The Navy’s surface fleet has spent the past 15 months taking down hundreds of missiles and drones fired by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels at U.S. and allied Navies’ ships, as well as commercial vessels in and around the Red Sea. While it has become the most intense sustained combat the sea service’s warships have seen since World War II, the Navy continues to prioritize preparing for a conflict in the Pacific. This begs the question: What lessons does the Red Sea fight offer the Navy when it comes to preparing for conflict with its top pacing threat, China?
TWZ reached out to a range of active-duty and retired military officers to answer this question. They said the Red Sea was a prime stress test for a fleet preparing for war with China, even as it drained finite munitions and further exposed shortfalls in the defense industrial base.
“A lot of these lessons and everything that we are taking from the Red Sea are an incredibly valuable warm-up for us in the high-end fight,” an active-duty surface warfare officer (SWO) who spoke with TWZ on the condition of anonymity said.
Analysts acknowledged the obvious — that China would be an entirely different adversary to take on compared to the Houthis, and that war with Beijing would be far more fearsome and intense than the Houthi campaign. But while the theater, geography and capability of the adversary would differ, the Red Sea has nonetheless been a major experience generator and proving ground on several fronts.
Even without the China preparation angle, the Navy has earned some undeniable wins in the Red Sea. No American warships have been hit, and crews have countered Houthi attacks that have, at times, come dangerously close to putting a hole in a gray hull. Navy brass says they are now able to tune ship radars, provide feedback and update tactics far more rapidly than when the hostilities started. Just analyzing engagement data has gone from 40 days or more to just a day or two, a massive gain that could prove critical in a Pacific fight. A year ago, TWZ detailed how the potential implications of this unprecedented amount of real-world experience and its resulting data flowing out of so many engagements, and how lessons learned from it could be used to the advantage of not only the U.S. Navy but China as well.
Despite Red Sea success so far, the surface fleet must remain humble, according to a retired warship captain who spoke to TWZ on condition of anonymity to share his thoughts.
“I think it is important that we not be lulled into a sense of complacency by our own success,” he said. “We are fighting a high-end fight against a low-end adversary. The weapons, tactics, and strategic implications of a Pacific war could be quite different and more challenging.”
The lessons the Navy has learned for fighting in a littoral environment like the Red Sea would be applicable to potential littoral conflict in the South China Sea or Luzon Strait, weapons engagement zones that would be far more saturated than an open ocean war. But even within a blue water fight over the expanses of the Pacific, key lessons apply, the active-duty SWO said.
“When you are in the littorals, your timelines are shorter” for tracking and intercepting incoming fire, he said. “If you can execute on a littoral timeline, then you can execute on a blue water timeline.”
Working through environmental frictions and the fog of war in the Red Sea is also a good dry run ahead of conflict with China, he said.
“The geography, the way the Houthis have evolved, is giving us some great insight, and it directly translates into us getting ready for that high-end fight against China,” the active-duty SWO said.
And while Beijing may employ more advanced drones, anti-ship missiles and other ordnance, and in different ways, the Red Sea experience in taking out those threats still carries over, the active-duty SWO said.
“A missile, no matter what the origin is, is still going to be targeted,” he said. “It’s still going to be targeting you, and a lot of those kinetic aspects still transfer over to even a higher-end type of missile.”
While the Red Sea has been a closed-in, littoral fight, drones would still be seen in a blue-water war with China, the active-duty SWO said, noting Chinese amphibious ships that are being built to carry and launch advanced unmanned systems. TWZ reported last fall on China’s Type 076 amphib and its electromagnetic catapult for launching drones. Smaller drones don’t even need this infrastructure and can be launched in large numbers from nearly any vessel.
The math of wartime missile expenditure is another prime Red Sea takeaway that is applicable to a China war, according to Jan van Tol, a retired forward-deployed warship captain and current senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank.
Expensive surface-to-air (SAM) missiles that take a long time to procure and build have regularly been used to shoot down relatively cheap Houthi aerial attack drones, he said. Go here to read TWZ’s reporting about precisely which Navy munitions have been fired in the Red Sea, and how many times.
But expenditure rates of guided munitions will be “far worse in a China fight,” van Tol said. Exacerbating that reality is the fact that the PLA’s weapons are more sophisticated than the Iranian-derived munitions that the Houthis rely on, which will likely increase the number of American SAMs expended per engagement with the Chinese.
China has far more anti-ship missiles than the Houthis, in a variety of iterations. It has developed short, medium, and intermediate-range anti-ship ballistic missiles to help exert authority over its broad territorial claims and deny opponents access to vast areas during conflicts. If Beijing attempts to invade Taiwan, it will rely on a variety of munitions to keep U.S. surface combatants and aircraft carriers far from the East China Sea and South China Sea. This is all part of the PLA’s overreaching anti-access/area-denial strategy that is currently heavily dictating what a war would look like in the Pacific.
“PLA raid density will be far higher than the relative dribbles of Houthi attacks, so Navy ships will quickly run out of SAMs,” van Told said, adding that some U.S. Vertical Launching System (VLS) missile cells are loaded with non-SAM weapons, and that U.S. warships will have to retire to rearming locations far from the fight.
The Navy is trying to mitigate having ships leave the battle for days or even weeks at a time for reloading via an at-sea VLS reloading capability known as the Transferrable Reloading At-sea Method (TRAM) that was demonstrated for the first time last fall. Go here to read TWZ coverage of that effort.
In a high-intensity war with China, SAMs and other weapons would be exhausted quickly, and the American defense industrial base “has relatively little surge production capacity relative to need,” van Tol said.
The Red Sea has hammered home the need to increase production of Navy munitions, van Tol said. A peacetime effort to increase precision-guided munition production of all kinds would help to identify component subcontractor chokepoints and other hiccups that would metastasize into a major problem when a surge in demand happens during a war with China. Military leaders have warned of how missiles fired in the Red Sea and elsewhere are eating into stocks that could be used for a war with China too.
“It would be important to identify those and make [defense industrial base] investments to ease those chokepoints,” he said. “This was analogous to the difficult production problems the U.S. initially faced in 1939-1941 during the pre-Pearl Harbor industrial mobilization, which really was spurred by huge French and British demands for arms starting in the late 1930s … If it wasn’t for the ‘head start’ working out the problems while supplying those allies, the vast production of 1943-1944 would have never been possible.”
While concerns about supply remain, the Red Sea is offering invaluable, real-world proof that a Navy warship’s air defense weapons actually work in combat, according to the active-duty SWO.
“We’re going to be facing an even higher-end fight against China,” he said. “Confidence in the system is extremely important for us, for those sailors and operators and Marines and others that are going to be pushing out forward for that fight … whether it is a five-inch round, or whatever ordnance, a missile coming off a rail from an aircraft.”
Military history is full of examples of weapon systems that appeared to be good to go, only to fail in the heat of battle, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told TWZ. He pointed to the Navy’s defective Mk 14 torpedoes during World War II as a prime example.
“Real world operations always enhance warfighting readiness because nothing is simulated,” he noted. “Everything must be done, and there is a concrete result in the end. Even the best training doesn’t replicate these conditions.”
The Navy would also face a multi-domain attack from China. Unlike the Houthis, who have largely launched airborne weapons and sometimes surface drones at warships, the PLA would come at the service in the undersea, space and cyber domains as well, van Tol said.
“Ships will not have the ‘luxury’ of concentrating on only one domain,” he said.
While short on specifics, the active-duty SWO noted that the Navy’s electronic warfare (EW) capabilities have also benefited from real-world experience in the Red Sea.
“The exploitation of the RF spectrum to try and stay to the left of kinetic engagements is always something that we would like to take advantage of,” he said. “Electrons are free, and I can read and I can produce those as long as I’m making electricity … there’s a lot of lessons learned on that aspect that we were able to put forth, from a detection to an engagement, in that whole kill chain aspect.”
While the Red Sea campaign doesn’t come close to matching the intensity of operations should a war with China break out, it nonetheless provides the Navy with invaluable real-world insight into how systems work and what planning, training and procedures need to be tightened up, according to Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare officer (SWO) who spent two-thirds of his 30-year Navy career at sea.
Among the lessons the Navy can take out of the Red Sea are the stark realities of cyclic carrier air wing operations near an enemy’s weapons engagement zone, said Martin, now a senior policy analyst with the RAND think tank. The perils of such operations came into focus last month, when the cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG-64) accidentally shot down a F/A-18 Super Hornet during a sustained Houthi attack on the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75). The Navy has released few details on the encounter, but at least three investigations are underway to determine what transpired.
“Dealing with attacks from an enemy with a substantial shore-based arsenal is an important experience” as well, Martin added.
The Houthi arsenal is provided via Iran, and past TWZ reporting revealed that the Navy has taken out more than 400 of the group’s anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) and aerial attack drones since October 2023.
But while the Red Sea is providing the Navy with valuable lessons, “readiness is without question being drained,” Martin said.
The U.S. Navy’s part in defending Israel from Iranian and Houthi ballistic missile attacks, and the tying in with Israeli defense infrastructure to accomplish that, has direct relevance to Taiwan’s defense in a future fight as well, the active-duty SWO said.
Culturally, the Red Sea fight is nudging the surface fleet out of its “peacetime” footing and giving it a taste of what war with China would entail, van Tol said. With the exception of Navy SEALs and some aviators, the fleet has not faced a serious threat of being attacked for decades, which has inhibited “tough, realistic training.” A “safety first” culture is fine and necessary for a peacetime Navy, but it is not helpful for preparing in earnest for a real conflict, he said.
“This has now seemingly changed to some extent … when ships deploy to the Red Sea, the crews know that they may come under attack,” van Tol said. “The real chance of having to no-kidding defend the ship helps concentrate the mind wonderfully. This change in mindset and mentality is really important and seems to be happening.”
The Red Sea has further reinforced the importance of maintaining a high level of tactical training and proficiency among a ship’s watch teams during war, he added. Such training can’t be limited to pre-deployment work-ups, because a war with China will come with relatively little notice.
“Ditto with regard to damage control training and material readiness,” van Tol said. “The ships that have operated in the Red Sea to date have done a great job defensively so far, no hits. But even the Houthis may get lucky on an attack. Against the PLA’s much more potent threats, the odds of ships being hit would be far higher.”
The current conflict is teaching the surface fleet vital lessons for the next war when it comes to crew stress under the threat of constant engagement, while instilling in sailors that all the training that they do really matters in the real world, according to the active-duty SWO. The surface fleet has increased how it monitors sailor wellbeing and ensures that those who need help get it as soon as possible as a result, he said.
“That’s an important aspect that we can’t just gloss over,” he said. “That is the sailor’s investment in the combat situation. We’ve seen a lot of initiatives pay off, and we’re getting better data on that.”
The Red Sea has also helped to demystify certain munitions fired by the Houthis – variants of which China would use in a future fight – and proved that a U.S. warship can defeat them, according to James Holmes, a maritime strategy professor at the Naval War College. The Houthis are the first entity to ever fire an anti-ship ballistic missile in anger, and the Navy has now shown that such weapons can be taken out.
“The same goes for ‘kamikaze drones,’ which essentially serve the same purpose, as ship killers,” Holmes told TWZ in an email. “Demystifying the next big and bad thing is a major contribution. We should not be cowed.”
At the same time, the Navy shouldn’t “get cocky” about its performance in the Red Sea, he said.
“Carl von Clausewitz, probably the best strategic thinker of them all, implies that success in warfare is about a 60-40 proposition at best,” Holmes said. “We can lose, and in fact I think the odds are in China’s favor. When a fraction of one force faces off against the entirety of another, who wins? We are the fraction, China’s PLA has the entirety. That is not the case in the Red Sea.”
Still, he said, the Red Sea has provided the surface fleet a taste of what they might meet should war erupt with China.
“We are expending munitions we sorely need, so there is a material dimension to correct,” Holmes said. “But at the same time, warfare is a human contest. We are getting our people ready to do what they may have to do before long. If we give them the tools, the tool wielders can do the work.”
The Navy’s preparations for a potential battle against Chinese forces is accelerating, and the sea service has undoubtedly benefited from taking on a real-life adversary, even one far weaker than the People’s Liberation Army. The at-times daily Red Sea conflict may be drawing to a close, with the Houthis announcing they would halt such attacks following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. However it ends, the surface fleet has seen sustained combat for the first time in decades and shaken off the peacetime cobwebs in the process, a process that has provided great experience, a tsunami of data, and a sobering look at how prepared the surface fleet is to face-down a far more powerful foe.
Contact the author: geoff@twz.com