Constant jet launches, high tech, and tight quarters are part of daily life for US Navy members as they battle Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
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00:00 (plane engine roaring)
00:01 On the flight deck, it is loud.
00:04 Standing next to a fighter jet taking off,
00:06 you can feel it in your whole body.
00:08 I mean, we're given helmets with goggles
00:12 and giant industrial earmuffs, and it still is loud.
00:17 It completely permeates through you.
00:19 Hi, my name is Jake Epstein.
00:21 I'm a defense reporter here at Business Insider.
00:23 I recently came back from the Middle East
00:27 where I had the chance to embark on two US Navy ships
00:31 in the Red Sea to get a sense of what's happening
00:34 on the front lines of the fight against the Houthis.
00:37 I was on one carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower,
00:40 and then from there, I took a helicopter
00:43 to a destroyer, the USS Gravely.
00:46 The most nerve-wracking part for me was landing
00:48 and taking off from the aircraft carrier.
00:50 But to be with the Navy, I mean,
00:52 these are incredibly well-defended ships.
00:55 So it wasn't any concern about the Houthi threat.
00:59 But landing on an aircraft carrier
01:01 in the middle of the sea was enough
01:04 to make me a little uneasy.
01:06 I did not have a window seat coming in.
01:09 The only way I knew that we were about to land
01:12 is because the crew on the aircraft told us
01:15 to get in a brace position and that we were gonna be landing
01:17 within a couple of seconds.
01:19 The plane shakes around.
01:20 I mean, it goes from traveling at a fast speed
01:23 to zero miles per hour in two or three seconds.
01:26 And the same goes for taking off.
01:28 When we landed on the Eisenhower, it was hot.
01:32 It was a bit of a shock when the cargo door came down
01:35 and I saw that I was on an aircraft carrier
01:37 in the middle of the sea.
01:39 There were a ton of crew members on the deck.
01:42 People wearing different vests
01:43 to indicate their different jobs.
01:46 There were fighter jets moving around.
01:49 Aircraft were constantly taking off and landing
01:51 in cycles, so we'd watch it happen for a few minutes
01:55 and then they would come in and land
01:57 or they'll stay airborne a little bit longer.
01:59 While the planes are taking off and landing,
02:02 there's crew members refueling them
02:04 and performing maintenance and rearming them if needed.
02:08 So there's just a lot happening all the time.
02:11 The commander of the strike group
02:13 that the Eisenhower is a part of
02:16 said that they were launching aircraft
02:18 every hour to hour and a half.
02:20 So it is very, you know, it's very constant.
02:23 I was running on adrenaline the whole time,
02:25 not really sleeping a lot.
02:26 There was obviously places to sleep and shower
02:29 and rest for a second.
02:30 I mean, there's a shift store.
02:32 From the outside looking in,
02:34 it might seem a little bit chaotic,
02:35 but it's obviously very orderly
02:37 because everything works so seamlessly.
02:39 The Eisenhower, you know, as an aircraft carrier
02:41 is a floating city for lack of a better term.
02:44 The carrier has more than 5,000 sailors
02:47 that are basically, you know, calling it home
02:49 during the current deployment.
02:50 The Great Lees, a destroyer,
02:52 it was smaller, a couple hundred sailors.
02:55 There's a combat information center
02:56 that's inside the destroyer.
02:59 We got to take a look at that.
03:00 That is staffed all the time.
03:02 Anything, any sort of weapon or interceptor or whatever
03:06 that would leave the ship, the process starts there.
03:09 So that's where, you know, decisions are made.
03:11 That's where, you know, the threats are tracked.
03:14 That's kind of like the, you know,
03:16 the brain of where the ship is defended from.
03:18 It's dimly lit, a lot of screens, radars, digital maps.
03:23 And yeah, so it's staffed all the time.
03:26 The Houthis are basically firing drones and missiles
03:30 on a routine basis, sometimes, you know,
03:33 multiple days in a row into international shipping lanes
03:37 off of the coast of Yemen,
03:39 where US Navy ships are located,
03:42 where commercial ships are transiting.
03:44 The Houthis have said repeatedly
03:46 that their actions are directly a result
03:49 of Israel's ground invasion of Gaza.
03:53 However, you'll see US officials are pushing back on this
03:57 quite often because the ships that are under attack
04:00 and are not, you know, necessarily connected to Israel.
04:03 In early January, there was a pretty large-scale attack
04:08 by the Houthis.
04:09 Since then, there's been several rounds
04:12 of coordinated airstrikes between the US and the UK
04:16 on Houthi sites across Yemen,
04:18 targeting air defenses and weapons storage facilities
04:20 and radars and stuff like that.
04:22 The US has also been conducting preemptive strikes,
04:26 they'll say self-defense strikes, on a routine basis.
04:30 The idea is to take out Houthi drones and missiles
04:34 before they can even launch.
04:36 So the US military will say that it has identified,
04:39 you know, a drone or a missile that is loaded
04:42 or, you know, prepared to launch or ready to launch
04:45 against international shipping lanes
04:47 and poses an imminent threat.
04:49 The Houthis have still managed to get missiles
04:52 and drones in the air.
04:53 We've still seen the US Navy shoot down missiles
04:56 and drones in the air,
04:57 and we've also seen them hit commercial ships.
05:00 So while the preemptive strikes are happening
05:02 around the clock, the Houthis are still able
05:05 to get some of their threats airborne.
05:07 The anti-ship ballistic missile threat,
05:09 this is obviously a new threat that we've seen
05:12 in a conflict theater,
05:13 because this is the first time that the US Navy
05:16 has engaged with these threats.
05:18 It is learning a lot from these interceptions.
05:21 Basically, you know, gathering information
05:23 about its weapons system and learning, you know,
05:26 that the systems that, you know, have been tested
05:28 and are performing as they would hope,
05:31 because, you know, we've seen the Navy shoot them down.
05:33 So yeah, it's definitely a very serious threat
05:36 in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,
05:38 but it's something that the US Navy
05:40 is paying close attention to,
05:42 because this could be a continuous problem down the line,
05:47 should the US ever go to war with China.
05:51 What remains to be seen, though,
05:53 is how often the Houthis are getting, you know, rearmed,
05:58 and, you know, what remains of their inventory.
06:02 So lots of unknowns as to how much of a dent
06:06 the US has put in their attacking capabilities.
06:09 From the Navy's perspective, they, you know,
06:12 you've had people say repeatedly,
06:14 "We'll be here as long as the president needs.
06:16 We'll be here as long as we need to be,"
06:18 you know, until the Houthis stop.
06:20 (helicopter whirring)
06:23 (dramatic music)
06:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]