Happy Friday! It’s been more than a month since the U.S. military resumed attacks against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the endgame is still unclear.
The Defense Department has not detailed the number of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen since March 17, when Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters that the operation would not be “an endless offensive.”
“There is a very clear end state to this operation,” Parnell said. “And that begins the moment that the Houthis pledge to stop attacking our ships and putting American lives at risk.”
But the Iranian-backed Houthis, who survived seven years of attacks from a Saudi-led coalition, have shown no sign of yielding after firing at least one ballistic missile towards Israel on Sunday. Meanwhile, U.S. military commanders have raised concerns that operations in Yemen and the Red Sea are burning through munitions that would be badly needed in a war against China. The military’s stockpile of air defense missiles is already depleted by 15 months of combat against the Houthis between October 2023 and this January.
The conflict has also prompted the U.S. military to divert a Patriot air defense battalion and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson’s strike group from the Pacific to the Middle East.
And while no U.S. troops are known to be operating on the ground in the campaign, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that American security contractors are advising Yemeni militias on a planned ground offensive against the Houthis with targets like the port city of Hodeida on the Red Sea. But importantly, Saudi Arabia has no intention of joining such an effort.
For the time being, U.S. service members will continue to fight an undeclared, over-the-horizon war against the Houthis. Top civilian and military leaders owe those troops an explanation of what the strategy is and how this war will end. One key lesson from the defeat in Afghanistan is that you can’t “muddle along” to success.
With that, here’s your weekly rundown.
- Syria drawdown. The U.S. military is planning on withdrawing half of the roughly 2,000 service members deployed to Syria, Reuters first reported. “There is a consolidation occurring over the coming weeks and months involving about 1,000 troops,” a U.S. official told The War Zone. “That will leave about 1,000 troops.” In December, longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by Islamic rebels. That month, the U.S. military took advantage of Russian forces’ withdrawal from parts of Syria to strike Islamic State group fighters and camps.
- Pentagon officials suspended. As of Thursday, three Defense Department officials had been placed on administrative leave as part of an ongoing investigation into leaks of classified information announced last month. Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; and Darin Selnick, the Pentagon’s deputy chief of staff, have all been shown the door. On March 21, Hegseth’s chief of staff Joe Kasper announced that defense officials could face polygraph tests about unauthorized disclosures of classified information after the New York Times reported that Elon Musk, a key ally of President Donald Trump, would be briefed on war plans for China when he visited the Pentagon. The briefing was later called off.
- No U.S. support for an Israeli attack on Iran. Trump has declined a request from Israel to provide U.S. military air support for an Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear sites that was planned to begin next month, the New York Times has reported. After Trump’s advisors expressed concerns about the plan, the president told Israeli Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. military would not support such an attack while the United States negotiates with Iran about its nuclear program.
- If you gotta go, go with a smile. The Advanced Inflight Relief Universal System or AIRUS is designed to make it easier for pilots to urinate while flying. This should be a source of relief for women pilots, who have for decades had a much more difficult time using traditional “piddle packs” that were designed for men to answer nature’s call. “It’s kind of reversed to what typical designing the military is,” said Colt Seman, founder of Airion, the company behind the device. “It’s usually designed for males, and then, ‘hey, yeah, we’ll make it for a female.’ This was a total opposite approach. We designed it for the females, and now the males are asking for it.”
Thanks for reading! See you next week!
Jeff Schogol