Nick Childs
The recent upsurge in attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden, committed mainly by Ansarullah (Houthi) forces in Yemen in relation to the Hamas–Israel war, has sounded alarms in the international shipping community. Multiple major ship operators have now said they are steering clear of the area. The longer this persists, the greater the eventual cost and disruption to international maritime trade and energy security. The pressure on governments and navies to ‘do something’ has been mounting.
This pressure will have ramifications both for the region and more widely. The Red Sea is a key maritime artery, and the narrow Bab el-Mandeb is a critical choke point for shipping. Threats to shipping in the region arcing from the Gulf to the Horn of Africa are by no means new. But they have grown more complex, as have the challenges in countering them; this complicates the business of finding an effective response to the current threat.
In the last few years, the threat level in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb seemed tolerable to the international shipping community. The focus of attacks seemed to be Saudi-linked maritime assets. More recently, in the wake of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s military response, the Houthis declared that they were targeting Israeli-connected or Israeli-bound traffic. The shock waves have grown stronger as the tempo of attacks has increased and the level of discrimination has decreased.
The choppy waters of the Middle East have played host to some of the high points of cooperative maritime security, despite contestation in many areas. A coalition of nearly 40 countries under the Combined Maritime Forces based in Bahrain and led chiefly by the United States has developed and conducted security operations in regional seas since 2002. Dealing with non-state threats such as al-Qaeda or Somali-based piracy, at a time when navies faced relatively few other major commitments and had more ships to hand, was one thing; it is something else entirely to operate in an environment of increased regional competition among states and state proxies like the Houthis and with major navies now overstretched.
The flare-up in tensions in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in 2019 hinted at the increasing challenges. There was general acknowledgement of an international stake in the attacks on shipping at that time, largely blamed on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But this was also perceived as fundamentally the result of increased tensions between Iran and the US. The Combined Maritime Forces’ approach was not the answer, but equally galvanising another kind of coalition response was a major challenge. This presaged the so-far limited international response to the latest shipping attacks, not least from regional players whose navies have been largely absent from the scene.
Regional and other governments are balancing several factors: the risk that they will be perceived by their publics and international audiences as becoming embroiled in the Hamas–Israel confrontation, which might escalate; the desire to re-establish deterrence at sea to avoid escalation in that domain; and the fact that Iran’s links to its Houthi proxy remain murky, at least regarding the most recent attacks.
Washington has now unveiled a new multinational maritime effort, dubbed Prosperity Guardian, to respond to the attacks, but the division of labour is undetermined. It appears to be a rebranding and slight bolstering of the Combined Maritime Forces’ Task Force 153, focused on maritime security in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The declared members include the US, several European states and Bahrain, although American sources have briefed that additional states have signed up on an undeclared basis. France, Spain, the United Kingdom and the US now have ships deployed in the region, and the first three have already engaged in defensive actions. The key questions remaining are who under the new framework will be willing to deploy ships cleared to intervene (and under what circumstances), and will this be enough to deter future attacks. More broadly, the roles and attitudes of regional navies and other naval stakeholders, not least China, will be important factors in how events at sea unfold.
The threat posed by the current attacks will be challenging to counter, even for the most sophisticated navies. When Somali pirates served as the main threat – with skiffs, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades – ship operators themselves proved able to suppress the threat in large part, simply by placing armed guards on their vessels. Now, explosive-equipped uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) and anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles are threatening shipping and naval vessels. The Houthis have also displayed other new tactics, seemingly learned from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the helicopter-borne seizure of a merchant ship.
The US Navy has downed multiple Houthi UAVs and missiles in the region. Naval planners must now grapple with the thought of expending large numbers of expensive air-defence missiles to counter threats, many of which are a small fraction of the cost, and risking running out of those missiles while on station. This will likely spur the efforts of major navies already under way to increase stockpiles of air-defence missiles and revive ways of restocking warships with these weapons while at sea. The US Navy is already focused on this issue in the context of the threat that China’s anti-ship missile arsenal could pose in a future conflict. Developing new and more cost-effective weapons to deal with the UAV threat is an urgent naval requirement as much as it is for land forces, as illustrated in the context of the war in Ukraine.
With the pace of Houthi attacks via direct-attack UAVs and anti-ship missiles increasing, so too are the odds that some will succeed, with potentially devastating effects; this is sharpening the dilemma over whether to counter these attacks with direct strikes against launch and targeting sites on land in Yemen. Saudi Arabia is concerned about the risk of escalation in this event, which would endanger its tenuous ceasefire with the Houthis. It could also complicate the prospects of keeping any new naval coalition at sea together. However, perhaps at least as an added deterrent, Washington has moved one of the two aircraft carriers it has deployed to the region, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the Gulf of Aden.
The US Navy faces the prospect of raising its presence in and around the region for an extended period, which would affect other commitments globally. It has already significantly extended the planned deployment of a carrier strike group led by the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. The navy’s vessels are stretched in an arc around the region, attempting to deter multiple threats. Given the tense state of affairs, an Iran-induced flare-up in the Gulf or Strait of Hormuz is surely also on the minds of naval planners. The US, which has put much effort into fostering a cooperative approach to regional maritime security, is now seeing this approach pushed to extremes with its limitations exposed.
No comments:
Post a Comment