Pete Hegseth Blunders Into His Forever War

Opinion|A Beleaguered Hegseth Wanders Into His Forever War

President Trump came into office promising to disentangle the U.S. military from its costly forever wars in the Middle East. Three months in, he is embroiled in the same sort of open-ended military campaign that plagued his predecessors, and one that holds the potential for wider war with Iran.

The military, in a controversial mission to stop Houthi attacks from Yemen on commercial ships in the Red Sea, is amassing firepower in the region — sensitive details about which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in a second unsecured conversation on Signal. He’s 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?

While the newly arrived troops and weaponry have achieved tactical victories in Yemen, restoring routine maritime activity in the Red Sea will be nearly impossible without driving the Houthis from power along the country’s west coast. The Houthis, after all, have been bombed for more than a decade. Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States — under three American presidents — have taken turns pummeling the militia from the air. The Saudis hit the Houthis with an estimated 25,000 airstrikes for seven years, part of a campaign that led to the estimated deaths of 377,000 people in Yemen. But Houthi control over the coast has proved resilient, thanks in large part to the continuing financial support and weapon shipments from Tehran.