Cnn
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The total cost of the US army operations against Houthi activists supported by Iran in Yemen is approaching $ 1 billion in just under three weeks, even if the attacks had a limited impact on the destruction of the capacity of the terrorist group, said three people informed of the campaign progress.
The military offensive, which was launched on March 15, has already used hundreds of millions of dollars in ammunition for the strikes against the group, including long -range cruise missiles JASSM, JSOWS, which are sliding bombs guided by GPS and Tomahawk missiles, the sources said.
Diego Garcia B-2 bombers are also used against Houthis, and an additional aircraft carrier as well as several hunting squadrons and air defense systems will soon be transferred to the central command region, defense officials said this week.
One of the sources said that the Pentagon will probably have to request additional funding from the congress to continue the operation, but may not receive it – the offensive had already been criticized on both sides of the aisle, and even vice -president JD Vance said that he thought that the operation was “an error” in a reported cat published by the Atlantic last week.
The Pentagon did not publicly reveal what impact the daily US military strikes really had on the Houthis. Officials of Pentagon, US Central Command, US Indo Pacific Command, Office of the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the State Department has declared to the Congress in recent days that strikes had eliminated several members of the Houthi management and destroyed certain Houthi military sites.
But they admitted that the group had always been able to fortify their bunkers and maintain the stocks of weapons underground, just as they did during the strikes that the Biden administration carried out for more than a year, the sources said. And it was difficult to determine precisely how much the Houthis stored, said a defense official.
“They have removed certain sites, but that did not affect the capacity of the Houthis to continue shooting on ships in the Red Sea or to shoot American drones,” said one of the informed sources of the operation. “Meanwhile, we are burning the preparation – ammunition, fuel, deployment time.”
The New York Times first reported details of the shared military operation during information with the Congress.
The operational tempo of the strikes is also higher now than the commander of Centcom, Erik Kurilla, no longer needs higher level approval to make strikes – a transition from the Biden administration and a return to the policies of the first term of Trump, when military commanders had more freedom to carry out missions in order to achieve “a strategic effect” in the need for the case of the case in the case of the White House. ”
It is still not clear, however, how long the Trump administration plans to continue the offensive, which Centcom described as an “24/7” operation. Trump said it would last until the Houthis stop attacking navigation in the Red Sea, but despite weeks of bombing, the Houthis continued to launch missiles and drones on targets in and on the Red Sea. Earlier this week, they killed another US MQ -9 Reaper drone – the second MQ9 killed since the start of the offensive last month, several sources told CNN.
Another defense official, however, noted that the Houthis’ ballistic missile attacks against Israel had decreased last week, and said that the United States’s incessant bombing campaign had made Houthis more difficult to communicate and hit things with precision because they were forced to “keep their heads down”.
People have informed the operation also described Houthi officials who were killed in the United States as means, similar to “intermediate management”. An exception is the head of the Houthis in charge of drone operations in the group, which was killed in a strike last month, officials said.
The national security advisor Mike Waltz refers that chief Houthi in the Signal cat in March who was disclosed by the Atlantic. Waltz said in this conversation that the “top missile guy” of the Houthis had been killed when he entered the building of his girlfriend in Yemen who “collapsed” in the middle of the American strikes.
Two of the informed sources of the current operation said that the comments indicate the way in which the US military under Trump adopts a more “expansive” approach to the strikes than the Biden administration, in terms of damage to guarantees. Houthis have long used more populated areas to hide command and control sites, according to sources.
But one of the defense officials said that the building was not a civil building, but rather a meeting place for Houthi officials, and that the US military uses precision ammunition and takes other measures to mitigate the risk of civilian victims.
The large-scale operation has also shaken certain officials from the US Indo-Pacific Command, who have complained in recent days and weeks of the large number of long-range weapons spent by Centcom against the Houthis, in particular Jassms and Tomahawks, the sources said. These weapons would be essential in the event of war with China, and the military planners of Indopacom fear that the Operation Centcom can have a negative impact on American military preparation in the Pacific.
One of the defense officials also minimized this concern, calling it “an exaggeration”.
“We use precision ammunition in each strike. We keep the power to use the full capacity of our forces deployed in the Middle East region against Houthis,” said the official. “We have no concerns about the use of long -range weapons when and if necessary to maximize our efficiency.