The US military’s attempt to halt Yemen-based attacks on Red Sea shipping is being hindered by insufficient intelligence about Houthi militants’ arsenal and full capabilities, according to American officials.
While the Pentagon is confident that weeks of missile strikes have destroyed much weaponry and forced Houthis into tactical adjustments, the extent of the damage is unclear because the US lacked a detailed assessment of the group’s capabilities before launching its bombing campaign, said current and former US officials.
Some of those concerns have been voiced in public in recent days. Dan Shapiro, the Pentagon’s top official on the Middle East, told a congressional hearing last week that while the US military had “a good sense” of what it had destroyed, it did not “fully know the denominator” — meaning the original make-up of the Houthis’ arsenal before the start of the US military campaign in January.
Shapiro’s public remarks reflect a growing concern expressed by senior US officials in private that the incomplete intelligence picture is clouding the Pentagon’s assessment of what capabilities the Iran-backed rebel group has retained.
Houthi attacks on vessels sailing through the Red Sea, a crucial shipping lane for global trade, began last year after Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza. The Iran-backed group has said its campaign will continue as long as Israel continues fighting in Gaza.
The US and the UK, backed by other allies, launched air strikes on Houthi positions on January 12 and have pounded the group periodically in the seven weeks since. The campaign has destroyed or degraded 150 targets, the Pentagon said, including anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles launchers, communications facilities, drones, unmanned surface vessels, air surveillance, weapon depots and command facilities.
But the Houthis, who endured almost a decade of bombardment by a Saudi-led coalition before the current conflict, have proven adept at resupplying their positions, and have continued to menace ships in the region.
An attack by Houthi rebels on a UK-owned Belize flagged ship sailing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait last month caused an 18-mile oil slick and demonstrated the group’s capabilities despite US bombardment. The ship sank on Saturday with its 21,000 metric tonnes of ammonium phosphate sulphate fertiliser presenting an environmental threat and a risk to other ships in the waterway, said the US military.
The Houthi strikes are part of growing anti-US activities by Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance”, a loosely affiliated network of militant groups that includes Hamas and Lebanon’s Hizbollah.
Although Iran has publicly said it does not seek a wider war in the region with the US and its regional allies, US and western officials said Tehran is continuing to provide intelligence to Houthi rebels that has enabled them to continue the Red Sea attacks.
The Houthis have hit four US-flagged commercial ships passing through waters near Yemen since November 19, according to the Pentagon. They have attempted to hit far more vessels, however, having attacked or threatened US Navy or commercial vessels 62 times over the same period. The US and its naval allies maintain four to eight ships in the Red Sea and have conducted 35 strikes on Houthi targets since January.
While Joe Biden’s administration has vowed to keep striking Houthi positions as long as the Red Sea attacks continue, western officials said the US and its allies have recently broadened the campaign to include efforts to interdict weapons before they get to Houthi fighters and to step up sanctions.
US intelligence has a stronger picture of Houthi ties to Tehran, said officials. The Defense Intelligence Agency last month released an unclassified report into the group’s use of Iran-made missiles and drones, including in recent Red Sea attacks.
The US in January declared the Houthis a specially designated global terrorist group, and last week Washington and London imposed sanctions on an Iranian military commander and a Houthi militant they said were linked to the Red Sea shipping attacks.
Officials said diplomatic pressure on Iran to rein in the Houthis would be increasingly important, although they acknowledged that Tehran had less control over the rebel group than other regional proxies, such as Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.
Those groups conducted 170 attacks on US forces in the region between October 17 and February 4, but have become less active after the US conducted retaliatory strikes last month.
Current and former officials said the Pentagon saw a drop-off in intelligence on Yemen after the end of a drone campaign against al-Qaeda in the south of the country that was carried out under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
“Because Yemen went down as a priority, so did our intelligence focus there,” said Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official and CIA officer.
As part of a diplomatic overture to Yemen shortly after he took office, President Biden removed the Houthis from the US’s list of specially designated terror groups and an uneasy truce in the country’s civil war has held since late 2022. The move also reflected a shift in US intelligence needs to other areas of the world — a shift that was reinforced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Pentagon had faced a “major challenge” in balancing ongoing military needs to check China in the Pacific with mounting demands for intelligence capabilities in the Middle East and Europe, said Jonathan Lord, director of the Middle East Security programme at the Center for a New American Security.
“We’ve seen things come back to the region over the past five months that weren’t there,” Lord said. “But in the intervening time period before that, the proverbial Eye of Sauron [from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings] was fixed elsewhere.”
Ted Singer, a recently retired senior CIA official, said the Houthis tended to store their weapons in “very inhospitable terrain”. But acquiring on-the-ground intelligence has been more difficult since the US evacuated its embassy in Sana’a in 2015, when the rebel group seized control of the capital.
“Reporting on a country from afar or offshore is inherently challenging, and doubly so for a country that has seen so much churn over the past 10 years,” said Singer.
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