WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden acknowledged today that the airstrikes conducted against Houthi targets in Yemen so far have yet to put a stop to the rebel group’s harassment of vessels in the Red Sea, and that more military action is to be expected.
Just before boarding Marine One this afternoon, Biden was asked by a reporter if the airstrikes were “working.”
“Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,” Biden said.
The United States military has launched a series of strikes against Houthi targets since American and British munitions first rained down on targets in Yemen last week.
At a Pentagon briefing Wednesday, Defense Department spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to provide a battlefield assessment on the success of American strikes up to that point — claiming it could reveal sensitive intelligence — except to say that the US “employed over 150 munitions, targeted over 16 locations, and had impact.”
“The objective here was to disrupt and degrade Houthi capabilities to conduct attacks, and we believe that overall, in terms of the scope and the number of strikes that we took, we have degraded their ability to attack,” he said. “Clearly, they maintain some capability and we anticipated that after any action, there would likely be some retaliatory strikes, and that’s what you’re seeing now.”
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Today another Pentagon spokesperson, Sabrinah Singh, likewise said no one expected the Houthis to immediately lay down their arms.
“That is something that they will have to make, that decision and that calculation to do,” she said.
Singh, who said the DoD has assessed the strikes haven’t killed any civilians, insisted that despite US military action in Yemen, the administation didn’t seek a widening of the conflict there. “We don’t seek war. We don’t think we are at war.”
In the days since the initial strikes, the Houthis continued to launch missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles at targets in the Red Sea, including US-owned ships. Today, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said it had struck two “Houthi anti-ship missiles that were aimed into the Southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch.” The day before, CENTCOM said it conducted strikes on “14 Iran-backed Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired in Houthi controlled areas in Yemen.”
Singh said the Houthis’ more recent “lower scale” retaliatory attacks have been dialed back in part due to the effectiveness of Western strikes.
She also said US strikes are not always tied to particular Houthi provocations, noting that a strike is “not necessarily a tit-for-tat every single time.” The actions taken most recently, she emphasized, were self-defensive since missiles were prepared for launch.
On Wednesday the Biden administration formally designated the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
“This designation is an important tool to impede terrorist funding to the Houthis, further restrict their access to financial markets, and hold them accountable for their actions,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said. “If the Houthis cease their attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the United States will immediately reevaluate this designation.”
Houthis began launching attacks against vessels in the Red Sea in November, including a dramatic, on-camera boarding of a cargo ship, in support of Hamas in its conflict with Israel. US Navy ships in the region have shot down dozens of Houthi-launched drones and missiles since.
Earlier this week, Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the RANE Network, told Breaking Defense he was skeptical that the airstrikes up until then would have much practical effect.
“The strikes were effective and establishing a new paradigm of risk for the Houthis showcasing that the US-led coalition will carry out military action to attempt to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. But beyond that political dimension, it’s still unclear whether or not it caused enough damage to Houthi infrastructure to slow down or deter attacks,” he said. “It seems more likely that a sustained pace of intermittent attacks on Houthi infrastructure will eventually degrade their more sophisticated capabilities like drones and ballistic missiles, but will probably not halt all Houthis attacks.”
Breaking Defense’s Michael Marrow contributed to this report.