The top American official responsible for buying weapons for the country’s military expresses astonishment regarding the firepower that was being deployed by Yemen’s Armed Forces against the Israeli regime and its allies.
The Pentagon’s official for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante made the remarks during an event held by the American news website Axios in Washington, DC. on Wednesday.
“I'm just shocked,” he said, addressing the quality and extent of the operations that the Yemeni forces have been carrying out over the past six months.
The forces are in possession of increasingly sophisticated weapons, including missiles that "can do things that are just amazing," he said, noting, "I'm an engineer and a physicist, and I've been around missiles my whole career."
The Yemeni forces "are getting scary," the American official added.
The forces have been conducting hundreds of strikes against Israeli targets inside the occupied Palestinian territories in retaliation for the regime’s October 2023-present genocidal war and concomitant siege on the Gaza Strip and deadly escalation against Lebanon.
The brutal military onslaught and the escalation have respectively claimed the lives of more than 43,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and at least 3,360 Lebanese.
The forces have also been targeting Israeli ships as well as vessels heading towards or away from the territories as a means of piling up economic pressure on the regime.
Axios said the operations that feature deployment of attack drones and missiles, including ballistic and cruise projectiles, had “strangled waters off Yemen.”
The Yemeni forces had “even sent some [of the targeted vessels] to the seafloor,” the report added.
Additionally, servicemen have been targeting American military vessels off the coast of Yemen. This is in protest against US political and military support for Israeli aggression and in retaliation for American military attacks on Yemen, which aim to hinder its pro-Palestinian and pro-Lebanese operations.
Most recently, the Armed Forces carried out two significant preemptive military operations against US naval assets on Tuesday.
The first operation struck the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea using cruise missiles and drones, while the other targeted two US destroyers in the Red Sea with ballistic missiles and more unmanned aerial vehicles.
According to Axios, the second strike featured the firing of at least eight drones, five anti-ship ballistic missiles, and four anti-ship cruise missiles toward the two destroyers.
Yemen has repeatedly stated that its military operations will continue until the Israeli aggression on Gaza and Lebanon stops and the siege on Gaza is lifted.