larry johnson explores the empire being challenged on all fronts, and the yemen one is currently one of most interesting;

Credit to Scott Ritter for this salient observation. We made a joint appearance on Danny Haiphong’s podcast tonight and were discussing the remarkable accomplishment of the Houthis in Yemen in shutting down commercial maritime traffic in the Red Sea. Yemen has never been known as a naval power, but it has succeeded in hurting Israel by preventing cargo container ships and oil tankers from sailing to Israel’s ports.

Although the United States has assembled a motley international armada to deal with the Yemeni threat (e.g., Canada sent three naval officers, no ship, and the Seychelles fields a small fleet of coast guard vessels that are one-fourth the size of a U.S. destroyer), there are several obstacles that will hinder the effectiveness of this hodgepodge collection of ships. I discussed these in my previous article (THE U.S. NAVY IS UNPREPARED FOR A PROLONGED WAR WITH YEMEN). These include:

Yemen’s ability to launch $2000 drones against ships that fire $2 million dollar missiles.

Yemen’s ability to launch a swarm attack of more than 30 drones/anti-ship missiles at one time is likely to overwhelm the Aegis capability to rapidly reload and take out inbound threats.

The limited supply of the Aegis missiles on board the U.S. destroyers that can be quickly exhausted if Yemen launches more than 100 drones against each destroyer.

Lack of adequate stockpiles of Aegis missiles in the U.S. inventory.

Each U.S. destroyer must sail to a U.S. or coalition base to refit (this assumes that the U.S. has been able to forward deploy an adequate supply of replacement air defense missiles).

Deploying adequate ISR assets to locate mobile missile sites in Yemen without having those assets shot down by Houthi air defense systems.........more....