Fighting in the Red Sea is intensifying as more international warships pile on
On 15 December, HMS Diamond announced her arrival in the Red Sea by shooting down a Houthi drone. In normal times this would be remarkable: surface-to-air engagements by navies are rare – the Royal Navy’s last one before this was by HMS Gloucester in the 1991 Gulf War.
But we are not in normal times. Since 26 October, when the USS Carney engaged four missiles and fifteen drones in one sitting, the Red Sea has seen a firework display of Houthi attacks and naval interceptor missiles and gunfire shooting them down. The three US destroyers on scene, Carney, Hudner and Mason have shot down 34 missiles and drones between them. French Ship Languedoc then got in on the action firing an Aster missile and downing another target (before the British, as a French Navy friend of mine was quick to remind me). And now the Royal Navy has joined the party too.
The main point of all this naval activity is maintaining freedom of navigation in a strait, the Bab-el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea, which in normal times carries a sixth of world trade. The area has now become sufficiently risky that four major shipping companies – MSC, Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM – have decided to avoid it, either routing their ships the long way around the Cape of Good Hope, adding time and cost, or pausing them in situ whilst things settle down. BP has suspended tanker transits through the strait.
This is not quite the disaster some are painting it as, or not yet anyway. The Suez Canal Authority states that in the last month, 55 ships rerouted whilst 2,128 made the canal transit. This doesn’t reflect total tonnage or how fast this number is increasing. It is, however, going to be a key metric in the minds of those who are deciding ‘what next’.
Egypt will have a view on this given that its economy depends on revenue from the canal. The Authority recently raised tariffs for transiting the canal in anticipation, but again, 55 ships down in a month when 50 to 90 go through a day is not going to bankrupt them.
With HMS Diamond now in the middle of this, we should reflect briefly on the effort, pain and tears it has taken to get this class of ship – the Type 45 destroyers of the Royal Navy – through their troubled gestation period to a place where they can be deployed by the Secretary of State one week and engaging drones in a shooting war the next.
The first T45, HMS Daring, was handed over to the RN in 2008, but her primary armament – the Sea Viper missile system just used by HMS Diamond to shoot down the Houthi drone – did not work, a situation reasonably enough described as “disgraceful” by the MPs of the Public Accounts Committee. Sea Viper finally became operational in 2011, by which time Daring was on her third captain.
The problems didn’t end there. It also turned out that the T45s have a massive flaw which results in them occasionally suffering a total loss of all electrical power and propulsion. There is a fix for this problem but it involves drydocking the ship, cutting a big hole in it and installing an extra generator. This process has only been applied to one ship so far, HMS Dauntless – she recently returned to the fleet after an absence of seven years – so we’ll just have to hope that HMS Diamond doesn’t “trip out” at the wrong moment down in the Red Sea. We’ll also have to hope that the Houthis don’t target her with ballistic missiles, as Sea Viper can’t handle those. Fortunately, engaging a ship out at sea with ballistic missiles isn’t nearly as easy as the various critics of the aircraft carrier think it is.
Despite the continuing problems of the T45, Diamond has now carried out a successful engagement and her ship’s company are to be congratulated. Unless you have been in a ship firing large missiles and seen and felt the violence of it even at your end, it is easy to forget the number of people and systems required to converge perfectly in those final few seconds. I doubt this will be Diamond’s last taste of combat.
There was some discussion over the weekend about what it meant to be firing a £1 million pound missile at a £20,000 drone, but this is the wrong way to look at it. The right question is ‘what would be the cost of not firing the missile?’ It could be astronomical in terms of damage to a ship, pollution, insurance premiums, the obligation to assure freedom of navigation and – let’s not forget – in human life.
Of course ships have a limited stock of missiles, and yes reloading will take time, and yes, it would be better if we had lasers or super jammers or round-the-clock air cover but we don’t, so ‘missiles away’ in my view. In some cases a warship may be able to knock down slower-moving targets such as drones using its gun rather than a missile, but that would only be a good option if there was clearly no threat to the ship itself.
We were already working on this problem when I was last in a frigate in 2012 so I would imagine those working in laboratories who are developing the technologies to defeat this threat were somewhat bemused by this weekend’s sudden clamour for them. Having said that, they do need to get a move on because in the never-ending game of weapons ‘cat and mouse’, it is clear both here and in the Black Sea that offensive drone capabilities are ahead of defensive ones.
In terms of ‘what next’, things are taking shape in a fairly predictable way. Various countries have sent warships and they now need to be organised. This is where we are today – Operation Prosperity Guardian was announced over the weekend to do just this. Who will be in it and how exactly they will operate is not clear yet. The good news is that planning for it will have commenced weeks ago so the setting up time should be minimal.
Tanker War-style convoys will be too resource intensive so it is likely that a corridor will be set up similar to the Internationally Recognised Transit Corridor (IRTC) used in the Gulf of Aden during the anti-piracy years. This one will be shorter than the IRTC was and, given the ratio of merchant ships to warships, it is likely that the warships will be placed so as to create a protective barrier between the Houthis and passing merchant vessels. They may occasionally peel off to individually escort vessels of particular interest.
Whatever the solution it will tie up a lot of warships, hence the call for the coalition. The US, UK, French, Spanish and Japanese navies are already on scene. The Germans are preparing a ship and the Norwegians and Australians have been invited, amongst others. US destroyers The Sullivans, Laboon and Delbert D Black passed Gibraltar this weekend, most likely coming to help. The US carrier Dwight D Eisenhower – Ike – is approaching from the east partly to deter, partly to assist with this mission and partly to be ready to strike.
China’s state shipping line COSCO has ships regularly moving through the Red Sea, and China has three warships based in Djibouti on counter-piracy duties. They won’t be joining the coalition anytime soon, but they are in the mix and arguably China needs the strait open at least as much as the US does.
And it’s not just drones and missiles they are there to defeat. There have been multiple pirate boarding attempts. The helicopter hijack of the MV Galaxy Leader grabbed the headlines recently and the MV Ruen was pirated last week and is now at anchor in Somali waters. There have been many other failed attempts.
On the plus side, we haven’t seen anything of the fast attack craft or mine threat yet – long may that last.
The big question, and those like me who have a long acquaintance with the US Navy are quite puzzled by this, is why has there been no counter-strike against the Houthis? The USN has had assets in theatre for weeks now that could take various kinds of action. There’s the Ike and her powerful air wing, there are amphibious ships carrying much of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit at the top of the Red Sea, there’s an Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine with 154 tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAM). All these have special-forces units aboard too. All the US cruisers and destroyers also carry TLAM, and the French frigate Languedoc has land-attack cruise missiles too (the naval version of the Storm Shadow / SCALP, well known for its use in the Ukraine war). A little embarrassingly for us Brits, land-attack missiles are another thing that HMS Diamond doesn’t have.
But what do you strike? One thing you can guarantee the Houthis have learned from their Iranian sponsors is how to be mobile and therefore hard to strike with missiles. They’ve no doubt upped their game since 2016, when a US destroyer blew up several Houthi radar stations with TLAMs. The alternative is to use special forces but the minute you do that you are entering a different reality. And it would be far from a one-way street. The Houthis have an impressive arsenal and could escalate far above what they are doing now, for instance targeting nearby bases such as Djibouti.
Something in the US calculus is holding the Americans back. I’m not sure what, although I suspect maintaining the improvement of Saudi-Iranian relationships is in the mix. Blaming the lack of action on ‘Biden being weak’ is a bit shallow, especially when you consider the robust US responses that have occurred recently in Syria and Iraq. Nonetheless, at some point the cost of inaction will start to outweigh the cost of action. Clever people doing the maths across all domains, many of which are not visible to us, are still saying ‘not yet’.
Ultimately, international markets need the Houthis to stop disrupting shipping in this important chokepoint. This can be done one of three ways: they decide to stop, they are told to stop or they are made to stop. While we wait, a group of warships are convening to safeguard traffic there. The more this task endures, the more the risk increases and the more expensive it becomes and so the likelihood of striking back goes up.
The next few weeks will determine if Ike is heading that way to deliver the good news.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer
