chapotraphouse

There are a combination of tools at play. I have seen videos of the Ansarallah (A.K.A. "The Houthis") using conventional missiles against ships, as well as borderline-commercial UAVs to attack the port of Eliat rather early in the conflict (I believe these are produced by the Iranian military, but commercial clones have appeared through some Chinese vendors). They've also used more conventional boarding parties via helicopter and boat - with mixed results. Setting Yemen aside, commercial drones were instrumental in destroying the network of surveillance towers and machine gun nests surrounding Gaza on October 7th. They have also seen regular use by the resistance forces in Iraq and Syria to molest American military bases.

Even conventional military forces have begun to adopt commercial drones. Their use in the Ukraine-Russia war has skyrocketed, even though these forces have access to conventional military hardware (including UAVs).

The guy in the video is correct that a historical shift is taking place as far as armed conflict goes, but access to cheap UAVs alone is not sufficient to explain the strangle-hold Yemen has managed to place on international shipping, nor is it sufficient to recreate this disruption in a vacuum.

What makes the situation in the Red Sea unique is that the Ansarallah cannot be dislodged. The most recent civil war saw the Saudis attempt to do this. A country which does nothing but shit money, employing all the state of the art American military hardware money can buy for 10 years failed to do it. It is the combination of these two factors. The enormous leap in the capabilities of improvised munitions, combined with extreme difficulty in deterring a battle-hardened militant movement with nothing to lose.

The West has no leverage whatsoever in this situation, except the ability to make threats about launching an incredibly costly and bloody military expedition against one of the poorest countries in the world no chance for anything but a pyrrhic victory.

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/2-million-missile-to-shoot-down-2000-drone-houthis/

Ansarallah are the legitimate government of Yemen with massive popular support, they are uniformly referred to in western propaganda as rebels to delegitimize them

the spice must flow

Not just any trade route, my friend. THE trade route. And you can hardly call them rebels when they are the de facto government of the country.