncomfortable but necessary question of an election year. If the Biden administration decides to open up a front for a potential war in another area, that opens him up to attacks from the other party, because we know how U.S. politics is played. So what's the answer here? How can an administration safely lead the United States into having a more effective deterrence policy when an election's coming up?
Adm. Donegan: The answer to that question is, How can we afford not to? When we're looking at something that is so important to our interest and global interests, not only does the world expect us to lead, but so does our own country. And I'm not saying lead to war, where we're going to invade Yemen or invade Iran. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about bringing together what's necessary to defeat the network, which is not just the military means. It's building the coalition I talked about. It's ensuring that we're going after the supply chain and resourcing that effort. It's not that we're going to put soldiers on the border or Marines on the coastline of Yemen and invade and destroy the Houthis.
All we need to do here is ensure that the pain level for them to continue this is greater than they can bear. We know how to take out that network without an invasion force or an escalation to a war. And it's also clear that Iran doesn't want a war now, and they will back down as they did in Syria and Iraq. And I believe these other nations are looking for the United States to step up and take a leadership role.
Let's talk about China for a second. I would argue that China needs the Red Sea open more than the United States does. They made an agreement with the Houthis that they wouldn't have their ships attacked. And what happened the very next day? The next day, a Chinese ship was attacked. Why? Well, the Houthis, they're not a nation, they're a terrorist organization. Even with the intelligence they're getting, their weapons are indiscriminate and not as good as if they were in the hands of a professional military force. So they probably didn't intend to attack the Chinese ship, but for whatever reason it did get attacked.
I think probably 40-ish percent of Chinese goods that go to Europe travel through the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. So they are also a player in wanting this resolved in the right way. I'm not saying China's going to be in the U.S. coalition, don't get me wrong, but there is global interest in that waterway being open and not held hostage by our terrorist organization.
The Cipher Brief: What do you think it will take to get China to take more action here? And how can the U.S. be effective in helping bring that about?
Adm. Donegan: That's going to be tough for a lot of reasons, but I do believe that China absolutely needs that waterway open. That's kind of a no-brainer. Even if it's not for Chinese ships, they have things coming to them that aren't on Chinese ships. And so it is in their interest, and this is where diplomacy is really going to have to do its magic.
I think they'll be a supporter. And just to tell you how important the Chinese believe that waterway is, they only have one overseas base in the world, and it happens to be in Djibouti, which is at the southern end of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.
For the U.S., we have to be clear and lead forward to a solution in Gaza - that has to happen. But we also have to separate what's going on here and be very clear and articulate that this situation cannot exist after the war is over. Meaning the Houthis - a terrorist organization that has not been elected to any position in Yemen - having weapon systems that can hold the world's supply chain hostage. It has to stop and we want to build a coalition that's going to eliminate that threat to the global supply chain.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the key indicators that you're going to be looking for in the coming weeks that are going to really signal to you that this is taking a turn, either for the worse or for the better?
Adm. Donegan: I am not as hopeful as I would want to be. I'm afraid we may just continue more of the same. It's not going to get us what we want and we risk having an at sea incident similar to what we saw in Jordan. And that's not going to be good for anyone.
What I would look for is a change in rhetoric. And let me give you an example. When the soldiers were killed in Jordan, our rhetoric changed from, Hey, we're doing this proportional response, to We're doing a multi-tiered campaign now.
And when we started to say that, that's when the Iranians started to react and pull back, when we started to do that and we backed it up with actions.
The other thing I would like to see is, let's not leave the burden of pulling these coalitions together in the hands of NAVCENT (U.S. Naval Forces Central Command). We have to do this holistically at a much higher level. I would like to see a coalition and I'd like to see that coalition start higher than the navies, if that makes any sense. I would look for those two things.
The simplest way that I can sum all this up is one, we know how to deter Iran. That's not something that we have to go, "I wonder how I can do that." With Iran, they'll just wait until that pot isn't as hot and then they'll go back there again. That's how Iran operates. We just need to raise the heat up on the Houthis’ side to the same level that we did on the other militias’ side, and we have to raise that heat up on the Houthis themselves.
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