The U.S. Navy lost a F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft Monday during an engagement with the Houthi militants off the coast of Yemen. But it wasn’t in the air when it happened. A tractor was towing the $67 million jet to “a hangar bay when the move crew lost control” and “the aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the service said in a statement.
The jet was part of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) aircraft carrier, which was carrying out an “evasive maneuver” that sent the Super Hornet sliding off the deck and to the bottom of the Red Sea, a U.S. officials told CNN and USNI News.
About the evasive maneuver: “You typically do a series of alternating 30- to 40-degree turns. Each takes about 30 seconds each way, but the turn starts sharply. It is like riding in a zig-zagging car,” Carl Schuster, a former Navy captain, told CNN. “The ship leans about 10 to 15 degrees into the turn” if the ship is moving at maximum speed, he said.
Fortunately, “All personnel are accounted for, with one sailor sustaining a minor injury,” the Navy said. And “The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group and embarked air wing remain fully mission capable.”The carrier has been deployed since September, when it departed its home port in Norfolk.
How deep is the Red Sea? Near Yemen depths can reach around 1,000 meters farthest from the banks. But some of the deepest parts of the sea (more than 2,000 meters) are closer to the Saudi coast. Due to security considerations, it’s unclear exactly where in the Red Sea the carrier was when Monday’s incident occurred.
The carrier strike group has been in the region since late February assisting President Trump’s escalated airstrike campaign against the Houthis, headquartered in Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a. Several recent intense airstrikes around Yemen (in Sadah and Hodeidah, e.g.) have killed dozens of people, according to Houthi officials.
While the U.S. military has carried out many recent airstrikes inside Yemen, it is not alone. The Houthis have attacked Israel with missiles, and the Israelis have periodically responded with their own airstrikes over the past several months—extending a conflict that began when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, prompting Houthi attacks on U.S., Israeli, and commercial shipping through the Red Sea in professed solidarity with Hamas.
Operation Rough Rider: The Pentagon’s Yemen airstrike campaign, named for the country’s 26th president, has been ongoing for 45 days. The U.S. military on Sunday said it has “struck over 800 targets” since it began on March 15. “These strikes have killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, including senior Houthi missile and UAV officials,” Central Command officials said while avoiding specific names.
“The Houthis have continued to attack our vessels, [but] our operations have degraded the pace and effectiveness of their attacks,” CENTCOM said Sunday. “Ballistic missile launches have dropped by 69%” since March 15, and “attacks from one way attack drones have decreased by 55%.”
It’s still not at all clear how long the campaign will continue, or how much it will eventually cost, or even if it will ultimately succeed. The first four weeks of bombing were estimated at more than a billion dollars, according to the New York Times. But there have been other costs as well: “So many precision munitions are being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks and implications for any situation in which the United States would have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.”
And if the loss of a Super Hornet sounds familiar, “In December, an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying from the aircraft carrier was shot down by the guided-missile cruiser Gettysburg, which was accompanying the Truman,” the New York Times reminded readers.
Read more: “How US strikes against Yemen’s Houthis have unfolded,” via Reuters, reporting Monday.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2013, all seven crew members were killed when their cargo plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Bagram Airfield after an improperly secured load dramatically altered flight physics, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s final accident report (PDF).
100 days of Trump 2.0
Two DOGE employees received accounts on classified networks holding nuclear secrets, NPR reports. A Department of Energy spokesperson denied the reporting, then confirmed it, but said the two men—Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern, and Adam Ramada, a Miami-based venture capitalist—had not actually used the accounts.
Experts and sources told NPR that:
- “The DOGE employees’ presence on the network would not by itself be enough for them to gain access to that secret information, as data even within the networks is carefully controlled on a need-to-know basis.”
- The access could be considered a “‘toehold’ that would allow DOGE staffers to request information classified at the secret level.” Said one source: “They’re getting a little further in. It’s something to make note of…It could lead to something bigger.” Read, here.
On Sunday, DHS suddenly ordered employees to report to the office the following day, GovExec reported Monday. Those unable to adjust were forced to burn a vacation day. Like much of the federal government, the Homeland Security department had been phasing in return-to-work efforts when the edict came down. Some workers were told that they would be sent home after checking in because there was no office space available; others were told to send selfies to prove they had complied with the short-notice order. More details, here.
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Global military spending rose last year in a spike unseen since 1988, according to the latest annual data (PDF) from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, released Monday.
The $2.7 trillion spent in 2024 also capped a 10-year run of consecutive rises across the globe. But the “9.4 percent increase in 2024 was the steepest year-on-year rise since at least 1988,” SIPRI said in its new report.
And as we discussed in a three-part podcast series last year (which addressed spending in Russia, Asia, and overall), “For the second year in a row, military expenditure increased in all five of the world’s geographical regions, reflecting heightened geopolitical tensions,” SIPRI writes.
Driving all this spending: “the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, and in the Middle East, driven by the war in Gaza and wider regional conflicts,” but also as U.S. officials have requested of Europe for the past several years, “Many countries have also committed to raising military spending, which will lead to further global increases,” SIPRI observed.
And lastly: Amazon just launched its first Kuiper internet satellites, which could eventually put some pressure on Elon Musk and his Starlink program in fairly wide military and civilian use today.
More than two dozen of the broadband satellites were carried toward low-earth orbit Monday via United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket taking off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “It was the first of more than 80 planned launches to build out the Project Kuiper megaconstellation, which will eventually harbor more than 3,200 spacecraft,” Space-dot-com reports.
In contrast, “SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, which already beams service down to customers around the world, currently consists of more than 7,200 operational spacecraft. And Starlink—perhaps Project Kuiper’s biggest competitor—is growing all the time.” (Here’s a real-time visualization of the Starlink constellation.)
Also notable: “Ground stations will connect the Kuiper satellites to the web services infrastructure in a manner that could also allow companies to communicate with their own remote equipment,” the NYTs reports. “For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.” Read more at Reuters or AP.
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