EU Operation Aspides in Dire Need of More Ships to Confront Yemen

Two western naval missions in support of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have failed to deter Yemen from launching attacks against commercial vessels linked to Israeli ports

JUN 21, 2024

The commander of Operation Aspides, Rear Admiral Vasileios Gryparis, says that the EU fleet deployed in the Red Sea to protect Israeli trade interests against Yemeni attacks “needs to more than double in size.”

“We don’t have that many assets, and the whole area we have to cover is enormous,” Gryparis told Bloomberg during an interview on Wednesday. “I am pressing all the member states to provide more assets.”

The Greek officer traveled to Brussels this week to make this plea. In his chat with the US financial publication, he also said that the air raid campaign launched by the US and UK against Yemen is “not contributing to the solution.”

“We don’t believe that hitting the Houthis might solve the problem,” he said. “Some other countries tried similar actions some years ago, and some other countries still do, and we see that it is not contributing to the solution to the problem.”

According to Gryparis, only four frigates have been at his command since February, when Operation Aspides was launched under a defensive mandate. However, the number dropped to three in April when France withdrew the FREMM Alsace frigate from the area, citing the “unexpected threat level.” 

As a result, the Greek commander says Operation Aspides is confined “to a small part of the southern Red Sea, near the Bab al-Mandab Strait between Yemen and Djibouti.”

“There are daily about 40 or 50 ships going up and down the strait so it needs a significant amount of ships to be able to provide this close protection,” he said. “There are cases where we are not able to provide this close protection but we try and cope with the volume.”

The mandate of Operation Aspides ends in February 2025, although Gryparis told Bloomberg he expects it to be extended.

The latest comments from Gryparis come less than a week after the Wall Street Journal reported that Washington's own naval campaign in support of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is “unsustainable.”

“Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long,” said Emily Harding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “We are playing whack-a-mole, and they are playing a long game.”

The Yemeni armed forces have targeted Israeli-linked ships passing through the Red Sea since November in support of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and to demand an end to the genocide. In recent months, Sanaa expanded this campaign to include US and UK-linked ships and began targetting vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.