The Yemeni Houthis have been trying desperately to get the attention of the US Navy since October 7. They have fired drones and missiles at Israel in a futile attempt to interject themselves into that conflict. Most of those attacks were thwarted by US Navy destroyers. They have harassed shipping in the Red Sea, attacking at least ten neutral ships with drones or missiles and pirating two more, to the point where a special international task force is trying to give the impression of caring about their antics.
For reasons that aren't particularly clear outside of Joe Biden's man-crush on the hirsute and odiferous mullahs in Tehran, the US Navy has contented itself to fire a large number of million-dollar missiles to knock down multi-hundred dollar drones. Compounding the fiasco, major shipping lines, like Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and BP, are rerouting ships around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to delivery times and increasing costs by millions of dollars.
The kind of a purely defensive strategy isn't sustainable. It does not make sense to fire missiles costing up to $4 million at a drone, but the vertical launch systems (VLS) holding the missiles can't be replenished at sea. The disruption of the West's supply chain is not something we should tolerate. For a few dollars more, we could level everything in Yemen associated with missile attacks and piracy.
The Yemeni Houthis seem to be basking in the international attention they are getting. They have boasted they will never stop attacking shipping, and now they've released a video that is being circulated as "Bring It On."
The soundtrack is "Danger Zone," which you'll recognize as the theme music for both "Top Gun" movies. The video is a Yemeni pilot suiting up and lighting the afterburners on one of the 11 Northrop F-5 Tiger fighters owned by the Yemeni Air Force. The F-5 was a solid multirole fighter in its day...which was 1964. Export versions were sold to over thirty countries.
This is great theater, and I'm sure it plays well with the Houthis's masters in Iran. Still, there is no equipment in the video that is fit to occupy the same battlespace with a second-tier military, much less our Navy, as degraded and emasculated as it appears.
The larger question is the strategy behind the video. Is it just internet trolling? Or are they deliberately trying to force us to choose between attacking them or backing down when confronted by an in-your-face challenge?