EUNAVFOR ASPIDES vs the Houthis: Is Europe's Naval Mission Actually Working?

EUNAVFOR ASPIDES has been defending European ships in the Red Sea for over a year. Here is an honest assessment of what it has and hasn't achieved.

Military operations are rarely evaluated with the rigour applied to other policy interventions, which means that EUNAVFOR ASPIDES — the European Union's naval protection mission in the Red Sea, launched to defend commercial shipping against Houthi drone and missile attacks — has been celebrated for its successes and discussed with uncomfortable silence about its limitations simultaneously.

The successes are genuine. ASPIDES has intercepted a significant number of Houthi drones and missiles that would otherwise have struck commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea. The statistics are impressive: over 450 aerial threats engaged since the mission's launch, with an interception success rate that compares favourably with most modern air defence systems. European warships from Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Belgium and others have rotated through the operational area with genuine professionalism and maintained continuous coverage.

The limitations are equally genuine. ASPIDES operates under a defensive-only mandate: it can protect ships from attack but cannot strike the launch sites in Yemen from which those attacks originate. This constraint — which was the political price of achieving unanimous EU agreement to launch the mission — means that ASPIDES is managing the symptom rather than the cause. Houthi forces can continue launching attacks indefinitely at essentially no military cost, because ASPIDES's rules of engagement prohibit the strike operations that would impose costs on the Houthi military apparatus itself.

The numbers bear this out. Despite more than a year of ASPIDES operations, the volume of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping has not declined significantly. Commercial shipping diversion away from the Red Sea route — which is the best single measure of whether the mission has actually restored confidence in the corridor — has also not returned to pre-crisis levels. The majority of major shipping companies that rerouted to the Cape of Good Hope in late 2023 have not reverted to the Red Sea route.

ASPIDES is valuable. It is not sufficient. And the gap between the two is a product of political constraints that the mission's designers accepted in exchange for the political unanimity that launching the mission required.