Iran is winning against the Americans in the Red Sea, through their proxy the Houthis, said a former Royal Navy Commander during an episode of Iran International’s podcast Eye for Iran.
Tom Sharpe, worked alongside the Americans in the Red Sea for two decades, witnessing their might as the most powerful navy in the world.
Despite that image and legacy, the Houthis have not been deterred by the US defensive and allied naval actions, he believes.
The Americans, and by extension the ‘West’, are failing to the Iran-backed rebels from the mountains of Yemen, he concluded.
The retired navy commander revealed on the Eye for Iran podcast that Tehran is winning against the US in the Red Sea.
“They're achieving their ends, all of them, and we're achieving none of ours. We're spending millions and millions of dollars on not winning. It's a real problem.”
Just after Oct 7, the Houthis have been attacking maritime shipping, disrupting shipping trade through the crucial Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
The Iran-backed rebel group say they are conducting the attacks in solidarity with the people of Gaza to push for a ceasefire, but Sharpe said they have only convinced a few.
According to the Joint Maritime Information Centre, the Houthis have attacked nearly 100 vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since Israel's war against Hamas began after the atrocities of Oct 7.
The rebel group released footage in August of their fighters on the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion, detonating explosives on the ship. That prompted concerns of an environmental disaster.
In early September, the US military said the Houthis attacked two crude oil tankers – the Saudi- flagged Amjad, carrying about two million barrels of oil, and the Panama- flagged Blue Lagoon in the Red Sea. The Houthis claimed responsibility for targeting the Blue Lagoon with missiles and drones.
For Sharpe, the way the US is responding to the Houthis is “unusual” given how the US Navy had been operating and their procedures over the years.
“When the USS Mason was fired at in 2017 in the same area, they shot T -Lam Tomahawks straight back almost immediately. This whole thing has been backward leaning for all sorts of political reasons, but it’s just engendered this idea that the Houthis can keep going.”
Why is it that the most powerful navy in the world cannot beat a rebel group from the mountains?
Sharpe said to “hit them hard enough to make them stop would be really difficult” and the reason is “they’ve learned so much from Iran in terms of mass maneuverability.”
The bedrock of Iran’s strategy, he said, is concealment and agility in the Persian Gulf. Sharp added, if you go after one target, which costs in the millions, the Houthis are skilled at hiding their weapons, and move it around on mobile launchers, hiding it in the mountains and villages.
The Americans would need a tremendous amount of airborne surveillance to achieve anything and that comes with huge costs with one missile used to strike a drone, amounting to around 6 million US dollars, according to Sharpe.
Another reason for a weak response from the Americans would be not to anger Iran and set off the balance of deterrence in the Middle East.
On Ward Carroll's YouTube episode, titled 'Admiral Tells the Real Truth about battling the Houthis in the Red Sea," a US Navy commander from the Dwight D Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, said he suggested more aggressive strikes on the Houthis, but he was told not to by higher command to reportedly avoid angering Iran.
Gen. Michael Kurilla, CENTCOM's commander claimed in a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that the current policies are "failing" to have the desired impact on Houthi attacks, according to an exclusive published in the Wall Street Journal.
On Eye for Iran, Sharpe also revealed that the Houthis are likely exporters of weapons, saying that they learned to reverse engineer from the Islamic Republic.
"They've become so good at this; they may well be sending it back to Iran."
For more, you can watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify, Castbox, Apple, or Amazon.