WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – For weeks, U.S. airstrikes have pounded Yemen, hitting oil refineries, airports and missile sites, with President Trump vowing to use “overwhelming force” until the U.S. achieves its goal of stopping the country from targeting shipping in the Red Sea.
Yemen began the campaign in solidarity with Palestinians when Israel went to war in Gaza in October 2023. Yemeni forces have carried out more than 100 operations and have sunk two vessels. The result: 70% of Israeli-linked shipping that once transited the Red Sea now takes the long route around southern Africa.
The U.S. says the campaign is working. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said that multiple Yemeni resistance leaders had been killed. But every round of strikes provokes more defiance, CNN reported on Sunday.
Yemeni fighters are what one veteran Yemen-watcher calls the honey badgers of resistance, referring to the belligerent mammal known for its fearless attitude toward predators. Bitten by a cobra, they get up minutes later and attack the snake, the American broadcaster wrote.
While some military officers may have been killed, according to analysts, the senior echelon of its military and political leadership appears intact. So are at least some of its missile-launching sites. Since mid-March, Yemeni forces have launched a dozen ballistic missiles at Israel, and barrages of drones and missiles at U.S. navy ships.
The Yemen Armed Forces (YAF) has shot down three U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones since early March. In total, at least 17 MQ-9 drones have been shot down by Yemeni forces since January last year. Each of these drones costs approximately $30 million.
On Friday, American media reported that the total cost of the U.S. military aggression against Yemen is nearing $1 billion in just under three weeks, but the attacks had so far had limited impact on destroying the group’s capabilities.
“We are burning through readiness — munitions, fuel, deployment time,” said one official, cited by CNN.
Far from being cowed, Yemenis have threatened to extend their range of targets to the UAE, which is a U.S. ally. Similarly, Saudi officials say the kingdom’s air defenses are on high alert.
“The dozens of airstrikes on Yemen will not deter the Yemeni Armed Forces from fulfilling their religious, moral, and humanitarian duties,” said a Yemeni military spokesman earlier this week.
Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, says history shows that the Houthis who comprise the backbone of the Yemeni resistance have an extraordinarily high tolerance for pain. And the Trump administration’s determination to eradicate the resistance may ultimately require a ground offensive.
“The Houthis are just inured to being at war with a first world military,” Knights says.“They’re ideological, but they’re also very tough tribal fighters from northern Yemen.”
The Houthis, CNN said, survived several offensives during the long presidency of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, then a Saudi offensive ten years ago, followed by more recent Israeli, UK and U.S. airstrikes.
Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst on Yemen at the International Crisis Group, says Israel and Western powers lack a deep understanding of the Houthis. “Their opaque leadership and internal structure have created persistent gaps in intelligence.”
Another Yemen expert, Elisabeth Kendall, questions the endgame of the U.S. campaign. “The Houthis have been bombed tens of thousands of times over the past decade and remain undeterred. So one is left thinking that the bombing is largely performative: let’s show the world - we’ll do it because we can.”
Coercing the Houthis, Knights told CNN, is “really, really difficult.”
Nagi says the U.S. is wrong to believe that airstrikes can compel the Houthis to back down. “This approach failed under the Biden administration and is unlikely to succeed under the Trump administration.”
“Their logic is shaped by years of war; they see resilience as a form of strength and are driven to prove they are not easily deterred.”
The Houthis, if anything, may actually be relishing U.S. strikes. They are a “direct answer to the Houthi prayers to have a war with the U.S.,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni research fellow at Chatham House. The group “wants to drag the U.S. into a larger regional escalation.”
Analysts do not expect the U.S. to put any troops on the ground, beyond a handful of special forces to help direct airstrikes. The UAE would be “quietly supportive” as it has long supplied the Aden-based government, he adds.
The Saudi perspective is less clear. Knights believes Riyadh is apprehensive about the Houthis retaliating with long-range drones and missiles against its infrastructure. But the U.S. has accelerated deliveries of anti-missile defenses to Saudi Arabia in recent months.
Regional diplomatic sources say preparations are underway for a ground operation that would be launched from the south and east, as well as along the coast. A coordinated offensive could also involve Saudi and U.S. naval support in an attempt to retake the port of Hudadah.
“Whether such an operation is feasible remains unclear, as the past decade has shown mixed outcomes, successes in some areas and failures in others,” Nagi told CNN.
The U.S. appears ready to expand its campaign. B-2 bombers and KC-135 refueling planes have arrived on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That may presage strikes on hardened targets in Yemen.
“The next few weeks may be a crucial test of the honey badgers’ resilience,” CNN wrote.
Yemen’s military announced Sunday that it targeted a U.S. supply ship in the Red Sea.
Military spokesman Yahya Saree said Yemeni forces targeted the ship attached to the U.S. aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman with a ballistic missile.
He said the attack lasted several hours, and it prevented the U.S. from carrying out offensive actions against Yemen.
Additionally, Yemeni air defenses successfully shot down a Giant Shark F360 reconnaissance drone that was conducting hostile missions over the northwestern Saada province.
The U.S. drone was downed using a domestically-made surface-to-air missile.
U.S. airstrikes killed at least two people overnight in Saada, the military said. The strikes wounded nine others, with footage aired by Yemen’s Al-Masirah satellite news channel showing a strike collapsing what appeared to be a two-story building described as a solar power shop.
The intense campaign of airstrikes in Yemen under Trump has killed at least 69 people, according to casualty figures released by the Yemeni military.
Early Saturday, Trump posted what appeared to be black-and-white video from a drone of a group of over 70 people gathered in a circle. An explosion detonates during the 25-second video, with a massive crater left in its wake.
Without offering a location for the attack or any other details about the strike, Trump claimed that “these Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack”, referring to Yemen’s Ansarullah fighters who have been carrying out operations against Israeli, U.S. and British targets in solidarity with the Palestinians.
“Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis! They will never sink our ships again!” he wrote, in his typical insensitive social posts.
The U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees America’s Mideast military operations, has not published the video, nor offered any specific details about the strikes it has conducted since March 15. The White House has said there have been over 200 strikes so far targeting Yemen.
The SABA news agency in Yemen described the bombing as targeting “a social Eid visit in Hudaydah governorate.” Muslims across the world just celebrated Eid al-Fitr, the festival at the end of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
Muhammad al-Basha, a Yemen expert of the Basha Report risk advisory firm, cited social media condolence notices suggesting a colonel overseeing police stations in Hudaydah had been killed in the strike Trump highlighted, alongside his two brothers.
The strikes have expanded significantly, hitting multiple governorates simultaneously, alongside telecommunications infrastructure, al-Basha said.
While failing to deter Ansarallah, U.S. airstrikes on Yemen have been deadly, killing women and children and compounding an already severe humanitarian crisis that the country has been facing for years due to a Saudi-led war and blockade that began in 2015.