On the flight deck, it is loud.
Standing next to a fighter jet taking off,
you can feel it in your whole body.
I mean, we're given helmets with goggles and,
you know, giant industrial earmuffs and it's still is loud.
It completely, like, permeates through you.
Hi, my name is Jake Epstein.
I'm a defense reporter here at Business Insider.
I recently came back from the
Middle East, where I had the chance to embark on
two US Navy ships in the Red Sea to get
a sense of what's happening on the front lines of
the fight against the Houthis.
I was on one carrier in the USS Dwight D
Eisenhower.
And then from there I took a helicopter to a
destroyer,
the USS Gravely. The most nerve wracking part for me
was landing and taking off from the aircraft carrier.
But to be with the Navy,
I mean these are incredibly well defended ships.
So it it wasn't any concern about the Houthi threat.
But you know, landing on an aircraft carrier in the
middle of the of the sea is it was enough
to make me a little uneasy.
I did not got to have a window seat coming
in.
The only way I knew that we were about to
land is because the crew on the aircraft told us
to get in a brace position and that we are
going to be landing within a couple of of seconds.
The plane shakes around, I mean it goes from traveling
at a a fast speed to
0 mph in two or three seconds and the same
goes for taking off.
When we landed on the Eisenhower,
it was hot. It was a bit of a shock
when the cargo door came down and I saw that
I was on an aircraft carrier in the middle of
the sea. There were a ton of crew members on
the deck,
people wearing different vests to indicate their their different jobs.
There were fighter jets moving around.
Aircraft were constantly taking off and landing
in cycles. So, you know,
we'd watch it happen for a few minutes and then
they would,
they would come in and land or they'll stay airborne
a little bit longer while the
planes are taking off and landing.
There's crew members, you know,
refuelling them and performing maintenance and rearming them if if
needed.
So there's just a lot happening all the time.
The commander of the strike group that you know the
Eisenhower's is, is a part of said that they were
launching aircraft every like hour to hour and a half.
So it is very, you know,
it's it's very constant. I was running on adrenaline the
whole time,
not really sleeping a lot.
There was obviously places to sleep and shower
and and and rest for a second.
I mean there's a shift store
from the outside looking in it might seem a little
bit chaotic,
but it's obviously very orderly because everything works so seamlessly.
The Eisenhower you know as an aircraft carrier is is
a floating city for a lack of a better term.
The carrier has more than 5000 sailors that are basically,
you know, calling it home during the current deployment
the greatly is a destroyer.
It was smaller, a couple 100 sailors.
There's a combat Information Center that's inside the destroyer.
We got to take a look at that.
That is staffed all the time,
anything, any sort of weapon or interceptor or whatever that
would leave the ship.
The process starts there. So that's where you know decisions
are made.
That's where. That's where, you know,
the the threats are tracked.
That's kind of like the,
you know, the brain of where the ship is defended
from.
It's dimly lit, a lot of a lot of screens,
radars, digital maps, and yeah,
so it's it's staffed all the time.
The Houthis are basically firing
drones and missiles on a
routine basis, sometimes, you know,
multiple days in a row into international shipping lanes off
of the coast of Yemen,
where U.S. Navy ships are located,
where commercial ships are transiting.
The Houthis have said repeatedly that their actions are directly
a result of
Israel's ground invasion of Gaza.
However, you'll see U.S. officials are pushing back on this
quite often because the ships that are under attack and
are not,
you know, necessarily connected to Israel.
In early January, there was a a pretty large scale
attack by the Houthis.
Since then, there's been several rounds of coordinated air strikes
between the US and the UK
on Houthi sites across Yemen,
targeting air defenses and weapon storage facilities and radars and
and stuff like that.
the US has also been conducting preemptive strikes,
they'll say self-defense strikes on a routine basis.
The idea is to take out Houthi drones and missiles
before they can even launch.
So the US military will say that it has identified,
you know, a drone or a missile that is loaded
or,
you know, prepared to launch or ready to launch against
international shipping lanes and poses an an imminent threat.
The Houthis have still managed to get missiles and drones
in the air,
and we've still seen the US Navy shoot down missiles
and drones in the air and we've also seen them
hit commercial ships.
So while the preemptive strikes are happening around the clock,
the Houthis are still able to get some of their
threats airborne.
The Anti Ship Ballistic Missile threat,
this is obviously a new threat that we've seen in
a conflict theater because this is the first time that
the US Navy has engaged with these threats.
It is learning a lot from these interceptions.
Basically, you know, gathering information about its weapon system
and learning, you know, that the systems that you know
have been tested and are performing as they would hope
because you know,
we've seen the Navy shoot them down.
So yeah, it's definitely a very serious threat in the
Red Sea in the Gulf of Aden,
but it's something that the US Navy is paying close
attention to because this could be a a continuous problem
down the line should the US ever go to war
with with China. What remains to be seen though
is how often the Houthis are getting,
you know, rearmed and you know what remains of their
inventory.
So lots of unknowns as to how much of A
dent the US has put in their attacking capabilities.
From the Navy's perspective, They,
you know, you've had people say repeatedly,
we'll be here as long as the president needs,
we'll be here as long as we need to be
now until the Houthis stop.