ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The Houthi boat that attacked and hit a Saudi frigate Jan. 30 in the Red Sea, reported earlier as a suicide boat, was instead carried out by an unmanned, remote-controlled craft filled with explosives, the US Navy’s top officer in the Mideast said.
“Our assessment is that it was an unmanned, remote-controlled boat of some kind,” Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, commander of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet and head of US Naval Forces Central Command, told Defense News in an interview here Saturday.
The attack on the frigate Al Madinah appears to be the first confirmed use of the weapon which, Donegan said, represents a wider threat than that posed by suicide boats and shows foreign interests are aiding the Houthis.
Donegan is concerned “first that it is in the hands of someone like the Houthis. That’s not an easy thing to develop. There have been many terrorist groups that have tried to develop that, it’s not something that was just invented by the Houthis. There’s clearly support there coming from others, so that’s problematic.
“The second is the explosive boat piece — you don’t need suicide attackers to do a suicide-like attack. There are certain terrorists that do things and they get martyrs to go and do it. But there are many others that don’t want to martyr themselves in making attacks like that and that’s pretty much where the Houthis are. So it makes that kind of weaponry, which would normally take someone suicidal to use, now able to be used by someone who’s not going to martyr themselves.”
The unmanned boat was likely supplied by Iran, Donegan said.
“I don’t know that it’s Iranian-built, but I believe that it’s production in some way was supported by Iran,” Donegan said.
“Here’s how I connect those dots. About a year ago we began and were successful in interdicting about four weapons shipments of things going to Yemen,” he said, noting that three of the shipments were intercepted by coalition partners of the US, while one shipment was intercepted by a US ship.
“We allowed the United Nations access to all the weapons we got from one of the interdictions, and they published quite an extensive report,” Donegan said. “They said specifically that the weapons came from Iran and were destined for Yemen in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. That’s not my assessment, that’s the United Nations assessment.
“Secondly, the other three weapon shipments that were interdicted were examined by another independent group, the [U.K.-based] Conflict Armament Research. They’ve also put out a report that almost said exactly the same thing. And they did this by analysis of the weapons and serial numbers and where they were manufactured and the instruction manuals, and the GPS waypoints of the systems.
“So we know that weapons were shipped from Iran to Yemen. The question is at what level and how many, etc. We know what was in the weapon inventory of Yemen before the conflict started, and the Yemenis didn’t have a weapon that could range Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That’s an 800-kilometer ballistic missile shot, whereas the Scud missile, about 200 kilometers is what it can do. They had a rudimentary coastal defense missile. But most of their systems had atrophied. So they’re being supported by Iran. Maybe there’s others supporting them, I don’t know. But for certain these things aren’t indigenous, there are parts and components that need to be coming from other places to make them effective like this.”
