U.S. Navy Accidentally Throws $64 Million Jet Overboard Off the Coast of Yemen
One of the most poignant images of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was sailors dumping aircraft into the sea. More evacuation flights were approaching the U.S. fleet from Saigon than American ships had room to hold, so sailors had to push helicopters overboard to make room for incoming airlifts.
On Monday, the U.S. military made a similar maneuver, but entirely by accident. While trying to escape from a Yemeni missile and drone attack, the U.S.S. Harry Truman veered so hard that a F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet fell from the aircraft carrier into the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy informed CNN. None of the crew were harmed, except for a sailor who suffered “minor injuries,” according to the Navy’s statement.
Although the cost of the Super Hornet has changed over time, the Navy recently bought 17 of them for $1.1 billion, making for a cost of around $64 million per warplane. And this F/A-18E was the second one lost to the war in Yemen. Last December, the U.S.S. Gettysburg accidentally shot down one of its own fighters shortly after it took off.
And in January 2024, two Navy SEALs slipped and drowned while trying to board a cargo boat allegedly smuggling Iranian-made missile parts to Yemen.
The campaign against the Houthi movement in Sanaa, one of Yemen’s two rival governments, has been criticized for its wastefulness. It cost $3 billion in just the first three weeks. But money is not the only issue. The wars in the Middle East are sucking up scarce physical resources that the U.S. military wants to station near China instead. A senior Pentagon official warned Congress that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command was “risking real operational problems” as a result of the Yemeni crisis.
During the first night of U.S. air raids in January 2024, the Navy used up a year’s production of Tomahawk missiles. “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,” then-President Joe Biden told reporters shortly after.
Houthi attacks on shipping (and U.S. attacks on Yemen) paused in late January 2025, with the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire. President Donald Trump resumed the Yemeni war in March, promising to end the Houthi campaign of “piracy, violence, and terrorism” once and for all. His hawkish national security adviser, Mike Waltz, promised to go further than Biden’s “feckless attacks,” though the administration wouldn’t name any of the Houthi leaders it claimed
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