Tag Archives: Houthi

More on Carney’s Red Sea Getaway

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The guided-missile destroyer USS Carney launches land-attack missiles while operating in the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command area of responsibility, Feb. 3, 2024. The Carney was deployed as part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East. U.S. Navy Photo 240203-N-GF955-1012

The early Flight I Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) is not a young warship. Commissioned in 1996, the Navy has frequently deep-sixed younger greyhounds over the years.

Her epic 235-day October 2023-May 2024 deployment to the Red Sea to keep the area open in the face of Houthi attacks earned her a Navy Unit Commendation (her third) and she took part in a staggering 51 engagements against a high-low mix of everything from cruise missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles to swarms of much simpler prop-driven one-way attack drones.

She also made the first publicly acknowledged SM-6 combat intercept, downed air-to-air targets with her 5-inch gun (!), and launched retaliatory TLAM strikes against targets ashore.

Her entire crew earned the Navy’s Combat Action Ribbon while her skipper picked up a Bronze Star and other key members of the crew received Meritorious Service Medals, Navy Commendation Medals, and Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals– well deserved as the ship had the highest anti-air op-tempo that the U.S. Navy has seen since 1945.

An excellent 10-minute Navy film, USS Carney: A Destroyer at War, dives deeper with crew interviews:

Hauling wheat around Yemen will get you holed

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“The assessment at the moment is it was almost certainly non-state Yemen based actors firing a land-based missile or rocket at the vessel,” Major Tom Mobbs, head of intelligence and security with the European Union’s counter-piracy mission EU Navfor, told Reuters.

Damage to the Turkish-flagged bulk carrier Ince Inebolu after last weeks missile attack.

The Turkish flagged Ince Inebolu bulk carrier was damaged by an explosion on May 10, some 70 miles off the Red Sea port of Salif where it was due to deliver a 50,000-tonne cargo of Russian wheat. Likely culprits are the Houthis, who last month hit a Saudi oil tanker was off Yemen’s main port city of Hodeidah, suffering limited damage.

And of course, the Houthis have exchanged fire with both Gulf State and U.S. military vessels several times.

Drone boat suspected in attack on Saudi frigate

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As noted by Defense News:

The Houthi boat that attacked and hit a Saudi frigate Jan. 30 in the Red Sea, reported earlier as a suicide boat, was instead carried out by an unmanned, remote-controlled craft filled with explosives, the US Navy’s top officer in the Mideast said.

“Our assessment is that it was an unmanned, remote-controlled boat of some kind,” Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, commander of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet and head of US Naval Forces Central Command, told Defense News in an interview here Saturday.

The attack on the frigate Al Madinah appears to be the first confirmed use of the weapon which, Donegan said, represents a wider threat than that posed by suicide boats and shows foreign interests are aiding the Houthis.

Donegin is concerned “first that it is in the hands of someone like the Houthis. That’s not an easy thing to develop. There have been many terrorist groups that have tried to develop that, it’s not something that was just invented by the Houthis. There’s clearly support there coming from others, so that’s problematic.

“The second is the explosive boat piece — you don’t need suicide attackers to do a suicide-like attack. There are certain terrorists that do things and they get martyrs to go and do it. But there are many others that don’t want to martyr themselves in making attacks like that and that’s pretty much where the Houthis are. So it makes that kind of weaponry, which would normally take someone suicidal to use, now able to be used by someone who’s not going to martyr themselves.”

The unmanned boat was likely supplied by Iran, Donegan said.

More here.

Why you don’t poke around a littoral in an aluminum ship with no armament.

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Video surfaced that purports to be a Houthi missile attack on the former MSC’s HSV-2 Swift near the Red Sea port city of Mocha near the Bab Al Mandab Strait early Saturday.

The 1,700-ron/321-foot Swift was built by Incat in Australia in 2002 and was privately owned and operated by Sealift Inc., under the JHSV program, for the MSC on two five-year charters which ended in 2013. Sold to the UAE’s National Marine Dredging Company, she was apparently a civilian ship carrying medical and humanitarian aid when hit (and reportedly sunk) last weekend.

War Is Boring has the low down.

No word on what may have sunk her but the Yemeni rebels are financed and backed by Iran, which has a host of indigenous anti-ship missiles including the Kowsar, Nasr-1, Noor (reverse engineered Chinese C-802), Qader (a ship killer with a 440-pound warhead), Raad (a take off of the Chinese HY-2 Silkworm) and Zafar.

The smallish (read= truck portable) 220-pound Kowsar, with a 64-pound warhead, has been used by Hezbollah in Lebanon, with one hit on the Israeli corvette INS Hanit in 2006, a Sa’ar 5-class ship about the same size as Swift, causing serious damage, and another on an Egyptian merchantman which reportedly left the ship commercial nonviable.

kowsar

Kowsar, which would be my bet for the Yemeni rebels. Based on the Chinese C-701, it’s smaller than Exocet and can be carried on a small truck