The US just lost a war, and no one noticed

Vital trade routes aren't

Over the eight decades following the end of World War II, the US has taken part in dozens of land wars, large and small. The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage. By contrast, the US Navy’s admission of defeat in its longest and most significant campaign in many decades, has received almost no attention. Yet the failure of attempts to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping has fundamental implications for the entire rationale of maintaining a navy.

Operation Prosperity Guardian was launched in December 2023, following a series of attacks on shipping undertaken by Houthi rebels. The US dispatched a carrier strike group, led by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and supported by ships from the Royal Navy and other European forces. Despite intensive bombardment of Houthi positions, attacks on shipping continued and traffic through the Suez canal fell by 70 per cent.

In July, the Dwight D. Eisenhower quietly returned to returned to Norfolk, after what the Navy correctly described as “a historic nine-month combat deployment” but not historic in a good way. The strike force without achieving any of its goals. And then, in late August, came the official admission of  defeat As reported by Voice of America:

Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who heads the U.S. naval efforts in the Middle East said that not only have U.S. strikes and defensive efforts done little to change the Houthis’ behavior, it now appears unlikely the group will be swayed by military force.

“The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system,” Wikoff told an audience in Washington, speaking via video from U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

“We have certainly degraded their capability. There's no doubt about that. We've degraded their ability,” he said. “However, have we stopped them? No.”

Why has this failure attracted so little attention? Why, for example, has it not even been mentioned by either side in the course of the Presidential election campaign? The answer, quite simply, is that the strategic rationale for the mission turned out to be spurious. “Vital shipping lanes” are not actually vital at all.

The closure of the Suez canal has, indeed imposed higher insurance costs on shippers using the canal, and has led much of the traffic to be diverted to the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. But the overall impact on freight rates has been modest, and any effect on global economic activity has been too small to be observable. 

There shouldn’t have been any surprise here. Despite some hyperbolic claims at the time, the six-day blockage of the Canal in 2019 (due to the grounding of the Ever Given) caused only modest disruptions, with massive insurance claims being quietly settled for much smaller amounts

More notably, the Canal was closed for lengthy periods in the 20th century allowing studies of the economic impacts. These turned out to be very small except for India and Pakistan, both of which were then heavily dependent on trade with the UK and Europe.

And what is true of the Suez Canal is just as true of other “vital shipping routes”, such as the Straits of Malacca. It’s almost always better to take the long way around (for example through the Sunda straits or even through Australian waters in the Southern Ocean) than to fight a war to keep a short cut open.

On the other side of the coin, the failure of Russian attempts to block Ukraine’s exports of wheat and grain provides further lessons on the limits of naval power. Ukraine’s tiny navy was wiped out on the first day of the 2022 invasion. But Russia’s much-touted Black Sea Fleet has fared little better, being driven from its Sevastopol base to ports in Russia, out of reach of Ukrainian missiles. By sailing close to the western coast of the Black Sea, ships carrying Ukrainian grain can be protected by land-based defences, while sailing in waters too shallow to permit attack by submarines.

In summary, as a recent commentary put it, the failure of Prosperity Guardian poses an “existential threat” However, the threat is not to the world economy but to the US navy and, indeed, all the navies of the world. If keeping “vital trade routes” open is neither militarily feasible nor economically important,  a large part of the rationale for surface navies disappears.  

It’s unlikely that defeat by the Houthis will have much effect on perceptions of the US Navy in the short run. But with so many other demands on the defense budget, the rationale for maintaining a massive, but largely ineffectual, surface fleet, must eventually be questioned.