U.S. military strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels continued into their sixth day on Thursday, as the Pentagon and Trump administration had yet to fully explain what prompted the resumption of operations against the Iranian-backed rebel group after months of relative quiet in the Red Sea.
Officials said the new round of strikes in Yemen may last for weeks and that they are now less worried about casualties. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday claimed the renewed military operation is necessary due to attacks on Navy ships and shipping, telling Maria Bartiromo on Fox News that “ships haven’t been able to go through for over a year without being shot at.”
However, as leaders like Hegseth demand the Houthis halt their attacks as a condition of ending the strikes, multiple officials at the Pentagon, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely discuss the current situation, told Military.com that the last Houthi attack they were aware of occurred in December — months ago and before President Donald Trump even took office.
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In his Fox News appearance, Hegseth said that, around that time frame, “we sent a ship through, it was shot at 17 times,” but he didn’t offer any further details about whether it was a U.S. warship or merchant ship.
U.S. Central Command did announce two attacks against U.S. warships and merchant ships that month, but the munitions used didn’t appear to add up to 17.
The latest round of Houthi attacks began in October 2023 when the destroyer USS Carney first shot down a Houthi barrage of missiles and drones headed for Israel. Since then, Navy ships in the area have engaged in a steady stream of missile and drone interceptions aimed at them and merchant ships. At least seven Navy ships have been awarded the prestigious Combat Action Ribbon as a result.
The Houthi rebels began targeting merchant ships in the region following the outbreak of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The rebels warned this month that any Israeli vessel traveling in those waters is a target due to the continuing siege of Gaza, though they have also attacked merchant ships with no ties to Israel.
Military.com reached out to the White House and the National Security Council for more clarity on what prompted the strikes now.
The White House didn’t respond, and an official from the NSC referred Military.com to “statements made by the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, [the White House spokeswoman,] and many others.”
The Trump administration’s military operations against the Houthis began Saturday with a strike that hit “over 30 targets at multiple locations,” Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, the joint staff’s planning boss, told reporters Monday.
“These included terrorist training sites, unmanned aerial vehicle infrastructure, weapons manufacturing capabilities and weapon storage facilities,” Grynkewich said, adding that the targets “also included a number of command-and-control centers, including a terrorist compound where we know several senior Houthi unmanned aerial vehicle experts were located.”
Since Saturday, Grynkewich said strikes have continued; posts on the U.S. Central Command and Defense Department social media pages show that jets from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman were flying as late as Thursday.
Grynkewich wouldn’t say how many targets were hit on subsequent days, but several defense officials told Military.com that the number of targets was lower than the total reported Saturday.
One official described the ensuing several days of strikes as bringing the number of targets to about 60, or about twice as many as were struck in the initial wave last weekend.
The military strikes are not unique to the Trump administration.
In January 2024, the Biden administration began a series of strikes, with the first one hitting more than 60 targets at 16 locations controlled by the Iranian-backed militants, and immediately followed those initial strikes by attacking 12 other locations.
One of the last strikes under the Biden administration happened Dec. 21.
According to Grynkewich, the difference in the Trump administration’s operations in Yemen is a “much broader set of targets … and the other key difference is the delegation of authorities from the president through Secretary Hegseth down to the operational commander.”
That means the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Erik Kurilla, is able to make more strikes with less oversight, which according to Grynkewich “allows us to achieve a tempo of operations where we can react to opportunities that we see on the battlefield in order to continue to put pressure on the Houthis.”
Two defense officials told Military.com that there is also less reluctance to hold off striking targets based on the casualties that may result.
Trump, posting Wednesday on his social network Truth Social, called the Houthis “barbarians” and said they would be “completely annihilated” by U.S. military strikes.
The defense officials who spoke with Military.com said they expected the strikes to go on for about a month or so.
The Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, said Monday that “there’s going to be … a very clear end state to this.” But neither he nor Grynkewich would go into detail about what specific aims they were trying to achieve.
“Just know that there is a design to the operation,” Grynkewich said Monday. “There’s specific targets that have been selected and approaches that we’re taking in order to achieve the president’s end state.”
Parnell said the rebels “could stop this tomorrow if they said ‘we’re going to stop shooting at your people.'” He didn’t offer any examples more recent than what Hegseth offered to Fox News.
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