Houthis launch barrage of missiles and drones against two US warships in Red Sea

Iran-backed Yemeni rebel group is trying to score a high-profile propaganda victory by striking a US warship

American troops on the missile destroyer USS Carney monitor the ship’s systems during an operation to defeat a combination of Houthi missiles and drones in October. Photo: US Navy

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The Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked two US warships passing through the Bab Al Mandeb strait with a barrage of missiles and drones, all of which were repelled, the Pentagon said.

At least eight Houthi drones, five anti-ship ballistic missiles and three cruise missiles were fended off by the USS Spruance and the USS Stockdale, said the US Central Command, America's military headquarters in the Middle East.

The Iran-backed militias said they had attacked the US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, but the claim was denied in a Tuesday night briefing by Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder, who added that US counterstrikes against the Houthis on November 10 “involved US Air Force and US Navy assets to include F-35C fighter aircraft”.

The stealth jets, almost impossible to track on radar, were probably not needed against the Houthis’ obsolete and depleted air defences, but the F-35C has been carrying out operations from the 100,000 tonne Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, Mr Ryder said. The combination of at least 16 projectiles flying at different altitudes and speeds may have been an attempt to overwhelm US air defences in the narrow confines of the Bab Al Mandeb, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden .

While similar attacks have previously been unsuccessful, the group is evidently trying to score a high-profile propaganda victory by striking a US warship. The Houthis, who control parts of Yemen, have said their attacks on ships in the region will continue as long as Israel continues its war in Gaza.

Missile stockpiles

Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles present one of the biggest threats if they can hit an enemy ship, according to missile expert Fabian Hinz, with weapons such as the Asef, a variant of the Iranian Fateh 313, which has a 300-kilogram warhead.

These weapons are said to have a terminal speed of up to five times the speed of sound, meaning they can inflict heavy damage on impact from kinetic force alone. The US can intercept them using the Standard Missile 3, which is optimised to hit high-altitude missiles moving at speed.

For comparison of how powerful the Houthi weapons are, the explosive warhead on the Asef is nearly twice as powerful as that on an Exocet anti-ship missile, an air-launched weapon that devastated British ships during the 1982 Falklands war with Argentina, and killed 37 US sailors on the USS Stark in 1987, after an Iraqi aircraft mistook their ship for an enemy Iranian vessel.

But the anti-ship ballistic missiles are said to suffer from serious inaccuracy, in part due to a weak “kill chain,” the links between reconnaissance and sensors that can track a ship over the horizon moving at 37 kilometres per hour, and update the position to the missile in flight.

Houthi missiles have been seen missing ships by kilometres, but have also struck a number of commercial ships, doing serious damage. Cruise missiles may be more of a serious threat, possessing sensors that can seek out ships and flying at high subsonic speed under the radar beams of warships.

Without airborne radar, such as the E-3 Sentry or air patrols that can detect cruise missiles flying low over the sea, US warships would be vulnerable to this missile.

If aircraft fail to detect them and shoot them down with AIM-9X heat-seeking missiles, the warships have various options including the Advanced SeaSparrow missile, and the Close-in-weapon system, better known as Phalanx, which tracks missiles with an array of cameras before firing a stream of 4,500 canon shells per minute, out to several kilometres.

This leaves the drones, which carry small warheads and fly under the radar, but the US navy has said the Houthi drones pose less of a threat than the missiles due to their slow speed of less than 200 kilometres per hour.