The US Navy’s inability to lift the Houthis’ self-imposed partial blockade of the Red and Arabian Seas or to meaningfully degrade the militia’s missile and drone capabilities in six months of air and missile strikes has given rise to embarrassing questions from allies and adversaries alike about whether the US military is a mere “paper tiger,” and not the “all powerful,” global and “omnipotent force” it’s cracked up to be.
In testimony by senior Pentagon officials on the state of America’s air and missile defenses earlier this year, Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces chairman Angus King complained that the US has proved not only unable to defend against peer competitors like Russia and China, but ineffective against smaller adversaries, including Iran and the Houthis, as well.
His concerns were echoed by media reports that the US has already spent over a billion dollars fighting the Houthis, with the USS Eisenhower supercarrier’s Super Hornet jets racking up tens of thousands of flight hours, and US warships firing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of interceptor missiles to target the militia’s simple missiles, UAVs and maritime drones.
Amid the Houthis’ successes in humbling the American goliath, panicky voices have emerged in Washington and US military-affiliated media calling for something to be done to stop the Yemeni militia’s humiliation of the US Empire in the Middle East from spreading online.
The “Navy should hit back harder against Houthi online disinformation,” Max Lesser, a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a DC neoconservative think tank, wrote in an op-ed that appeared in the Navy Times on Wednesday.
“While the US military and allies regularly hit back with airstrikes against Houthi missile launchers and other assets in Yemen, the Pentagon is less prepared to defend against the online lies and disinformation that the Houthis are spreading,” Lesser complained.
The think tank analyst pointed to a series of social media posts from late May shared by “Houthi supporters” of digitally altered images and videos of damage purportedly done to the USS Eisenhower in one of the militia’s attempts to retaliate to US-UK strikes into Yemen.
The manipulated images apparently proved prolific enough for the carrier’s captain, Captain Christopher Hill, to invite journalists to inspect the warship’s flight deck to show it had not in fact suffered any damage in Houthi attacks.
Lesser suggests that the “deluge of deceptively labeled images” spread by “pro-Houthi accounts” has generally not been sufficiently challenged or debunked by the Pentagon, despite the operation of a DoD Joint Maritime Information Center stood up specifically to report on the situation in the Red Sea region. The analyst urged the military to include any "Houthi disinformation" it finds into its weekly updates, noting that for now, “debunking” the false images is falling to lone “independent” OSINT analysts.
“The challenge is not limited to the Red Sea or the Middle East,” Lesser stressed. “Military forces in every command should have public affairs and open-source intelligence personnel working together to debunk false and exaggerated claims of enemy success on the battlefield.”
Given the US military’s proven track record of covering up information the Pentagon finds inconvenient, there’s no guarantee that any DoD-led campaign to combat Houthi “disinformation” online won’t result in the creation of new falsehoods spread by the Defense Department.