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About 10 percent of the world's sea traffic goes through the Red Sea. Rerouting ships around the Cape of Good Hope lengthens the trip by about twelve days, adding considerable cost to freight and disrupting supply chains. The frequency of the attacks has led two of the world's largest shipping companies, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, to order their ships to avoid the Red Sea until further notice; see Major Shipping Lines Avoid Red Sea; Is It Just the Houthis or Should We Be Looking Deeper?.
The new coalition, to be called Operation Prosperity Guardian (is it too much to ask that we begin calling military operations things that don't suck?), will involve ships of several nations. The concept of the operation is not yet known, but it is expected to combine the protection of individual ships with convoys. In fact, very little is known about the operation (number of ships, which countries, when it starts, its Mission) other than its name.
Shipping companies are taking it seriously. Automatic Identification System beacons are showing that Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd ships are forming up for a convoy. //
As I wrote in Major Shipping Lines Avoid Red Sea, Is It Just the Houthis, or Should We Be Looking Deeper? we need to look beyond the possibility of the Israel-Hamas War expanding if Israel carries out retaliatory strikes against Yemen. This is an exercise in testing the US and NATO response to a critical maritime route being obstructed and the tactics, techniques, and procedures we will use in keeping the sea lanes open.