THE SET-UP: Pete Hegseth’s troubled tenure at the Pentagon has become the “legacy media’s” favorite scandal of Trump’s first hundred days. It’s understandable given the former FOX News infotainer’s background of questionable behavior, questionable judgment and, in particular, his refusal to address a myriad of questions about his garish habits—which included heavy drinking, profligate spending and a pattern of sexual harassment that may have been predatory.
Pete was a target-rich environment before he ever sent a single Signal message. His frenetic incompetence and smug smarminess only fuels the feeding frenzy. But while the waters around Pete are chummed with titillating details about his unorthodox inner circle, the real story of Pete’s Pentagon is the widely-overlooked fact that he’s managing to get the US involved in a prolonged war in Yemen.
Ironically, the subject matter of his Signal chats is far more consequential and potentially more troubling than his ill-advised use of Signal. But, of course, the reporting has largely focused on the style of his communication and ignored the substance. It could’ve (and should've) been the impetus for a thorough examination of the start of yet another war in the Middle East. That’s particularly true given Trump’s brand as a “peacemaker” who never goes to war. Hopefully, today’s headline from Axios will serve as a wake-up call:
As it stands, Hegseth may or may not being actively managing … or, like everything else, mismanaging … a six week-long military campaign that I daresay most Americans don’t know a damn thing about. - jp
TITLE: Trump Orders Expanded Military Action in Yemen, Cites Houthi Threats to U.S. Forces and Shipping
https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/maritime-security/trump-orders-expanded-military-action-in-yemen-cites-houthi-threats-to-u-s-forces-and-shipping/
EXCERPTS: On Tuesday, the White House released the text of a letter from President Donald Trump to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate President Pro Tempore Charles Grassley, confirming that he has ordered the Department of Defense to deploy additional combat-equipped forces to the Middle East and launch expanded strikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen as reported by Newsweek.
Dated March 28, the letter signals an escalation in U.S. military operations in the region, as attacks on American personnel and commercial vessels in the Red Sea continue. Trump’s message outlines the administration’s assessment of the security landscape in Yemen and the broader Middle East, highlighting what he called “piratical aggressions” by the Houthis and the ongoing danger they pose to U.S. forces and maritime activity.
“I will no longer allow this band of pirates to threaten and attack United States forces and commercial vessels,” Trump stated, according to the letter. The president authorized the Defense Department to carry out a large-scale response, including coordinated air and naval strikes targeting Houthi leadership, infrastructure, and weapons caches.
The letter, submitted in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, reaffirms Trump’s authority to defend American interests abroad and asserts that the operations will continue until the threat posed by the Houthis is eliminated. Trump also called for congressional backing as the military campaign unfolds.
TITLE: In Yemen, the U.S.'s Anti-Houthi Campaign Raises the Specter of a Government Ground Offensive
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/yemen-uss-anti-houthi-campaign-raises-specter-government-ground-offensive
EXCERPT: As intensified U.S. airstrikes fail to halt Houthi attacks on Israel and Red Sea shipping, Washington is increasingly likely to seek on-the-ground Yemeni partners to apply military pressure on the militant movement. U.S. air power will likely fail to thwart all Houthi attacks due to the group's decentralized military infrastructure, as well as its relatively low-tech weapons that rely on smuggling routes from Iran and using dual-use consumer goods. Meanwhile, in Washington, the political appetite for the ongoing airstrike campaign is weakening against the backdrop of growing costs and concerns that munitions used in Yemen may be better deployed to Europe or Asia. As a result, the United States will likely seek Yemeni partners to advance against the Houthis' frontlines on the ground. Such a plan would face major constraints, including hesitancy from key U.S. allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But if it did come to fruition, Hodeidah would be a particularly notable target, as it is the only major Red Sea port under Houthi control and would severely hinder the militants' ability to resupply and obtain critical imports of food and fuel for the north and put forces on the road to Sanaa. It would also deliver a blow to morale within the group and impair its ability to recruit fighters and retain the loyalty of the key tribes that comprise its coalition. However, Hodeidah is not the only potential target, with more limited ground offensives potentially taking place around Marib (where the United States is already conducting airstrikes) and Taiz. Should the United States and its on-the-ground partners attack these targets, it would signal Washington's interest in altering the balance of power in the Yemeni civil war without necessarily destabilizing the Houthis' overall position in the north. Indeed, the United States might prefer to more methodically climb the escalation ladder against the Houthis to conserve military resources, given that U.S. airstrikes are depleting stocks and the Houthis have shot down numerous surveillance drones.
TITLE: Pete Hegseth Blunders Into His Forever War
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/opinion/pete-hegseth-yemen.html
EXCERPTS: [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is] overseeing an operation in which the United States has not only so far failed to restore regular traffic through the sea lane, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, but has also sent the Trump administration into an exorbitant, potentially escalatory spiral from which it will be harder to extract American troops with every passing day.
Consider the bill: Two aircraft carrier strike groups, each of which costs about $6.5 million per day to operate, are now parked off Yemen’s coast. Radar-evading B-2 bombers, which were designed to blitz the Soviet Union and cost about $90,000 per flight hour, have conducted airstrikes. In the first month of the operation, those bombers, along with dozens of fighter jets and drones, have dropped more than $250 million worth of munitions. The Navy is firing antimissile interceptors, which can cost some $2 million, to blast Houthi drones and missiles, which can cost just a few thousand dollars apiece. The tally for a military operation in Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest nation, is now expected to reach $2 billion in May, congressional aides say.
One of the deadliest attacks of the campaign came last week, when the United States bombed an oil terminal and killed at least 74 people, according to the Houthis. The next day, the Houthis shot down a $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone and yet another on Tuesday night — the fifth and sixth since the mission began in March. The bombing raids, called Operation Rough Rider, show the United States has yet to establish air dominance above the country, despite hundreds of airstrikes that put pilots at risk as they routinely conduct attacks against Houthi militia forces.
The U.S. Navy has defended commercial vessels against hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles since the Iran-backed group began its maritime attacks in November 2023 in a show of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The Houthis sank two foreign commercial ships last year, killing at least four sailors, and the assaults have raised transport costs as the world’s largest shipping companies have opted to reroute their traffic around the southern tip of Africa. Still, only about 12 percent of world trade annually passes through the Red Sea — and an even smaller share of U.S. trade. Does this warrant spending billions of dollars, risking military preparedness in other regions and imperiling the lives of American service members?
The administration has insisted the mission against the Houthis is “putting American interests first.” The Signal chat logs released by The Atlantic last month revealed Vice President JD Vance’s misgivings about the operation. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote on March 14, the day before the strikes began. Other senior officials publicly criticized the mission when President Joe Biden, rather than their boss, directed a more limited number of strikes in Yemen. “We are burning readiness to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for what really amounts to a ragtag bunch of terrorists that are Iran proxies,” Michael Waltz, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, told Politico in August.
Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, delivered a similar sentiment several months earlier. “It’s truly a mark of how off-kilter our foreign policy is that we are now embarking on ongoing military attacks in Yemen — Yemen! — without any real prospect they will be effective,” he wrote in a January 2024 post on X.
Mr. Colby, like others in the administration, has long argued for the United States to turn away from the Middle East and refocus on China and the Asia-Pacific. The irony has probably not escaped him, then, that much of the arsenal amassing around Yemen was pulled from Asia, where in recent years the United States has expanded military bases and relocated weapons for a possible conflict with Beijing. This month Navy Admiral Samuel J. Paparo, who oversees the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress that an entire U.S. Army Patriot missile defense battalion was recently transferred from Japan and South Korea to the Middle East. It took 73 cargo flights in all, he said.
Here, again, the Yemen mission is cutting against the administration’s stated goals. Mr. Hegseth told Asian allies that the United States will focus on their struggles against Chinese aggression. “What the Trump administration will do is deliver, is to truly prioritize and shift to this region of the world in a way that is unprecedented,” he said at a March 28 news conference in Manila.
Mr. Trump is the latest commander in chief to arrive at the White House with an eye toward China, only to be diverted. Long-term strategic success in the Middle East will continue to remain elusive if it isn’t coupled with intense diplomatic and political efforts. If we’ve learned anything in a quarter-century since 9/11, it’s that a president can’t bomb himself out of a problem.