Irregular Warfare Podcast - Irregular Warfare at Sea: The Cod Wars and Sea Shepherd

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is publishing! What do the Cod Wars—a years-long series of confrontations between Iceland and the United Kingdom over North Atlantic fishing rights—and the operations of the marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd teach us about irregular warfare in the sea domain? How do the actions of states and both nonstate and substate actors intersect to shape the maritime operational environment in which irregular warfare at sea plays out? In this episode, Kevin Bilms, a career civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Dr. Claude Berube, a retired Navy commander who teaches at the US Naval Academy, join hosts Ben Jebb and Lisa Munde to explore this fascinating and important subject. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

This podcast is part of an IWI special project entitled Project Maritime, where we explore modern challenges and opportunities in the maritime dimension at the intersection of irregular warfare and strategic competition. human security at sea and migration, novel domains like riverine and subsea and seabed environments, and the ways commercially available technology and data, or Blue OSINT, are changing maritime domain awareness. Please join us as we embark on this important conversation and send your submissions via the IWI website and follow us on ex-formally Twitter at proj underscore Maritime. To me, Iceland did something that the special operations community likes to include as part of its value proposition. It created dilemmas. It created a lot of dilemmas across all elements of government power. But Iceland also did something else that is very creative on the escalation ladder.

It created more rungs below the threshold of armed conflict than the UK really had countermeasures to respond to. Sea Shepherd was a well-beyond non-state actor, and I'm not sure if they were ever technically a non-state actor. They now work with states under agreement to provide ships, crew, fuel, while the host nation provides the authority and a law enforcement detachment in order to patrol local waters and interdict illegal fishing vessels, all under the authority of a host nation. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and my co-host today is Lisa Mundy. Today's episode examines two in-depth case studies associated with maritime irregular warfare. Our guests begin by discussing the Cod Wars, which were a protracted maritime conflict between Iceland and the United Kingdom.

They then explore how Icelandic maritime forces were able to secure a strategic victory against the much more powerful British Royal Navy. Next, our guests discuss how sub-state actors, like Sea Shepherd, are capable of disrupting illegal fishing and enforcing maritime law. Finally, our guests conclude by addressing how countries can work with non-state actors

to uphold international norms in the maritime domain. Mr. Kevin Bilmes is a career civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a non-resident fellow of the Joint Special Operations University and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and a term member with the Council on Foreign Relations. His article entitled, The Cod Wars and Lessons from Maritime Counterinsurgency, serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Dr. Claude Baraby teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy and has worked on Capitol Hill and several Navy commands. He's a retired Navy commander and is the author of several nonfiction books as well as novels, including the recently released The Philippine Pact.

You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project 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. Here's our conversation with Mr. Kevin Bilmes and Dr. Claude Berube. Kevin, Claude, it's great to have you both on the show, and thanks for joining us on the pod. Hey, Ben, thanks for having me. Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. So before we deep dive into today's episode, I do want to take a moment and just define terms,

because this episode is going to be a little different, right? It's the start of our Maritime Special series, and it's a story of maritime resistance, which I don't think a whole lot of us have thought about. When most people think of irregular warfare, they think of landlocked campaigns to influence populations. And there aren't necessarily gorillas hiding in mountains or Viet Cong operating in jungles and the high seas. So I guess just to start, what is maritime campaigning? And how is it different from land-based campaigns? And I'll direct that question to Kevin first. Yeah, that's a great question. While I'm not a navalist, I hesitate to offer a doctrinal definition for maritime campaigning,

but a helpful framing comes from the Hudson Institute, Brian Clark, who has characterized some main lines of effort, including sowing uncertainty about forced disposition and intent, strengthening allies and partners' interoperability, and contesting gray zone actions. All of these as a way to dissuade aggression and maintain position of advantage. I'm really glad that you seized on the observation that maritime resistance or maritime irregular warfare, in the human-centric sense of the phrase is underexplored.

That's something that through the Joint Special Operations University is something that has led me in my personal research and also as a fun way that I was exploring that concept through the Cod Wars. So I think as we go more into this case study and as we go more into the discussion on maritime competition, this human element is an area where there is considerable room for growth and further study for maritime campaigning. It's really important that you mentioned the Hudson Institute, because I think with every think tank, every organization, there's a different definition. irregular warfare as you have to have operations at sea involve at least one irregular actor or tactic that affects supply routes, adding to the capacity of forces, or projecting power ashore. I think more simply, it's a maritime component of operations to complement or supplement land-based

objectives. At the root of it may also be a traditional state's failure to recognize the potential threat of irregular warfare at sea or irregular operations at large. In the case of the United States Navy, for example, the Navy Irregular Warfare Office was established in 2008 but disestablished only five years later. Part of that was lack of resources but also the difficulty in defining the problem. I was in several VTCs, for example, with a Navy captain early on in this process of NIWO. And they kept debating in these VTCs the definitions and scopes of what is maritime irregular warfare. And if you don't know what the mission of your organization is, if you can't define it, it's a lot tougher to justify it to those who resource it. So it was very frustrating to the

point where the captain and I just decided we were going to stop attending the VTCs until they finally came up with a definition, which was all-inclusive with all these commands. But as one of my colleagues, Commander B.J. Armstrong in the History Department has written about in his articles and a book, the Navy's been doing irregular warfare, however you define it, consistently for much of its history. While it's true that there are no populations at sea in terms of maritime irregular warfare, there are both advantages and disadvantages. There are two primary challenges for an organization, whether it's a non-state actor or non-governmental organization, or even a state actor. First, unlike a land-based operation, mostly, it must invest in platforms. And these are

costly, so they have a higher cost, They have a higher degree of technical training with regard to navigation in various sea states. Second, these platforms, and again, I use the word mostly because as an intel officer, I always have to use the word mostly to qualify anything I assess. It can't remain at sea indefinitely, whether because of fuel or food limitations. And one example was the Somali piracy crisis of a decade ago. However, that can be mitigated with replenishing motherships, as we did see with Somali pirates, or logistics vessels hundreds of miles off the coast, as we saw with the Tamil Sea Tigers during the Sri Lankan Civil War until 2009. Another disadvantage is that there are a finite number of ports, harbors, and beaches from which these platforms can operate. And those are known geographical locations that can, in the right circumstances, be monitored,

assuming we can monitor all these places. The primary advantage is that it is, as journalist Ian Urbina describes, an outlaw ocean. Irregular warfare against smaller state navies can be very effective when those states rarely go beyond a few miles off their coast, whether it's limited by the platforms or tempered by political will. Claude, I'm really glad that you hit the point that the Navy's been doing irregular warfare for a long time. Largely, I agree. I think as we talk about the Cod Wars, what makes that such a unique case is that that is really a case where the campaign, so to speak, was not supporting a land-based operation.

This is where the contest at sea was the main show in town. And I think what I found so rewarding and interesting as we go into more discussion on the cod wars itself is that this is a competitive space where the object, where the means, where everything that was at the table was focused on affecting outcomes on the maritime domain, and everything else was ancillary. Diplomatic support came in, information operations came in, everything else was there to affect the outcome at sea. So Kevin, set the scene for us. I'm not sure a lot of people are aware that Iceland and the UK fought a multi-year, albeit low-intensity, conflict that ended in Iceland securing a strategic victory over the world's then second-strongest navy. Can you give us a broad

overview of the Cod Wars? Sure. So broadly, the time period is from the mid to late 1950s when the first Cod Wars began in 1958. It goes all the way to 1976 at the conclusion of the third Cod War. And full disclosure, before I started studying this case, I could have thought that was a typo for Cold Wars. And I know a number of people have made that mistake themselves. But what we really have here, as you described, was a low intensity. And by low intensity, I mean, there was one fatality in the entire duration of the conflict between Iceland and the UK where fishing rights were the core issue. It started in the 1950s when Iceland, which was newly independent, had observed outside fisheries taking excessive share of its cod and its fishing waters around the island. And they extended their nautical exclusive

economic zone from three to four miles. That went relatively uncontested. Norway had done it the previous year. In 1958, though, Iceland moved it from four miles to 12 miles. That pushed the UK fishing industry to a breaking point at the time, led to a lot of political deliberations within London, whether the Royal Navy should be involved and to what extent. Iceland ultimately was able to reach a settlement that ended the first cod war, and that kept kind of an uneasy truce until 1972, when a second cod war started after Iceland, again realizing some environmental impact and some limitations of how much fish its fishermen were obtaining, increased that limit again,

unilaterally from 12 nautical miles to 50. Same show kind of broke out. The Royal Navy was escorting British fishermen and West German fishermen, interestingly enough. Iceland was able to contest as they could through their coast guard and through other small maritime platforms. And there was an uneasy settlement that ended the Second Cod War, recognizing Iceland's fishing rights to 50 miles. And that kind of kept the peace until the Third Cod War kicked off in 1975, when Iceland, following international shifting norms on exclusive economic zones and continental shelving rights, increased its limits from 50 nautical miles to 200. That led to a third round

of skirmishes where Iceland was able to both prevail on the water, but more importantly, as we talk about it, was able to prevail diplomatically. So Kevin, that was a really great overview of the entire process of what happened. And in your article, you cite four mutually reinforcing elements that Iceland expertly employed to wage a maritime competition against the UK. Those include greater national willpower, asymmetry of interest, political risk-taking, and innovative non-lethal tactics, all of which are fascinating. So I really want to kind of deep dive into some of these. So let's just start with the first one. How did Iceland leverage sustained national willpower in a contest of wills against the UK?

So it's really important to hold on to some context on where Iceland was as a country at that point. The early 1950s, it's only a couple of years after Iceland acquired its independence in 1944 from Denmark. As a result, the 1950s roll around and the Icelandic government, more importantly, the Icelandic people are determined to assert their sovereign status. And part of that exercise came from claiming extended fishing rights and territorial waters as any state can do, but also pushing back against what they perceived as aggression from the Royal Navy. So there was an immense sense of national pride and determination each time the Royal Navy intruded

in what they considered their territorial waters. Second and relatedly, there was bipartisan consensus throughout the Cod Wars. There were several changes of parliament within Reykjavik, but the Icelandic position never wavered. Some political scientists in previous studies on the Cod Wars believe that this may have limited negotiation space for finding a quicker solution to the conflict, and they may be right about that. But also important to highlight is an observation that I made in my article. The Icelandic people cared about winning the Cod Wars with an almost religious importance. So with that kind of rhetoric, which was universally held amongst a very small country, giving an inch was going to be a pretty tough proposition domestically. proposition domestically. So the biggest reason, though, that willpower was so important, in my opinion, was it's because it explains why the conditions were there for Iceland to turn conventional logic upside down. The smaller country with no actual navy, much smaller fleet, should not have won on paper if you looked at their entry force against the Royal Navy.

But the pure focus on materiel didn't determine the outcome. And obviously, as we're talking about it now, the outcome was completely different. Because Iceland was more willing to outfight, outlast, and out-innovate the UK, that's ultimately why they were able to get the outcome that they did. I think this is one of the reasons that Kevin's article is important for discussing maritime irregular warfare. And that's his point about this David versus Goliath aspect to it. I think it's very important to understand the psychological and the public relations aspect of this, because in nearly every application, people will support and root for David over Goliath. Think of the Soviet Union invading Finland during World War II, something

that is completely overmatched, but people rooted for Finland. Even with the case of Somali piracy, I was told by one highly educated and formerly well-placed individual who actually sympathized with Somali pirates as there being simply Robin Hoods taking something from large companies and countries. So that effect shouldn't be underestimated. Publicly, the threat was mitigated in popular culture, I think, by many articles turning to movies that people could relate to, Pirates of the Caribbean or Spoofs by South Park. So that can be an aspect of unintentional information operations suggesting that there really is no danger or threat.

So how was there an asymmetry of interest between Reykjavik and London? It seems like a domineering country and formal imperial superpower like the UK could surely muster the capacity to take on an island nation of 300,000. Even though the UK is much bigger than Iceland, and the UK fishing industry did have a passionate lobbying element within London, it really didn't have the same impact on British citizens' livelihoods. If you think about this and how long of a campaign it was, this captured frontline news in Iceland for 20 years, the full duration of the campaign. This might have been on page B33 of the London Times.

This might have been on page B33 of the London Times. It just didn't captivate and compel that same sort of motivation, interest, and fervor that we saw on the Icelandic side. That both explains why Iceland persisted, in my opinion, but it also explains why the UK eventually relented to political pressure. And that's eventually why they found or sought a settlement to the dispute. London had a lot more to lose politically, whether as a member of NATO, as a UN Security Council member, in order to keep indefinitely contesting and competing in the Cod Wars. So they had to find a reason to settle, to both placate their alliances. And as the third Cod Wars rolls out, there's a lot of pressure from the United States and

others at how much resource the Royal Navy was applying to the Icelandic fishing waters instead of deterring Soviet incursions as a point of contention. So at the end of the day, winning the Cod Wars really just mattered more to Iceland. They had more at stake. They were able to prevail in the contest while it didn't just mattered more to Iceland. They had more at stake. They were able to prevail in the contest while it didn't matter as much to London, and they eventually found an incentive to settle. Again, I think that's an excellent point that Kevin notes in his article that in Iceland, the fishing industry represented 80 to 90 percent of Iceland's export earnings compared to about 1

percent for the UK. Iceland could coalesce around a vital economic interest in a way that the UK, with its domestic and international roles and responsibilities, couldn't convey to its own public, much less the international community. Perhaps we should come up with some sort of give-a-care-per-capita formula that might support the intensity of a nation's public to support something, much like the beginning of World War II, again, looking at England when Hitler decided to start bombing the cities and towns rather than focusing on the RAF airfields. In terms of the UK, the Cod Wars, I think, were a strategic overreach when they employed something like three dozen warships

rather than if they had had, perhaps, used something like a U.S. Coast Guard cutter whose white hulls and orange stripes are simply less threatening from a public relations perspective. And we shouldn't undervalue that. We've talked about an asymmetry of interest, right? But I'd also like to talk about risk-taking and cost imposition. From what little I know, it sounds like Iceland was able to dominate the escalation ladder by making calculated threats. Kevin, can you start off by explaining how Iceland leveraged its bargaining power with larger states to accomplish its interests? Sure. So to me, Iceland did something that the special operations community likes to

include as part of its value proposition. It created dilemmas. It created a lot of dilemmas across all elements of government power. Diplomatically, Iceland knew its worth to NATO, its strategic location for monitoring Russian naval activity, and leveraged that as a sort of damocles over the alliance, threatening to leave if its needs weren't met in the Cod Wars. alliance, threatening to leave if its needs weren't met in the Cod Wars. Economically, Iceland, when the UK shut down its fishing rights, was the first country within NATO and within the West to enter into a long-term trade agreement with the Soviet Union right at the onset of the Cold War. Both of these measures, diplomatically, economically, showed that Iceland was willing to pump up the volume early and often and make noise in order for outsiders to take notice and take its claims seriously. We'll get

to the specific tactics at sea in just a minute, I think, but Iceland also did something else that is very creative on the escalation ladder. It created more rungs below the threshold of armed conflict than the UK really had countermeasures to respond to. Going back to how the Hudson Institute had characterized maritime campaigning, this is the real example in action. Iceland made its maritime disposition and intent much more difficult for the UK to counter. For some of the reasons we talked about earlier, the UK was obviously unwilling to escalate militarily, but they didn't have countermeasures for all the other dilemmas that Iceland was creating, which as a result, Iceland was able to maneuver much more freely below that threshold,

even though an escalation of war was not certain. But the UK kept sticking to the same playbook, the same maritime tactics, didn't innovate and ultimately lost the contest. Lastly, the article talks about innovation and how Iceland experimented with non-lethal tactics to impose costs on the UK. You essentially write that necessity was the mother of invention for Iceland to compete without a navy. So can you kind of go over how Iceland adopted new concepts to take on the UK Navy? So that came in two types. One was actually adopting older concepts and technologies in new ways for the struggle. In a very fascinating read on cod, the book is named Cod, a biography of the fish that changed the world by Mark Kolansky.

He showed how the Icelandic Coast Guard basically applied old minesweeping technology to fashion trawl wire cutters that would sail to right angles of UK fishing boats and then snap their fishing nets. As a result, the fishing boats lose their entire catch. They face a lot of material damage. And for pennies on the dollar, Iceland was able to wipe away thousands of dollars of UK investments in the form of fishing revenue, supplies, salaries, wages, time spent back at maintenance and dock. So it's an asymmetric tool that Iceland created with devastating strategic impact. At the same time, Icelandic boats, on a lethality basis, even though they were severely outgunned, were much more durable and more able to sustain significant physical contact. So especially when ramming became more common in

the Second and Third Cod Wars, again remaining under that threshold of armed conflict, the Royal Navy and other fishing vessels couldn't take the beating and hang in there. Those ships, much more designed for conventional combat, would sustain damage and then have to rotate out of theater. James Holmes has stressed in maritime campaigning that you have to be there in order to compete. Presence is a prerequisite to changing the outcome at sea. Iceland's ships showed that focusing on denying access to the UK in order to prevent them from staying in the area was highly strategically effective. At that point, the Royal Navy couldn't counter Iceland's claims. UK and West German

fishing boats didn't feel safe fishing without their protection. And Iceland ultimately changes the facts on the ground as a result. So something that strikes me about this situation is the fact that Iceland and the UK actually had a fairly symbiotic trading relationship prior to the conflict. And there's this theory out there, largely rooted in liberal internationalist theory, that countries that trade together are less likely to fight, right? But the Cod Wars still happened. In fact, it seems like their interdependence may have actually exacerbated the conflict. So given how intertwined many countries are right now, I'm quite curious to get your thoughts on the matter. I know that's kind of an open-ended question, but I'll direct it to Claude first. I think I'd have to question that statement. I know it's an old statement, but if you look at

prior to World War I, where Europe was incredibly interconnected, the pieces just simply fell. incredibly interconnected. The pieces just simply fell. If you look at today's environment where the United States and China are really so codependent on each other for each other's economies, and yet we still seem to be escalating year by year, whether by rhetoric or by deed, to a potential conflict that we hope will be avoided. But we have to be prepared for it if it does occur. So I'm not sure if that old standard still really holds. I agree with Claude, and I would even take it a step further. In this case, I don't think that's the right prism to look at this conflict. So from the onset, NATO didn't support what Iceland was

doing unilaterally. That didn't deter Iceland, this tiny country that could easily have lost a maritime conflict, from pressing on anyway for a lot of the reasons we covered. And on the other hand, they persisted so long that NATO was finally stepping in in the 1970s to resolve this dispute in Iceland's favor. Once when it triggered a diplomatic crisis and continued to put pressure and impose costs on the UK Navy, that breaking of the alliance had never happened before in the history of NATO, and to my knowledge has not happened since. So the point on indecision is a good one. It shows that Iceland's gambits forced NATO's hand to intervene. It created dilemmas,

as we mentioned earlier, and helped put an end to a struggle that may have continued. Even then, Iceland was still able to continue to push the issue. I forget if the question brought up the United Nations, but I think that angle is interesting too, because Iceland's extensions, as we talked a bit earlier, coincided with evolving international norms on territorial waters, exclusive economic zones, EECs, and access to continental shelves. The UK, interestingly, might have done something for its long-term strategic interests, but certainly undermined its position in the Cod Wars when in 1974, they signed up to a 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Iceland, as an element of lawfare,

certainly capitalized on that as part of their argument to do the same around Iceland's waters. Earlier in the Cod Wars, the UN also acted as a kind of constraint on the UK's behavior. We talked a bit earlier about how the UK, as a member of the UN Security Council, felt bound by existing norms against wars of aggression. So, Claude, even though we've been talking about the Cod Wars, which took place in the mid to late 20th century, you've also written about Sea Shepherd of Whale Wars fame, which is a non-state entity that essentially patrols the oceans to hold illegal actors accountable. Can you give us a brief overview of Sea Shepherd and how they and their approach are both similar and different from the Cod Wars case study? Sea Shepherd was an offshoot of Greenpeace when

founder Paul Watson left or was asked to leave Greenpeace in the early 70s, depending on who you ask. Initially, Sea Shepherd started with an anti-sealing campaign or two in Canada, focused then on whaling in Iceland and the Southern Ocean. It sought to limit fishing since global fish stocks have reduced dramatically, so they were pretty much ahead of the curve on that one. So with about a dozen ships around the world today, it's fair to call them a blue water force since they've demonstrated sea-going up capabilities globally, especially in regions where most countries don't patrol or even pass through. As I pointed out in a case study that I wrote a few years ago for the Naval War College, Sea Shepherds had three phases in those four decades as I see it. The first was

the pre-Whale Wars era when Watson had ad hoc campaigns with a ship. He tried to get somebody from Hollywood to publicize it to bring awareness to the cause of marine life protection. The second phase was the highly publicized television show Whale Wars on Animal Planet that covered their annual operations or campaigns against Japanese whalers and sometimes ramming ships. So the more media attention they got, they were successful. They, as a result of Whale Wars, were able to expand their fundraising around the world. They increased the number of their volunteers. They were able to increase the size of their fleet every year. The third phase, however, I think is the most important, and that's been the past seven years.

It's been their evolution into a legitimized maritime capacity builder. They now work with states under agreement to provide ships, crew, fuel, while the host nation provides the authority and a law enforcement detachment in order to patrol local waters and interdict illegal fishing vessels. And to date, they've inspected some 600 ships and arrested about 85 vessels. I think it's important, all under the authority of a host nation. vessels. I think it's important. All under the authority of a host nation. So they have moved well beyond non-state actor, and I'm not sure if they were ever technically a non-state actor. Non-state actor necessarily wouldn't have flags if their ship's registered. Pirates don't. Illegal fishing trawlers don't. They can use flags of convenience. So there are a lot of things that legitimized the organization, but I think it was greatly reinforced by these cooperative measures, these memorandums of understanding and agreement with Gabon, Benin, Mexico, a number of other African nations, which has been incredibly successful because in a lot of the cases, these countries don't have the resources

to fund ships that can go offshore. And so Sea Shepherd provides these ships and increases their surveillance capability and their interdiction capabilities for those countries. Yeah, what I think is so interesting about this organization and the study that you did, Claude, is that element that you described as a legitimized maritime capacity builder. international norms surrounded by the UN Convention Law of the Sea, but also meeting the needs of a state which, as you pointed out, may not have the capacity to do that kind of state-like behavior on its own. And I think as we look at the Cod Wars in particular, I think as we look at Sea Shepherd and other organizations into the future, that's really the opportunity in this space. And I think for Project Maritime in particular, there is so much capacity that I think is needed in international waters and in this space. And case studies and organizations like Sea Shepherd who are already providing a

service I think are certainly worth further exploration from parts of government, parts of the private sector that may not ordinarily look at their activities. Can you talk about the Thunder incident and how that was important and how that sort of demonstrated their goals really was to do things right? And then also maybe just highlighting the budget numbers. I saw your War on the Rocks article says about $15 million a year. I don't know if you have a better figure to offer. So maybe if you can touch on those two things. So the Thunder was an illegal fishing vessel that was chased for 10,000 nautical miles over 110 days.

The primary captain for Sea Shepherd, Peter Hammestad, who had been at that point with Sea Shepherd for something like 15 years. He literally grew up in Sea Shepherd, rising from deckhand to a qualified captain of a ship. They began chasing the thunder in the Southern Ocean, went around the globe, began working with a number of countries and their own intelligence network to find out more information about the ship before that. Peter wasn't sure if they could continue the chase. So he called his chief engineer and a couple of other people, chef, and he said, can we do it? How long can we stay at sea? The chef said, you know, we could stay at sea technically for two years. And he says, are you kidding me? The chef said,

no, because we have tons of rice. We have tons of X, Y, and Z. Because keep in mind, these are vegetarians or vegans in some cases. And so they don't have the same limitations as, say, a Navy or Coast Guard ship do with regard to refrigeration of food. They can sustain themselves for a far longer period. And when they pull into port, they don't have the same restrictions on reporting meat and dairy products. So it reduces the time in and out of port. The only limitation was fuel. Fortunately, they had a second ship which could refuel them eventually. And off of Sao Tome and Princepe, they were able to continue the chase.

The illegal fishing trawler decided they were going to scuttle the ship. They put the crew off. And again, this is important for what Ian Urbina does. The first priority for Peter Hammerstadt was the safety of the crew that they were putting off because they knew the crew weren't at fault. This was the owners of the ship and the captain. They were able to board the ship before it was completely scuttled. They took photos, videos, and for those in the Navy, if you've done VBSS, visit board search and seizure like I did, then you recognize how much information is on a ship. They went after it. They took out all the pertinent material from this boarding. With that, they were then able to assist in the prosecution of the captain of the vessel as well as the owners. That proved

to be extremely of interest to some nations, and one of those nations reached out to Sea Shepherd, said, we need help. We think you can help us with your ships, and we'd like to work with you. From that point, once it was seen as a successful prototype in one country, other countries started emerging as well to work with Sea Shepherd. But yeah, they can operate on anywhere between $8 and $15 million a year. If you can operate a fleet of 12 ships and personnel on $8 to $15 million, that's something we need to look at. Now, granted, as we all know, one of the highest costs in DoD is personnel, which is why personnel is usually one of the first things that takes a hit when you're designing a new ship. But what they have done, they only have a few paid people, and then even on their ships, it's usually the captain, maybe the first mate, the chief engineer,

maybe one or two other people. Everybody else are volunteers. But they have this database of thousands of volunteers who want to work on the ship of varying qualifications. So that's why the money trail is a little difficult to follow at this point. That's an amazing way you could do on $12 to $15 million. I think that innovation and ingenuity is just fascinating. And what I see a lot of promise out of that is you have a determined actor, in this case, a non-government entity that is really mastering domain awareness, knowing where the malign activity is, but also able to mobilize and sustain presence. As we've seen in a number of cases across the world, bad actors tend to stand down or bug out, for lack of a better term, if the light is shone on them. And this organization is not only, to your point, doing a lot with a little, but really making a playbook that I think others could emulate or take lessons and adapt. Yeah, absolutely right. Shining a light is part of what they do, and it's an important element in showing the illegal fishing that's being carried on. So I think they're sticking with what works that they've learned. I should note that some of their ships are former U.S.

ships. They've got a former NOAA ship. They've got three former U.S. Coast Guard cutters, the island-class cutters that are operational. I think at one point, all three were operating in Baja, Mexico. So there are definitely lessons that we can learn for low budget items. The question is, is anybody in DOD or State Department willing to invest in even low operations to try to find money, just a few million dollars? Sometimes can be rather difficult to try to pry away, just a few million dollars, sometimes can be rather difficult to try to pry away. But I'm always hopeful. I just read Mike Vickers' book, Mike Vickers, who was ASD Solick, and probably one of the most significant national security figures of the past 40 years or so. And to realize what he did initially on small budgets that eventually grew, but it proves what

you can do with small budgets if given the chance. Claude, the next question's adapted from your brilliant discussion guide and your War College piece. So it seems like the lines are increasingly blurred between constabulary issues and larger national security and ocean governance issues, as we see with China's distant water fishing fleet near the Galapagos or Gulf of Guinea. So what other domains of contemporary conflict environment might benefit from non-state actors operating in the way Sea Shepherd does in filling governance gaps and capacity gaps and seams? And what about partnerships of state institutions with these types of non-state actors?

When I first wrote about the opportunities for non-state organizations to supplement U.S. forces back in 2007, I wrote an article for Orbis, and don't blame me on the title, this was the editor's choice. It was called Black Waters for the Blue Waters, the Promise of Private Naval Companies. And in it, I suggested that as we drew down from Iraq and Afghanistan and as Somali piracy went up, we'd see a drawdown of private military companies on land, and they would evolve into private naval companies. Well, shockingly, this happened about a year or two later. Blackwater purchased a ship, modified it.

There were a number of other companies that emerged to deal with Somali piracy, but not to attack Somali pirates, but to escort vessels through the Gulf of Aden. So you had onboard private maritime security folk teams, and then you also had companies with ships that would act in convoy. Blackwater never was able to do that, and there's a long story that I wrote in SimSec about that. That's where my lengthy interview with Eric Prince of Blackwater in January of 2009 occurs, and how I almost wound up on the Blackwater ship as well as the Maersk, Alabama. What I suggested in that article is that private maritime security companies could address low-level operations such as convoy duties as a result of Somali piracy,

but that the real issue in which the U.S. and its partners or other nations should address is illegal fishing. So if we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the most fundamental component are the physiological needs, such as air, water, food. These are absolute necessities. Marine life and the maritime ecosystem are important for local economies, but they're fundamental for human existence. And in this way, Paul Watson is correct when he has said for 40 years that if the oceans die, we die. Absolutely correct. So keep in mind that according to reports, 50% of global fish stocks are fully exploited. 40% of the world's population relies

on fish for food. 30% of the world's fishing fleet is Chinese, and 20% of global fish is caught illegally. So that's why I said we need to look at this Venn diagram. There's a very real intersection between, say, our state interest in terms of national security in China, which is depleting the world's oceans at an incredible rate, local state interests with heavy reliance on the sea for their local economies. Organizations like Sea Shepherd, which want to do level 10, but if they do level 8, it actually helps out with working with other organizations. And then everyone else globally who needs the ocean for survival. Now, a top navalist told me just a few years ago, we had a disagreement about this. And I used to run into more resistance about this. He told me that the Navy has no interest in illegal fishing. And I countered it with this, that the fleet follows the trade. It's

an old saying. I think it was either Raleigh or Drake who said that. So here's my argument for Navy involvement in illegal fishing. Whenever they say that's a Coast Guard issue. China's fishing fleet has depleted a lot of the South China Sea, and maps are available that show where their fishing fleet has expanded to globally, gradually over the past 50 years. So as fishing stock is reduced in more places, there's going to be a desperation, a growing desperation among states to compete for what is going to be the strategic resource of the 21st century. And with that fight, the Chinese Navy is going to be there to protect its fishing fleets. It's not quite all the way there now, but you're starting to see it in places where their fishing vessels are. As we start to see more of their fishing fleet off of the coast of South America, for example, we're going to see Chinese Navy ships preparing for this and defending

their interests. So that's the maritime showdown that I see in terms of competing state interests. And one thing to add that I think was especially prescient off of what you raised, Claude, is how timely the discussion is. It was earlier this year that the Coast Guard identified illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing as a global threat surpassing piracy for the first time. And as we've talked a bit earlier about the Navy's role in combating piracy, I believe there could be a logic tail that then suggests if illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing is now a higher priority and the Navy was previously committed to anti-piracy missions, there very well could be a

maritime or a naval element that looks at this problem set. And then I think it's especially important to hold on to why we're looking. And you mentioned how fundamental the physiological motivations are. That's why it can't just be platform-centric or material-centric, in my opinion. That's why we've got to keep a human focus on here for the populations involved and affected, and to bring it all home to see the other stakeholders that can affect positive outcomes. It can't just be a hardware or platform-centric approach to this evolving problem set. So what are the dangers of government ceding authority and influence in the maritime space? and influence in the maritime space? So something that I've pitched for about 15 years when I was first talking about private maritime security companies and how to work with them is, I said, you needed to have three components to it. First, you needed to regulate the organization,

basically vetting them and controlling what they can and can't do. So there's clear lines, so they can't go off on their own and do something that's illegal. Number two, you incorporate them into your system. I'm not saying, you know, like the Wagner Group in Russia, but there are elements that you can leverage. And the third is to coordinate those missions. If you do those things, then you can work with a Sea Shepherd or a similar organization in order to work off the coast of XYZ country to assist them. And in a way that doesn't put off the local government, such as if a cruiser or a destroyer pulls in for a few days. I think there's only benefits to this. I think that question came from one of the discussion questions I put out in the case study.

I think that question came from one of the discussion questions I put out in the case study. But I think if you regulate them and ensure that they are complying with U.S. laws, I think some of these organizations, I think Sea Shepherd would be very willing to do that. I think they'd be open to it in order to leverage these resources. In return, I think we have the opportunity to share information. I'm not saying classified information that wouldn't be feasible, but there are ways to share information in a way that we couldn't do before. And we have, you know, NOAA, for example, things that track fishing stocks that most people

might not look at. You know, the Navy might not look at that, but Sea Shepherd might find some of that information of interest in order to track certain trawlers. So again, I have gradually come around to advocating that we should support and work with organizations like Sea Shepherd. So I'd like to wrap up with just some policy implications and recommendations. So based on our conversation today, what are the relevant implications for practitioners, academics, and policymakers interested in resource competition, maritime conflict, and IEU fishing? And I'll direct that one at Kevin first. So frankly, I think there are a lot of implications, not only from the Cod Wars,

but also the Sea Shepherd discussion that we had earlier. For me, I like to think, I guess, along two lines. One is a quote attributed to Mark Twain that history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. We might think that we are in a new security paradigm right now with the threat of illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing and other types of maritime coercive activity. But the Cod Wars is a case where this has played out before. activity. But the Cod Wars is a case where this has played out before. And I think there is value in looking back at history, looking at some of the previous case studies that Claude and others have written and going back to them for inspiration. I also think for smaller states that have an interest in this space, looking at those case studies is beneficial to them as well, and maybe even in a different way, where we look at, again,

what can they do with the resources available to them? And as Claude pointed out with Sea Shepherd, they are able to do a lot with a little. Those kinds of approaches could be even more relevant for more resource-constrained states, or as a small investment that a larger state could make instead of piling on to other well-resourced areas. My other takeaway, and it goes back to looking at the human element of this space, is that the high-tech, high-end approach is not always going to be the winning proposition. And that is certainly true for how Iceland prosecuted the Cod Wars. Going back to minesweeping technology and having that be the tool of choice that ultimately changed the struggle around Icelandic waters is hardly a high-tech, huge contractor-funded program, but it was

extremely effective. Those kinds of asymmetric capabilities are very present and available in the maritime domain and certainly are worth taking a closer look. I think that similar out-of-the-box thinking for challenges that policymakers, academics, practitioners are studying today could find very similar applications of that kind of mindset with an eye towards non-lethal weapons and other sorts of intermediate force capabilities as well. I think there are some people, as I mentioned in the Department of Defense, State Department, Coast Guard, who are very focused on this issue. But I'm not sure if a critical mass yet exists within the policymaking community to effectively fight for and justify even small amount of resources to devote to this. The Coast Guard's overtasked as it is, but it still does what it does extremely well.

The U.S. Navy, and this is my personal opinion, not those of any organization with which I'm affiliated, I think has had too many shipbuilding challenges in the past decade to look beyond the traditional big ship Navy model that it had during the Cold War to the detriment of identifying smaller resources, because in some cases they're so desperate for resources, funding resources, that they can be dismissive of other concepts. To address the issues of illegal fishing, the government can play a large role, but the direct action, as Sea Shepherd calls it, I think will have to devolve to non-governmental organizations like Sea Shepherd. Why? Because

they're on site where the U.S. is not. They have the expertise in the issues. They know where the fish are a good amount of time. They know where the illegal phishing vessels are going to go. They have the platforms. They have the ability to talk to IT firms, which they have actually a very robust intelligence and IT network, which I was very surprised about that I haven't been able to write about because of discussions I've had with the organization and limitations of what I can mention. But organizations outside of government have the ability to quickly innovate and adapt in a way that the United States Navy can only talk about sometimes. We talk about innovation. We talk about adaptation. But it's really tough

when your organization is built like a carrier or a 200,000-ton tanker. It's going to move slowly, if at all. We have these challenges in financial and contracting systems, employing new technology, modifying agreements with countries. So that's why I think we can work with smaller organizations that do these things that we can't or we have a difficult time in doing until eventually. So I think the primary takeaway is number one, be open-minded. Be curious about how other organizations and people work. There is always something you can learn from another organization or other people who don't think like you. I think, again, I blame myself early on in this evolution of studying the organization, that there are incredible lessons out there. And our concepts of where the world needs to go in terms of securing the maritime environment

overlap, even if there's 20 or 30 percent overlap, that's what both organizations and state bureaucracies need to fight for, rather than simply say, we don't agree with your tactics or we don't agree with your primary mission. Find what is in common. And I found that there's a lot in common that we can build something on. Well, gentlemen, that was an excellent conversation on maritime irregular warfare, which is a highly understudied aspect in the wider national security space. So thank you for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast today. Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast.

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