"What is the virtue of a proportional response?” asks President Jed Bartlet of his National Security Council (NSC) in one episode of The West Wing. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That’s a proportional response.” Angrily, the president cuts off the aides trying to explain and interjects: “They do that, so we do this—it’s the cost of doing business. It’s been factored in. Am I right or am I missing something here?” Exasperated by the president’s interrogation of the virtues of a proportional response, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reluctantly admits, “It isn’t virtuous, Mr. President. It’s all there is, sir.”

The opening story arc of Aaron Sorkin’s magnum opus is an extended meditation on the limitations of military power and the responsibility of command. Faced with a crisis in the Middle East, a U.S. jet shot down over Syria, which happened to be carrying a member of his staff, the newly minted commander-in-chief struggles to calibrate his response to this affront to American military power. Ultimately, after asking his national security team to devise a “disproportional response” that “doesn’t make me think we are just docking somebody’s damn allowance,” Bartlet orders the original precision strikes to go ahead out of concern for the civilian casualties and diplomatic blowback that might attend a full-bore military incursion. The president’s chief of staff reminds Bartlet—and the viewer—that this is “how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible—it’s not nothing!”

Today, the United States faces the challenge of mounting a proportional response to Houthi aggression in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthi’s drone and missile blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is now well into its ninth month. The U.S. Navy has just dispatched its fourth sequential carrier strike group (CSG)—the USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts—to protect international shipping in the region. Thus far, the Biden administration’s preferred response has been to order the Navy into harm’s way and let U.S. warships intercept missile and drone attacks directly rather than to address the root causes of the crisis, which includes the administration’s own derelict Iran policy. This has empowered Tehran to finance and arm the Houthis. The administration’s response to the crisis in the Red Sea has been “reasonable,” “responsible,” and certainly “not nothing”—but by tying up scarce strategic resources and expending irreplaceable munitions against third-tier threats, it has been anything but proportional to the interests of the United States.

For the past nine months, the United States has stepped up to the plate to defend the freedom of the seas and the global commercial system from the Houthi’s blockade. Two aircraft carrier strike groups—led by the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—were already in the region when the Houthis announced their intention to attack shipping transiting the Bab el-Mandeb in support of Hamas’ war against Israel. Since then, the Theodore Roosevelt CSG and the Abraham Lincoln CSG have been diverted from the Pacific to stanch the bleeding from the global shipping system’s open sore. In doing so, Washington has elevated the Bab el-Mandeb to an equivalent level of importance as the Euro-Atlantic, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific theaters—the three regions where the Pentagon aims to maintain a round-the-clock carrier presence. By adopting a posture of direct defense of civilian shipping, the United States has also elected to expend $1 billion of scarce, difficult-to-procure munitions shooting down Houthi missiles and drones rather than addressing the root causes of the problem.