Bombshell NYT Report Reveals 'Invisible' F-35 Nearly Shot Down by Houthis
This nearly ~4,000 word premium article covers the recent ‘bombshell’ reports about US failures in Yemen, then segues into the perennial ‘drone war’ topic, with new updates from the front which include new Russian drone units, technology, missiles, and how militaries of the world are adapting.
A truly ‘bombshell’ New York Times article revealed the jaw-dropping truth a few days ago about the real reasons Trump pulled out of Yemen.
First a summary for those who don’t want to read the article:
According to a New York Times article, U.S. President Donald J. Trump grew frustrated after the lack of immediate results and numerous mishaps and setbacks during Operation Rough Rider (ORR), the operation to degrade and destroy Houthi military capabilities and hamper their ability to strike commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea.
New details were also revealed in the article, including those on the nature of strike operations themselves. Already known to many, the Houthis downed a staggering 7 MQ-9 "Predator" drones in just the first 30 days of ORR, which started back in March 2025.
Additionally, citing unnamed U.S. officials, an unspecified amount of F-35 and F-16 fighter jets were nearly downed by Houthi air defenses in the same time period. While U.S. pilots are well trained enough to be able to evade, counter, and/or defeat incoming surface-to-air missiles, the article detailed the looming possibility that a U.S. pilot could be shot down, killed, or captured.
Ultimately, intelligence agencies were able to quantify "some degradation" of the Houthis' capabilities but caveated their assessment with the fact that reconstitution efforts would be easy for the Houthis.
After deliberation with top U.S. officials and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, key players in the fight against the Houthis, a consensus on how to move forward was unable to be reached. the last straw for President Trump? The accidental loss of two F/A-18 fighter jets in just as many weeks.
As the above notes, Trump didn’t want to get into a long entanglement and demanded a ‘progress report’ of results from the Yemeni campaign after 30 days. The report was not promising: the US was unable to even establish ‘air superiority’ over the Houthis:
But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.
Let’s first make something clear. Some have claimed that the US established ‘air superiority’ but not ‘air supremacy’, as if there’s a difference between the two. These are phony terms concocted—or at least popularized—by the US MIC to sell its Iraq war adventures, with claims that the modern ‘unstoppable’ American ‘airpower’ is capable of somehow totally dominating the skies against a foe. In reality, no such thing as true ‘air supremacy’ exists in a near-peer conflict, and has never been established in history over a foe that can fight back. These are nothing more than marketing terms to sell weapons for a war that doesn’t exist.
What we find in Yemen is that the US had to engage in distant ‘stand off’ strikes, as was the case with Israel when it attempted to hit Iran. Long ago our detective work here proved that Israel was firing missiles from well within Iraqi borders, with its F-35s terrified to cross over into Iran proper. Amongst other evidence, this was indicated by the booster casings of the Air LORA ballistic missiles fired from Israeli F-35Is being found well within Iraqi territory, where they were launched.
But we’ll get back to the F-35s in a moment.
The NYT article goes on to mention how the US was essentially blindsided and blinded by the Houthis’ destruction of a large amount of Reaper drones within the first month of the operation:
In those first 30 days, the Houthis shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), hampering Central Command’s ability to track and strike the militant group.
As we know, the Houthis then caused the USS Truman to lose two F/A-18 Super Hornets, valued at ~$70M each. NYT writes that by then, Trump had had enough.
But the cost of the operation was staggering. The Pentagon had deployed two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses, to the Middle East, officials acknowledged privately. By the end of the first 30 days of the campaign, the cost had exceeded $1 billion, the officials said.
But of course, the most shocking of the article’s admissions that has everyone in fantods relates to how an American F-35 was reportedly nearly shot down by Houthi air defenses. The strike came so close that the F-35 had to take evasive dodging maneuvers:
Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses, making real the possibility of American casualties, multiple U.S. officials said.
Many top military publications immediately jumped on this:
TWZ provides a further scoop:
U.S. F-35 stealth fighter had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid being hit by Houthi surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, a U.S. official told The War Zone.
“They got close enough that the [F-35] had to maneuver,” the official said.
TWZ’s conclusion says it all:
The fact that even the Houthis, with their relatively rudimentary air defenses, were able to keep many U.S. aircraft from making direct attacks, with a heavy reliance on valuable standoff weapons and even stealth bombers instead, certainly has broader implications that we will be exploring further in future articles.
First of all, recall this earlier quote about US heavily favoring long-range munitions, particularly as used with the stealth B-2 Spirits:
However, so “many precision munitions were being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners were growing increasingly concerned about overall stocks and the implications for any situation in which the United States might have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China,” the Times explained.
This gives us a clear picture of the situation. The US is unable to safely conduct operations near even Yemen’s airspace, with its so-called ‘rudimentary’ air defenses. F-35s—claimed to be ‘the most advanced fighter jets ever assembled’—are unable to safely operate without being detected. What do you think it could be that’s allowing the Houthis to detect “invisible” F-35s to such an extent as to fire on them, causing evasive maneuvers? Is it hand-me-down Iranian radars, which themselves are likely hand-me-down Russian ones? How would the vaunted F-35s and B-2s handle the far larger and superior national Iranian AD network if they can’t even handle the Houthi one?
It now makes all the more sense as to why Israel dared not go anywhere near Iran’s border with its own F-35Is: the West knows their planes are in fact detectable by the radars of the resistance, and the latest episode merely proves this fact. The only reason the Houthis didn’t get the shoot down likely comes down to the fact that it’s easier to manufacture a radar—a much older technology—than it is to make a missile with the kinematic properties that allow it to chase down a maneuverable fighter jet; the radar likely did its job but the missile couldn’t quite finish it.
The fact is, the West has spent decades building up an entire doctrine of warfare that is slowly becoming obsolete—one that relies on high-tech, high-cost weapons which cannot be reproduced at scale. Part of this is due to the fact that with the increasing complexity of modern ‘high-tech’ weapons, supply chains become problematic, particularly when China controls most of the world’s rare earths.
Just listen to this stunning new Macron statement, wherein he admits that France has nothing left to give to Ukraine because their model of warfare was never designed for such high-intensity fighting:
“You have to understand we had an army model that wasn’t designed for high-intensity land conflicts. So we gave everything we had, even produced more and more faster…but we can’t give what we don’t have.”
This has been increasingly the theme in world conflicts of late: the surge in innovations from the Global South outpacing the outmoded, profit-driven military models of the West.
The recent Pakistani-Indian clash appeared to be another example, as Chinese arms in the hands of Pakistanis were said to have punched well above their weight, and—if reports are accurate—were more than a match for equivalent Western weapons, particularly in the case of fighter jets:
From Bloomberg:
It begins with:
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