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What Red Sea Battles with the Houthis Have Taught the U.S. Navy
(The War Zone) Geoff Ziezulewicz - The U.S. Navy's surface fleet has spent the past 15 months taking down more than 400 anti-ship cruise missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and aerial attack drones fired by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels at U.S. and allied navies' ships, as well as commercial vessels in and around the Red Sea, in the most intense sustained combat the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II. In the Red Sea, no American warships have been hit, and crews have countered Houthi attacks that have, at times, come dangerously close to putting a hole in a gray hull. Navy brass says they are now able to tune ship radars, provide feedback and update tactics far more rapidly than when the hostilities started. The math of wartime missile expenditure is a prime Red Sea takeaway. Expensive surface-to-air (SAM) missiles that take a long time to procure and build have regularly been used to shoot down relatively cheap Houthi aerial attack drones, said Jan van Tol, a retired forward-deployed warship captain. He noted that the American defense industrial base "has relatively little surge production capacity relative to need," and that the Red Sea experience has hammered home the need to increase production of Navy munitions. Military leaders have warned of how missiles fired in the Red Sea and elsewhere are eating into stocks. At the same time, the Red Sea is offering invaluable, real-world proof that a Navy warship's air defense weapons actually work in combat.