The National Interest report is as follows:
Today, the United States faces the challenge of mounting a proportional response to Yemen's operation in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Yemen drone and missile blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is now well into its ninth month. The US Navy has just dispatched its fourth sequential carrier strike group (CSG)—the USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts—to protect international shipping in the region.
Thus far, the Biden administration’s preferred response has been to order the Navy into harm’s way and let US warships intercept missile and drone attacks directly rather than address the root causes of the crisis.
Two aircraft carrier strike groups—led by the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—were already in the region when Yemen announced its intention to attack shipping transiting the Bab el-Mandeb in support of Gaza against Israeli aggression. Since then, the Theodore Roosevelt CSG and the Abraham Lincoln CSG have been diverted from the Pacific to stanch the bleeding from the global shipping system’s open sore.
In doing so, Washington has elevated the Bab el-Mandeb to an equivalent level of importance as the Euro-Atlantic, West Asia, and Indo-Pacific theaters—the three regions where the Pentagon aims to maintain a round-the-clock carrier presence. By adopting a posture of direct defense of civilian shipping, the United States has also elected to expend $1 billion of scarce, difficult-to-procure munitions shooting down Yemen missiles and drones rather than addressing the root causes of the problem.
In effect, the White House and Department of Defense (DoD) created a new, de facto “Aden Station” that must constantly be serviced by the Navy, stretching an already-too-small fleet even further.
This analysis questioning the US approach to the Red Sea, criticizes the allocation of one-third of America’s forward-deployed carrier force and stresses allocating the weapons that the American Navy needs to deter and win the war against China in the Red Sea is unjustified and inconsistent with its strategic interests.
On the strategic level, however, the relevant question is whether the effort we exert in the Red Sea, the resources we expend, and the opportunity costs that those represent are proportional to the value of the results they have achieved. To this, the answer is decidedly no.
For all the United States’ efforts to combat Yemen's threat, the Bab el-Mandeb remains too dangerous for many shippers to use, with a nearly 50 percent year-over-year decline in traffic as vessels sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead.
The Suez Canal has seen its revenue decline by $2 billion as a result. If safeguarding freedom of transit through the Red Sea is a vital US interest, Biden’s strategy has proven insufficient to meet the challenge. If it is not important enough to warrant a more forceful response to solve the root problem, then it certainly does not justify tying down one-third of America’s carrier force indefinitely to poorly manage the symptoms.
The Biden administration has followed a slow, costly, and ineffective strategy to deal with the Yemenis, the report emphasized.
MNA
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