Pentagon Suggests There’re No U.S. Troops in Yemen — but Last Month the White House Said There Are

Amid a raft of U.S. strikes targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon has boots on the ground in the country — a fact the Defense Department has recently refused to acknowledge.

“A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS,” the White House told Congress in its most recent War Powers Act report on December 7. 

This month, the U.S. began its military campaign against the Houthis for attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea, a move the Yemeni rebels said was aimed at getting Israel to end its assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

As the U.S. began to attack, defense officials suddenly became more reticent about the American military presence in Yemen. In a press briefing on January 17, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder was asked if he could give assurances that the U.S. had no troops on the ground in Yemen. Ryder responded, “I’m not aware of any U.S. forces on the ground.”

The National Security Council and the Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment.

“It’s possible that U.S. forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, who worked on Yemen as a Capitol Hill staffer. “But it’s also possible that, given the dramatic expansion in US presence in the region in recent months, he is trying to skirt the question to avoid greater scrutiny.”

“It’s possible that U.S. forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all.”

The Yemen conflict is a touchy subject for the Biden administration, which has repeatedly said that it is taking care not to allow Israel’s war in Gaza to metastasize into a broader regional war. As it has become increasingly difficult to deny the threat of a growing conflict, the administration is nonetheless trying.

“We currently assess that the fight between Israel and Hamas continues to remain contained in Gaza,” Ryder said on January 17, following strikes on the Houthis by the U.S. and coalition partners. 

“We don’t think that we are at war,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the next day, on January 18. “We don’t want to see a regional war.”

Her remarks were met with incredulity by one member of the press corps, who quipped: “We’ve bombed them five times now … if this isn’t war, what is war?” 

Despite the rhetoric, tension with the Houthis has reached its highest point in years. 

The U.S. has conducted eight rounds of strikes on Houthi targets in the past month alone. On December 18, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a U.S.-led coalition to defend ships against Houthi attacks called Operation Prosperity Guardian. Since then, the coalition has conducted both cruise missile strikes and airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The strikes came after attacks by the Houthis on merchant ships in the Red Sea, through which a substantial amount of global shipping passes. The Houthis, a rebel group in Yemen that controls most of the country’s most populous territories, blockaded the Red Sea, with the stated objective of halting Israel’s war in Gaza.

The U.S. military has quietly assigned a name to its operation targeting Houthi assets in Yemen. Observers have pointed out that formal names for operations suggest they will be long term in nature. (Officials have not identified an end date for the fight against the Houthis.) Called “Poseidon Archer,” the name for the anti-Houthi strikes is another fact the Biden administration has refused to acknowledge.

“So, this mission is just, ‘We’re striking the Houthis?’” cracked one member of the White House press corps after spokesperson John Kirby declined to provide the name. “I would — I’d refer you to the Pentagon if they’ve given it an operational name or not,” Kirby responded. “That’s really for them to speak to.”