MARITIME WARHouthis’ Lesson for the U.S. Army: How a Land Force Can Fight a Maritime War
The US Army should consider borrowing a page from the playbook of Yemen’s Houthi militants. The character of war is always changing, and the Houthis’ ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea may prove to be one of the more significant inflection points in military history.
The US Army should consider borrowing a page from the playbook of Yemen’s Houthi militants.
The character of war is always changing, and the Houthis’ ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea may prove to be one of the more significant inflection points in military history.
The change involves sea control and sea denial through the application of long-range precision missile fire and autonomous drone employment from the shore. The Houthis effectively blend a mix of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and one-way attack drones to contest control over maritime lines of communication in the Red Sea littoral. They have so far damaged at least 30 merchant ships, sunk two and killed or detained several merchant sailors.
The US Army should aim for much the same capability in a contested littoral environment against an adversary such as China. Technically and tactically, the service is moving in this direction, but it needs to fully embrace the strategy to avoid becoming largely irrelevant in the major war in which the US is most likely to become involved. Army heavy formations almost certainly won’t be available in the initial fighting in a Western Pacific war.
The army can draw on efforts that are already underway in the US military. It can, for example, take inspiration from the US Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, in which ships are widely separated but act in unison. Army units might operate similarly in the Western Pacific.
The navy is developing DMO for forces that find themselves in combat against an adversary, such as China, that can detect, track and attack US and allied assets at great distances with a variety of different weapon systems.
The army’s own Typhon or Strategic Mid-Range Fires (SMRF) program, in which it is fielding its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) and navy SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles for strike missions, should contribute, as should research into drone technology by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In a maritime war in the Western Pacific, the army would likely have to operate on distant island bases and attack shipping in much the same way the Houthis are doing from the interior of Yemen. Geographic dispersal will be a vital aspect of survivability in the next war.
The SMRF program is already well adapted for shore-based sea control operations. So is the army’s new Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF), in which units are tailored to specific theatres for long-range precision effects, including cyber, electromagnetic
