Two ships passing in the night…
A national security story where an insurance company is the hero.
Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly post where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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Next time you go to the store, take a minute and look around. Chances are, a lot of the goods you see spent time on a ship during its transit from origin to your local shelf. Food, fuel, clothes, electronics—almost all of it came from somewhere far, far away by boat.
In fact, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “over 80% of the volume of international trade in goods is carried by sea, and the percentage is even higher for most developing countries.”
The ocean is a biiiig place. There is nothing more humbling than being on the bridge of a ship in the middle of the ocean and realizing that you and your crew are the only human beings for hundreds of miles in any direction.
That vastness of the ocean is the reason there is a system called AIS, or Automatic Identification System. It’s a transponder that continuously and automatically broadcasts vital information about the vessel. Things like ship ID, course, speed, GPS location, and the like. All ships over a certain tonnage operating in international waters and all passenger vessels are required to have an operational AIS.
There’s lots of great reasons to have such a system. Search and rescue, shipping arrival schedules, navigation hazards, monitoring fishing fleets, maritime security, and accident investigation to name a few.
The information is public. You can go to Marinetraffic.com and check it out for yourself. Below is a screen grab from the website showing the Strait of Hormuz, which was featured in the opening chapters of Command and Control during a skirmish between the Iranian Navy and the USS Delbert D. Black.
In Threat Axis, the AIS data was the first stop for Don Riley’s team when they investigated the [REDACTED EVENT] in the North Pacific. They compared the AIS data with satellite images to figure out who they were after.
You can probably guess where we’re going with this bit of knowledge. The AIS can be turned off or manipulated—the technical term is “spoofed”—to hide a ship’s actual location. This week, we saw a real life example in the news.
In the New York Times article “Fake Signals and American Insurance: How a Dark Fleet Moves Russian Oil,” reporter David Botti tells the story of how Russia is spoofing the AIS to sell oil outside of the economic sanctions imposed as a result of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine.
Since December, Russia has had a price cap imposed on their oil sales, a practice designed to limit revenues to Russia without destabilizing the global oil market. Using a combination of satellite imagery and other public data, like social media posts (!), NYT has figured out that Mr. Putin has been running a “dark fleet” of tankers.
To carry out their deception, the tankers can use military-grade equipment, or software, that is now commercially available. This technology makes it possible to manipulate a vessel’s reported location, which is broadcast by an automatic identification system, or AIS. The signals communicate a ship’s identification, location and route over a radio frequency picked up by other vessels, ground stations and satellites.
(The article has some cool graphics that explain how they tracked down one specific vessel. It’s a worth a few minutes of your time if national security rabbit holes are your jam.)
You may ask why Mr. Putin is bothering with this subterfuge. Neither Russia nor China are party to the Western oil price sanctions, so why not just ship the oil without all the cloak and dagger? As the article explains:
But the tankers still have motive to spoof: to maintain their insurance coverage, without which they cannot operate in most major ports. The only insurers financially able to cover tankers are mostly based in the West and bound by the sanctions. If a client ship were to carry Russian oil that’s sold above the price limit, the Western insurer would be in violation of the sanctions and must drop its coverage.
Capitalism for the win!
On his radio show, National Security This Week, JR goes back to school! His guests are Colonel Chad Jagmin, the Director of Wargaming at the US Army War College, and Mr. Edmund “Cliffy” Zukowski, the Director for the International Strategic Crisis Negotiation Exercise. They dig into the role - and the importance - of the United States War Colleges.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
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David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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