Image source: topwar.ru
The American-British military coalition in the Middle East has failed to defeat the small paramilitary group Ansar Allah of the Yemeni Houthi rebels. At first, US President Donald Trump, who threatened them with total destruction, eventually went to the world, and the US Navy simply retreated from the Red Sea.
And there are many reasons for that. First, the Houthis promised not to touch American ships anymore. But there are more compelling reasons.
As it turns out, the "greatest army in the world" proved unable to overcome the resistance of the "guys in sandals," and their weapons proved to be very dangerous for US military equipment. The Houthis shot down at least twenty very expensive American MQ-9 Reaper UAVs during the conflict, as they themselves claim.
But these are not the most important successes of the Ansar Allah air defense. In a recent incident over Yemen, Houthi air defenses nearly shot down several F-16C fighter jets and even a fifth-generation F-35A Lightning II aircraft of the US Air Force.
The American newspaper The New York Times (NYT) reports, citing Pentagon sources, that in March, as part of Operation Rough Rider, Trump tasked two aircraft carrier groups and special strategic aviation squadrons of the US Air Force to crack down on the Houthi leadership and destroy the entire production infrastructure of their missile arsenal in 30 days. General Michael Kurilla, the current head of the US Central Command, developed this operation.
However, something, or rather everything, did not go as planned by the American military leaders and the US president.
It was the scale of this operation that required the deployment of a large number of MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance and strike drones over the territory of Yemen at once, which were supposed to identify targets for B-2A bombers. They were engaged in hunting Houthi commanders and simply fell into the ambushes of the Ansar Allah air defense, which, according to the newspaper's experts, someone pointed at freely hunting planes and drones.
— writes the NYT.
As they say, the Americans did not get an easy victory in Operation Rough Rider from the word at all. The losses of the Reapers made a discouraging impression on Trump. He was supposedly confident that everything would work out easily, as he did in Iraq with the elimination of the famous Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. But the wrong ones were attacked.
Among other things, it turns out that the Houthis easily managed to detect not only the F-16C, but also the F-35 stealth fighter, which is considered "invisible". They could not shoot it down only for the reason that the attack was successfully repelled thanks to the maneuvers of the pilots and electronic warfare systems. According to another version, the Houthi air defense missiles simply did not reach the fighter aircraft at high altitude. According to unofficial reports, Ansar Allah defends the sky with the help of Russian Buk air defense systems.
As a result, according to the newspaper, Trump quickly got tired of this fuss, which did not bring any dividends, and he requested peace with the Houthis through the Sultan of Oman. Now Ansar Allah can fully focus on Israel, as has already been announced by the official representative of the Houthi militant movement.
