- US Navy ships have spent months shooting down Houthi missiles and drones off the coast of Yemen.
- Sailors on the warships sometimes have only minutes, sometimes just seconds, to deal with a threat.
An anti-ship missile is inbound and coming in fast — as the red line that has suddenly appeared on a digital map inside the destroyer's combat-information center shows — and the ship's crew has only moments to respond.
This simulated scenario that Business Insider observed firsthand offers a glimpse into what sailors aboard the American warship USS Gravely have been facing.
The Gravely is on the front lines of the US Navy's effort to defend international shipping lanes off the coast of Yemen from Houthi missiles and drones, and BI visited the destroyer in the Red Sea this week to see how its crew dealt with the relentless threats from the Iran-backed rebels.
Among the threats that the Gravely, a member of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, has engaged over the past two months are deadly anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles. They often leave the 340-strong crew with little time to respond.
Every combat response from the Gravely begins in its combat-information center, a multimission room full of monitors with digital maps and radars, staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If something is fired from the warship, the process starts here.
When dealing with any inbound threat, the first thing sailors do is identify it and make an evaluation to determine the best course of action to defend US assets in the area, Lt. j.g. James Rodney, who works in the combat-information center, said.
The faster a threat is traveling, the less time there is to react, Rodney told BI, adding that the available response time could be a matter of minutes, or just seconds.
"We're generally here just to defend the ship," he said. "That's the main thing. So have situational awareness of what's around us and what's around our strike group."
US Navy ships are incredibly well defended — outfitted with formidable armaments such as surface-to-air missiles and guns — and the Houthis have not yet managed to hit one in the Red Sea. But there have been close calls.
In late January, for example, a Houthi anti-ship cruise missile came within 1 mile of the Gravely, so close that the warship was forced to use its close-in weapons system to shoot down the threat. The gun is essentially a last line of defense.
Arleigh Burke-class destroyers such as the Gravely are equipped with at least one of the systems, a radar-guided 20 mm cannon that can fire up to 4,500 rounds a minute. The system has a range of about 2 nautical miles and would likely come into play only after a warship had already fired missile interceptors, such as the SM-2 or SM-3, to destroy the threat farther out.
In addition to shooting down Houthi threats that are already airborne, the Gravely has used its long-range Tomahawk land-attack missiles for strikes against the rebels inside Yemen.
Since mid-January, the US Navy has conducted several rounds of widespread and coordinated strikes alongside the UK military against rebel facilities, and it has also carried out preemptive strikes — hitting Houthi missiles and drones before they can even launch — on a nearly daily basis over the past few weeks.
Interceptor missiles and Tomahawks are launched from the Gravely's vertical-launching-system cells, and for Petty Officer 2nd Class Joselyn Martinez, a gunner's mate on the ship, her main priority is making sure this system doesn't have any degradation and is ready to go at any point.
"It is a rush of adrenaline when I see one of my missiles being launched. It also means that I'm doing my job properly," she told BI.
"And when they do launch, it's for the defense of my crew," Martinez added. "I believe they're my family because I don't want anything to happen to them."