Houthi rebels in Yemen fired on a U.S. military F-35 during recent operations, and the missile came close enough to the aircraft for the pilot to take evasive action, a U.S. official confirmed to Task & Purpose.
The incident was first reported in the New York Times as part of a story about why President Donald Trump decided to end air and missile strikes against the Houthis earlier this month.
No further information was immediately available about just how close the F-35 may have come to being hit by Houthi air defenses.
It would have been an “absolute disaster” if the U.S. military had lost one of its advanced and costly F-35s to the Houthis, said Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C.
“The reason why the American people have sacrificed hundreds of billions of dollars already on this program is that it was supposed to be the fighter jet of the future,” Grazier told Task & Purpose. “It was supposed to be able to go up against the pacing threats out there — penetrate heavily defended airspace. If one of those got shot down by a non-state actor, that would really put a lie to all the claims about the magical capabilities of the F-35.”
Costs have soared, but capabilities haven’t
Even after years of development, the F-35 still has “very limited combat capabilities,” Grazier said. The aircraft needs updates to its computing power and software to employ most of its weapons, but that process could take until the end of the decade.
Given the current state of the F-35, it’s “a little surprising, but it’s definitely not shocking” that the Houthis had targeted the aircraft, he said.
“If it can’t survive this level of combat, then a reasonable person would not be unjustified in questioning whether or not it can survive a more intense form of combat, which is exactly why the American people are paying a premium to design and build the F-35,” Grazier said.
For more than two decades, the F-35’s costs have increased dramatically while the program has faced numerous delays. As of last spring, the entire U.S. military had about 630 F-35s, according to an April 2024 Government Accountability Office report.
The F-35A, used by the Air Force, costs $82.5 million per plane; the F-35B — a Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing aircraft that is used by the Marine Corps — costs $109 million per plane; and the F-35C, which is used by both the Navy and Marine Corps for aircraft carrier operations, costs $102.1 million per aircraft, according to the F-35 Joint Program Office.
The entire F-35 program is estimated to cost $2.1 trillion during its 94-year lifespan from 1994 to 2088, and that includes all the costs of developing, producing, and sustaining F-35s, including building and modernizing 2,456 aircraft by 2049, the Joint Program Office announced in April.
Meanwhile, the Air Force variant of the jet continues to face reliability issues. Between 2021 and 2024, the F-35A’s mission-capable rate — how often it can perform at least one of its missions — dropped from nearly 69% to 51.5%, according to Air Force Times.
It’s the mission, not the plane
But if the Houthis had managed to shoot down an F-35, it would have been more of an indicator of shortcomings with the military operation rather than the aircraft itself, said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a consulting firm for the aerospace industry.
“Of course, losing an F-35 or two doesn’t have any great meaning, except if the pilot is hurt of course,” Aboulafia told Task & Purpose.
Aboulafia noted that between 2015 and 2022, a Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes in Yemen and learned that the Houthis have very capable air defenses.
“The F-35 is a very capable weapon,” Aboulafia said. “If you misuse it by refusing to understand history, that’s one thing. But the weapon itself and its capabilities, that’s a completely different issue.”
In a war with China, the F-35’s mission would be “kicking down the door” by destroying advanced air defense systems and other high-value targets — ideally with long-range weapons —before they could be detected, Aboulafia said.
The most recent U.S. air campaign against the Houthis involved targeting the group’s decentralized leadership network that is spread out across the country, and that raises the chances of American aircraft encountering sophisticated enemy surface-to-air missiles, Aboulafia said.
“That’s a recipe for trouble,” Aboulafia said. “When the Israelis have used F-35s, say, in Syria, it’s been a lot more discrete: Here is this specific mission; there is this specific target; let’s do it. If you’re just doing an ongoing campaign of targeting a variety of terrorist cells or what have you, I really don’t understand why you’d use F-35s.”
The Houthis also do not have the types of infrastructure that F-35s are meant to destroy, including ground-based radars, airfields, and shipyards, he said.
“This has more in common with — dare I say it — Vietnam,” Aboulafia said. “Did it matter what you were flying in Vietnam? I’m not sure it did, truth be told. Basically, if the other guy happened to have air defenses in the right place distributed among his dispersed units, then it was very unlucky for the pilot.”
No plane can be a silver bullet, and any war will involve casualties, said Aboulafia, who added that during the 1999 Kosovo war, Serbia shot down an F-117A Stealth Fighter.
“It was the same — look, we’re just roaming over the country, and eventually something bad might just happen,” Aboulafia said.
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