A ship fires missiles at an undisclosed location after the United States launched military strikes against Yemen's military in this screen grab obtained from a handout video released on March 15, 2025. (Via Reuters)
A recent report has revealed that the US military’s nearly $1 billion offensive against the Yemeni armed forces has had limited success in impacting its capabilities.
The US broadcaster, CNN, cited three unnamed sources as saying that the onslaught, which was launched on March 15, has already used hundreds of millions of dollars worth of munitions for strikes against Yemen’s armed forces, including JASSM long-range cruise missiles, JSOWs, which are GPS-guided glide bombs, and Tomahawk missiles.
US defense officials announced earlier this week that B-2 bombers out of Diego Garcia — a British-administered atoll — are also being used against the Yemeni military, and an additional aircraft carrier as well as several fighter squadrons and air defense systems will soon be moved into the Central Command region.
“They’ve taken out some sites, but that hasn’t affected the Houthis’ ability to continue shooting at ships in the Red Sea or shooting down US drones,” said one of the sources, referring to Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement.
“Meanwhile, we are burning through readiness—munitions, fuel, deployment time.”
Another source underlined that the Pentagon will likely need to request supplemental funding from Congress to continue its aggression, but may not receive it as the offensive has already been criticized on both sides of the aisle.
Even Vice President JD Vance said he thought the aggression was “a mistake” in a Signal chat published by The Atlantic last week.
Although Pentagon has not publicly disclosed what impact the daily US military strikes have actually had on the Yemeni resistance movement, they acknowledged that the group has still been able to fortify their bunkers and maintain weapons stockpiles underground, much as they did during the strikes that the Joe Biden administration carried out for over a year, the sources said.
And it has been difficult to determine precisely how much the Yemenis still have stockpiled, a defense official said.
In a speech on Friday, Ansarullah leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said the intensified US acts of aggression against Yemen had failed to stop Yemeni resistance operations in support of Palestinians plagued by Israel’s months-long genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Houthi stressed that the US aggression on Yemen, which exceeded 90 attacks on some days, “has failed to stop the military operations supporting the Palestinian people, nor has it been able to protect Israeli navigation in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea.”
A few weeks after the onset of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Yemeni forces began carrying out solidarity operations with the war-hit Gazans, striking targets throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in addition to targeting Israeli ships or vessels heading toward ports in the occupied territories.
In support of Israel, the US announced the formation of a maritime task force in the Red Sea in December 2023 to protect the passage of vessels bound for the Israeli-occupied territories.
The Yemeni forces responded by ramping up their strikes against strategic and sensitive Israeli and American targets, including the US warships and aircraft carriers that are deployed off Yemen’s coastline.
The Yemeni forces paused their retaliatory strikes in support of the ceasefire that took effect in Gaza on January 19 before Israel broke it last month.
