Houthi Drones Over the Red Sea: The New Threat That's Costing Shipping Companies Billions

Houthi drone and missile attacks on Red Sea shipping have now been going on for 16 months. Here is the cumulative economic cost and why EUNAVFOR ASPIDES hasn't stopped them.

The first Houthi drone attack on a commercial vessel in the Red Sea occurred in November 2023. As of March 2026, Houthi forces have conducted more than 350 attacks on commercial and military shipping in and around the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and increasingly in the Arabian Sea — an area of operations that has expanded significantly since the Iran war began on February 28.

The cumulative economic cost of these attacks is measured not primarily in the value of ships sunk or damaged — the actual physical destruction, while significant, is not the primary economic impact — but in the rerouting costs imposed on global shipping that has chosen the Cape of Good Hope alternative to the Red Sea route. An additional 10-14 days of sailing for a container ship or tanker means additional fuel costs, crew costs, insurance costs, and time costs that compound across hundreds of vessels making hundreds of voyages over 16 months.

The most rigorous current estimate, produced by the shipping economics research unit at the University of Copenhagen in conjunction with the Baltic Exchange, suggests that the cumulative cost of Houthi-induced shipping disruption has now exceeded $95 billion globally — with the majority falling on European importers and exporters who rely on the Red Sea route for trade with Asia, and on Asian economies whose supply chains were built around Suez Canal transit times that the current situation has made impossible to plan around.

EUNAVFOR ASPIDES has intercepted more than 450 aerial threats. Its defensive effectiveness is genuine. What it has not done — because its mandate explicitly prohibits offensive operations against Houthi launch infrastructure — is reduce the frequency of attacks. The Houthis can fire at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per salvo. ASPIDES intercepts at a cost of millions per intercept. This economic asymmetry is sustainable for the Houthis and gradually less sustainable for the alliance maintaining the defensive operation.