The European Union’s decision to launch Operation ASPIDES in February 2024, at the height of the Red Sea crisis, represented a calibrated assertion of Europe’s capacity to translate economic exposure into maritime power. The Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, narrow and strategically fragile, serve as the hinge between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean—an artery through which a substantial share of Europe’s energy, industrial inputs, and finished goods moves in both directions. When Yemen’s Houthi movement began a sustained campaign of missile, drone, and unmanned surface vessel (USV) attacks in late 2023, animated by the war in Gaza and calibrated to impose costs on vessels perceived to be linked to Israel and its supporters, the shock to Suez Canal traffic was immediate. Container lines and tramp owners alike diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to schedules, burning more fuel, and setting off ripple effects in inventories and prices. Into this environment, ASPIDES entered not as an expeditionary force for coercion, but as a defensive escort-and-assurance instrument designed to solve the problem as the shipping industry experiences it: not in declarations of “presence,” but in whether a master, a cargo owner, and an underwriter will all agree—today—to sail.[1]

The operation’s title, ASPIDES, is drawn from the ancient Greek word for “shield” (ἀσπίς), an emblem of defensive protection that reflects both the mission’s posture and its political intent. In classical usage, the term evoked not only a physical barrier against attack but also the disciplined cohesion of a phalanx—an image resonant with the EU’s multinational naval contribution. By adopting this name, Brussels signalled that the mission’s purpose was to provide a protective screen for maritime trade, not to engage in offensive action or alter the conflict’s trajectory ashore. The metaphor is apt: like the aspis carried by hoplites, ASPIDES is designed to be held steady under pressure, forming part of a larger wall of collective defense for the free flow of commerce.

Close Protection and Predictability

From the outset, Europe wagered that close protection, predictable convoy windows, and disciplined rules of engagement would be more persuasive to commercial stakeholders than airstrikes alone—and that a European Union (EU) flag would be perceived in the region as focused on navigation rather than entanglement in Yemen’s internal conflict. This approach found early proof in operational vignettes that spoke convincingly to risk managers. One of the most emblematic came in February 2024, when the French Navy escorted the ultra-large container vessel (ULCV) CMA CGM Jules Verne, operated by Compagnie Maritime d’Affrètement–Compagnie Générale Maritime (CMA CGM), France’s leading container shipping and logistics group, after the line had suspended transits earlier in the month. That escort provided a concrete reference point—a ULCV sliding north under a frigate’s umbrella—showing that, with proper safeguards, passage remained feasible. The same day, French air-defense frigates were engaging Houthi drones in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, underlining the hard-edge capability underpinning the assurance. The blend of practical convoying and capable air defense—replicated across a small but potent rotation of French, Italian, German, Greek, Dutch, and other EU hulls—defined European Union Naval Force (EUNAVFOR) Operation ASPIDES’ operational identity through 2024 and into 2025.[2]

A second proof point, darker and more complex, arrived in August 2024 with the MV Sounion crisis. The Greek-flagged oil tanker was first engaged on 21 August in a multi-vector Houthi assault—small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and an explosive unmanned surface vessel—forcing the crew of twenty-five Filipinos and Russians, along with four private security personnel, to abandon ship. A French destroyer, operating under the ASPIDES flag, closed in to rescue the survivors and ferry them to Djibouti, while also detecting and neutralizing an additional suicide boat moving toward the drifting casualty.

In the days that followed, Houthi media released footage of a small team briefly re-boarding the unmanned Sounion, placing explosive charges and detonating them for propaganda effect—a technique seen earlier in the campaign. Public reporting indicates the boarding party left the tanker after setting off the charges; there was no on-deck interdiction by EU warships. By then, the crew had already been evacuated by a French destroyer under Operation ASPIDES after the first attack, which also saw a bomb-laden USV neutralized. Days later, after the Houthis signalled they would allow rescue access on environmental grounds, ASPIDES established a safety cordon and protected the tugs and salvage teams. This enabled a controlled tow-off and lightering operation that ultimately removed roughly one million barrels of crude without a catastrophic spill.[3]

The recovery of the MV Sounion proved to be a prolonged and technically complex undertaking. Salvage teams required several weeks to stabilize the vessel, extinguish persistent onboard fires, and make it safe for towing. According to private maritime security firm Ambrey, which coordinated with a European naval contingent and commercial salvors, the process involved sealing damaged cargo tanks, injecting inert gas to eliminate ignition risk, and systematically cooling the hull. By early October, the tanker was under tow toward Suez, where its crude oil cargo was offloaded in a controlled operation, bringing to a close one of the most intricate maritime recoveries of the Red Sea crisis.

Lesson Learned in Brussels

For EU decision-makers, the operational lesson was that a defensive mission can still produce strategic effects when it is the only actor on scene, knitting together rescue, defense, and environmental risk mitigation. For insurers and coastal authorities, the lesson was equally sharp: an EU umbrella not only reduces the probability of a strike on a protected hull; it reduces the worst-case consequences when a strike succeeds outside the escort bubble.[3]

The question that preoccupied treasuries in Cairo and Athens, terminal operators in Jeddah and Salalah, and retailers in Rotterdam and Hamburg was more prosaic: was maritime traffic returning, and was ASPIDES the right tool to restore it? The key data point came from Rear Admiral Vasileios Gryparis, ASPIDES commander, who stated in June 2025 that average daily Red Sea transits had climbed to roughly 36-37 ships, up around 60 percent from the August 2024 nadir—a welcome rebound but still far below the pre-crisis norm of roughly 72-75 ships per day.[4] He credited the improvement to a temporary narrowing of the Houthi target set and to the cumulative assurance created by regular EU escorts. He was equally candid about the bottleneck: with only two to three EU warships typically on station, ASPIDES faced queues and scheduling friction that dissuaded some operators from attempting Suez at all. By early June, the mission had provided close protection to 476 merchant ships, a notable achievement that nevertheless masked unfulfilled escort requests, translating directly into lost canal tolls and foregone supply-chain efficiencies.[4]

Institutionally, the Union signalled commitment by extending and broadening the mandate. On 14 February 2025, the Council prolonged ASPIDES until 28 February 2026 and expanded its remit to include the collection of information on arms trafficking and on sanction evasion by “shadow fleets,” with a view to sharing with EU agencies and international partners. The press notice also put a reference amount of over €17 million on the common budget—modest, but meaningful as a headquarters and coordination spine.[5] The decisive costs and commitments would still live with member states, in the form of crewing cycles, munitions stocks, and opportunity costs on fleet availability elsewhere. But the extension mattered politically because it reassured shippers and underwriters that EU escort capacity would not evaporate with shifting headlines.[5]

Comparing U.S. and EU Strategies in the Red Sea

A comparison with the United States-led Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) is instructive. Tactically, OPG achieved formidable interception rates and sustained months of high-tempo air defense, yet it did not restore schedule certainty—largely because it never institutionalized predictable, bookable group transits (convoys) that risk managers and underwriters could price.

By design, ASPIDES complements rather than duplicates that approach. It has a strictly defensive mandate (no strikes ashore) and is centered on close-protection escorts and planned group transits that shippers can book. Its area of operations runs from the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab through the Gulf of Aden into the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf. The two initiatives operate in parallel and coordinate through established navy-to-industry and navy-to-navy mechanisms—United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), the Maritime Security Centre—Horn of Africa (MSCHOA), the Shared Awareness and Deconfliction process (SHADE), and the multinational Combined Maritime Forces (CMF). In practice, this means intelligence sharing and route management rather than carving the sea into fixed “U.S.” and “EU” boxes. Where ASPIDES has tried to translate tactical defense into commercial confidence is in offering escorts that can actually be booked, albeit with limited capacity at times, which can mean multi-day waits. Even so, the steady cadence of close-protected transits and the gradual rebound in daily traffic suggest that success is better measured by ships sailing on time than by the number of inbound threats shot down.[6]

ASPIDES, smaller and more politically constrained, found purchase precisely because it stayed in its lane. This meant organizing merchant vessels into structured convoys, positioning a missile-armed escort—equipped with the Aster air-defense system—just beyond the visual horizon to provide discreet but ready protection, deploying helicopters for extended surveillance and rapid response, and scheduling transits in predictable windows that allowed for concentrated defensive coverage. Crucially, the operational data from these passages could be used to demonstrate a measurable reduction in threat exposure, giving marine insurers a quantifiable basis on which to offer coverage at sustainable rates.

Houthis Launch Phase Four

For much of early 2025, this approach was bearing fruit. Underwriters experimented with conditional terms for escorted voyages, and some operators resumed transits selectively. That partial equilibrium was shattered in late July 2025, when the Houthis declared what they called “Phase Four” of their naval campaign: they would target any ship belonging to companies that do business with Israeli ports, irrespective of flag or immediate destination.[1, 7, 15, 16] By shifting from a voyage-based trigger (route and recent port calls) to a corporate-exposure trigger (beneficial owners, operators, and slot-sharing partners), the Houthis widened the risk perimeter far beyond ships physically bound for Haifa or Ashdod. In a global liner industry knitted together by alliances and vessel-sharing agreements, such a doctrine captures fleets whose sister ships or parent groups have Israeli port exposure, even if a given hull is sailing between third countries with no Israeli nexus. For ASPIDES, the implication could be a surge in escort demand from owners who had previously seen themselves as marginally exposed; for insurers, more complex due diligence on corporate linkages and a likely hardening of premiums for fleets with any Israel-related ties across their networks.[1, 16]

Events at sea soon translated the threat into grief. In the first ten days of July, the Liberian-flagged, Greek-operated bulker Magic Seas was attacked and ultimately went down after a multi-vector assault that combined missiles and small-boat weapons with explosive USVs. The crew were rescued, but the imagery of a bulker slipping beneath the surface after months of relative calm punctured the narrative that Red Sea risk had become largely theoretical outside Israel-linked voyages.[13] Within forty-eight hours, the Eternity C, also Liberian-flagged and Greek-operated, was attacked and sank after repeated strikes; at least four crew members were killed, others were rescued after long hours in the water, and eleven were shown in captivity in Houthi-released footage—the first such video since the shipping campaign began.[8, 12, 14, 16] The sequence—two sinkings in a week, one with multiple fatalities and detentions—reintroduced a level of psychological hazard that actuarial models cannot fully capture. It also reignited debates within ship management firms and Protection and Indemnity (P&I) clubs—the member-owned mutual insurers for shipowners, charterers, and operators that pool risk and cover third-party liabilities such as pollution, crew injury, cargo loss, collision damage, and wreck removal, and that routinely issue loss-prevention and routing guidance—about the sufficiency of private maritime security teams, the right mix of routing and reporting, crew consent to transit, and the elasticity of charterparty obligations under elevated risk.

For ASPIDES planners, the July escalation poses a practical dilemma. The mission’s legal foundation under the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy limits the mandate to defensive measures—tracking, escorting, interposing warships against imminent attack, and neutralizing aerial or surface threats at sea. It does not authorize pre-emptive strikes ashore on launch infrastructure or the declaration of exclusion zones. European diplomats argue that this limitation preserves ASPIDES’ perception as a neutral protector of commerce and insulates it from being drawn into Yemen’s civil war. The cost of restraint, however, is visible when attacks occur beyond the immediate shield of an escort: a launcher that survives a strike remains available for the next salvo. This stands in deliberate contrast to the U.S.-led coalition’s willingness to engage targets ashore under Operation Prosperity Guardian if an attack chain is detected. Each approach has trade-offs. ASPIDES’ defensive profile has preserved regional acceptability and access, notably with Djibouti and Egypt, while the more kinetic approach raises deterrence but carries greater political exposure.[6]

At the operational level, ASPIDES appeared to evolve in response to the protracted threat environment. By mid-2025, naval analysts and industry observers suggested that its commanders were experimenting with more flexible convoy scheduling, potentially adjusting escort departures by hours or days to align with intelligence assessments of probable Houthi launch windows. While the EU has not disclosed specific tactics, such an approach would be consistent with standard maritime security practice. Publicly available reporting confirms that the mission draws on EU Satellite Centre imagery and commercial space-based synthetic aperture radar to enhance situational awareness, tools that could support prioritizing vessels at elevated risk and allocating escorts accordingly. This would effectively amount to a form of operational triage: not every request for protection can be met, but those approved receive intensive coverage. Within the current defensive mandate, measures like timing, routing, and enhanced surveillance represent the upper limit of permissible agility, shrinking exposure windows without altering the rules of engagement.[5, 4]

Even with tactical refinements, the real determinant of ASPIDES’ flexibility lies in hard assets—warships and embarked helicopters, not communiqués. By June 2025, Rear Admiral Vasileios Gryparis was candid: he could not guarantee merchant ships would not be attacked, and some companies remained deterred from using the corridor because of the mission’s limited number of escorts—just two to three ships operating at a time—which could delay transits by as much as a week for those seeking protection. To address this bottleneck, he formally requested the EU to raise the force to 10 ships, a level he argued was necessary to meet demand. Since its launch, ASPIDES has provided close protection to 476 ships, shot down 18 drones, destroyed two remote-controlled boats, and intercepted four ballistic missiles, underscoring both its defensive value and its untapped potential if reinforced. In a commercial environment where voyage decisions are made weekly, delays of several days can permanently shift vessels to the Cape route. The operational fix is neither novel nor complicated: increase the number of air-defense escorts and aviation detachments so the mission can turn heightened demand into predictable, timely schedules. For Europe’s force-generation conferences and seasonal rotation planning, the economic logic is straightforward: without more hulls, assurance remains rationed, and rationed assurance cannot close the gap to pre-crisis volumes.[4]

The Gulf Countries

For Gulf Cooperation Council partners—whose terminals, feeder networks, and bunkering ecosystems were collateral victims when traffic cratered in 2023-24—the dividends of a scaled ASPIDES are tangible. The EU’s strictly defensive posture and its separation from strikes ashore have preserved diplomatic space with Gulf capitals that favor de-escalation at sea while pursuing their own channels with Yemeni actors. This makes the Red Sea an arena where practical cooperation between the EU and GCC states can expand without entangling disagreements elsewhere. Selective non-EU participation is feasible under EU rules of engagement and coordination mechanisms, mirroring lessons from the anti-piracy era in the Gulf of Aden, when the EU, NATO, and independent deployers choreographed presence through information-sharing and deconfliction cells. In the Red Sea, the threat is more air-maritime and time-sensitive, but the principle holds: users of the sea lanes should be invited to share the escort burden under a cohesive defensive concept. The Council’s addition of arms-traffic and sanctions-evasion monitoring to ASPIDES’ remit creates further points of alignment with partners whose appetite for direct escorting may vary but whose interest in policing illicit logistics remains steady.[5]

The insurance market will watch the next quarter of escort performance and incident rates closely. War-risk premiums reflect not only reported attacks but the perceived predictability of protection. ASPIDES’ advantage over ad hoc “presence” is that it provides a schedulable service with measurable outputs: how many hulls were escorted, how many requests were received, the median wait time, and how many incidents occurred within the escort bubble. While tactical details must remain confidential, publishing aggregated, commercially useful metrics—monthly, with enough lag to protect operations—would allow underwriters to craft conditional discounts for escorted voyages, creating a positive feedback loop in which discounted premiums stimulate more demand for convoys. The July sinkings demonstrate that, absent such assurances, premiums rise and marginal operators, especially in bulk segments with thinner charters and fewer substitution options, peel away.[4, 16]

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the EU launched ASPIDES with a “purely defensive” mandate because it judged that the political costs and escalation risks of striking into Yemen outweighed the tactical gains such strikes might deliver, and because it believed its comparative advantage lay in providing an escort service that reconnected commerce to Suez. The mission’s measured success through mid-2025—the upward slope of daily transits, the accumulation of protected voyages, and the absence of catastrophic environmental disasters on its watch—supports that diagnosis. The July 2025 Phase Four announcement and subsequent sinkings do not negate the logic; they reinforce the need for a service that offers market actors something actionable in the face of shifting threats: book an escort, accept the convoy window, update the underwriting endorsement. In that sense, ASPIDES is not merely a shield; it is a behavioral technology that converts political volatility into operational predictability.[4, 5]

Limits remain. First is inventory: Europe does not have a surplus of modern area-air-defense escorts relative to commitments in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indo-Pacific. Second is endurance: munitions expenditure and maintenance cycles constrain how long any navy can sustain high-alert deployments far from home. Third is cohesion: ASPIDES thrives on a diplomatic framing that insists on freedom of navigation and avoids being dragged into Yemen’s internal power struggles or the broader Iran-Israel confrontation. As the July incidents reignite calls to “do something,” the temptation to broaden rules of engagement will return. Changing the mission might destroy the reason it works. The defensive posture is not a bug; it is the reason littoral states tolerate the mission and shippers trust it. If Europe wants more throughput, the solution lies in more escorts, refined corridors, and deeper insurer-navy coordination, not in altering the mission’s essential character.[6, 5]

The complementary roles of Washington and Brussels are clearer after two years of crisis. American firepower has bounded the threat set and demonstrated the ability to defeat complex salvos. European escort assurance has provided the scheduled, bookable service industry needs to return. The division of labor fits the Red Sea’s geography and politics: a muscular backstop coupled with a neutral commercial shield. The question for policymakers is whether Europe will resource its role proportionately to the stakes. With four to six escorts steadily deployed and a reliable convoy cadence, daily transits could climb into the forties or fifties, restoring Suez revenues and easing supply-chain costs. Without that, the corridor will remain bifurcated: a thin stream of escorted hulls and a costly detour around Africa that keeps inflationary pressure embedded in freight indices. That is not a debate for another day; it is a budgeting and force-generation choice for this quarter.[4]

Against that backdrop, the July sinkings and the expanded targeting doctrine offer clarity. The Red Sea is not going to revert to pre-October 2023 normalcy in a straight line; the Houthi movement has demonstrated both capability—multi-vector strikes with missiles, drones, and explosive boats—and political agility in framing maritime operations as leverage in a broader conflict. Europe’s role is not to resolve that politics but to preserve a channel of commerce through it. ASPIDES has given the EU a tool to do exactly that: it is lawful, regionally accepted, and valued by the industry it serves. The task now is to scale what works—more hulls, tighter corridors, clearer metrics, deeper insurer integration—and invite like-minded maritime users to shoulder part of the load under EU rules. The alternative is to allow a relatively small but lethal armed movement to hold a globally strategic waterway at risk at will by changing the criteria by which it brands a ship a target. That would be an abdication unworthy of the stakes and inconsistent with the Union’s stated ambition to be a guardian of the rules-based order at sea.[1, 16]

The strategic logic is clear. Each additional escort directly translates into reduced waiting times, increased convoy frequency, and higher daily throughput—measurable outputs that underwriters, charterers, and coastal states can all register. In this sense, force generation is not an abstract defense debate but a concrete lever for restoring pre-crisis trade volumes. With the United States no longer in the fight, the EU has an opportunity to demonstrate that it can act decisively in its own interest, aligning naval capacity with economic exposure. Meeting the commander’s request for 10 ships is not simply a military objective—it is a strategic investment in the resilience of Europe’s supply chains, the stability of global energy flows, and the credibility of the EU as a security actor in its extended neighborhood.

References

1. “Red Sea Risk Widens as Houthis Vow to Target Carriers Tied to Israel,” gCaptain, August 5, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/red-sea-risk-widens-as-houthis-vow-to-target-carriers-tied-to-israel/.
2. “French Navy Downs Houthi Drones and Escorts CMA CGM Ship Through Red Sea,” gCaptain, February 20, 2024, https://gcaptain.com/french-navy-downs-houthi-drones-and-escorts-cma-cgm-ship-through-red-sea/.
3. “Tanker hit by Houthi rebels salvaged,” Associated Press, January 10, 2025, and related Sounion coverage: https://apnews.com/article/yemen-oil-tanker-fire-red-sea-sounion-salvage-houthis-35e0af867087a18c653b71ca49dc1d0e.
4. “Red Sea marine traffic up 60% after Houthis narrowed targets, EU commander says,” Reuters, June 5, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/red-sea-marine-traffic-up-60-after-houthis-narrowed-targets-eu-commander-says-2025-06-05/.
5. Council of the European Union, “Red Sea: Council prolongs the mandate of Operation ASPIDES,” February 14, 2025, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/02/14/red-sea-council-prolongs-the-mandate-of-operation-aspides/.
6. Joshua Tallis, “How the Biden Administration Won Tactically but Failed Strategically in the Red Sea,” War on the Rocks, April 2, 2025, https://warontherocks.com/2025/04/how-the-biden-administration-won-tactically-but-failed-strategically-in-the-red-sea/.
7. “Yemen’s Houthis Threaten To Target Ships Linked To Firms Dealing With Israeli Ports,” gCaptain, July 28, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/yemens-houthis-threaten-to-target-ships-linked-to-firms-dealing-with-israeli-ports/.
8.  “Houthi Video Shows Deadly Attack and Sinking of Eternity C Bulk Carrier in Red Sea,” gCaptain, July 9, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/houthi-video-shows-deadly-attack-and-sinking-of-eternity-c-bulk-carrier-in-red-sea/.
9. EU External Action Service, “About Operation EUNAVFOR ASPIDES,” (updated 2024/2025), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eunavfor-aspides/about-operation-eunavfor-aspides_en.
10. “Red Sea marine traffic up 60%…,” Middle East Monitor (Reuters syndication), June 5, 2025, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250605-red-sea-marine-traffic-up-60-after-houthis-narrowed-targets-eu-commander-says/.
11. “Red Sea marine traffic up 60 percent after Houthis narrowed targets, EU commander says,” Arab News (Reuters syndication), June 5, 2025, https://www.arabnews.com/node/2603483/middle-east.
12. “Eternity C Sinks in Red Sea; Search Underway for 15 Still Missing,” gCaptain, July 9, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/eternity-c-sinks-in-red-sea-rescue-underway/.
13. “Houthi Video Shows Sinking of M/V Magic Seas in Red Sea,” gCaptain, July 8, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/houthi-video-shows-sinking-of-m-v-magic-seas-in-red-sea/.
14. “Houthi Militants Release Video of Kidnapped ETERNITY C Crew Members,” gCaptain, July 29, 2025, https://gcaptain.com/houthi-militants-release-video-of-kidnapped-eternity-c-crew-members/.
15. “Yemen’s Houthis threaten to target ships linked to firms dealing with Israeli ports,” Reuters, July 27, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-threaten-target-ships-linked-firms-dealing-with-israeli-ports-2025-07-27/.
16. “Yemen’s Houthi rebels threaten to escalate attacks on ships linked to companies dealing with Israel,” Associated Press, July 28, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/002a52ed270245427fbe29a0118c3711.