Shipshow: The world's waterways are at war

Hello everyone, I'm Bill Rodgeo. I'm a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Editor of FDT's Long War Journal. This is Generation Jihad, the podcast that covers all things in what used to be known as the global war on terror, but we now call the Long War. With the increased strikes in the Strait of Wormews, the Houthis threatening the Babylon man of Strait and Russian and Ukrainian strikes on shipping in the Black Sea, we have a real ship show on our hands. Joining me to discuss this is Dr. Salvatore Mercogliano. If you don't know Sal's work, he should. He's the host of the Muswatch YouTube channel. What's going on with shipping? Sal is an associate professor of history and the chair of the history criminal justice and political science department at Campbell University and an adjunct professor at the U.S. merchant marine academy. Sal is also a fellow peasant, which one is my art. Sal, welcome back to Generation Jihad. Always a pleasure to have you on and really looking forward to your update today. Bill, Gumball, happy to be back. I'm really excited about it on joining you again. Yes, sir. Yeah. Well, before we get into all of that, Sal, how was your trip to Venice? I hope you had a good time and tell us a little bit about what you were in Venice for. Oh, well, yeah. It was, it was, I've been very Italian recently. So got a chance to go to Venice. I have a very Italian name and everyone in Italy wanted to speak to me in Italian. And I know almost no Italian whatsoever. My, my Italian is limited to what my grandfather used to yell at me at, and that wasn't good Italian words. Venice was great. I was, I was there for the 15th Transregional Seapower Symposium. This is hosted by the Italian Navy. Absolutely. Unbelievable form. 77 Chiefs of Navy were there. I'm talking about the head of the U.S. Navy, the Royal Navy, Canadian Navy, Australian Navy. You name it. I mean, there were heads of Navy from everywhere. Just an amazing form. I got to sit on a panel, talk about commercial shipping, which is my forte here, talking about the impact that has really listening to multiple panels, including ones with the heads of most of the largest navies, talking about issues and dealing with this kind of challenge to freedom of the seas that's out there right now. I think this is the largest challenge to freedom of the seas we have seen in literally since post-World War II. I can't even come close to coming up with one that's that even rivals this. So it was, it was a fantastic time. Anyone who has an opportunity to go to Venice, it is just an amazing city to go see. It's just absolutely phenomenal. So I had a great time. I ate some good food. So I'm very happy. Well, definitely we're going to eat some good food in Venice. That's for sure. Look, Sal. So I'm, I guess I'd be four generation Italian. I'm still the last of my line to be 100% Italian. And yet my grandparents, my, I don't know, my grandparents are great grandparents. They didn't want my, my mom and dad to, they wanted to integrate, right? So they didn't, my, my parents didn't want to tell you. So I don't know Italian. The only Italian that I, I would say no, but I really don't was, I'm just remember my Balini, the Balini's my grandparents cursing at each other in Italian. That's Italian, I know. Yeah, exactly. So you, I shared that one with you. And obviously your, your, your visit to Venice very well timed. You're absolutely correct. It is the topic. I mean, the entire world is being impacted by this. Let's start off with the straight of hormones. There has been a, a spike in attacks on shipping. Tell us, what is the spike? How many, how many strikes have taken place? Who's executing these strikes? And when, what is driving this in your opinion? Sure. So what we've had happen here in the straight of hormones is this. The US is, is kind of orchestrating a convoy operation where we're running ships out of the street of hormones into the Gulf of Oman. And there's kind of two, two different versions going on here. There's two, two operations going on concurrently. One is operation run in conjunction with the state operated tanker companies of the Gulf state. So Saudi Arabia operates barry, UAE has a company called AdNoc, Kuwait has KOTC, and there's a few other ones. These state operated tanker companies are shuttling fuel out of the person golf in their tankers running the straight of hormones, meeting up with tankers in the Gulf of Oman, conducting what we call a ship to ship transfer where they go skin the skin with the ship, offload the oil into them, those tankers then proceed off into the open market. And then the ships that ran the straights come back in. And the reason they're using those ships is their state owned. The companies can underwrite the insurance to do this. Basically, they can direct them a lot better. So you have those. And then you have ships that are privately owned ships that are running the straight of hormones into junction with the US. They're doing this because they're getting paid a ridiculous amount of money bill. I can't even tell you the amount of money they're getting paid. I can't. So normally, a charter rate for a very large crude carrier, two million barrel crude carrier, anywhere from $50 to $100,000 a day. That's what we saw pre-war. These ships going through the straight of hormones are making $1.4 to $1.6 million a day. It is just a obscene amount of money that's being made. And these are private ship companies that are doing this. And they're running through. And so what we've seen is literally, we're not returning to pre-war levels. We're nowhere near pre-war levels. Pre-war levels were about 20 million barrels per day. We're running somewhere on the range of probably about 12 million, maybe a surge of the 15 million, maybe dipping down the 10 million. It depends on the day of what we see coming out. And so the US has been able to do that. Now, the way they're doing that is providing aerial coverage with helicopters and fixed wing. They're using drones, surface drones in the area. There was even a crazy story I had on my channel where the US was using a ship, the same helens, which was a commercial ship. They put marines on board to provide protection against small drones and small boats. But what we don't see is US Navy destroyers in the area. So they're running these convoys through. They're doing them at night, but now they're getting bold. They were starting running them during the day. Minimal emissions, radar and radio transmissions. They're using US naval officers, strategic sea lift officers to organize the convoys through. And what we've seen is the Iranians are reacted. They've reacted to these by since about the end of September, about 28 September, a pretty concentrated effort to target ships coming out. They're hitting about 5% of the ships coming out with a variety of weapons. We're looking at unmanned aerial drones. We're looking at unmanned surface drones. And we're looking at potentially crews and ballistic missiles. So roughly, probably at the point, we're filming this roughly around 16 ships have been hit since 28 September, although we don't know the scope and scale of those damages. What we think the Iranians are trying to do is deter future ships coming through. So they're trying to make it costly. And what they're hoping to do is either convince the private companies not to run through anymore, even with that huge amount of money. The problem with that analogy is it just gets more expensive to do it. They make more profit running through if it's more dangerous. So that's kind of the problem in that argument. The second is to deter the state-run companies from doing that. And by treating the fleet that's out there, the issue we have is, at what point do you run out of tankers? And this is the problem that we're having. The Persian Gulf has a massive repair capacity for shipping. So we can see ship's fixed very quickly in that area. They did this pre-war and now they're really empty. They're not doing anything so they can really use their entire resources of ship repair facilities there to get the ships back in order. But the Iranians are trying to wage this kind of economic war against the United States. And I would argue that the reason we're seeing this spike now at the end of September, early October, is because the Iranians know the US political calendar and they know there's a midterm election coming up in November. And so they are trying to exert pressure against the United States to get a better deal so that the Iranians will have control over the straight of war mues, whether it's a toll booth or it's some other method that helped finance them. On the flip side, the US has executed a blockade against Iran that's a very effective blockade. We believe that not one barrel of oil has come out of Iran on an Iranian tanker since July. So it is a fight in the straight of war mues right now between Iran and the United States. Really quick and just correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption. The price and gas and diesel. I assume that you're talking what you just explained here. Reduced flow in the movement of oil, gas, diesel, drop in anywhere from what 25 to 50% based on those numbers you gave, plus the increased cost of shipping. Is that what keeping our gas prices eye? Yeah, the normal cost to move a barrel of oil by sea is about three, you know, the cost to move it by ship is about $3. So when you look at a barrel of oil price, $3 of that is the normal price you see to move a barrel of oil. Now it's $30. So that's what you're seeing. So that's the issue at play there. But the other one really important bill here is is we got to go back to March in April in May when oil wasn't getting out of the Persian Gulf. We created a two billion barrel donut hole in global supply that we haven't filled back up again. You know, if you look at the SPR, the street of petroleum reserve, we see it dipping. That's because we have pull out of there to make up the shortfall in oil, not in the United States. that states as much, but globally. And so we have not been able to fill that back up. And what that means is refining capacity is down across the planet because guess what? There's not oil to feed the refineries. And that means diesel becomes very pricey, very expensive all of a sudden. Plus, don't forget, we're talking about crude oil coming out of the Persian Gulf. But the other thing the Persian Gulf does is it refines oil too. What we're not getting is diesel out of the Persian Gulf. That's a big problem, because we need that diesel coming out. We need the aviation fuel coming out. We need the gasoline coming out. That's not coming out. And so we're in a holding pattern. I would argue that we're in the hole. We're not going deeper in the hole. But we're not coming up out of the hole either. And that's what you're seeing gas prices kind of plateauing where they're at right now with gas in the high $3 and diesel and the $4 to $6 range, depending on where you live it. Yeah, that's really helpful, Salves, didn't consider-- I mean, wow, 10 times the cost to ship a barrel of the oil. That makes a lot of sense. What about the convoy protection? Do you have any indication of what that cost daily? No, because we can't get a clear read from Sencom, from Department of Defense, or whatever we're calling it today. We're just not getting a clear indication. I mean, this is one of the biggest problems we have. We haven't had a news briefing on this in months. So everything is coming anecdotally. And like, for example, the issue I just told you about with the St. Helena. You know, that's derived from the fact that the ship got hit on September 14th. And we know eight Marines got injured. It's like, OK, well, this is the only ship that got hit. This is going to be where they got hit. This is it. We're not getting confirmation. We're not getting denialized. So numbers are a bit of a hard. We did have a testimony before Congress talking about the cost of the war. But that was as of July, I think. So we really don't know what the new numbers are going to be for this escort operation. I understand. We've got the 82nd Airborne, a Brigadium there. So you've got Army helicopters involved. You've got Marine Corps units involved. We've got Air Force Navy units involved. We've got a third carrier strike group involved here. We just deployed the theater Roosevelt battle group to head out there. The George Washington is out on station. The Bush just left Thailand after a port call there. They're heading back out on station. We've got at least a dozen and a half destroyers on station out there. I mean, this is expensive. This is a really tough logistics expense to do. It's very similar to what we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan when we're trying to deploy and maintain forces in Afghanistan. You know, we talked a lot about the Afghan war. I was always looking at the logistics for the Afghan war. I mean, we were railing stuff in from fly to Vostok and regalatvia into Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to rail and road and fly in along with going into Karachi. And in many ways, we're doing the same thing. I've used this analogy with you and it's, you know, what we see right now happening in the state of Ormuz with the Navy is waging here. It's very similar to the asymmetric style of warfare that the U.S. Army and the Marines encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's very much the same way. This is not what the Navy had kind of trained for. The Navy had trained for power projection. You know, they want to be deploying and catapulting aircraft and supporting, you know, ground exertion. They want to do a blue on blue Navy type of aspect where they're going, you know, toe-to-toe against the Chinese Navy, what they don't want to be doing is a blockade operation and an economic enforcement operation and running convoys because this is a traditional. This is a traditional style of warfare here. You're grinding through equipment and material and men and women and vessels at the end of a very long supply chain that runs, you know, from the U.S. West Coast across the Pacific to the Philippines, Korea, and Singapore to Diego Garcia and then 2200 miles to a blockade line that runs from Oman to the Iran-Pakistan border. It's a brutal campaign for the Navy and the Navy is learning what a long war is and they're getting it right now. Yeah, the Army and Marine Corps learned that. They didn't want to fight these small wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and places like that. The Navy's got it now. I mean, they are doing it now and it's kind of hammering home to them. This is aspect. And it's never the war you want, right? It's the war you get and that's where the Navy is right now. You know, you mentioned the logistics in the Afghan war and you know, as much as I railed against Pakistan and it's a perfidious against us and it's a role in killing American soldiers by backing the Taliban, we were reliant on them to get our logistics into Afghanistan and it was one of the biggest, the greatest ironies in that war, one of the things that frustrated me the most. So we talked about petroleum products moving through the straight homeowners. What other critical products are moving through the straight and are those types of commodities being shipped? Are they passing through the straightover news as well? No, one of the big problems, Bill, is that there's a lot of commodities in art. We're fixated on crude oil because I would argue that crude oil is easy to measure. It's easy to kind of move in some ways. What we're not moving through there is a lot of other material, liquefied natural gas, for example. I mean, LNG, Qatar is the largest, one of the largest producers of liquefied natural gas in the world, Australia, US, and the other two big ones out there. So you're not getting liquefied natural gas. That matter of fact, what we saw was Qatar just moved eight empty LNGs into the Gulf of Oman, indicating, hey, they were getting confident that they were able to move LNG and what we just saw was a strike by Iran at a vessel off the coast of Qatar, something they hadn't done in months, but they staged a strike against the ship there, kind of giving a shot across the bow to the Qataris, like, hey, don't do this because we can hit these ships. So you know, when I get liquefied natural gas out, ammonia, ammonia, sulfur, absolutely essential for fuels and production methods around the world, including the construction of microchips, helium, not coming out. Another key element, and probably the most important is fertilizer. Fertilizer is not coming out. This is a big issue, not so much for the United States, but for countries around the world, Africa, Asia, which are not getting fertilizer, which means that we're not gonna see the shortfall immediately, but we're gonna see it during harvest seasons next year. When all of a sudden yields go low, and remember, there's another war going on up in Russia, Ukraine and the Black Sea, where they're targeting the kind of the same ships, grain ships, bulkers, we're getting fertilizer, we're getting oil hit. It's the same thing. There was just a massive campaign executed by the Ukrainians against the Russians where they hit over 200 ships in an operation called Malochka, where they targeted both the inland waterway system of Russia, but also their ability to export commodities across the Black Sea. Russia is responded by hitting port facilities in Ukraine. They're even hitting ships in Romania and Bulgarian waters, which is an old whole other issue that's developing here. So what's crazy is those wars are beginning to overlap a little bit, and we're seeing that. And let's not forget, too, the Houthis raised their rear their head again against the Saudis, and now they blocked the ability of the Saudis to export oil out of Yanbu on the Red Sea coast southward. So now you gotta take oil out of Yanbu. If you want to ship it to Asia, you gotta go around Africa. And so that adds 22 days. And I mean, every time you turn around, Bill, there's another piece of ship happening to the global shipping situation here. - Yeah, it's really a ship shell. - It is. - It is, I am gonna ask you about the Houthis, as well as the Russia Ukraine war on the seas as well. Before I turn to those, your last, I believe this is your last update on what's going on with shipping, it might have been the previous one. You talked about the information war, or maybe the misinformation war about videos being posted, questioning the authenticity. This really hit home and a lot of my research, particularly today with AI and with just ag many actors out there, it's just difficult to sift through information that figure out what's real and what's fake. Tell us about the information war with respect to the strikes on shipping in the straight-up or moves and beyond. - Yeah, well, I mean, when you look at this, for example, Ukrainians, very good at the information war when it comes to striking ships. I mean, they have been masterful of that, the Houthi. I mean, for everything about the Houthi, the Houthi, I think, are the best at doing this. They have a Hollywood crew put together, to put their videos together. Probably the best, highest definition videos I've ever seen, the music's cheesy, but it's just, it's fantastic. But with the Iranians, the Iranians are really good at this kind of, I would argue disinformation because they mix enough information in it to create the problem. So for, they're striking ships. There's no question they're striking ships. We know they're hitting ships. But what they want to do is make it seem more severe than what it is. And so, for example, they're saying that every ship that's hit hits a mind, for example. There's been zero indication of any ship striking a mind in the straight-up war moods. Now, we know there were minds because the US acknowledged that. The US acknowledged that there were minds. There was a massive demining campaign undertaken by the United States using both surface and underwater drones. We know that. But the Iranians want to keep that message floating because what they're trying to do is drive up insurance costs. They're trying to force the US to use this southern channel where they push the shipping up against the coast. of Oman, which, again, kind of really direct shipping so they can target the ships a little bit better. And so they are flooding their ways with this. And again, what they have is very people on social media and areas that buy into this. The minute the Iranians come out and they say it, people take it for granted or they run with it. And so, you know, what I spend on for a lot of time doing is kind of talking about what this actually is, including false information. When on ones that came out just the other day, keep showing, you know, look at this lit, this fleet of ships anchored off the straight of hormones that's going in. And then you realize, this is from like a few years ago off of Chittagong and Bangladesh, which is an acreage where bulkers, grain ships always gather. It's there every day of the year. But, you know, if you don't know it, it, it, it, it, it, you buy into, into the narrative. But you know, as well as I do, information campaigns are part of conflicts and I mean, this is exactly what you do. And, and I would argue the US is doing a very bad disinformation campaign. They're not putting out information. And, you know, when you don't put out information, people will consume whatever information is out there. And the Iranians are doing a good job of filling the void. Yeah. US information campaigns from what I witnessed during the war on terror have historically been awful. Um, very rare cases where there were successes, Marines in Western Ambar province. And from about 2005 to 2007 did a fantastic job. Other than that, I mean, maybe you get our general portrays as job during the surge in Iraq, but beyond that, uh, just been historically terrible. So that's not shocking. You mentioned the Houthis and that that brought as soon as you mentioned that, the, that video, I don't know if you remember the salve, right? When the first war in the Babelman, the straight, that video of the helicopter raid on that tanker. I mean, it was Hollywood production quality. That was really impressive. I, I actually thought it was fake the first time I saw it because I didn't think the Houthis could pull off something like that. Yes. I mean, that was the taking of the galaxy leader, which was very dramatic. I mean, the guys had mounted cameras. I mean, that's why it looks so weird because they literally physically mounted cameras on them. And, you know, they, they knew that. And, and again, they would stage every attack and, and they were masterful at editing. And this is one of the things I would do is I would always take a Houthi video and break it down. Like, okay, this is, this is cut. This happened before this. You got to understand that because when you look at the videos and they would show the vessel exploding and everything's like, okay, hang on a second. The Houthis went on board the ships in the plan of explosive. That's how you get these detonations. That's how you get all this kind of stage elements to it. And again, they, they were very good at, at kind of putting that out there. And let's not forget they were supported by the Iranians during this too. And so the Iranians took the Houthi tactics very much from the Red Sea and have used them in the straight-up horror moves. I think that the Iranians learned very effectively what can be used against. And the Iranians were in a better position because there's no diversion around the straight-up horror moves. There really isn't. There's a pipeline that you can use to get some oil out. But that's about it. The Houthi, you can go around Africa and you can go, you can avoid the Houthi if you want to. You can't avoid the Persian Gulf in the straight-up horror moves. You've got to go in there. And what we're seeing right now is that it is really the Iranians trying to force an economic coercion at the end of the war. That's what they're trying to do. That's the only mechanism they have really left. They can do these strikes where they can hit an air base and a target. And we've seen them demonstrate that before where they're very effective at hitting that. But it's limited. What they're trying to do is get world opinion on their side by raising the price of oil, not just in the United States, but globally. And that's what's happening here. Trying to exert that pressure against President Trump and BB Netanyahu to end the conflict. Yeah, I agree. It's economic. There's a political angle to that as well. I think the economic and political go hand in hand here. Really, the military is secondary, the military option. It's used to affect that political and economic pressure on the Trump administration on the Israelis as well. We just talked about the Houthis. What's the status? Are attacks on shipping moving through the bubble? Are they on the rise? And what are you observing? So the Houthis in the Red Sea, or it's probably the strangest story that doesn't get enough coverage right now because there's two things going on at the same time. One, you have the resurrection of the Houthi. They grabbed this coastline, this poor mocha. They grabbed permanent island, which literally puts them astride the channel. I mean, they're literally, I mean, when you're on permanent island, you don't need a missile. You throw a rock and hit a ship. It's literally off the coast right there. I mean, you can put an artillery piece there and hit ships going by. It's right. It's why the British owned it forever. It's like it was key. It's like they knew this was a strategic choke point. What they have done is targeted Saudi ships. I mean, this is it. They're just targeting Saudi Arabian ships. So the Saudis responded by not selling ships through there, which raises issues about the why Saudi Arabia even has a Navy, you know, if they can't even escort their own ships through there. So the Saudis are forcing their ships to go north and you get this weird situation where the Saudis have to load very large crude carriers with two million barrels of oil. But you can't go through the Suez with a fully loaded two million barrel VLCC. So you got an empty half of it into a pipeline, meet it at the other side, sail through halfway, completely inefficient. But at the same time, we have the return of commercial shipping back to the Red Sea, the major container lines that have vacated the Red Sea since the Galaxy leader since the the Houthi stage that attack on on the ship, you know, they they evacuated the Red Sea. They'll screw this. We're going to go around because it's cheaper because of the insurance will just sail around Africa. They're coming back and it's the weirdest story, Bill. It's because because here the Saudis not going through, but here come Marish Glides and Hophawk and all the companies that were attacked by the Houthi, you know, a few years ago, they're coming back and sailing right past Houthi positions. Now, the Houthi can change that tomorrow. I mean, this is the thing about the Houthis. You just never know. I mean, the Houthis, the problem with the Houthi attacks was they said they were only going to attack Israeli and then they expanded to US and UK, but 60% of the ships they attacked had nothing to do with those three countries. It's just because they just attacked ships. So I mean, there's always the fear that the Houthi raised their hair and raised their head again and do the attacks. The problem is that the EU, the EU has an escort operation in the Red Sea that they've been doing. They largely escort high value ships of the European Union. So large, these big container ships go through. They provide escorts for. I think the Houthi are staying fixated on the Saudis right now. That seems to be their focus. We see that with the strikes they're doing on shore against the Saudis, the airports, the refineries. That seems to be their focus right now is against Saudi Arabia. So I think right now the Red Sea is actually picking up in traffic. We're actually seeing more ships come through. You're just not seeing Saudi tankers come through, which is essential because of the bypass. But what the Saudis are doing is just pushing more oil through the straight of Hormuz. And I think that's why the Iranians have also escalated their attacks because the Saudis were getting more oil out through the straight of Hormuz than they were in the Red Sea. So the strikes that are hitting the Saudi oil lines, that pipeline that's running through. Is that shut down now? Is that also impacted by this? I believe there's attacks to place from Iraq, by the way, by the Iraqi militias. Are the Houthis impacting that as well? Right. So the east, the east west pipeline. So there's a pipeline that runs from the main Saudi facilities at Rostatin or in Addemon. And it goes to the port of Yambu. And it can handle about seven million barrels per day. But the port of Yambu can only handle 4.5 million. So what we saw is when the straight clothes back in March and April, or shut down in March and April, the Saudis opened up the pipeline. And so oil was flowing over the Yambu. They were refining oil in the diesel fuel and they were shipping out 4.5 million barrels per day. And so Saudi ships about six million barrels per day, typically the export. So they were doing pretty good. Actually, Saudis were getting oil out pretty good. Then you have this strike, as you mentioned, out of Iraq, we don't know who did it. But it's obviously groups associated with Iran or the Houthis, stage the attack. They hit the pumping stations. And they knocked pumping stations out, which kind of shut down the pipelines. Well, they've now rigged bypasses around the pumping stations. They brought portable pumps on. And what we know is oil is flowing once again through the pipeline to Yambu. Not the level it was, but then again, they don't need to be pumping it at that level because the Saudis are pushing oil out through the straight corn mousse now. But again, a lot of people were sitting there going, well, you know, you had secretary Besson, for example, come out and sit there and say, well, the straight corn mousse is going to be irrelevant because we're going to have pipelines and pipelines will take care of this. Well, you know, pipelines are fixed assets. They can be targeted and is exactly what you see. And oh, by the way, pipelines can't move everything that needs to come out of the straight corn mousse. This is one of the big problems. When you talk about oil, yeah, you can put oil in a pipeline, but you can't put everything else into a pipeline. You can't put all the fertilizer, all the ammonia, all the sulfur, all the natural gas, and petroleum gas in the pipelines. So this creates that problem, which, which, okay, fixed infrastructure, it can always be targeted. And you know, that's the other aspect here is that Huffie and the Iranians have demonstrated the ability to hit fixed targets, but also mobile targets, which really raises the issue about, you know, a potential conflict in the Western Pacific, when everybody sat there and said, well, you can't hit ships at sea with ballistic missiles. That's [BLANK_AUDIO] possible whether Houthi demonstrated it. The Iranians are demonstrating this. I think, you know, we're changing our idea of how warfare at sea and on land could be fought. And I think this, this is a, you know, a lesson learned for everyone to be watching. - I hope it is, but I just, I worry, Sal, and this is a whole nother conversation, perhaps, we'll have it another day. But I just, is the U.S., I look at Ukraine, and Russia Ukraine war, and is the U.S. military internalizing that conflict and preparing for a war like that with the drones, with the how logistics are being managed. I just, I'm not really sure. I don't feel like we're at the cutting edge of that, but you would definitely know more on the Navy side than I am. I would, I just, I'm not seeing it on the, you know, on the ground side, which I probably watch a little bit more closely. But yeah, it's a big concern of mine. I, I hope we're trying to learn it. And I, the good news is, is we are in this fight, right? That we are experiencing this. So we do have to internalize some of these lessons. I just think we're, we tend to be poor observers of conflict and, and taking on this lessons. Would you agree or disagree with that characterization? - I, I think, I think you have to be, I mean, militaries have to be swacked in the head a few times to learn lessons. I think it, it, it takes that. You know, shipping is, is not different. I mean, every, every law and rule and shipping is written in blood. You have to, you have to, something has to have, terrible happen for us to change the rules and laws because it just, it just has to happen. I, you know, one of the things about logistics, for example, is, is, is, I think maybe learn some logistics are going in this and, and actually it benefited them. For example, fuel, one of the things they started back in 2015 was start getting commercial ships converting them so that they can do replenishment at sea. They can marry up with underweight replenishment vessels and actually fuel at sea. You can actually take a commercial tanker out and meet up with an MSC military seal of command oiler and actually fill it up, you don't have to go into port. And that was started back in 2015. Something we had for a long time, but we got rid of it and then this process came back in and it's one of the ways we're keeping ships forward deployed. Unfortunately, the lesson we didn't take is like, well, what do we do about food ammunition and, and, and all the other aspects of it? And you kind of saw that on the Abraham Lincoln when people were talking about, oh, the food, you know, is, you know, is, is, is, is crap. I, which I always, I know every army and, and marine who deployed a Iraq and Afghanistan just laughed at the fact that the Abraham Lincoln was, was like, oh, your food is bad. Oh, that's terrible and everything like that. It's like, yeah, in the air conditioning, it's terrible food in here we're having right now. We're running low on chocolate ice cream. So, but I, that was, I, I think, you know, that's going to have to be learned. Because again, the logistics to stage this is amazing. I, I'm a logistics guy. I love studying logistics. And, and this is the most kind of, you know, extended logistics we've done at sea since World War II. I mean, literally is. I mean, I mean, you know, we have fought every war with the base, you know, just over the horizon, you know. It's like, hey, you know, you know, by rains right there, food jars right there, Vietnam, it's Subik Bay, Korea, you had Japan. Now, you're 2,200 miles away from Diego Garcia. And I've been in Diego Garcia and something there is like, you got to bring everything to Diego Garcia. This is a big problem. And again, how do you sustain this operation? And the scary part is, is how long does it go on? Because we're wearing through platforms here at a, at a rapid level in everything. There was a, there was a briefing out in San Diego by the chief of naval operations to retired naval officers there. And of course, retired naval officers can't keep their mouth shut. So they've labbed about this meeting. And they talked about the fact that, you know, we're going to have to keep naval forces forward deployed into the Persian Gulf region for the next year or two, you know, up until 2027 they're talking about. And maybe even longer. And it's like, wow, can you keep, you know, carriers forward deployed and destroyers forward deployed at this level for a long period of time? And, you know, again, you know, army guys are laughing about this because, you know, they've done their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, now the Navy's doing it. But the Navy's got to learn this lesson because how do you do this style of warfare? Because again, to me, this is a carbon copy of what the army and Marines did in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy's doing now. And this only gets magnified too, Bill. If you do a Pacific conflict with China as your opponent, and you get to do this across 7,000 miles of ocean across the Pacific. Yeah, I look at your point about the Army and Marines laughing about this. So like some of the combat operations, some of the cops and the smaller bases that combat outposts and the smaller bases that I visited when I embedded with the Army and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, yeah, they'll rotate in to get a shower. You know, there was no such thing as fresh fruit and stuff. So seeing the Navy guys complaining about that stuff, that was a real headshaker for me. I can remember, had some texts with some friends about laughing about that. But you know, that being said, though, it does point to a prologistics problem that does need to be addressed. And in some ways, this isn't a bad thing if the Navy does learn its lessons. If there is a war with China that perhaps we could resolve some of these problems now while the stakes are a little bit lower. Let's turn to the Black Sea. Sal, I will say, you know, Ukraine's ability to take the fight to the Russians in the Black Sea and beyond has really impressed me. But now we're seeing Russia is begun striking Ukrainian ships. Is this in retaliation for that operation that you mentioned with the 200 plus targets being hit by the Ukrainians? Yeah, so if you go back to Black Sea and you go back to the beginning of this operation, you go back to 2022. So I've got a very kind of unique view on Russia-Ukraine conflict. I think it's a very maritime conflict. I know we focus on land. I mean, it's obviously a massive land campaign in many ways. But I think the sea is an important component of this. So one of the big things that Russia wanted to do was connect Crimea to Russia. They wanted that land bridge, which is what they've done in the Donbass region, grabbing those eastern provinces you crave. And they argue, well, that's because there's a very large Russian population in there. And so they want to bring it in. I agree with that. The other issue they were very concerned about is if Ukraine controlled the northern part of the Sea of Assaf, this is that little kind of sea there between Crimea and the Russian inland waterway. Russia has a massive inland waterway system. There's the Don River, which connects into the Volga, which goes into the Caspian Sea, which actually goes up to Moscow, goes up to St. Petersburg, and actually dumps into the Baltic and the White Sea into the Arctic. All of that float right past Ukraine. I mean, literally within, you know, I shot of Ukraine. You go, you know, if you go to cities like Burdansk and Maripol, you can see Russian ships sailing right past. And the Russians were paranoid that the Ukrainians were going to choke off that supply chain. And so I think one of the things they did in February 22, February of 2022 was to seize that. They wanted to make the Sea of Assaf a Russian lake, and they have, they've done that. They also blockaded Ukraine at the beginning of that war. They mined the waters, seized Snake Island, they put the Moscow, their cruiser off the coast, and they basically choked off Ukraine's ability to export. Well, Ukraine retaliated. They took the island back, they sank Moscow, and eventually there was a broker deal by Turkey and the UN called the Black Sea Green Initiative that allowed Ukraine to export grain. At the same time, Ukraine agreed not to attack Russian shipping, which is what Russia wanted. They wanted free flow of food, fuel, and fertilizer coming out, because that's their economy. That's what they wanted. The G7 and the EU retaliated with the price caps, so they were trying to constrain Russia. G7 and the EU, putting those price caps on, resulted in the growth of the dark fleet. This is that fleet of vessels that was avoiding the price caps. And then what we had was basically the breakdown of that Black Sea Green Initiative, and eventually Ukraine, developed the technology very rapidly, not just on land, but at sea, just strike at ships. Now, initially they were targeting Russian naval vessels. Either Russian naval vessels or commercial ships supporting the Russian military. So some commercial ships got hit, but they were largely logistics ships supporting the Russian military. But then in 2025, it all changed. Ukraine started targeting commercial ships going to Russia, out in the Black Sea. And they initially used their sea drones, their sea baby drones. These are kind of like the modified jet skis with Starlink, with the thermal imaging camera, and with a butt load of explosives in the bow. And they would just ram them on those stern vessels. And basically what they were trying to do was deter commercial shipping from going into the Black Sea, loading at Russian ports and coming out. Well, much like we saw Ukraine undertake these massive drone attacks on Russian infrastructure, they launched this operation Operation Malochka, which is an attack against Russian shipping. So they hit the coastal Russian shipping, the inland mortarway Russian shipping. So all those ships in the sea of azoths, they started hitting. And what was interesting is they weren't trying to sink the ships, but they were going for mission kills. They were going for the bridges. They were trying to burn out the ships so that you couldn't use them. And these were ships that were hauling grain fuel down to the larger anchorages, loading up these ships out at the anchorages, and then sailing out of the Black Sea through the Turkish straits. So they started it and the press campaign they did on this was magnificent. I'm sorry, I can't think of anything better. Every ship they hit they had a video. I mean, they would put out synopsis videos every day. Here's strikes 105 for 118. And they would just, you know, music, and here's the ship getting hit. And, I mean, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was brutal. I mean, it was brutal. We do not know the casualties on the Russian ships, but they had to be atrocious. And what it was was a very systematic campaign to curtail Russian shipping. Now, the Russians responded. And the Russians, I would argue, in some ways, are as smart as the Ukrainians when it comes to this, they knew targeting the ships was a problem, because there's too many ships. It's a problem. So what the Russians target is the ports. They hit the loading facilities. They wanted to hit the grain facilities, you know? You can have all the grain ships in the world, but if you can't load them, it doesn't matter. And so they hit the grain facilities. And that's what they did. A very concentrated campaign against it. The problem is that it's easy to defend. You could put anti-drone defenses in and around the ports. And so that becomes a very kind of fixed battle for the between the Russians and the Ukrainians. And so you saw a series of attacks on the ports. The Russians shifted a little bit. They started attacking ships. And more importantly, they're trying to turn ships from going into Ukrainian waters. So we've seen these recent attacks in Romanian and Bulgarian waters. This is where the large anchorages are where ships gather before they run up to Ukraine. The Russians don't seem to care about Russian-Bulkarian territorial waters. They have attack ships within them. And I have to say NATO hasn't really done squat in retaliation to that. They haven't really said or done much about it. Now, Romanian-Bulkarian have put up defenses to this. They've, in fact, for Romania moved a large oil, offshore oil platform into the region and put weapons and defenses on it to kind of provide screens for the vessels. It doesn't stop the Russians, but from hitting some ship. So the Black Sea is escalating. We're definitely seeing a ratcheting up. Matter of fact, it got so bad the attacks on the infrastructure in Ukraine and the attacks on Russian shipping that the US turkey in a batch of countries and proceeded and say, hey, you got to stop. This is getting out of control. This is going to spill out. And I should note, by the way, that the Ukrainians don't just hit ships in the Black Sea. They have actually targeted ships out in the Mediterranean. And that's the crazy thing. We've seen drone attacks on vessels out in the Mediterranean. So just like the Ukrainians have hit airports and oil refineries in northern and central Russia, the Ukrainians are striking out into the Mediterranean. And it gives a lot of indication to me that it was probably the Ukrainians or someone associated with the Ukrainians that hit Nord Stream very early in the conflict. Yeah, that's always struck me as the Nord Stream, the strikes on the vessels in the Mediterranean. I mean, I'm not just going to sit here and say the Ukrainians shouldn't be acting in their best interests, but I think that escalates things when they're hitting shipping in the Mediterranean. The Europeans can't be happy with that, but they've certainly withheld their criticism. Who has more to lose in this shipping world? Is it Russia, is it Ukraine, or are they both going to be losers? And it comes to escalates. I think it goes back to where we are in the Strait of Haramuz, where Iran is trying to exert an economic element here against the U.S. and the world. I think when you have stalemate on the battlefield, you've got to go to how else can I win this war? Well, economics, who breaks first? I think Ukraine was trying to break Russia economically, if they can curtail and it worked kind of 'cause Russia announced what they announced. We're not exporting diesel fuel anymore 'cause we can't, there's the refineries are hit and it's too dangerous to ship it out. So you're trying to exert that. At the same time, let me be clear, Russia is exerting a lot against Ukraine. Ukraine, in September, only shipped out 45% of the grain had shipped out last September. So that's economically hurting Ukraine. I mean, so who loses in this matter? Who economically breaks first? Again, it goes back to that issue about what determines a war? Is it the military or is it the economics? And it's a little bit of both, obviously, but they're both trying to break each other economically here. And that's what we're seeing right now. It looks so much to me like World War I, 1917, where the Germans decide, hey, we got a risk war with the United States, so we're going to do unrestricted summary warfare 'cause we got to break the Allies and we need to cut off their supplies because there's no way for us to hit the British, so this is the way we hit the British. That's kind of where we're at right now in both Black Sea and straight-of-hormouths. - Sal, if anything, you should need to do about strikes off the coast of Bulgaria and elsewhere. - Listen, my opinion is NATO needs to defend NATO. I mean, that's the whole purpose of the Alliance. I have been, the beginning of the Black Sea, I was very strong that NATO should force Turkey to allow a NATO force into the Black Sea to at least guard NATO territory. The very, keep the conflict constrained to Ukraine and Russia to exert freedom of the seas. I mean, this is what NATO does. I mean, this is where the whole purpose of what it should be is defend. Now, if you don't want to push ships up into the Black Sea, you can put military units in the Romanian Bulgarian, you can put air craft over Romanian Bulgarian waters and ensure, I mean, it's 12 mile limit. I mean, that is Romanian. It doesn't matter if it's on the water or land, that is Romanian, that is Bulgaria, that is Turkey. And so I've been very strong advocate for it. Obviously, there's an issue about that 'cause it appears you're taking sides maybe in the conflict if you do that. But, you know, Russia doesn't control the Black Sea and neither does Ukraine for that matter. It is an international sea. And it's like, even though it's a cul-de-sac, it's an international sea. This is one of the issues that is very similar to the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea. You know, does Iran have the right to control the straight-of-war moves? Turkey's weird because it has the Montreux Convention and everyone gives acknowledgment to it. I don't know why they do, but they do. It's a weird thing. It shouldn't. It has a carve-out in un-claws, the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea that they get this. But Turkey's different, too, and that they control both sides of the strait. It's also a really narrow strait. I mean, you need pilots to go through. It is much different than the straight-of-war moves. Straight-of-war moves is 20 miles across. It's. You know, you don't need pilots to go through straight-of-war moves. It's different. But I do think NATO needs to be more active in defense. One of the reasons why you see Poland spending as much money and Romania spending as much money as they are are defense is because they're worried about these encroachments by Russia into their areas. Yeah, certainly, you know, something to keep an eye on. I worry about that conflict escalating and spiraling at a control. I certainly don't want to see NATO get in direct confrontation with the Russians. But as you said, NATO does need the defendants territory. Well, real quick, just a weird overlap of these two conflicts doesn't get a lot of attention. It's the Kaspian Sea, which borders Russia and Iran to the north of Iran. It's an area where Russia is able to supply Iran directly. There's no blockade there. Now, you don't have huge ships on the Kaspian Sea, but it's very strange at the very beginning of the conflict between US, Israel, and Iran, the Israeli struck on the northern shore of the Kaspian Sea. And they struck Iranian bases there. But we just had as part of that operation, Melodica, Ukrainian attacks on shipping in the Kaspian Sea. So it's a weird confluence of these two conflicts where they're overlapping a little bit. And it gives me pause. I've just been teaching World War I to my students. And so I have all these weird things about the Balkans and how small wars lead to big wars. So it just creates weird bit of kind of deja vu for me when I teach this stuff. Yeah, and the nations didn't have nuclear weapons when World War I broke out and escalated. That's what gives me pause with escalating conflicts. You know, we've managed previous wars very poorly. The war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. And I get concerned when people tell me, "Yeah, but this is the war we can manage." Yeah, I don't want to find out the wrong way. Well, and I think I talked about it with you at the very beginning. I think when the Trump administration launched this conflict, they viewed this conflict with Iran kind of like July 2025. It was going to be a 12-day conflict. We're going to do precision strikes. And then we're done. And then we're going to be able to back out after two to four weeks. We're going to do our strikes and everything be good and everything returns back to normal because hey, in July 2025, that's what would happen. And by the way, we just did Venezuela. And that went swimmingly well. And you know, this worked great. But you know, everyone who's ever done anything military. And I worked for the Navy for years. And the most of them, we looked at the straight alarm moves. We knew what the Iranians could do. We knew that they would do something. But this administration didn't seem to appreciate that. Now, I know the military did. I know for a fact, people in the military were saying they're saying this. It's like, hey, the Iranians are going to do something in the straight alarm moves. They're crazy not to. It's the one thing they can do. And this administration just did not perceive it. And I don't think they understood the economic impact that this was going to have. And my fear is they don't have an exit strategy here for how to back out of this. This seems to be the big problem. They announced, for example, a tanker for tanker, you know, hit every time the Iranians hit a tanker, we'll hit a tanker. Well, that hasn't happened. I mean, we've had, you know, just a ridiculous number of tankers hit over the past couple of weeks with no strikes by the US, except for one strike against the ship trying to run the blockade, which was a foreign flag bulker coming in. I mean, the Iranian ships are sitting, you know, there are 20 tankers sitting off a Sri Lanka. Iranian tankers sitting off Sri Lanka that are just sitting there. And the US has done nothing to target them or anything. So I just don't see how the US has a strategy to end this right now. Yeah, I don't as well. I don't see, I don't see an exit for the Trump administration, you know, I thought it had one with that memorandum of understanding which we discussed in detail. I think in our last podcast, I think the Trump administration would prop that was back on the table. I think it would take it. It would try and implement that because I don't see any other way out for the administration. I just think President Trump signed that thing like I agree to my iTunes agreement. I never read the details. I don't know what it included. It's just like, it's like, did you read section four and five? I mean, it basically gave Iran control of the straight-of-horn moves. It's like, did nobody read this thing? It's like, listen, I understand, but it's like, this should be a little bit more important than an iTunes agreement. No, I couldn't agree with you more. The short agreements that no one, it seems to understand that that seems to be a real problem these days. So, thanks so much for joining us. Really, thanks for your insights, for your clarity on these very complex issues. It's real pleasure to have you. Bill, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to be on with you. Yeah, thanks, Sal. I hope to get you back on soon and thanks everyone for listening to today's episode of Generations You Hot.