As Donald Trump basked in his election victory in November, he promised he was “going to stop wars”.
Yet his order in March to use “overwhelming lethal force” against Houthi rebels in Yemen has propelled the US military into its most intense bombing campaign since the war against the Islamic State terror group, also known as Isis, a decade ago.
Over the past six weeks, the US has launched nearly twice as many air strikes as the Biden administration had carried out in 13 months before Trump took office. It says it has hit more than 800 Houthi “targets”, killing hundreds of the Iranian-backed militant group’s fighters.
But Washington is yet to answer a question that Joe Biden struggled to solve during his presidency, and before that Saudi Arabia: how to defang the group without getting sucked into a costly, long-term conflict with no clear end goal?
Trump’s escalated bombing campaign has pushed the Houthis’ top leadership underground, Yemeni analysts say. The US military says it has destroyed crucial military infrastructure and weapons stockpiles.
But the battle-hardened militants remain defiant. They claim to have shot down multiple US Reaper drones, have attempted attacks on US warships and fired more than a dozen missiles at Israel since Trump launched the bombing campaign on March 15th.
“I haven’t seen an ability to make the Houthis desperate for a pause,” Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. “When I’ve spoken with people in the US government, many seem consistently baffled by the Houthi calculus.”
Part of the problem is that the repressive Islamist movement uses its resistance to the US to boost its credibility across its terrain in populous northern Yemen. They also have a “lot of patience”, Alterman said.
Washington first intervened when the rebels began attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea 18 months ago, disrupting shipping through the Suez Canal. They said the strikes were acts of solidarity with Palestinians after Israel launched its Gaza offensive following Hamas’s October 7th, 2023, attack.
The Biden administration stepped in to deter the attacks, and launched regular air strikes on the rebels. But the Houthis, who endured years of Saudi bombing and who have underground tunnels and bunkers in the rugged northern mountains, were undeterred.
Biden’s team ultimately concluded “that probably we’re going to need to kill some Houthi leaders to change their policy”, Dan Shapiro, a former defence official in his administration, said. That, however, would raise the question of political strategy and “whether you are going to give backing to the other factions in Yemen”, he said.
Biden did not pursue that route. The Houthis only paused their assaults after Hamas and Israel agreed a ceasefire in January.
But when that truce collapsed in March and they threatened to resume strikes, Trump took the US operation to a new level. He pledged to restore navigational freedom to the region’s waters while also sending a warning to Iran in advance of talks on its nuclear programme.
In fewer than six weeks, the US military has launched at least 351 strikes, said Acled, a non-profit group that tracks conflict data. The US conducted the highest number of American strikes in a month since at least 2017, Acled said.
“It’s the most significant sustained air campaign the US military has carried out since the height of the ‘defeat Isis’ war more than a decade ago,” Dana Stroul, a former Pentagon official, said.
The US strikes have also hit civilian infrastructure. The Houthis said 74 people died last week in strikes on Ras Isa fuel port, and 68 more were killed in what they alleged was a US strike that hit a detention centre for African migrants.
Trump’s escalation has triggered speculation that anti-Houthi southern factions might use the moment to relaunch a ground offensive. Doing so would reopen a civil war that has been frozen since Saudi Arabia and the Houthis agreed to a UN-backed truce in 2022.
The Houthis have a PhD in being incognito and no matter how heavy the air strikes, it’s not going to make much difference on its own
— Farea al-Muslimi of Britain's Chatham House think tank
Such talk was premature, said two Yemeni officials with anti-Houthi factions. Both groups contacted the US to discuss strategy, but said there were no imminent plans for a ground offensive, the officials said.
“We’re telling them [that] to achieve their objectives; there needs to be something on the ground and the region [Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates] has to be involved,” one official said. “But there’s still scepticism.”
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which intervened in the civil war in 2015 to support the ousted Yemeni government against the Houthis, have denied being involved in any talks about an offensive.
“We are paralysed, everyone is waiting for the other one to move,” the Yemeni official said.
Riyadh has for several years sought to extricate itself from the conflict after years of bombing could not break the Houthis’ grip on the north, while the rebels hit the kingdom with regular barrages of missile and drone fire.
There is little clarity about Trump’s endgame.
The US military said on Sunday that due to “operational security” it would disclose few details about the campaign. Top US officials had earlier unintentionally revealed information about the strikes via the Signal messaging app. The United Kingdom also conducted a joint strike with the US on Tuesday targeting a Houthi drone plant.
But analysts caution that a bombing campaign alone may not be sufficient to dislodge or deter the Houthis.
Shapiro said the Biden administration strikes destroyed hundreds of weapons stocks, but “at the end of the day, they have many more than hundreds, and they can keep building”.
“They’ve got an indigenous capability and they are still smuggling” from Iran, said Shapiro, who supports the expanded strikes.
However, Stroul warned of the costs and strain on the US military. “They’ve pulled so much out of the Asia-Pacific theatre for this campaign in the Red Sea. So, how long are they willing to go on, and where’s the pain point for them?” she said.
Farea al-Muslimi at Chatham House, a British think tank, said the Houthis could be vulnerable to a combination of US air strikes with a ground offensive by Yemeni factions. But that would require the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE co-ordinating with the disparate southern groups that failed to dislodge the Houthis during a decade of civil war.
“You have a lot of people dealing with the war as if they’ve learned nothing from 2015 [when Saudi Arabia intervened], as if this is going to be easy, and I’m not full of that wishful thinking,” he said. “The Houthis have a PhD in being incognito and no matter how heavy the air strikes, it’s not going to make much difference on its own.” − Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
