TEHRAN – The US military admits failure to prevent Yemen’s Houthis, officially called Ansarallah, from targeting ships linked to Israel in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

In solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people in Gaza, who have been subjected to the worst kinds of brutality by Israel since October 7 last year, Houthis have attacked ships to and from Israel. The Houthis have announced that they will halt their actions if Israel lifts the blockade on the Gaza Strip and stops its cruel acts in Gaza.

In a commentary on August 24, The National Interest reveals that the U.S. is angry with the performance of its military against the Houthis even though it has deployed advanced weaponry, including warships, in the region to counter the military group.

Following is part of the article titled “A Proportional Response? American Strategy and the Red Sea”:

What is the virtue of a proportional response?” asks President Jed Bartlet of his National Security Council (NSC) in one episode of The West Wing. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That’s a proportional response.” Angrily, the president cuts off the aides trying to explain and interjects: “They do that, so we do this—it’s the cost of doing business. It’s been factored in. Am I right or am I missing something here?” Exasperated by the president’s interrogation of the virtues of a proportional response, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reluctantly admits, “It isn’t virtuous, Mr. President. It’s all there is, sir.”

The opening story arc of Aaron Sorkin’s magnum opus is an extended meditation on the limitations of military power and the responsibility of command. Faced with a crisis in the Middle East, a U.S. jet shot down over Syria, which happened to be carrying a member of his staff, the newly minted commander-in-chief struggles to calibrate his response to this affront to American military power. Ultimately, after asking his national security team to devise a “disproportional response” that “doesn’t make me think we are just docking somebody’s damn allowance,” Bartlet orders the original precision strikes to go ahead out of concern for the civilian casualties and diplomatic blowback that might attend a full-bore military incursion. The president’s chief of staff reminds Bartlet—and the viewer—that this is “how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible—it’s not nothing!”

Today, the United States faces the challenge of mounting a proportional response to in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthi’s drone and missile blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is now well into its ninth month. The U.S. Navy has just dispatched its fourth sequential carrier strike group (CSG)—the USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts—to protect international shipping in the region. Thus far, the Biden administration’s preferred response has been to order the Navy into harm’s way and let U.S. warships intercept missile and drone attacks directly rather than to address the root causes of the crisis. Tying up scarce strategic resources and expending irreplaceable munitions against third-tier threats, it has been anything but proportional to the interests of the United States.

Two aircraft carrier strike groups—led by the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—were already in the region when the Houthis announced their intention to attack shipping transiting the Bab el-Mandeb in a show of solidarity with Palestinians. Since then, the Theodore Roosevelt CSG and the Abraham Lincoln CSG have been diverted from the Pacific to stanch the bleeding from the global shipping system’s open sore. In doing so, Washington has elevated the Bab el-Mandeb to an equivalent level of importance as the Euro-Atlantic, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific theaters—the three regions where the Pentagon aims to maintain a round-the-clock carrier presence. By adopting a posture of direct defense of civilian shipping, the United States has also elected to expend $1 billion of scarce, difficult-to-procure munitions shooting down Houthi missiles and drones.

In effect, the White House and Department of Defense (DoD) created a new, de facto “Aden Station” that must constantly be serviced by the Navy, stretching an already-too-small fleet even further. One-third of America’s forward-deployed carrier force are in the Red Sea to counter Houthis. In short, has the response been proportional to America’s strategic interests?

The answer depends on what one means by “proportional response.” A commonplace and erroneous definition of proportionality—one which The West Wing peddles—is that to be proportional, a military response must employ a similar level of force as that which was used against you. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter.” By this standard, the Biden administration’s response to the Houthi threat could be seen as proportional. Ordering the Navy to intercept incoming drones and missiles and to conduct the occasional airstrike in retaliation against a successful attack on merchant vessels certainly keeps a lid on tensions and possible escalation. Proportionality as parity is a falsehood. In international law, proportionality is a measure of the acceptability of civilian casualties and collateral damage relative to the value of a military objective, not the relationship between the level of violence employed by two sides of a conflict.

On the strategic level, however, the relevant question is whether the effort we exert in the Red Sea, the resources we expend, and the opportunity costs that those represent are proportional to the value of the results they have achieved. To this, the answer is decidedly no. For all the United States’ efforts to combat the Houthi threat, the Bab el-Mandeb remains too dangerous for many shippers to use, with a nearly 50 percent year-over-year decline in traffic as vessels sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead. The Suez Canal has seen its revenue decline by $2 billion as a result. If safeguarding freedom of transit through the Red Sea is a vital U.S. interest, Biden’s strategy has proven insufficient to meet the challenge.

In effect, the Biden administration has elected to pursue a slow, expensive, and inefficient strategy for addressing the Houthi threat in the name of keeping the U.S. response superficially proportional to the level of danger thus far brought to bear by the Houthis. In terms of proportionality to national objectives, however, the current strategy is a poor match. The Biden administration’s approach to the Red Sea is in keeping with the post-Cold War mindset epitomized by The West Wing and endemic today among many who grew up watching it.