Iran, Ukraine, and the Future of Naval Warfare

I'm Kyle Atwell, the co-founder and current chair of the board at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. And I'm Chris Booth, co-director of IWI's Maritime Program. The episode you're about to listen to focuses on maritime irregular warfare. If you find the topic interesting, we have two other resources worth checking out. First, the IWI Maritime Program focuses on all maritime dimensions of irregular warfare, from riverine and littoral operations to subsea activities, critical infrastructure, and malign maritime activity, including Russia's shadow fleet, illegal Chinese fishing, and piracy and counterpiracy operations. We regularly publish expert Q&As, articles from the community, participate in conferences, and serve as your digital flagpole for the maritime irregular warfare community of interest. Second, IWI has partnered with the Naval War College's Center on Irregular Warfare and Arm Groups, CWAG, for their 2026 Maritime Symposium, to include running a panel focused on autonomous maritime vessels. You can find more information about both the IWI Maritime Program and the 2026 CWAG Maritime Symposium at the Irregular Warfare Initiative's Maritime Program website, www.irregularwarfare.org, forward slash maritime dash program. Thank you for continuing to be part of the IWI community. Now on to today's episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We're so focused on tactical success that we often don't recognize strategic failure. I go back to the Red Sea. We did an amazing, amazing job of shooting down Houthi drones and missiles and all kinds of surface and underwater craft. Incredible tactical job. But is the Red Sea open? Has shipping resumed? The thing we need to think about is platform flexibility now. And we're coming out of a long period of naval platform specialization where every single ship had a very specific purpose. I think we're beyond that now. I think vessels are going to have to be produced to have multiple purposes. Welcome to episode 156 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Atwell, and my co-host is Elisa Laufer. Today's episode examines the question, what lessons for maritime irregular warfare can we take from recent wars to include both the US Iran fight and the Strait of Hormuz and Russia-Ukraine fighting in the Black Sea? To discuss this, we are joined by Dr. Ben Conable, a retired Marine and current executive director of the nonprofit battle research group, and Dr. Ian Ralby, a preeminent naval researcher, the president of Axelium Worldwide and a senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy. The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Support for the Irregular Warfare Podcast comes from members of the IW community like you and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. Without further ado, here is today's conversation on the future of maritime irregular warfare. When people hear naval warfare, they often imagine carrier groups, fleet battles. What is naval irregular warfare and how is it different from conventional naval combat? Well, I think the term of art these days is asymmetry in that we are seeing navies getting defeated by powers without navies. And that is a pretty interesting dynamic, both in the Black Sea and now in both the Red Sea and the Gulf. We're seeing an incredible degree of innovation using both technology, but also other strategic operational and tactical ideas for how to defeat a navy without that conventional state-on-state conflict. And so it's bringing out new challenges. And I've had this bizarre experience of working with admirals, particularly in the Pacific, where I have found myself having to give disclaimers before giving a talk on hybrid aggression and asymmetry and say, look, if you spent your entire career working to be a carrier strike group commander, you're going to hate everything I have to say, because it's going to sound like your biggest enemy is a fishing vessel. Unfortunately, we are seeing innovation and using non-conventional assets for military advantage. And this is something that has been around for a long time. And I think it's worth always pointing back to General Van Riper, Marine Corps General, in the Millennium Challenge War Game back 25 years ago now, where in what was at the time the most expensive, most extensive war game the United States had ever run, he defeated almost the entire US Navy on day one using a mix of call-to-prayer signaling and messages moved on motorcycles to invigorate small boats in harbors in order to coordinate a devastating attack on the entire fleet. And so we have constantly been confronting lessons of asymmetry. We haven't quite learned them yet. One of the things that I really want to do with the group that we have now, but in general, in my kind of interaction with the national security and the military community is to bring historical context into every conversation. So Ian, I'm really glad you brought up Millennium Challenge. Weirdly enough, I was at a talk last night, it came up again. So that's twice within the last 12 hours or so. And it's important to think about that, but also going back even further to think about the first submarine attack. And it was, I believe it was a sneaky harbor attack. So there's a long evolutionary trend here of development of capabilities that would allow for really ingenious and thoughtful kind of integration of not just the manned capabilities, but now the evolving unmanned capabilities. I was at an Allied naval base 20-some odd years ago, and I got to drive one of their USVs with a machine gun on it. So there's not necessarily new technology. What's interesting and innovative is what the Ukrainians in particular are doing with it. Now we're seeing also US companies, we're seeing a lot of activity in the Gulf, even before the Iran War. So there's a lot of innovation. We're all caught up in the advanced technology. We're all caught up in the massive amount of money that's flowing into this. But we shouldn't act as if this is a new threat. Any US Navy ship that transited the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran-Iraq War has had to deal with the idea of speed boats and mines. So add speed boats and mines to USVs. It's another layer. And I think that's the important way to think about this is the irregular threat to naval shipping is a layered threat. And we have a new layer and a new wrinkle to think about. I just want to say that a common theme coming up in this podcast series over and over, a lot of discussion on this in the last episode that came out on unconventional warfare is that a regular warfare is just a constant, it's an ancient tool of warfare. It's not a new development. And to treat it like a new development would misunderstand that the fundamental character and nature of war. And so it's interesting you say that it's the same on the seas, although it will be interesting if we can get in to see if there's been an increase or a decrease in these tactics enabled by technology, which we'll get to in a little bit. But Alisa, did you have something? Yeah, for sure. So Ben, you brought up the role of technology, but you also acknowledged that there are a lot of other factors happening when we talk about naval or regular warfare. So I'm curious if we can unpack that a little bit more. I'm wondering what both of you think it is about the maritime domain that is uniquely attractive for irregular actors or weaker states. I can think of choke points. I can think of the ability to operate deniably a bit easier. And then on land, per se, there's some legal ambiguity. I'm just rattling off some factors, but curious to hear both of your thoughts on this. I think for thousands of years, maritime commerce has been extremely important, but it has never been as important as it is today. And in fact, if you look at our reliance on the maritime domain for life on land, it is the highest it has ever been. We have 90% of our world trade moving by sea. That means just an enormous amount of what we rely on every single day from our clothes, to our food, to our technology, to everything we use is coming on a boat, maybe sometimes four or five boats. We actually used to, when I was teaching at West Point, I used to drop that statistic of 85 to 90% and then argue that maybe the navy is more important than the army. Not something you're supposed to say to a bunch of West Point cadets. Well, I think Admiral Sir Benke, the former First Sea Lord, tried to bridge that gap by saying, armies protect territory, navies protect prosperity. And so, it depends on what you consider is more important. But that is a very fair point that you take away our protection of that aspect and our way of life on land goes away. But even more so, if you look at even how we're having this conversation right now, it's reliant on the submarine cable network of about 460 or so privately owned cables that sit on the ocean floor that are roughly the size of a garden hose. So our increased reliance on the maritime domain from fish to shipping to the submarine cable infrastructure and other offshore infrastructure is so extreme, but we forget about it. We don't think about it very often. The ones who do are criminals and bad actors. They have the drop on us on figuring out just how much of the world's wealth is actually out at sea. And so, when you want to harm someone, you often go for where they are most focused, which is often their pocket. And that is so incredibly dependent on the maritime space that it's a lot easier to impact it out there where there isn't CCTV, there isn't visibility, there isn't that continual presence. And when you think about the Navy mismatch on shipping, you've got about 60,000 commercial vessels moving at the moment. You have questions right now about whether 300 ships is enough for our Navy. Just do that math. We cannot provide visibility and coverage for the extent of the maritime movement on just the commercial fleet. Forget the tens and tens of thousands of fishing vessels, probably hundreds of thousands of fishing vessels, and it just becomes a very overwhelming space very quickly. So it's a good place to attack. And if you look really at the latorals as well, that opens up a whole range of opportunities for any armed group, whether it's a regular or irregular, I think you can go back to the Tamil Tigers of Elam. They had an effective Navy, they were using suicide boats against the Sri Lankan Navy. But I don't want to just make it about technology here. We should also talk about the human aspects of regular naval warfare. And I don't mean SEALs doing their thing. Of course, that's important. But if you also think about small boat raids against goplats in the Black Sea, if you also think about riverine operations that are so critical to the kind of success of the protection of Kherson and other areas in southeastern Ukraine, we don't want to just stay fixated on Ukraine either. You can look at every conflict across Africa, Latin America, there's always going to be a riverine or coastal aspect to this unless you're up in the mountains. And that is really human ingenuity. In many cases, using very old technology like an inflatable boat to do some really important things. If you think about Operation Spiderweb, the use of drones to attack an airfield, I wrote an article actually for IWI on this. And in the article, I argued, hey, there's nothing new about attacking airfields. And there's actually nothing new about attacking airfields with drones. This was just an ingenious application of that. I was more impressed by the Ukrainian ingenuity there to connect two older things together to take down an adversary's capability. And that is got to, we've got to keep that as a thread that adaptability is always going to be central to success and warfare, whether it's conventional or irregular. I completely agree. And I would argue that Spiderweb is one of the most impressive operations we've seen in the last half century at least. And it deserves a lot of study. I think though you make a really, really good point about the human aspect as well, which is that, you know, when you look at the maritime space, the majority of the people on the water have zero security, zero military training whatsoever. And that makes them in some ways seen as an easy target. And so if pirates with, you know, a grappling hook, maybe a weapon, maybe just a machete are able to disrupt maritime commerce, a well funded, well armed state can do all kinds of wonders to create incredible harm. And I think we've seen the Houthis actually experience a bizarre learning curve where on the one hand, they got incredible value out of shooting higher end missiles and even hypersonic missiles and new technology at ships. And it had dramatic effect for their visibility, their credibility as far as they were concerned. And it certainly brought all kinds of international attention. But when it came to actually sinking ships, it was old technology that really did it. Yes, with a new spin in terms of it being unmanned. But the same kind of concept that hit the USS Cole in 2000 is what they actually returned to in order to be more offensive towards the actual ships in terms of their buoyancy and staying afloat. It was an aerial bombardment. It was at the waterline and below the waterline impact into the hull. So it's a worrying time for that asymmetry. I just want to reflect on the fact that when I initially asked this question about what makes the maritime domain so attractive for irregular actors, I was thinking about the operating environment. I was thinking again about things like deniability, the legal ambiguity, the ability to exploit these natural choke points in the maritime domain. But in you went right to actually not the environment but the outcome and the ability to create these massive economic and strategic consequences that ripple around the globe. And yeah, if you're in a regular actor and you're looking or a more regular actor with irregular capabilities looking to relatively cheaply gain leverage, I mean, it's really that reward that you're referring to if you have the capabilities that is just so attractive. And I think it's helpful to look at some of the incidents that have been inspiration for bad actors over the last few years. And a lot of them are not security incidents. So take for example, the Evergiven getting stuck in the Suez Canal. That incident of a single vessel getting wedged between the two banks of the Suez in what was at least attributed to be a storm. That's one vessel created a six day backup in one of the most critical choke points in the world. And it forensically, according to Pricewaterhouse Cooper, cost the shipping industry over $400 million per hour. $400 million per hour is an enormous economic burn rate. And when you think of that in terms of bad actor going, okay, how could I inflict harm? Well, all you need is one vessel and one critical choke point to do it. And so when you start thinking in those terms and look at other single vessel incidents, whether it's a single oil spill or the Beirut blast in August 4, 2020 in Lebanon, where the cargo of ammonium nitrate that had come off of a abandoned vessel in 2013 blows up seven years later and creates one of the biggest explosions that Beirut in Lebanon itself, a country that has seen more explosions than is a fair share, really kind of inspires what could be done because the bridge in Baltimore, I'm from Baltimore, it was a pretty harrowing day, March 26, 2024, watching the Key Bridge come down. Single vessel incidents have had huge inspiration. So if you're looking at creating economic harm or getting international attention or making a critical access route impassable, we've had plenty of single vessel incidents without any kind of real clear security aspect to them, giving a huge inspiration to bad actors. I think we've got like an interesting divide here where you're hitting more of the strategic aspects of the challenge and I'm maybe getting a little more into the tactics. And from a tactical aspect, one of the things that's being uncovered here is the gaps in force protection and really in the gap of imagination on nautical, naval, and seaport security. And I think the same thing is being revealed in the aerial domain with drones. We don't quite know how to deal with the large mass of unmanned guided munitions coming in with our very expensive defensive platforms. We have a similar problem on the naval side of things. The Russians could not figure out how to deal with Ukrainian threats on the west coast of Crimea and they had to move all of their vessels to the east coast, effectively neutering themselves. Ukrainian, I think you can call it an irregular operation. I mean, they mixed in nautical, naval missiles, probably some aircraft, but a lot of USV activity, particularly in the last couple years, to effectively remove one of the largest navies in the world from an entire area of operations. Yeah, so let's dig into that a little bit more actually. So I'd like to orient to the character of these naval fights in Iran and Ukraine. So they both show that weaker actors can contest the sea without building traditional blue water navies. What are the similarities and differences between Iran's maritime strategy and Ukraine's strategy in the Black Sea? And Ben, since you were on a good role, could you just kind of frame exactly what we're seeing in these two cases? Yeah, so we saw Iran in the last several years try to invest in a kind of blue water navy and you can look at that now and say, well, it was a terrible mistake. You made some really bad investments. I'm gonna have to ask you later if that has reflections for what the US is investing in now, but we can come back to that. Yeah, I think maybe our stuff is a little more defensible if we play it right, but maybe not. Certainly something to think about. But the Iranian fleet, I mean, we just basically wiped out anything that was mid to large surface vessel within the first several weeks of combat, probably the first several days. So all of the money that they had dumped into these drone carrying vessels and everything seemed like a good idea on paper. They clearly didn't think through the vulnerability side of that and the vulnerability being we can see them, whether they turn their AIS on or not, and we can find them and we can kill them. Can you say what AIS is real quick? Yes, automated system that effectively pings and sends off a beacon globally into this broad network. And it's how honest shipping tells everybody where the vessel is. But what you're seeing a lot of, particularly from the Russian ghost fleet, is that they will either turn AIS off or more commonly will spoof their AIS to make it appear that the ship is operating elsewhere. And not just military ships, but commercial ships. All ships. They're trying to do illicit cargo deliveries essentially. Yeah, that goes down to Dow level, I believe. I mean, these are small vessels too. So the requirement for that was actually a safety measure coming in in about 2008 into the Safety of Life at Sea Convention requiring that every vessel over 300 gross tons engaged in an international voyage or 500 gross tons would have this beacon on it. And it started out just to make sure everybody was trying to avoid collisions. But now it's become the way that we actually monitor and track ships. And now we're seeing another iteration of it in terms of the innovative use of spoofing and all kinds of different dynamics involving dark activity. But it is, I think, we often forget when we start focusing on new technology that before it existed, we were still able to do certain things. And so everyone sort of seems to think that you can't track a ship unless it's got AIS on. But as Ben just said, no, you can still see it. It's still there. Sometimes remarkably difficult, right? And I mean, it's still difficult because of atmospheric and, you know, water conditions. Absolutely. And with 70% of the earth covered in water, we are often just so blind to how large the maritime domain is and how much you can hide. So yeah, finding a ship at sea is extremely difficult without any kind of signal. But it is still increasingly doable. Thinking about a regular warfare, we say that insurgents often hide in the mountains because it's hard to find them. It seems like there's a parallel here for asymmetric forces. But Ben, I cut you off before I- Yeah, small vessel. The Iranians have effectively been by the course of destruction that they just experienced. I mean, they've effectively been forced back to their core strategy, which is small naval vessels, very small, you know, speed boats, sometimes commercial vessels that are able to not just conduct direct attacks. That's a little more complex. I mean, and you have to make it across the water close to an enemy vessel in order to strike it. So that's more vulnerable. They're more like suicide operations. But to plant mines or to give the impression that you planted a mine, certainly that's far more viable. And so they're now in the position of doing what they do best and against our incapacity, right? We gave up almost all of our mine detection and mine clearing capabilities. We've got some USV stuff that's at least in the experimental phase. I know there's some operational stuff. But if you think about even just the, what is it, 40 kilometers across the Strait of Hormuz, you've got to, yeah, Miles, you've got to also think about the vast opening expanses beyond the Strait itself. You got to clear that area too, whether or not they're actually mines there. And that just requires volume of vessels. So what that means is that an irregular actor can deny even a closed space or even a more open space when there's a relatively shallow seabed and make things really difficult for a high-end conventional force. So what's the story in Ukraine then, Ian? Is that similar or different than what we're seeing? And just to give the bottom line up front, I mean, it seems like the Russian conventional Black Sea fleet was essentially destroyed by a country, Ukraine, that doesn't have any Navy at all. But you can correct me if that characterization is wrong. No, I mean, I think that's exactly right. I think it's the first example where a Navy without ships is defeated a Navy with ships in such dramatic fashion. And I think that this is where necessity is the mother of invention. I mean, the Ukrainians at the outset were still operating with a degree of conventional mindset. They had been a much bigger Navy before 2014 when the sort of little green men experiencing Crimea led to them losing a lot of their fleet in Sevastopol. And so, you know, they still were operating with in fact, very much Soviet vestiges of both their general procedures and doctrine. And so their mentality was 30 years old. But all of a sudden, they had an existential threat, and it really engendered a great degree of ingenuity very quickly. And there were a couple of pieces to that. There's the technology side, we can talk a lot about that, and they've done an incredible job of also realizing that the asymmetry isn't just about the technology, it's also about the cost. And that a $5,000 drone against a million to $5 million countermeasure, but it's very much in favor of the cheaper actor. And we've seen that playing out with the Red Sea and now that's straight up for moves as well. But the other piece was kind of getting creative legally and operationally. In the first few weeks of the war, the Ukrainians went after some of the Russian flag vessels that were inside of Ukrainian territory. All of a sudden, it was it was a wartime, not peacetime. They could go after capture and prize. And so we saw all kinds of changes in thinking to say, you know what, we can start to marshal assets. We didn't even think that we had to our advantage and let's see what we could do. And so the work to create target lists was very, very rapid in terms of seeing what are the naval auxiliary vessels that Russia uses on the slide? What are the row rows, the roll on, roll off ships that have been used in Syria and elsewhere? There were vessels in the Black Sea at the time that had allegations of having moved special nuclear material to Iran under JCPOA violations. So there were all kinds of vessels that could very quickly be targeted. They're all at the bottom of the sea now. They're all destroyed. What they realized was they didn't need a destroyer or a frigate or an aircraft carrier to go and destroy, you know, the Black Sea fleet. And so they got very innovative and said, all right, what's the way that we can make this the most detrimental for them while still staying within the law? And I think that's a really interesting point because working with the Ukrainians, one of the things that they realized was that if they had to sink an enemy battleship, they needed to do search and rescue for that crew. They needed to make sure that they were doing everything by the law as much as possible. And I think that's one of the other lessons I take away. Yes, some bias is an operational lawyer, but I think that they found that there was tactical advantage to thinking within the law. And they spent a lot of time looking at the San Remo manual, a lot of time thinking about law and naval warfare and seeing what kind of weird things were in there that might be useful that they might have forgotten about. If you bring it again, I'll do the same thing and bring it back to the tactical level. It's really important to not get laser focused on one technology. So I'll follow off of Ian's comment. And then we were, we are rightly drawn into the USV discussion because the Ukrainians have done some amazing things with USVs. They're not terribly cheap. If I'm not mistaken, I'm not going to win the USV technology trivia quiz game, but I think it's about 220K for the larger ones, but they bring a tremendous capability. Large warhead, they can shoot the surface to air missiles off of them successfully have shot down a couple of Russian fighter aircraft. I was going to say, I feel like some of the benchmark moments that came across as I remember the first time there was reporting that a underwater drone destroyed a ship, but then there soon followed that was an underwater drone shot down a Russian aircraft. So the technology is part of the story though. That's completely replacing traditional man ships with underwater drones, right? Or surface drones. I would, so again, completely replacing I think goes too far. But there was also another great incident. And again, God knows all the things we don't know about. There are probably many more fascinating stories, but there was also a USV with the machine gun mounted on it. They got into a fight with a couple of Russian helicopters. And there was a USV, the helicopter gunfight. There's some great footage online if you want to go look for it. The real kind of step back takeaway here though, is that the USVs have been successful in large part because they've been integrated with other technologies and capabilities. And so when you see a successful USV attack against a single ship, yes, that happens. They're more successful when they swarm several of them. They're even more successful when they combine a USV attack with a missile attack and or a drone attack or multiple drones and some other kind of capabilities. So there is very much a combined arms kind of approach to the way that this irregular naval campaign is being conducted. In terms of whether or not this replaces capability, but that is a fundamental question for the US Navy. And I think for all navies right now, because ships are expensive, more expensive than the ships or the people. And if you talk to US Navy leaders, they are struggling with how are they going to recruit people to put on these vessels. When we talk about partially manned or unmanned vessels, that's not so much necessarily technology or technophilia infatuation. It's often more about just not paying for the humans that go on the ship. So the problem then becomes what you have to really think hard about what you're exposing yourself to, if you mean too far in that direction. And I would argue that some kind of balance, like the Ukrainians have actually achieved, is more viable. And then you have to ask yourself to the counterfactual, what would the Ukrainians be doing if they still had a manned surface fleet? And so not to learn all of our lessons from just one example. And so I'm glad you frame the initial conversation with the Iranians and Taiwan and other other. Yeah, I think that there are also legal questions that do arise when you're completely unmanned as to what the character and personality of these vessels are, what happens if they malfunction and end up in somebody else's territory. Have you violated territorial sovereignty with them? There are all kinds of things that haven't been fully thought through and adjusted. And so we're not quite ready to advocate to technology over human innovation. But I also want to emphasize that there is a misnomer about some of the drones in the maritime space as if it's really easy to do. And I hear this a lot where people are looking for aerial drones in order to do monitoring and surveillance of fisheries areas or marine protected areas or anything. And the idea that you can just get any old aerial drone off the shelf and put it out at sea is insane for a couple reasons. One, the winds work differently. Two, the saline air. And three, if they fall in the water, you're done. And so the loss rate on aerial drones at sea is huge. And so to get to something that is actually effective at not only flying and operating, but also delivering some kind of impact is not that easy. And so one of the things that the Ukraine situation brought out was that the Ukrainians were able to innovate on maritime drones faster than the Russians were. And in fact, the Russians only started to succeed at anything in the aerial drone space at sea when they turned to Iran. And that's a really important piece here. It wasn't until the Shahid drone started coming through Russia that the Russians started having any kind of pushback success. And so that also points to the finger of Iran having spent a lot of time figuring out how to use the unmanned capabilities in the maritime space. They've been looking at this for decades, and they've also had field testing in all kinds of other places. And this is something about Iran that's important. They're quote unquote proxies through Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others have given them visibility of how technology is implemented, strategies implemented, tactics are implemented in different places and different operating environments so that they could learn from that as well. And with the Russians and the Iranians working together in the Black Sea, that also gave them added visibility that now makes them more threatening, I would say, in the Strait of Hormuz, even amid the decimation of their more conventional Navy. Can we squeeze naval direct action, manned direct action into this too? Because I think if we're, particularly if we're comparing Iran and Ukraine and Taiwan, I mean, let's think about the role of amphibious forces here. Certainly there have been some amphibious successful amphibious activities in the Black Sea. And then you can also look at the impact of the MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is brings an infantry robust infantry battalion with an integrated air capability off the coast of Iran right now off the coast of Venezuela. There's a threat there from the sea that forces the adversary shore to pick up and think about an entirely new dimension of threat. And so that can come at scale with the Marine Expeditionary Unit or force, and then it can come at small scale with special operations. And I would again argue to go beyond the three theaters we've been looking at in that routine kind of river crossing, late crossing, amphibious operations, those happen everywhere. And they often have significant tactical impact because they help the attacking force get inside the process or the outer loop of the defender. So Ian, I mean, we've thrown out a lot of information. If you could just in two sentences, attempt to summarize the character of this naval irregular warfare in Iran and Ukraine, what are we looking at in both cases that captures the similarities and differences at the very macro level? We're seeing actors with existential threats, marshalling minimal cost, high impact technology and using strategy and tactics creatively to undermine the the strength and force of conventional forces. And that is something that should be of concern for large navies going forward and that they have to be prepared for a much more diverse array of threats that are potentially at the low level as much as they are at the high level. We've bounced around between talking about commercial shipping targets and actual naval targets. So in a regular maritime competition, do we think of these commercial shipping targets as the real center of gravity rather than naval forces themselves? I think it's a great question. And I think it's brought up a couple of new challenges in that when we saw the Houthis start attacking commercial shipping on the 19th of November 2023, it was the first time a non-state actor had launched a military style campaign against a commercial body, maritime shipping as a whole. They weren't targeting grey holes, they were targeting the vessels that bring us our goods with men and women who have no military training on board. And so this was a very different situation. It's different than pirates where you're looking at gaining some kind of commercial private end, a payout, you're looking for profit. You know, what Iran is doing today is with limited actual kinetic action harming 20% of the global supply chain of energy supplies and with it, everything else. I mean, the amount of knock-on consequences for what's happening is incredible. And so it does bring up questions as to whether if you want to win a naval campaign, you should focus on sinking ships or on blocking commerce. And that is a really critical question. And I think navies have always had multiple roles, right? They have projection of sea power and the ability to engage in naval warfare, but also protection of sea lines of communication. That is a key responsibility of a navy. And so we're seeing bad actors playing with those different roles and responsibilities right now and seeing which one is most effective to manipulate. And I want to note that one concern I have is that the Houthis, in getting so much attention and having so much, I would say, strategic success on their end, because the Red Sea remains about 70% closed, they have inspired a lot of other actors to turn to them to look to them as being inspirational. And one of the groups that has turned to them are the, the, the, the, the spectrum of bad actors in the Horn of Africa who have formed alliances with them. And we've seen technology transferring weapons flow moving the other direction. They had flowed through the Horn of Africa into Yemen, and now it's moving the other direction to actors in Somalia and elsewhere that seem to be poised to, to create some new havoc. And what the Houthis may have done is transformed their own mentality from being one of Iran's allies as they saw themselves and as the rest of the world called them a proxy to being the hegemon, to now being the big dog with a proxy strategy of their own. So, you know, let, let's think about how this applies to our capabilities and opportunities, not just our vulnerabilities. Certainly we're vulnerable here a lot. Our commercial shipping has to be protected. It affects us economically and so on and so forth. But what about our opportunities to interdict using irregular warfare capabilities against commerce? And I think the Russian ghost fleet, the Iranian ghost fleet, and I would add the North Korean illicit shipping in there as well. There are a lot of non-attributable things we could be doing to these vessels that are illegally flagged, that are operating illegally. We're seeing the Europeans starting to take the lead on some of this activity now, and I think they're doing so quite effectively, but we could be doing it at scale. And if we were serious about directly competing with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, I think we would be hitting them where it really hurts. We want to make sure the legality was there, and you're more of an expert on that than I am. Love to hear your thoughts on it. But why aren't we and why can't we take more advantage of the vulnerability of the ghost fleets that seem to be so essential to these large economies that we're competing with? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, you know, part of the problem is that we don't have a definition of what these ghost fleets are. They're colloquial terms. So shadow fleet, ghost fleet, dark fleet, rogue fleet, whatever term you use, the problem is it's descriptive of a phenomenon. And that phenomenon is basically born of us sanctioning a lot of people and them trying to find ways to avoid those sanctions in terms of maritime movements. But what we're seeing is a concerning trend, which is that they're starting to realize that our sanctions may be toothless if we don't actually enforce them. Enforcing sanctions is very difficult in the maritime domain if they are not universal, if they're not UN sanctions. From a legal standpoint, there's limited authority. And as you say, if they're illegally flagged in a manner that makes them so that they're actually vessels without nationality, we have a way we can go about it. It's a bit of a stretch, but we get there. And the problem is that the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans have realized that. And so they're starting to reflag that ghost fleet, that dark fleet, that shadow fleet from either really poorly governed flag registries or even non-existent flag registries back into the Russian, Iranian, North Korean and other flags in order to do two things. One, make it so that there's a legal process we would have to follow in order to go after them, but two, make it so that they can provide protection. And so it's an attack on their sovereignty if we go after them. And so this is where we need to make sure that we are being very extensive in our red teaming of our own actions and how they could create second and third order consequences. Because the fact is that with the boarding of the marinara in the exclusive economic zone of Iceland in January, we saw a bizarre phenomenon. The bellow one, when it was leaving the Caribbean, was flagged in Guyana, which is not an open registry. It was illegally flagged there. And so that illegal, basically vessel without nationality status made it so that the US could board it very easily under Article 110 of UNCLOS, no problem. Easy to get on board. Harder to do something about it once you're on board, but then halfway across the Atlantic, it reflagged into Russia and the Russian Federation Navy gave it both a surface and a submarine escort. That meant that when we boarded it along with the UK, we were running the risk of potentially having an at sea conflict with a Russian surface vessel and even a submarine. And so we are starting to see a reverse trend in the flagging dynamics in order for those states to blanket the shadow fleet with visible protection and the protections that come with sovereignty. We need to be careful that our limited action on the shadow fleet doesn't create a massive backlash. And the Europeans have all kinds of great priorities of getting on board all these vessels, but they also have to be careful that they have a clear sense of what they're going to do next. Boarding most of these vessels is easy. I can give you a legal reason to board almost any vessel and almost anywhere. That's not the hard part. The hard part is then doing something once you're on board. And the challenge is that if we don't have a clear then what, and we just start interdicting vessels for no clear reason, we end up becoming violators of our own principle of freedom of navigation. I would certainly agree on the legally flagged vessels. Yeah. And that is, that's their smartest countermeasure. However, that also opens up a vulnerability for them. And then it means now we're tracking those vessels directly to them. They can't hide what they're doing anymore. Exactly. So we got to get more creative. We always close by asking what the implications of this conversation are for policymakers, practitioners and scholars. I'll let Ben go first. What do you think people should take away from this conversation and also just the state of naval and regular warfare? Let's take it from the perspective of the United States, Navy and force design and force development. And there are two things here. One is obviously, there's the alligator closest to the boat, no pun intended, is that we need to think much harder about how we defend our gray hull vessels against this, against the emerging threats. And I don't just mean the individual technologies like us fees, but I mean the combined use of those technologies. So we need to be thinking about the threat tactics as much as we are thinking about the threat technologies. And then the second thing is another caution, which is not to go too far into the Ukraine example. Again, I'm a huge supporter of Ukraine. I love what they're doing with technology, but they have an idiosyncratic perspective on things based on the context that we don't just start investing in things because they seem like a great idea without having a really clear and well thought approach to our overall force design that fits within our naval tactics and our naval strategy. And I think the concern right now is the race to beat our way around our own bureaucracy is going to extend us out into a technology world maybe that we're not ready to employ. Completely agree. And I would say in 1999, China diagnosed the problem with the West as being overly focused on technology as a function of military success and revolution. And if we let technology or even procurement be the driver of our strategy, we're going to sink ourselves pun intended. We are we're looking at a situation where the speed of innovation not only at the technology level, but also at the operational and tactical levels is outpacing our own doctrine and our processes of procurement and development in terms of warfighting capabilities. And so if we want to be successful in dealing with the actual threats, we need to recognize a couple of things. Number one, the threats aren't just conventional military, which means that we may need to be thinking in a mixed context of warfighting, but also law enforcement. And one of the problems that we're seeing right now is that we're bling law of naval warfare doctrines with law enforcement doctrines. That's a problem for us. Because if we don't want others to do the same thing, we shouldn't do it ourselves. And so we need to make sure we're clear on when we're doing law enforcement and when we're doing naval warfare. And those those are different things that have historically been governed by the Navy and the Coast Guard, respectively. And so we need to make sure that we're not forgetting that that sort of split between peacetime and wartime and making doctrines just fit what we want to do at any given time. It also means that we need to be thinking more creatively and proactively about what the overall mission is. I think we're we're so focused on tactical success that we often don't recognize strategic failure. I go back to the Red Sea. We did an amazing, amazing job of shooting down Houthi drones and missiles and all kinds of surface and underwater craft. Incredible tactical job. But is the Red Sea open? Has shipping resumed? And so what's the what's the strategic end state we're trying to achieve in Iran? You know, again, huge tactical success in terms of our military approach. But the Red Strait Horn moves was open two months and a few days ago. It's not now. And so when's it going to reopen? Anybody's guess. And so we need to make sure that our enjoyment of tactics doesn't blur our focus on a clear strategic end state and that we actually pay attention to how we get there. If we violate our principles, if we undermine our principles, if we violate the law, if we destroy the whole effort we've made at creating a rules based international order in the process of achieving some kind of tactical success, that is an overwhelming strategic failure for the United States. Yeah, yeah. And I think you're making a really important point here. I'm actually going to bring this into the last question that I'm going to ask you both today, which originally I was just going to ask what capabilities should US and allied policymakers be investing in given what we've discussed in this conversation. But given the point you just made, I feel like just asking for a list of capabilities is a little bit short sighted and might bring us a little bit too in the weeds on tactics. So I'm going to ask a version of that question, which is like, if you can talk through the capabilities and how they would actually play into an ideal strategy of dominance or denial in the seed domain, I would love to hear that. Ben, do you want to take that? Sure. I mean, I think the thing we need to think about is platform flexibility now. And we're coming out of a long period of naval platform specialization where every single ship had a very specific purpose. I think we're beyond that now. I think vessels are going to have to be produced to have multiple purposes. I think the LCS, the littoral combat ship, at least conceptually was a move in the right direction in that it had a modular capability. I think it was not effectively developed. Let's just leave it at that. But the idea of strapping things to decks is longstanding, especially special operations guys. If they needed the capability on a ship, they would just bring it and then lash it down to the deck and use it that way. We need to think about our vessels as mutable platforms that can do just about anything. And I would make a strong case there for amphibious vessels. Yet I know I'm biased and I know I'm a marine and I want to see the Marines have more amphibious ships because I want to see the muses out there. Okay, so take it with a grain of salt. But those amphibious vessels historically have been the ones that have been most flexible and then they're most adaptable not just to marine operations, US marine operations, but also to the kind of special operations that I was talking about where you lash things to the deck. Also thinking about lashing hypersonic missile capabilities to a deck, how about directed energy weapons, so on and so forth. That is interesting because honestly, I have a view as a person who watches the land domain much more than the maritime domain or the naval domain that we're going to move toward large autonomous fleets. And so I'd imagined in like a Taiwan strait situation or really anywhere in the ocean having large swarms of cheap drones would be a great toolkit to have. But you're not even really bringing that up. You're talking about the flexibility of the platforms we have now. And so that's an interesting learning point for me. Yeah, I really endorse Ben's comments there. And I think that agility is absolutely key because I think fundamentally we have to face the enemies we have not the ones we want. We have to fight them where they are not where we want them to be. And that means that we need to be able to adapt quickly to changing operating environments to changing situations. And right now our approach is not, particularly in the maritime domain, is not as agile as it could or should be. And that's both a technology problem and a mentality problem. It is about being eyes open on what the key threats are. And when we look at actors like China, like Russia, like Iran, like others who have been looking at the US force posture for years, they're finding every way they can to work around it. And so the moment we do anything, every adversary we have are going to adapt. And they're unencumbered by some of the same bureaucratic procurement issues that we have. They're unencumbered by the lobbying for making sure that somebody's state continues to make an aircraft carrier or anything else that slows down our evolution towards a more responsive force. And so we can't let the idea of how we want to fight dictate how we fight. And that's, I think, a problem that we're facing now, which is that we are encountering a diverse array of adversaries who are going to be as creative as possible, because for us, it's about winning. For them, it's about existence. They're under a completely different motivation to survive. And so I think we have to also recognize that that motivating factor of an existential threat becomes incredibly inspiring for innovation. And you will do anything you can to survive. And so that is going to become a challenge if we are just hoping and wanting them to capitulate. Unfortunately, now we're out of time. This has been a really great conversation. Ben Conable, Ian Raulby, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. If you like the show, please spread the word and consider sharing this episode with others. You can subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you do not miss an episode. You can also engage with us on X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and across many other platforms. If you found value in today's conversation, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It really helps us reach new audiences. Support for the Irregular Warfare Podcast comes from members of the IWU community, like you, and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. And one last thing. What you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, Princeton University, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, or any agency of the US or any other government. Thanks again for being part of this community and we'll see you next time.