Houthis Now Manufacture Ballistic Missiles Domestically, Not Just Import

Since November 2023, Yemen's Houthi forces have employed UAVs, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles in hundreds of attacks on maritime shipping and land-based targets in the Red Sea and beyond. What makes this a structural shift rather than a temporary crisis is that the Houthis have transitioned from importing complete missile systems to manufacturing them domestically. In 2024 and 2025, more than 80% of items seized en route to the Houthis were raw materials and manufacturing components rather than finished weapons, indicating that the group has developed indigenous production capabilities for ballistic missiles and drones with Iranian technical assistance. This matters because it represents a fundamental change in missile proliferation dynamics. Traditional nonproliferation regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) focus on preventing the transfer of complete missile systems and major subsystems. But when a non-state actor can manufacture missiles from commercially available materials and components, export controls become far less effective. The Houthis possess Scud-B and Scud-C variants, North Korean Hwasong derivatives, Tochka missiles, and Iranian-designed systems -- a diverse arsenal that a non-state group was never supposed to be able to field. The economic impact has been enormous. Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping disrupted 12-15% of global trade that transits the Suez Canal, forcing vessels on costly detours around the Cape of Good Hope, driving up marine insurance premiums by 10-20x in the region, and adding weeks of transit time to global supply chains. The multinational naval coalition assembled to respond cost billions of dollars and consumed hundreds of interceptors that cost orders of magnitude more than the drones and missiles they were shooting down. The structural reason this proliferation persists is that Iran gains strategic leverage from transferring missile technology to proxy groups at minimal cost. For Iran, enabling Houthi missile capability creates a threat to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and global shipping that forces the U.S. and allies to expend enormous resources on defense -- a classic asymmetric strategy. The international community has no enforcement mechanism to stop this transfer: UN arms embargoes on the Houthis are routinely violated, the maritime interdiction campaign captures only a fraction of smuggled materials, and diplomatic pressure on Iran has failed to halt the flow. The precedent is alarming. If a non-state actor in Yemen can field an arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range drones capable of threatening international shipping and striking targets 2,000 km away, other non-state actors with state sponsors will follow the same playbook. The era when ballistic missiles were exclusively the province of nation-states is over.