As a US administration once again looks towards hemispheric security issues, many of the challenges I anticipated are coming to the fore. As I argued in 2019, there is a path to success here, but it is narrow and at times counterintuitive.

Military tactics, however, may not be the ideal mechanisms for challenges that are often closer to crime than war. Leveraging the Navy’s capabilities, without overly militarizing maritime security, is a complicated problem that requires a strategic and partner-oriented approach to the challenge.

This highlights the importance of transitioning mature UxS out of experimental task forces and into the hands of commanders who need to gain operational familiarity with these systems in order to understand how to best employ them. That is, not coincidentally, a key charge in the 2024 NAVPLAN.

(3) The author assesses that poor target/weapon pairing contributes to some meaningful portion of small UAS failures. Commanders in Ukraine use drones because they have them, regardless of whether they are the most economical or effective tool for a strike.

This is consistent with the findings from my own @warontherocks.bsky.social analysis last year, which observed that the operational effectiveness of UAS and USVs in the Black and Red seas were both highly dependent on integration with more conventional cruise and ballistic missiles.

(2) Offensively, a critical observation here is the importance of understanding uncrewed systems as enablers operated in conjunction with other, often legacy systems (“the vast majority of our sorties were against targets that had already been struck successfully by a different weapons system”).

My take on 3 U.S. Navy implications:

(1) Defensively, the author’s findings may prove instructive for Navy’s counter-UAS strategy, given these systems may be less effective and less operationally impactful than initial observations suggest (particularly for precision strike).

The author notes (with regard to UAS) that “[higher end] loitering munitions provide greater precision in day and night, more ease of use, and higher resistance to electronic interference than first-person view drones… The investment in quality seems to justify the greater expense.”

BLUF: “If a member of a NATO military were hypothetically to ask me whether NATO countries should acquire first-person view drone capabilities, based on my experience and given the current state of the technology, I would probably say no.”

And while industry is not, so far, pricing in a Hormuz closure, they do seem to expect continued postponement of Red Sea traffic. The former is good for tankers, the latter for containers, though the long term impact on freight rates may not be as large as the Red Sea crisis has been.

Shipping seems to believe that conflict is not bad for business. Asian shipping stocks rose on the news of the strikes. Part of that is a hypothesized boon to crude carriers capitalizing on a potential dip in the number of Iranian tankers available to operate (see above from Lloyd’s List).

An executive at an international shipping association believes that any “tripwire” for impacts to global shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea would be the perception of U.S. involvement (so far no evidence of that).

So far, observers are not forecasting major shocks to global distribution. Iran is not yet reporting damage to oil facilities, and the head of the International Energy Agency issued a statement that oil “markets are well supplied.” x.com/fbirol/statu...

The Strait of Hormuz straddles >1/3 global crude shipments. Existing pipelines in the region (in KSA, UAE, Iraq) have limited spare capacity to move much more by land (maybe 4 million barrels a day). A disruption to Hormuz traffic could impact around 11 mbpd, most of which goes to Asia.

Israel has temporarily shut down exploitation of its Leviathan gas field, the major deposit in Israel’s EEZ west of Haifa. The complex supplies gas to Egypt, which may see the cost of LNG rise as Cairo looks to seaborne alternatives. Energy prices are not something you want to see spiking in Egypt.

My only reclama is that we keep the scale of the two efforts in mind. The US under OPG downed ~400 projectiles prior to the latest round of shooting. Nearest I can tell, EU Naval Forces claim around two dozen, which U.S. and UK forces did on some individual days in the thick of the fighting.