Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. We are coming to you from our usual spot in Jerusalem, and I have to say, looking out the window today, everything seems so quiet and grounded. But the topic our housemate Daniel sent over this morning is anything but. It is about the most volatile, high-stakes environments on the planet, the maritime chokepoints that keep our world running.
It is a fascinating prompt, Corn. And for those who are new here, I am Herman Poppleberry. Daniel really hit on something that I think most people take for granted until their gas prices spike or their packages are delayed. We are talking about the literal arteries of global civilization. If you look at a map of the world, it is mostly blue, but the vast majority of the goods we use pass through just a few tiny, narrow strips of water.
Exactly. And Daniel was specifically asking about the practicalities. How do the people on those massive tankers actually talk to the warships patrolling the area? When you are sailing a ship the size of three football fields through the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab-el-Mandeb, and there are drones in the air or fast boats on the horizon, what does that coordination look like on the water?
It is a massive invisible infrastructure. I have been looking into the latest protocols, especially given the sustained tension we have seen in the Red Sea and the Gulf over the last couple of years. Most people imagine it is like a movie where a captain sees a threat and just radios for help, but the reality is much more integrated and, frankly, much more bureaucratic than you might think.
Well, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the communication systems, let's set the scale here. We are talking about places like the Strait of Hormuz. Herman, what are we looking at in terms of volume? Because Daniel mentioned that one-fifth of the world's oil flows through there.
That is right. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is only about twenty-one nautical miles wide. But the actual shipping lanes, the two-way traffic separation scheme, are only two miles wide in each direction, with a two-mile buffer zone in between. So you have these massive vessels, some carrying two million barrels of oil, squeezed into a space that is smaller than most city bypasses. If a single ship is disabled or attacked there, it is not just a local problem. It is a global economic cardiac arrest.
And that is why the military is there. But I want to push on that. Daniel asked how they cooperate. We often hear about naval task forces. I know there is the Combined Maritime Forces, which is this huge international coalition of over forty nations. How does a civilian captain in Singapore or Rotterdam actually plug into that military umbrella?
It usually starts long before they even enter the high-risk area. There is an organization called the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, or the U-K-M-T-O. Despite the name, they are the primary point of contact for merchant vessels across the entire Indian Ocean and the Gulf. When a ship is planning a transit, they register with the U-K-M-T-O and the Maritime Security Centre Horn of Africa. They provide their route, their speed, and their estimated time of arrival at certain waypoints.
So it is like a flight plan for a plane, but for a giant boat?
Precisely. And once they are in the zone, they use something called the Mercury system. This is where it gets really nerdy and interesting. Mercury is an internet-based, unclassified, but secure chat and information-sharing platform. It is basically like a specialized Slack channel for the world's navies and the shipping industry. You have naval commanders from the United States, France, India, and dozens of other nations sitting in the same virtual room as the security officers of the major shipping lines.
Wait, so a commander on a billion-dollar destroyer is actually chatting with a security guy at a private company like Maersk or Mediterranean Shipping Company?
Yes. They are sharing real-time data on suspicious sightings. If a merchant ship sees a group of fast boats or a suspicious drone launch from the coast, they post it on Mercury. The military assets in the area, like those in Operation Prosperity Guardian or the European Union's Operation Aspides, see that immediately. It creates what we call shared awareness. Instead of every ship being an island, they become part of a sensor network.
That makes sense for the high-level stuff, but what about when things get tense? If I am the captain of a tanker and I see a drone approaching, I am probably not typing in a chat room. I am on the radio, right?
Right. That is where the bridge-to-bridge communication comes in. They use V-H-F Channel Sixteen, which is the international calling and distress frequency. But in high-risk areas, the military often designates specific secondary channels for security coordination. The naval ships will actually broadcast what they call Marsec, or Maritime Security, advisories. They will say, all vessels in the vicinity of point alpha, be advised of a potential hazard. It is a very structured, very calm dialogue, even when the situation is anything but calm.
I have always wondered about the crews, though. Daniel mentioned this in his prompt. These are often civilian sailors, many from the Philippines, India, or Eastern Europe. They did not sign up for a war zone. When you are sailing through a place like the Bab-el-Mandeb right now, in early twenty-six, and you know there is a risk of missile fire or drone strikes, how does that affect the practical operation of the ship?
It changes everything. The ships implement something called Best Management Practices version five, or B-M-P-five. This is a set of industry-standard security measures. They might include things like hardening the bridge with ballistic film on the windows, creating a citadel, which is a reinforced safe room where the crew can retreat if the ship is boarded, and even using physical barriers like razor wire around the deck.
A citadel? So if a boarding party gets on deck, the crew just locks themselves in a steel room and waits?
Exactly. And the citadel is equipped with its own independent communication system and often the ability to kill the main engines from inside. The idea is that if you can't control the ship, you can't steal it or steer it into a port. It buys time for the naval forces to arrive. And that is a key part of the coordination. The military needs to know exactly where that citadel is and how to communicate with the crew inside if they have to conduct a boarding operation to retake the vessel.
That sounds incredibly stressful. You are basically sitting in a metal box under the waterline while people with guns are on your deck. I can see why Daniel was asking about the crews. There has to be a massive psychological toll.
There is. And that leads into the economic side of the coordination, which is the insurance. This is something people often miss. The decision to sail through a chokepoint is often made by an insurance underwriter in London or New York, not just the shipping company.
Right, because of the war risk premiums. I remember reading that when the risk level goes up, the cost to insure a single transit can jump by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sometimes more. In some cases, the insurance premium can be higher than the actual cost of the fuel for the trip. This is where the military-civilian coordination is actually about economics. If the United States Navy or the British Royal Navy can demonstrate that they are effectively patrolling a corridor, the insurance companies might keep the premiums at a level where it is still profitable to sail. If the military presence feels inadequate, the insurance companies will effectively close the lane by making it too expensive to enter.
So the warships are basically acting as a physical guarantee for the global insurance market. That is a very different way of looking at a carrier strike group. It is a floating insurance policy.
It really is. And there is a second-order effect here too. When we talk about coordination, we also have to talk about private security. Many of these merchant ships now carry what they call P-C-A-S-P, which stands for Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel. Usually, these are former special forces soldiers, often from the United Kingdom or the United States.
Wait, so you have private security teams on the same ships as civilian sailors, navigating through waters patrolled by international navies? That sounds like a recipe for a lot of confusion.
It can be. And that is why the rules of engagement are so strictly coordinated. The private security teams have to follow very specific protocols. They can't just open fire on anything that looks suspicious. There is a whole ladder of escalation. They start with flares, then loud-hailers, then warning shots into the water. Only if the threat is imminent and life-threatening can they use lethal force. And they have to report every single interaction to the military authorities in the area.
I am curious about the geopolitical friction here. Daniel mentioned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In the Strait of Hormuz, you have the Iranian navy and the Revolutionary Guard navy. They are there legally because it is their territorial waters, or at least they are right on the edge of it. How does the coordination work when the threat isn't just a pirate in a skiff, but a state actor who says they are just performing a routine exercise?
That is the highest level of the game. It is called de-confliction. Even between nations that are hostile to each other, there are often basic mariner-to-mariner communication standards. They use the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, or Colregs. If an Iranian fast boat is buzzing a United States destroyer, the destroyer will call them on the radio and say, this is United States warship number eighty-two, I am a sovereign immune vessel, your actions are unsafe and unprofessional.
Unsafe and unprofessional. That is the classic line, isn't it?
It is the standard script. But beyond the script, there is a lot of signaling. The military ships will use their radar to lock onto targets as a way of saying, I see you and I am ready. The merchant ships, meanwhile, are trying to stay as predictable as possible. They stay right in the middle of the designated lanes. They keep their Automatic Identification System, or A-I-S, turned on, which broadcasts their name, position, and speed to everyone.
Although, I have heard that sometimes they turn that off, right? If they are trying to hide from someone?
Yes, and that is actually a point of contention with the military. The navies generally want the A-I-S turned on so they can tell the good guys from the bad guys. But if a ship is worried about being targeted by a specific group, they might go dark. The problem is, if you go dark, the navy might not be able to find you quickly if you are attacked. So there is this constant back-and-forth between the ship's security officers and the naval coordinators about whether to stay visible or try to disappear.
It feels like such a fragile system. You have these ancient maritime laws, some dating back hundreds of years, mixed with twenty-first-century drone warfare and satellite-linked chat rooms. And yet, millions of barrels of oil and thousands of containers keep moving. It is a testament to how much work goes on behind the scenes.
It really is. And you know, Daniel mentioned the Black Sea too. That was a very different kind of coordination. During the Black Sea Grain Initiative, you actually had a Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul with representatives from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, and the United Nations. They were literally inspecting ships together to make sure they were only carrying grain and not weapons. That was a civilian-military coordination on a diplomatic level that we rarely see.
And it shows that even in the middle of a hot war, these chokepoints are so vital that enemies will sometimes sit at a table to keep the ships moving. But Herman, what happens when it fails? We saw the Ever Given get stuck in the Suez Canal a few years back. That wasn't a military issue, it was just a big ship and a gust of wind. But it showed how vulnerable the system is. If you add a military threat to that kind of bottleneck, what is the contingency?
The contingency is usually a very long detour. If the Suez Canal or the Bab-el-Mandeb becomes truly impassable, ships have to go around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. That adds about ten to fourteen days to the trip and millions of dollars in fuel costs. But more importantly, it disrupts the entire global supply chain. The ships aren't where they are supposed to be to pick up the next load. The containers aren't at the port for the trucks to take them to the factories. It is a massive bullwhip effect.
So the military's job isn't just to protect the ship; it is to protect the schedule.
Exactly. Global trade is built on just-in-time delivery. And just-in-time doesn't work if you have to spend two weeks sailing around a continent because a chokepoint is too dangerous. This is why the coordination is so intense. They are trying to maintain the illusion of a safe, borderless world in places that are actually very dangerous and highly contested.
I want to go back to something Daniel mentioned about the warships being floating intelligence hubs. Herman, you mentioned they are sensing things. What kind of data are they actually providing to the merchant ships? Is it just, hey, there is a boat over there, or is it more sophisticated?
It is much more sophisticated. These warships have signals intelligence capabilities. They can pick up the radio signatures of drone controllers or the radar of shore-based missile batteries. They can share what they call a recognized maritime picture. They might tell a group of merchant ships to alter their course by five degrees to stay out of the effective range of a known threat. They are basically providing a high-tech weather report, but for violence instead of rain.
A violence forecast. That is a grim way to put it, but I guess it is accurate.
It is. And for the crews, that information is life-saving. Imagine you are a deckhand and you know your ship is being watched by a military that has your back. It doesn't make the danger go away, but it makes it manageable. You see the destroyer on the horizon, or you see the helicopter fly over, and you know that the coordination is working.
You know, we have been talking about this for a while, and it really strikes me how much of our modern world depends on this very specific, very technical cooperation between people who have totally different goals. The merchant captain wants to deliver his cargo and get home. The naval officer wants to maintain regional stability and project power. And the insurance guy wants to minimize his payout.
And yet, they all have to speak the same language. They all have to use the same chat rooms and the same radio frequencies. It is a massive, global exercise in pragmatism. And I think that is what Daniel was getting at. In a world that feels more and more divided, the sea is one place where everyone still has to follow the same rules, or else everything falls apart.
It is a great point. And I think it is a good place for us to take a quick breath. When we come back, I want to talk about the future of this. Because we are seeing more and more autonomous ships. We are seeing A-I being used for maritime security. How does the coordination change when there isn't a human captain on the bridge to talk to the warship?
Oh, that is a whole other level of complexity. I have some thoughts on the new protocols for uncrewed vessels in high-risk zones. It is actually being tested right now in the Arabian Gulf.
Alright, let's get into that in just a minute. But first, a quick reminder for everyone listening. If you are finding this deep dive into maritime security as fascinating as we are, we would really appreciate it if you could take a second to leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other curious people find the show, and we love reading your feedback.
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Okay, Herman, let's talk about the robots. If we are moving toward autonomous shipping, and we are already seeing autonomous military vessels, what does that do to the cooperation? Does the Mercury chat room just become an A-P-I call?
In many ways, yes. The United States Navy has a group called Task Force Fifty-Nine, which is based in Bahrain. Their entire mission is to integrate uncrewed systems into maritime operations. They use these small, solar-powered autonomous boats called Saildrones. They can stay out at sea for months at a time, just sitting there with cameras and sensors, acting as a persistent eye on the water.
So instead of a destroyer that costs tens of thousands of dollars an hour to operate, you have a bunch of little robot sailboats?
Exactly. And the coordination there is entirely digital. These drones are constantly feeding data into an A-I that looks for patterns. It can identify a ship's wake and tell if it is a standard merchant vessel or a fast boat that is behaving aggressively. When the A-I flags something, it alerts the human operators in the command center, who can then reach out to the merchant ships in the area.
But what about the merchant ships themselves? If I am a shipping company, why would I want to send an expensive autonomous ship through a place like the Strait of Hormuz where it could be easily captured or jammed?
That is the big hurdle. Right now, the risk of electronic warfare is so high that most companies are hesitant to go fully autonomous in those regions. If someone jams your G-P-S or your satellite link, an autonomous ship can become a multi-million dollar floating hazard. But, we are seeing the development of more resilient systems, like inertial navigation that doesn't rely on satellites. And the military is looking at how to provide a localized, secure navigation signal for friendly ships in a jammed environment.
So the warship of the future might not just be protecting you from missiles, but providing you with a secure data bubble so you can keep sailing.
Precisely. It is a move from physical protection to cyber-physical protection. The coordination becomes about managing the spectrum, not just the shipping lanes.
It is incredible how quickly this is evolving. I mean, five years ago, we were mostly talking about pirates in skiffs off the coast of Somalia. Now we are talking about state-sponsored drone swarms and autonomous sensor networks.
And the scary thing is that the threats are learning too. We have seen reports of non-state actors using relatively sophisticated drones and even underwater uncrewed vehicles. The barrier to entry for disrupting a chokepoint is getting lower and lower. You don't need a navy anymore; you just need a few thousand dollars and some technical know-how.
Which brings us back to Daniel's point about the crews. If the threat is getting more technical and more anonymous, the psychological pressure on those sailors must be through the roof. You can't even see who is attacking you half the time.
That is why the human element of the coordination is still so important. There are organizations like the International Seafarers Welfare and Assistance Network that work with the navies to provide support for crews who have been through these high-stress transits. The military and the shipping companies are starting to realize that the most vulnerable part of the whole system isn't the hull of the ship or the engine; it is the mind of the sailor.
That is a powerful point, Herman. It is easy to get lost in the tech and the geopolitics, but at the end of the day, it is about people trying to do a job in a very difficult place.
It really is. And I think that is the biggest takeaway for me. The global economy isn't just a series of spreadsheets and shipping routes. It is a massive, coordinated effort involving tens of thousands of people who have decided that cooperation is better than chaos, even when they don't particularly like each other.
Well said. I think we have covered a lot of ground today, from the narrow lanes of Hormuz to the digital chat rooms of the naval task forces. Herman, any final thoughts on where this is going?
I think we are going to see even more integration. The line between a merchant ship and a military sensor is going to continue to blur. Every ship on the ocean will eventually be part of a single, massive data network. The challenge will be keeping that network secure and ensuring that the coordination remains a tool for peace and trade, rather than a tool for surveillance and control.
That is the big question for the next decade. Well, this has been a fascinating one. Daniel, thanks for the prompt. It really forced us to look at the world in a different way.
Definitely. It is always good to remember that the things we use every day have a very long and often very dangerous journey before they get to us.
Absolutely. Well, that is it for this episode of My Weird Prompts. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find the contact form and our full archive of over five hundred episodes at our website, myweirdprompts.com. We are also on Spotify and most other podcast platforms.
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Thanks for listening, everyone. We will see you next time.
Take care, everyone. Goodbye.
