It may be difficult to stop the launches, but you know where they came from and it if was a few vehicles in the desert, they are easy to follow. You track them down and kill the crews.
The prospective launch areas are under constant real-time surveillance and there are a limited number of sites. If your observers are good, you have a chance of catching the launch crews as they setup and wait for victims.
With back-tracing, you may be able to spot the armories where the launch trucks are being loaded. Once you have reasonable certainty of where they are located, you hit them too.
Civilian causalities? That is just too bad. The coast is an active war zone.
You must be very careful about anti-aircraft systems that may be deployed in the area especially the Russian S-300 and S-400 systems. Once they show up, it is "game-over" for simple air offensive measures. You aren't going to be using airstrikes more than a few times before you must stop. Better make them fast and effective while you still can.
At some point you had better deploy a whole bunch of expendable attack drones, because manned aircraft won't be able to get through to targets. Neither will most of the drones, but it comes down to swarm numbers and clever evasion software. Some drones will always get through. That might be enough.
The American ships have a very limited supply of defensive missiles, and they cannot be reloaded while at sea. (Whoever though that was an acceptable design for a weapon system?) Once they run low, they must return to a safe port for reloading, or they become sitting ducks for attacks, just like the freighters they are supposed to be protecting.
The Houthi (Iranian) missiles are cheap and plentiful. They are meant to exhaust the supplies of American counter-missiles more than to actually destroy unarmed freighters. Behind the swarm of cheap missiles is a group of much more capable Chinese or Russian anti-ship missiles, or even Iranian anti-ship missiles of advanced design. The Iranians have some very capable engineers and can do quite a lot with just a little help from their friends. They would be thrilled to take an "accidental" shot at an American capital ship and sink it.
We are being setup for a sucker punch. We cannot just hang around in the area on patrols for an indefinite period of time. We are going to have to leave eventually.
Purely defensive tactics are a losing game. Then again, the shadow people who control the US government want us to lose. It is in their best interest for us to lose. We must deal with that before we deal with a lot of other things.
Seeing the light always helps.....
Engaging in purely defensive tactics to defend something you have no obligation to defend is the losingest game of all.
What I find most distressing about threads like this is that they are filled with posts from Freepers who think it’s a good idea for the U.S. to use its military assets to defend someone else’s shipping industry. When the hell did this make any sense at all?
You have a number of valid points. Thanks for the reply.