https://unherd.com/2025/05/americas-military-humiliation/
Malcom Kyeyune
May 26, 2025

When, in reaction to the war in Gaza, the Houthis of Yemen started imposing their blockade on the Red Sea, it was seen as a sure sign of waning American power: a global hegemon was allowing its control over a vital sea route to be contested. In their rush to fathom why this might be happening, detractors of the then president claimed he was simply too weak, too much of an appeaser to use the full width of America’s military might to quash the problem.

In fact, in response, Biden authorised not one but two military campaigns. The first was Operation Prosperity Guardian, which aimed to combine US naval power with a coalition of willing states to protect shipping and break the blockade. That fast turned into an embarrassing debacle, as most of the coalition partners walked away and ships kept getting hit by Houthi missiles. And so, in January 2024, Operation Poseidon Archer was launched, which involved British as well as American aircraft attempting to bomb the Houthis into submission. Here again, the operation was unsuccessful, doing almost nothing to dent Houthi attacks or open up the Red Sea to shipping. But even then Biden was blamed; the mighty US military was being held back somehow. Thus, the natural conclusion was that once Trump was in office, the gloves would come off.

Biden’s critics were actually half right. Once Trump came in, the gloves did come off. Operation Poseidon Archer was followed by Operation Rough Rider, in March of this year, which attempted to show a new, much more muscular American military response against Houthi targets in Yemen — for all of six weeks. For six weeks, US warplanes pounded Yemen around the clock, with rare and expensive stealth bombers flying missions out of Diego Garcia in support of carrier-based aircraft. Yet once those six weeks were up, Trump proudly announced that Yemen had “surrendered” and that there was no more need for the US to keep up the bombing. A ceasefire had been brokered by Oman. This was trumpeted as a glorious victory for the US military, with the Houthis finally promising to not attack US ships anymore, and America graciously returning the gesture.

Of course, Trump didn’t mention the terms of the “surrender”. The Houthis only had to stop attacking American ships in exchange for America stopping the bombing; they were free to continue blockading the Red Sea or firing missiles at Israel. America, in other words, had given the Houthis carte blanche to carry on the behaviour that was the reason America had gone to war in the first place. Thus, to call this deal a surrender was entirely appropriate; it’s just that it wasn’t the Houthis hoisting the white flag.

It is very commonplace to blame reversals and even defeats in America’s various wars of choice as merely a matter of lack of will. If America really wanted to win, it would win, the story goes; the failure of the US is just one where it never commits the force necessary to finish the fight. But today, that excuse rings hollow. Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, unlike Biden’s operations, utilised many of America’s most limited, expensive, and advanced weapons to try to bring the Houthis to heel. And still it surrendered. The lessons here are thus quite bleak. America’s preferred and increasingly only viable method of warfare — aerial warfare — is no longer cost-effective nor practical. But the US has no alternative modes of warfare to fall back on, which means that its days as a military hegemon are probably coming to a close.

To understand just how big a mess the air war against the Houthis has turned out to be, it’s important to understand a very basic rule to US military inventories. For while, on paper, America has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an impressive figure that far outstrips any other country on the planet, that top line figure is barely relevant in practice.
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For comparison, look to the United Kingdom. The UK has two large aircraft carriers, putting it near the top of the international leaderboard when it comes to the ability to project military force. But as anyone with any familiarity with the Royal Navy can tell you, that number does not tell the real story. The number of carriers the UK can actually deploy is far lower, a number which is fairly close to zero. For while the ships exist, the Royal Navy lacks the crew, the planes, the escorts, and the logistical capacity to actually put them to use for any length of time in a real war. The UK Navy has become something of a Potemkin village, where superficial on-paper strengths hide a catastrophic reality of deferred maintenance, insufficient budgets, and lack of personnel.

Though the situation for the US Navy isn’t quite as dire, in practice, the problem is the same: it cannot realistically put more than two to four carriers to sea at any given moment. The ability to surge capacity in times of crisis is limited, because the various reserve components of the US armed forces have catastrophically atrophied. If you discount the American carriers that are slated for the scrapyard, or those currently lacking a functional nuclear reactor, or those which are tied up in deep maintenance, the number of active, usable carriers is roughly a third of the on-paper number. Half of those carriers were being used against the Houthis.

But carriers are not the only example we ought to look at. For Operation Rough Rider, the US Air Force contributed some six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, arguably the most advanced (and by far the most expensive) airframe in the US arsenal. At first blush, this seems like only a fraction of America’s power, because it has some 20 such bombers in its inventory. But a closer look at these planes suggest that those six used in Rough Rider very likely represent the entire working inventory of US stealth bombers. Because B-2s haven’t been built for decades, the only way to keep them operational is to cannibalise other B-2s for spare parts: as a result, a large number have been functionally scrapped and cannot ever hope to fly again. Only half of US bombers even qualify for so-called “mission capable” status on an average day, a status which doesn’t actually mean that the plane works; it simply means the plane isn’t completely broken and inoperable. Only two thirds or fewer of those mission capable planes can hope to qualify for what the US military instead classifies as “full mission capable” status. “Full mission capable” is your standard Pentagon-speak; it means the plane is in working order, has nothing broken that’s really important, and can realistically be used for what it was built for.

From carriers to stealth bombers, the pattern here is fairly clear, and it is further corroborated by testimonies from inside the Pentagon itself. America essentially pulled out all the stops to attack the Houthis, waging an extremely expensive and intensive air war against a militia controlling most of Yemen, the fourth-poorest nation in the world. The cost to operate a B-2 stealth bomber is extremely high on a per-hour basis; and their fragile stealth coating is not particularly fond of the warm, salty sea air at Diego Garcia. You don’t send in all of them unless you really mean business. America also committed roughly half of its active carriers, spent a fortune in land attack and air defence missiles, and it even cannibalised ammo stores and air defence systems from the Pacific theatre of operations for the sake of the operation.
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But as the stories of the campaign start leaking to the press, it’s clear that none of this effort did anything good. The US couldn’t establish air supremacy, meaning it couldn’t risk flying its older, non-stealth planes for fear of losing them. This itself might seem like proof that America was once again just not trying very hard; for what kind of war is it when you’re not ready to accept losses? But the problem is, America can’t afford to replace planes that get lost and pilots that get killed. This is not a problem of cowardice, but of force generation: even if the US military suffers zero losses due to enemy fire in the years ahead, it is still slated to shrink precipitously. This shrinkage and loss of capacity is just due to America’s planes and ships wearing out, with not enough workers, dockyards, engineers, and dollars to replace them. As America burns through its massive military inheritance bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and the Eighties arms race, there is no plan to replace it. For the US military, avoiding casualties is not a matter of caution or cowardice; it is the result of a total inability to replenish the force.

The result of this American Achilles’ heel has been an extremely expensive reliance — when it has come to defending the Red Sea — on so-called “standoff” weaponry; cruise missiles, for example, that can be launched from far enough away that anti-air fire won’t be a threat. But even then, there were problems: according to leaked reports, even the vaunted F-35 stealth fighter had to dodge incoming anti-air missiles on at least one occasion. In Operation Rough Rider, the US deployed many of its most rare and bespoke weapons, such as the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile) as well as heavy, specialised bunker-buster bombs. Again, by all accounts, this had little effect. Partly, this was because the US kept losing so many of its MQ-9 reaper drones, which come with a price tag north of 30 million dollars apiece, and which were supposed to provide the intel to ensure the bombing campaign found its targets.

When Biden first lost interest in defending the Red Sea against the Houthis, people were aghast. Not doing enough was akin to telling the entire world that the US was too weak to keep the Suez channel open. But Trump, after berating his predecessor, has also walked away, and de facto recognised the Houthi’s control of the channel. It would seem that the US doesn’t actually have many cards to play.