Adaptation Asymmetry: Why Disruption Now Matters More Than Dominance

Iran and the Houthis are reshaping the war by disrupting shipping and energy flows faster than the United States can adapt its military power to stop them.

The current war with Iran has revealed a simple but uncomfortable truth: in modern conflict, disruption matters more than dominance. Nowhere is this logic more visible than in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not closed the Strait. It does not need to. The mere demonstration that it can target tankers, container vessels or supporting infrastructure has already altered behavior. Insurance premiums have risen sharply. Shipping firms have reassessed risk exposure. Some vessels have delayed or rerouted transit altogether. Energy markets have responded not to actual closure, but to the credible threat of disruption.

This is the first principle of the new environment: control is no longer required to generate systemic effects. The entry of the Houthis into the war compounds this dynamic.¹ Operating from Yemen, the Houthis are extending the battle space into the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb corridor, creating a second axis of pressure on global maritime trade. Their official declaration of participation transforms what might have remained a localized chokepoint risk into a multi-node system of disruption.

This is not a story of conventional military weakness. The United States and Israel retain overwhelming superiority, but that superiority is optimized for a different kind of war. The current conflict is governed by a different logic. It is best understood as adaptation asymmetry, a condition in which actors with fewer conventional advantages compensate by aligning strategy, technology and geography more effectively - and more rapidly - than opponents whose superior capabilities remain tied to an earlier model of warfare. The asymmetry lies not in strength, but in the speed and coherence of adaptation. The result is not decisive victory, but the ability to impose sustained costs, stretch resources and generate persistent instability across systems far larger than the actors themselves.

The implications of this shift are best understood not in abstraction, but in practice. If the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates how a state actor like Iran can leverage disruption without closure, then the campaign waged by the Houthis in the Red Sea represents its most distilled operational form. What Iran signals at the strategic level, the Houthis execute tactically and do so repeatedly, visibly and at relatively low cost. It is here, in the Red Sea, that the logic of adaptation asymmetry becomes most legible.

Persistence as Strategy, Not Victory

A useful starting point is to clarify what the Houthis have - and have not - achieved. There is no credible scenario in which the Houthis can defeat the United States or Israel conventionally. Yet this framing misidentifies the objective. The Houthis are not attempting to win the war in the traditional sense. They are attempting to shape the conditions under which the war is fought. Their strategy is one of persistent disruption calibrated not to overwhelm, but to endure.

Primary source documentation underscores this distinction. Reports submitted to the UN Security Council and incident logs from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) detail a sustained pattern of attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea involving drones, anti-ship missiles as well as harassment operations targeting merchant vessels across multiple months. These are not isolated acts; they constitute a campaign.

Figure 1 shows 70 recorded Houthi-related incidents on shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden from November 2023 to the end of October 2024.² ³ December 2023 marked the campaign’s opening surge of fourteen incidents and the Houthis’ response to the announcement of Operation Prosperity Guardian on December 18, 2023. February 2024 marked the retaliation-and-expansion phase after US and UK strikes on Yemen and the subsequent widening of Houthi targets to American and British-linked shipping. June 2024 marked the resilience phase, when renewed US/UK strikes still failed to prevent another dense burst of attacks, including more sophisticated operations such as the strike on the Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier MV Tutor in the Red Sea using an unmanned surface vessel (USV) and airborne projectiles resulting in the ship’s sinking several days later.

The deeper point is that the spikes in shipping incidents in December 2023, February and June 2024 do not show a simple story of US weakness. They show a repeated pattern in which each visible US move from coalition formation to direct strikes and then repeated strikes was met by a Houthi attempt to prove that they could still keep the corridor unstable. This pattern reflects a consistent cycle of action and counteraction rather than deterrence.

The United States Central Command’s (CENTCOM) own record reveals the rhythm clearly. First, US ships intercept missiles and drones. Houthi launchers and mobile systems are then struck in self-defense. Yet the Houthi attacks recur. On January 24, January 27, February 14, and February 23 alone, CENTCOM announced successful destruction of Houthi anti-ship missiles, UAVs and explosive surface platforms prepared for launch. Yet those successes were followed by fresh launches by the Houthis against the USS Carney, commercial shipping and Red Sea traffic more broadly. By March, General Michael Kurilla testified that the Houthis had already launched more than fifty drone and missile attacks against US and international vessels.⁴

The US campaign against the Houthis was de-escalated on May 6, 2025 through an Omani-mediated ceasefire covering US forces and shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb. This did not amount to a full end of Houthi hostilities since attacks on Israel were not clearly included. The attacks later continued.

This dual record of persistent Houthi attacks alongside continuous US defensive operations demonstrates a critical point. The Houthis are achieving strategic continuity, while the United States is achieving tactical success without strategic closure.

The Logic of Cost Imposition

The underlying mechanism that enables this persistence is economic, not military in the conventional sense. The Houthis have adopted a model of warfare centered on cost imposition rather than force parity.

This model exploits a structural asymmetry. Defensive systems deployed by advanced militaries including interceptors, naval patrols and surveillance architectures are expensive, complex and resource-intensive. Offensive tools used by the Houthis such as drones, modified missiles and decentralized targeting are comparatively inexpensive and scalable. The result is a form of strategic leverage in which the defender expends disproportionate resources to maintain baseline security, while the attacker incurs relatively low marginal costs to sustain disruption.

Data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the IMO reinforce the consequences of this approach. Houthi operations altered shipping behavior, reduced traffic through key corridors at various points and introduced volatility into energy markets. Figure 2 shows that oil flows through the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint fell by 56 percent, from 9.3 million barrels per day in 2023 to 4.1 million in 2024, while flows through the Suez Canal system declined by 45 percent. At the same time, traffic around the Cape of Good Hope increased by 53 percent, demonstrating large-scale rerouting rather than cessation.⁵

The effect is even more pronounced in natural gas markets. LNG flows through Bab el-Mandeb fell by nearly 100 percent, effectively disappearing. Uncertainty alone was sufficient to reorganize global shipping behavior.

A conservative official-data estimate suggests that the Houthi campaign affected at least $630 billion to $788 billion of trade moving through the Suez–Bab el-Mandeb corridor between January and September 2024, with the true figure likely higher once December 2023 and the sharper mid-2024 collapse are incorporated. Within that total, the energy component alone likely involved roughly $92 billion in oil flows rerouted away from the Bab el-Mandeb route through August 2024.

War Expansion Under Constraint

The strategic significance of this dynamic becomes clearer when placed within the broader context of a direct US–Israeli confrontation with Iran. The conflict has already crossed the threshold of escalation that earlier analyses treated as hypothetical. What remains constrained is not the willingness to escalate, but the ability to manage escalation across multiple, simultaneous theaters. In this environment, the Houthis function as a force multiplier for Iran not because of their intrinsic strength, but because of their position within the conflict architecture. The constraint is not escalation; it is simultaneity.

Institutional assessments from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) highlight the systemic sensitivity of Red Sea disruptions. Maritime instability in this corridor reverberates immediately through global trade flows, shipping costs and energy pricing mechanisms. The Red Sea is not a peripheral theater; it is a critical node in the global economic system.

Under these conditions, the United States faces a structural allocation problem. It is already engaged in high-intensity operations against Iran. Expanding into a fully resourced, decisive campaign against the Houthis would require a redistribution of assets, attention and risk across theaters that are already interlinked. This is not restraint in the traditional sense. It is prioritization within an active war.

Operations conducted by CENTCOM demonstrate the ability to degrade Houthi capabilities and defend maritime traffic. What they do not provide, and cannot easily provide within current constraints, is rapid, decisive elimination of the threat without generating secondary effects elsewhere in the conflict. The Houthis, by maintaining pressure in the Red Sea, exploit this condition. They compel continuous allocation decisions, ensuring that no single theater can be resolved in isolation.

Doctrinal Lag: A Superpower Optimized for the Wrong War

What emerges from this interaction is not simply a tactical challenge, but a deeper misalignment between doctrine and environment. The United States retains overwhelming military superiority. Its naval forces dominate open waters, its airpower is unmatched and its logistical networks enable sustained global operations. These capabilities are optimized for conflicts in which decisive engagements are possible and where control of territory, airspace or sea lanes can be established and maintained.

The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf environments do not conform to these assumptions. Instead, they represent hybrid battle spaces characterized by dispersed actors, low-cost technologies and critical geographic chokepoints. The objective is not to seize and hold, but to disrupt and destabilize. In this sense, the method resembles guerrilla warfare in function - focused on disruption, persistence and cost imposition - but applied at the level of maritime systems and state-backed actors rather than insurgent bands.

Historical perspective reinforces this point. Declassified CIA assessments long identified the Bab al-Mandeb as a strategic vulnerability. One such report prepared in November 1973, a few weeks after the Yom Kippur war highlighted the problem of petroleum deliveries to Israel’s port of Elat:

“The supply of petroleum constitutes a potential problem [for Israel]. Closure of the Bab el Mandeb Strait has stopped petroleum deliveries to Elat from Iran. Israel's petroleum stocks, however, amounted to more than 16 weeks of supply at the beginning of the war, and if major fighting does not resume, Israel can import sufficient petroleum via the Mediterranean.”⁶

Separately, another declassified CIA assessment on Soviet influence in the Arabian Peninsula stated that:

“Contiguous to Saudi Arabia and situated on the southern Red Sea and the Bab el Mandeb Strait, the Yemens offer a potential site for interfering with maritime traffic passing between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. South Yemen is particularly well placed at the southern entrance of the Red Sea, and its significance is further enhanced by Aden’s natural deepwater harbor.”⁷

What has changed is not its importance, but the accessibility of the means required to exploit it. Where once such leverage was reserved for great powers, it is now available to non-state actors capable of integrating modest technological capabilities with strategic insight. The doctrine, however, remains anchored in a paradigm of control. The challenge is not that American power is insufficient, but that it is not optimized for the specific form of conflict being waged.

Adaptation Asymmetry and the Reconfiguration of Power

Seen together, these dynamics point to a deeper shift. The conflict is not simply a contest of capabilities, but of alignment between how actors fight and the environment in which they operate. The Houthis - and at a larger scale, Iran - illustrate this alignment with unusual clarity. They do not seek territorial control or decisive engagements. Instead, they exploit chokepoints, deploy low-cost and scalable systems and operate within a networked environment that amplifies the impact of each action.

What follows from this is a broader rethinking of power itself. Traditional metrics such as military expenditure, platform superiority and force size remain necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. Power increasingly depends on the ability to match means to environment, to identify structural vulnerabilities in complex systems and exploit them efficiently and sustainably.

In this sense, the Houthis and Iranians are not anomalies. They are early manifestations of a wider transformation in how power is exercised. The question is no longer who possesses the greatest force, but who can apply force in ways that generate disproportionate systemic effects.

Not Decline, But Dislocation

The temptation to interpret the Houthis’ persistence as evidence of the decline of American military power reflects a deeper analytical habit: the tendency to evaluate contemporary conflicts through outdated frameworks of victory, control and dominance.

What the Red Sea demonstrates is something more subtle and more consequential. The United States has not lost its power. It continues to project force, defend critical infrastructure and engage adversaries across multiple theaters. What has changed is the environment in which that power is exercised and the kinds of strategies that environment rewards.

Iran and the Houthis have exposed a structural gap between the nature of modern conflict and the doctrines designed to manage it. They have shown that disruption can substitute for control, that persistence can offset disparity and that limited capabilities, if properly aligned, can generate global effects. Power has changed form. The future of conflict will not be decided by who controls the most territory, but by who can make the system itself unstable enough to control behavior.

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References:

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1. Reuters. “Yemen’s Houthis Confirm Launching Attack on Israel for First Time in Current War.” March 28, 2026.

2. International Maritime Organization. Red Sea Incidents Report for Member States. September 11, 2024.

3. International Maritime Organization. Red Sea Incidents Report for Member States. November 25, 2024.

4. US CENTCOM, “Statement of General Michael “Erik” Kurilla on the Posture of US Central Command - SASC Hearing: Two Visions for For the Future of the Central Region”, March 7, 2024.

5. U.S. Energy Information Administration. World Oil Transit Chokepoints. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints

6. Central Intelligence Agency, “Israel: Economic Impact of the War”, November 1973.

7. Central Intelligence Agency, “The USSR and the Yemens: Moscow’s Foothold on the Arabian Peninsula”, An Intelligence Assessment, National Foreign Assessment Center, July 1981.