“The US Navy has been battling the Houthis and some of Iran’s best weaponry in the Red Sea and changing some of the ways it fights to defeat them, America’s top naval officer said this week.
Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, said this week that the Navy is taking away many lessons from its almost yearlong fight against the Houthis, including the fact that drones are fundamentally changing warfare.
The Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that Iran has armed and supported for years, have used aerial and surface drones to attack key merchant shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and threaten US Navy ships since last fall. The militants have also fired anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles at vessels.
US warships and aircraft, in partnership with allies, have been intercepting these threats. Just last week, American forces engaged a number of Houthi drones and missiles.
“We’re continuing to learn,” Franchetti responded to questions at a Wednesday Defense Writers Group event. “And again, I’ll just go back to the changing tactics, techniques and procedures based on adversaries.”
“The Houthis are using the best Iranian technology, and we know that we need to be able to defeat that,” she added. “And again, our ships are doing an amazing job. And our aircraft.””
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“In this fight, the Navy has fired well over $1.1 billion worth of munitions fighting the Houthis, a figure that covers hundreds of air-launched weapons and ship-fired missiles that have been used to take out rebel weaponry, both missiles and drones.
The increasing use of unmanned systems, such as aerial strike platforms and naval drones, has been seen in other conflicts, most notably the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, for instance, has built up a formidable arsenal of domestically produced naval drones and has used these systems to target Russian warships and ports around the Black Sea. Even though Kyiv lacks a proper navy, it has demonstrated it can still cause problems through this asymmetrical style of warfare.
“I think Ukraine has shown us that you can innovate on the battlefield,” Franchetti said. “I want to innovate before the battlefield so we can stay ahead of any adversary any time.””
“These targets include static Houthi facilities and sites located across Yemen, missiles and drones the rebels were preparing to launch at ships at sea, and weapons that they already fired into shipping lanes. The strike group has leaned on its aircraft and warships to engage targets and defend against varying threats.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-navy-carrier-strike-group-194234119.html
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Beijing’s publicly released military budget is inaccurate and does not adequately capture the colossal scope and scale of China’s ongoing military buildup and wide-ranging armed forces modernization.
After accounting for economic adjustments and estimating reasonable but uncounted expenditures, the buying power of China’s 2022 military budget balloons to an estimated $711 billion—triple Beijing’s claimed topline and nearly equal with the United States’ military budget that same year.
Equal defense spending between the United States and China plays to Beijing’s benefit. As a global power, the United States must balance competing priorities in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere, which spreads Washington’s budget thinly across multiple theaters. Meanwhile, each yuan China invests in its military directly builds its regional combat power in Asia.
America’s spy community has confirmed that Beijing’s defense spending is on par with Washington’s, but questions remain. The intelligence community’s estimate of China’s $700 billion in annual military expenditures needs more transparency to better convey Beijing’s military budget breakdown and inform policy debates regarding US defense spending investments, gaps, and imbalances.”