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I'm not convinced. The escalation is to easy for the pirates. Current Somali militias could do it if they cared. Slightly bigger ship, 10 tons of hand mixed concrete to form a ghetto pillbox, soviet artillery piece. Done.
They can't board as easily anymore, but they can threaten to blow up the cargo ship's bridge.
Escalating for the cargo ships is not as easy. They already have to keep most of their hardware and mercenaries in international waters on their floating armory ships, they really don't want to install naval guns every time the mercenaries board a cargo vessel.
How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower? The only reason the houthis are getting away with their current operations is precisely because they aren't doing stuff that presents an obvious stationary target.
It's not just the ships the pirates face, but the nations that back them.
The Houthis are operating in a much smaller area than the Somali pirates did before them. The oceans are big, the horizon is small. Finding a pirate ship via aircraft hours after a call for help (which is how long it takes until airpower arrives if your navy isn't dominating the seas and your allies are far and few between) is difficult, especially if you try avoiding blowing up random fishing boats.
And both Somalis and Houthis are extremely low tech. Doesn't take much to give a pirate ship thousands of miles of range.
The Somalis are extremely low tech. The Houthis are not; they are getting sophisticated radars, missiles, and drones drones from Iran. Very different opponent.
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