Commercial ships sailing off the coast of Africa are again facing heavily armed men attacking from speedboats — prompting a wide-ranging naval response, encouraging cargo vessels to station armed guards on board, and convincing shippers to divert into safer waters.

But the menace posed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on the Red Sea is very different from that of Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa over a decade ago — and beating them back may prove more difficult.

“The threat from Somali pirates was different in scale compared to what the Houthis present as a threat to shipping,” said John Stawpert, senior manager at the International Chamber of Shipping. “The Houthis are much better armed, they have a much greater capability in terms of attacking and boarding vessels, and their munitions are a significant order higher than anything we saw the Somali pirates use.”

Attacks by Somali raiders started in the 1990s but escalated significantly to begin affecting international shipping after 2006, as a civil war turned the country into a failed state unable to protect its fishing industry from foreign rivals. Impoverished Somali fishermen in turn began attacking commercial ships for money.

Piracy off the coast of Somalia peaked around 2012 but then declined sharply. Patrols by a coalition of international navies, including the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Canada and France; costly self-protection measures, such as stationing armed guards on vessels; and arresting and prosecuting pirates, both regionally and inside Somalia, were the key ingredients of that success. 

The operation even saw a rare measure of coordination among the U.S., Russian and Chinese navies.

The Houthis, by contrast, use different technology such as drones and missiles as well as speedboats. They also have different motivations, in that they are attacking ships as part of a regional conflict aimed at Israel, not raiding them for economic gain.

“They are targeting any ships that are directly or indirectly linked to Israel. In most cases this seems to check out, but sometimes the connection between the target and Israel is rather hard to find,” said Didier Leroy, a research fellow at the Royal Higher Institute for Defence, a Belgian think tank.  

A piracy problem

While the Houthis and the Somalis are very different, the West is framing both as a piracy problem, serving a strategic objective. 

“The U.S., the U.K., internationals in general, are actually trying to make this like the Somali pirate crisis,” said Tobias Borck, a senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute. 

Treating the Houthis as “a sort of outlaw pirate group” means that “any form of military engagement with them can be put into that bucket of dealing with a pirate-type organization,” Borck said.

Conversely, the stakes would be very different if the Houthis were considered “a quasi-state/non state actor in the mold of something like Hezbollah, that is supported by Iran, and therefore engaging with them would be essentially fighting one of Iran’s allies in the Middle East,” he said. 

So far, the U.S. has struggled to rally support for its security operation among skeptical allies. International collaboration involving Moscow and Beijing, as during the Somali pirate attacks, is also off the table. 

As a result, several shipping lines and oil major BP have suspended operations in the area. Vessels still passing through the waterway have ramped up on-board security, drawing from lessons learned during the Somali pirate attacks.

Although unwilling to disclose specific measures, Stawpert said that taking safety precautions on board ships, as well as communicating with the military in the region, were key elements of the strategy. 

Yet the Houthi attacks highlight the limitations of what shippers can achieve on their own. 

“You can have on-site security against potential kidnapping by having armed guards, and in the moments where the Houthis are using speedboats to try to essentially capture ships … that kind of security is probably thought to be sufficient,” Borck said.

But that doesn’t work against other types of Houthi attacks.

“When the Houthis use helicopters, we’re in a slightly different space already. When they use missiles in order to damage [their opponents], you can’t really expect a sort of standard-issue commercial ship to have sophisticated missile-defense technology on board,” he said. 

The Houthi threat, said Marco Forgione, director general at the Institute of Export & International Trade, “is not something that an individual shipping company or even a community of shipping companies can deal with. This is a political issue and a military issue and it’s going to take a political resolution to sort this out.”