The recent resumption of hostilities in the Red Sea underscores a potentially serious problem facing the Navy: It’s burning through missiles faster than it can replace them. For the first time in decades, the Navy has had extended periods of combat at sea as it faced 21st-century threats during Operation Prosperity Guardian and the renewed effort against the Houthis, named Operation Rough Rider.
Acting as protection for commercial shipping in the critical waterway, Navy warships have engaged anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and swarms of various drone types launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Aside from older missile types, these are threats the Navy hasn’t regularly faced outside of training exercises and wargames — and certainly not in the volume they’ve encountered in the past year.
While the ships and sailors who deployed to the Red Sea performed admirably — and you can read some of their first-hand accounts, here — the sheer volume of fire they had to intercept revealed an uncomfortable truth: American ships, and the Navy as a whole, are more vulnerable to attrition than previously realized.
According to retired Navy Cmdr. Bryan Clark, the Navy saw the most combat at sea within 15 months than at any other time since World War II.
“It’s kind of amazing how the Navy has held up with no losses, but the cost has been pretty enormous,” Clark previously told Task & Purpose.
During a 15-month period from October 2023 to January 2025, the Navy fired almost 400 separate munitions against Houthi-launched weapons. Ships also fired around 160 rounds from their 5-inch main guns against slower targets, or those that were too close for missiles to engage.
In this week’s video, August Dannehl, a Navy veteran and head of video production for Task & Purpose and our sister sites, The War Zone and We Are The Mighty, walks viewers through the Navy’s most recent naval engagements, the threat their warships and crews have faced, and how the service has had to adjust to the new realities of naval warfare.
Each week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Task & Purpose will be bringing in military veterans to host segments on different topics. These will range from breakdowns of tactics and doctrine to explainers on new tech and weapons systems, but each will be researched, reported and reviewed by the journalists on the Task & Purpose team. As with the stories we cover on the website, these videos will look at these topics from a rank-and-file perspective. This means they’ll aim to answer questions such as: Why does this matter to a junior service member about to deploy to [name a country], or who will have to use [name a weapon system] or deal with [name a problem or threat].
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