Two EU member states have signaled they may send additional warships to the Red Sea, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Monday after a meeting of EU defense ministers in Brussels — the first concrete sign that the bloc could reinforce a mission currently running on three frigates against a target fleet requirement of at least ten.

The shortfall has direct commercial consequences. Commercial ships are literally queuing for escorts that Operation Aspides cannot provide, Kallas told reporters.

"We need more vessels because literally there are commercial ships that are waiting in the queue to receive the escort, and we don't have enough frigates that can do that," she said.

She declined to name the two countries, saying only that they "were hinting today that they might provide additional vessels." The interest suggests EU governments may finally be shifting on a question they have dodged for months: whether to reinforce the mission launched in 2024 to protect merchant traffic from the Iran-backed Houthi militia.

A mission running at a third of its designed strength

Aspides currently consists primarily of three ships from Italy and Greece patrolling the Red Sea. When the mission was created, Kallas said, planners indicated it needed at least ten ships. Most member states have not moved to close that gap — until now, France has been the outlier, dispatching an additional frigate and publicly urging others to follow.

French Defense Minister Catherine Vautrin renewed that call in a recent interview with Journal du Dimanche, pressing other countries to help bolster the mission.

The hesitation has a familiar root: reluctance to be drawn deeper into anything connected to the Iran war. But Houthi advances in Yemen and fresh targeting of Saudi energy infrastructure have changed the political calculus, reviving fears of further disruption to fuel supplies that are already tight because of the conflict.

The Hormuz option that never sailed

Kallas offered member states a low-friction path to reinforcement: redirect resources already pledged — but never deployed — to the "coalition of the willing" for the Strait of Hormuz that France and the UK assembled in April.

That coalition pledged to protect Hormuz shipping routes but has yet to become operational. Some participating countries insist the fighting must stop first, or that Iran must grant permission — conditions Gulf states have dismissed as impossible to meet.

"There are many ships that have also been offered to this coalition of the willing that is not really operational at the moment," Kallas said.

For European governments, shifting those assets to the Red Sea carries two advantages. Aspides already operates there under an existing mandate to counter Houthi threats, so no new legal framework is needed. And keeping vessels in the Red Sea rather than the Gulf helps Europe avoid direct confrontation with Iran.

The macro backdrop raising the stakes

The economics make the delay expensive. The Iran war has already driven up the continent's energy prices and pushed inflation higher, forcing the European Central Bank to raise borrowing costs twice. Consumer-price gains breached 3% in August — an almost three-year high that economists expect to recede only slowly.

A renewed wave of Houthi attacks on shipping and Saudi energy assets threatens to compound that shock. France has said it will send troops and radar systems; the UK has offered aircraft for support — but naval capacity, the asset shippers actually need for escorted transits, has lagged.

For carriers and forwarders routing Asia–Europe traffic, the practical question is whether the two unnamed contributors convert hints into hulls, and whether pledged Hormuz assets get redeployed. Until escort capacity roughly triples from today's three-ship footprint, queueing delays for merchant vessels seeking protection through the Red Sea will remain a structural feature of the trade lane — and the Bab el-Mandeb diversion around the Cape stays the default planning assumption for risk-averse operators.