A US warship's Red Sea battle with the Houthis years ago helped the Navy ready for round two, its captain says

The Houthis targeted USS Mason with missiles in 2016, and then they did so again a little over seven years later.

• USS Mason, a destroyer, was forced to defend itself against Houthi missile attacks in 2016.
• Years later, in 2023 and into 2024, that same warship found itself battling the Iran-backed rebels once again.
• The 2016 engagements helped the Navy prepare for its most recent fight, the Mason's commanding officer said.

When USS Mason sailed into the Red Sea toward the end of last year, the US Navy warship quickly found itself in a familiar situation: defending against Houthi missile attacks.

Unlike some other ships, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer battled the Houthis years before they started targeting merchant shipping lanes in what has become a monthslong campaign. The Mason's commanding officer says that earlier fight helped the Navy prepare for its latest clash with the Iran-backed rebels.

It's not quite the same fight, the commanding officer said. "They are evolving in their own tactics, techniques and procedures, but we are continuing to outpace what they are changing," Cmdr. Justin Smith told Business Insider in an interview last week.

The Mason recently returned to its homeport in Florida after a deployment to the Middle East as part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which spent months defending merchant shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden from Houthi attacks.

During its exhausting deployment, the Mason intercepted a number of Houthi drones and missiles — including some fired at the destroyer. But it actually wasn't the first time that the warship found itself in this highly dangerous situation.

The Houthis targeted the Mason with missiles on multiple occasions in October 2016 while the destroyer was operating in the Red Sea and around the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Some of these threats were intercepted by the warship.

In November 2023, just over seven years later, the Houthis fired several missiles in the general direction of the Mason, this time while it was responding to an attempted hijacking of a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Aden. The projectiles landed in the water several miles away.

Smith said that the Navy learned a lot from the Mason's first engagements with the Houthis back in 2016 and explained that the investments the sea service made since then — specifically, in training and readiness initiatives — have "paid off" during the recent deployments.

"We took a lot of human performance factors away from the crew members and the watch team's performance during 2016, and the Navy really studied that to ensure that we are going to have this combat warrior mentality and mindset to be ready for any type of threat or engagement that can be encountered," Smith said.

Smith said sailors first develop this mindset during boot camp, but it became an enduring aspect of training and something he sought to continue on board the destroyer to ensure that the crew was ready for a sustained threat.

Smith said that the Navy has invested heavily in human performance and that the investment has been worth it. "Our sailors — they still remain the Navy's most powerful weapon system," he said. "If we didn't have the great training we have now, our readiness would be impacted."

The Eisenhower carrier strike group leadership has routinely stressed that the Navy will draw lessons from the ongoing counter-Houthi mission and apply them to future combat operations, and that process is already underway.

For instance, Rear Adm. Marc Miguez, who spent months commanding the strike group, said in a reflection on the deployment that the sea service would benefit from more training scenarios focused on unmanned systems.

Another consideration is the threat posed by anti-ship ballistic missiles. Though long in various arsenals, these weapons had never seen combat until the Houthis launched them in late 2023. In the fighting that followed, the Eisenhower strike group intercepted a number of these missiles, giving the Navy valuable information that would be useful in a future conflict — whether that's against the Houthis or another force.

"Everything is evolving, and things don't remain stagnant in threats," Smith said, adding that the Navy is always working to "demonstrate to the Houthis that we'll be able to challenge them currently and then moving forward in the future."