School of War - Ep 264: Mark Montgomery on Seizing Venezuela’s Shadow Fleet

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at FDD and retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, joins the show to discuss Venezuela’s shadow fleet, the cyber component of the Maduro raid, and the future of the U.S. Navy. ▪️ Times 03:04 Shadow Fleets 06:06 Ship Hunting  10:07 Coast Guard  12:35 Leverage and Sanctions 18:37 Planning the Maduro Raid 24:57 How We Use Cyber 28:45 Types of Risk    31:50 State of the Navy 36:56 Return of the Battleship? Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Today on School of War, more on military operations in and around Venezuela. We'll talk about dramatic ship seizures in the North Atlantic under the eye of the Russian Navy about suppressing Venezuelan air defenses during this past weekend's raid and the risks we ran and overcame in that remarkable operation. We'll also talk about the Trump class of battleship because why not? And more with the man who has seized some ships in his day, Mark Montgomery. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of late.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Before we get started today, I just want to remind.

listeners about a unique opportunity for students and young professionals interested in national security and statecraft, the Hurtag Security Studies Program, which I'll be teaching in in Washington, D.C., among some others, this coming summer. It's a five-week, fully funded residential fellowship that brings together top faculty and guest speakers to explore the strategic challenges facing the United States today. You'll study geopolitics, Russia, China, the Middle East, and you'll meet leaders shaping U.S. strategy. The early decision deadline is coming up on Tuesday, January 20th. Go to hertog Foundation.org.org. That's h-tog Foundation.org.

And apply early to join me next summer for the Hurtag Security Studies program. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today. Mark Montgomery, retired rear admiral, United States Navy, served in a senior role with the Senate Armed Services Committee under then-chairman John McCain. today. He is Senior Director of FDD Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy's Mark. Thank you for coming back.

Hey, thank you for having me again, Aaron. Great to be here. I can't think of anyone better to talk to you about some of the events of the last few days. You're a cyber guy, you're a retired naval officer with operational experience down in the Caribbean. Let's start with the naval side of things and these ship seizures and boardings that have been underway for a while now, but acutely in the last few days, sort of dramatically. Can you tell us, just to kick off here, this so-called shadow fleet with which Venezuela but also Russia, Iran, move oil, energy resources around the world, sort of off the books. What is it? How does it function? Why is it a challenge for U.S. policy? Yeah, so this is a great point to start. because I think I first want to say I'm impressed with what the president and his team have done in terms of a maximum pressure campaign over three months.

And it really is, you know, anchored in the maritime effects that we can bring. You know, whether it's, you know, removing drug ships, which the president chose to use kinetic tools. I might have used law enforcement. It doesn't matter. He took him out. He started to bring pressure. He also did a little nighttime. It looks like Title 50 strike on a port, you know, on Christmas Eve.

and then but probably you know most impressively what we're talking about now is these law enforcement actions to seize shadow fleet ships and what these shadow fleet ships are they are they are falsely registered or non-registered ships falsely flagged or non-stated flagged ships that non-insured ships that deliver fuel from countries that otherwise could not get their fossil fuel to a customer because they're sanctioned by either individual countries like the united states united kingdom or by the United Nations. And, you know, we've seen lots of countries use these shadow fleet ships. You mentioned three of them, Iran, North Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. I think North Korea in the past has used them. But what they do is they come into a port, you know, they quietly come in,

they turn their automatic information system, AIS broadcasting system off frequently, or even spoof it. So they look somewhere else. Or they put up another ship's name, a legal ship's name, pull in, get loaded with fuel, and then go off to the customers. These customers tend to be India and China, but there are other countries, Turkey, others that receive this fuel in violation of U.S. sanctions. And, you know, these ships have allowed Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to continue to sell their fossil fuels at discounted rates because one of the deals, if you're China and India here, one of the good deals is you're not going to pay a market rate for something where you're taking a little bit of risk. And then those, those, you're going to

Those countries then use that money in the case of Venezuela to fund a corrupt narco-terrorist regime in the case of Iran to fund their ballistic missile and IRGC efforts. And in the case of Russia, to fund their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So it clearly is the case that the Trump administration at some point, I don't know, a month ago, maybe a little longer, took a decision to crack down on this, especially in the context of Venezuela. Talk to us about the operational challenges involved in that. this most dramatic recent episode with this ship, I guess it was originally called the Bella

1, that it sort of renames itself, the marinara and reflags itself or as magically reflagged as a Russian ship. It got very involved. It took a while. Like what, you know, you're talking about ships turning on and turning off transponders. I'm always, this is sort of a dumb thing to say. I'm always struck by how big the ocean is. How, you know, you hear the U.S. military can't get to, can't get to something for several days. Well, the Atlantic's pretty big. What actually is involved in hunting these things down? So, again, I'm glad you brought that. I do want to mention that it goes all the way back to Trump 1 and Biden and Trump 2 all did these sanctions

because that's where the real evolution. There were little bits of ships that did this illegally, you know, in the 2000, 2010s, but it really took off in the mid-2010s. And in fact, I think the court order that they operated on against the Marinera slant Bella 1 was probably from July of 2024 timeframe. So, you know, this stuff is existed. But you're right. What happened was President Trump decided to do something about it because you can sanction things.

You can say something's wrong. But in this big ocean with, you know, lots of competing priorities, you're not necessarily going to go seize a ship. So what happened here was the ship gets underway. And I think it got underway, as you said, is Bella won with the Giana flag. You know, going along. And what happened is it was headed into Venezuela. Yeah, we had just seized two ships already. And, you know, they kind of, they, they just.

and they started to head out. And U.S. Coast Guard Cutters followed them and we started a process. Now, part of it's that they're going away and you have to stay with them and it takes a little bit of time. Another part is getting the legal paperwork right. It's easy for a stateless ship, a ship that declares no state. Some of these ships haven't paid the requisite bribes to foreign ministries to be able to fly a flag once in a while. So those ones, we jump quick. So the morning that we grabbed, Bella 1, we grabbed a stateless ship right off of Venezuela. But these ones took longer. I think it probably complicates it when somewhere around Christmas Eve.

It swapped flags and swapped names. The Foreign Ministry of Russia has kind of meekly put out like, yeah, we approve the renaming of it as a, you know, as a humanitarian issue, which is, you know, no, that's not what they're doing. They're trying to, like, save a large ship that could take fossil fuel for Russia. But the United States pursued and pursued, and basically as it approached the GI UK Gap, Greenland, Iceland, UK Gap, Greenland does matter. The UK Gap, which is normally an ASW term, anti-summery warfare term, they decided to execute. I think that's the right spot. South of Iceland would have been mine.

There's no red lines in this, but that's a nice line to say, I'm very close to the UK for logistic support, which we got and Kirstarmer acknowledged last night, excuse me, Defense Minister Healy acknowledged last night that they provided us. and it's a good place for that, a good place for flying P8s out of U.S. and other NATO airfields to execute this mission. And they did actually, they executed the mission. There's a lot of ways you can do it. But, you know, there's, there's low-level ways that you kind of do with a stateless ship that looks undefended all the way up to,

what we used to call visit boarding search and seizure level four, but a special forces insertion that is more dramatic, initially more aggressive, but more likely to, you know, terminate rapidly. So let's talk more about the operational set of things, and then I want to talk about the Russia angle. I saw reported in the press, and I don't really know what this means in its details, but that the Coast Guard made some sort of attempt around the time that the ship turned around, and it was obviously not successful. So one, you know, what do you make of that? And then two, I was struck by, apparently, the same Special Operations Air Regiment that was involved in the raid in Caracas last weekend got involved in the seizure in the N-Yesterday. And when we,

We did do the special operations option, so it is said in the media. So if you wouldn't mind just saying more about, you know, what does the Coast Guard do? What is the special operations option involved? Just help us understand. You know, you're a guy who was actually at sea involved in operations like this. You know, what are the various considerations and advantages and disadvantages of these different options? I'm laughing because I'm reminded of a boarding I did. I'd get into that story.

So you're right. Initially, Coach Guard, it's a Gianna flagship, you know, the Bella one. it goes, the Coast Guard says, okay, we'll do the boarding. And they probably do a level two, level one, you know, a lower level boarding, not needing soft support. You know, you put a small boat in the water, go alongside, asking to put down a ladder, you know, usually a rope ladder, you climb up it, and board the ship, inspect their papers and say, I got some bad news, you know, here's a court order. You know, a ship has to be mildly compliant with that. If it's going 20 knots, you know, you're going to have a little trouble boarding. You know, we can all remember the pirate film.

with Tom Hanks and, you know, keep that, you know, keep your cargo ship going 20 knots. It's going to make a lower harder. I remember it's a terrible incident just a year or two ago, right? Out in the Middle East where we lost a seal and not to end in the action. I mean, obviously, you can get on one of these ships and someone can shoot at you, but, I mean, it was lost in the water. In the boarding, yeah. In a boarding that went non-consensual.

Yeah, so you're absolutely right. It's dangerous. So they backed off and said, okay, we're going to get you at level four. At that point, it's probably competing. As you know, we were going to execute the strikes. sometime around, I think the president's alluded to December 27th, December 28th. So at that exact moment that you're having this problem, you have this other issue. So I think, and you have time, the ocean's big. It's a long way to Russia. We're okay. You know, and so I have no problem with

the time on this. I will tell you one time I was trying to board a ship, you know, where they put the rope ladder down. It was a sheep merchant, you know, it was one that was taking sheep and illegal contraband. And they started just pushing all the sheep extrament down the, pretty much down the ladder that we were climbing up. You know, so, you know, We persevered. We probably were a little more aggressive in our questioning after that. But, you know, these are interesting. We've done between the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy, we've done thousands of boardings. And the Coast Guard, by the way, is the premier organization for this. Don't, I mean, soft or help, you know, sometimes you need soft, sometimes you need the Navy.

You always need the Coast Guard. And they're the law enforcement, our maritime law enforcement arm. So when a court order says go do this, they're talking to the Coast Guard. They're not talking to the Navy. The Coast Guard may ask the Navy or special operators for an assist, but this is inherently a Coast Guard operation long term. Say more about this Russia dimension. Do they intervene in this issue to make trouble for us? Do they intervene because it's actually on some level their ship? Help us understand what might be going on behind the scenes there. So yes and yes, and probably because they're like, oh, this is a bad precedent, right? I give a third one. You know, it's, you know, hey, let's not make this too easy for the Americans. show the Venezuelans a little love because we haven't done crap based on the butt cooking

they took two nights ago. Number two is, hey, it is our ship. And number three is, we don't want Donald Trump to get a taste for this. And they better be careful. Because Donald Trump has just seen what a lot of us, you know, Lindsey Graham, Tom Kant and others have been arguing for, which is, hey, let's enforce sanctions on Russian Shadow Fleet ships so that Russia, which gets about 40 plus percent of its GDP from fossil fuel sales, they then take that, the government gets a percentage of that money, and they use 40 percent of the money they get to finance the illegal invasion of Ukraine and about 60 percent in Babushka payments to Putin's base. If you cut down the money going in, he's got to make a tough choice. Does he lower the war effort or lower payments to his base?

So if President Trump sees that, I don't think Steve Whitkoff has really made that argument to the president. I think it would be fantastic if the president kind of on his own said, you know what, this is a great tool. I'm going to go ahead and start using it some more. Yeah, and this is all clearly connected in complicated ways to the Ukraine question. I mean, there's the obvious level of connection where you have, you know, a conflict of some kind with the Russians over Venezuela. Meanwhile, you've got negotiations and everything playing out in Europe. But I saw what appeared to be, you know, from what was publicly available, a meeting with the Europeans in Paris and Zelensky, which Whitkoff and Kushner actually joined. You saw Lindsey Graham saying publicly that Trump has signed off on the Senate-Russia sanctions package, which if that actually goes through, would be pretty painful for the Russians.

So there are weird interconnections here that are not weird, but there are interconnections here that are not fully transparent to the. public yet that obviously matter. No, I agree. I would say that I worry the sanctions package, I think, is going to have a get out of jail clause for, you know, a national security clause for the president. So I worry a tiny bit that we're still, the president could sanction, he could take action against Russian shadow fleet right now. And more importantly, the companies in China, the entities in China and India that received this fuel. It's a choice of the United States not to do this. By the way, a choice the Biden administration took as well. So this is not a Trump thing. This is a America likes cheap gas thing, slant.

America is a little nervous about pushing Putin to the hilt. It could be an existential threat to Putin to lose access to so much of his GDP. So there's a lot of reasons for that, but I am for pushing this. At this point, if we want a ceasefire, if we want a legitimate ceasefire, a cessation of hostilities that both sides can live with, you're going to need Russia to move office talking points. And to do that, they need to feel pressure. And they just have not felt it for a lot of reasons. reasons under both of the last two administrations. And so it's time to, I think this is the right

action. And I love that the president's seeing this and seeing how effective it is and see we're good. I mean, we can do this again and again and again. We're world-class ship seizures. I mean, I feel for the Coast Guard team that's like occupying that ship now driving at the prize crew that's bringing it back to the States because generally I did some prize crews and I would just say hygiene is not like on shadow fleet ships. Hygiene is not a primary concern. So it's a little rough. That's amazing that term prize crew, which I have not heard in any other context other than Patrick O'Brien, Mastering Commander novels. And it ain't what it used to be, right, Mark?

Because didn't it used to get a cut, right? Didn't you? Didn't the sailors used to get a cut of the ship they took? So I was doing these boardings about the time that I became infatuated with the Master and Commander series. So I was reading these, doing them. Jim Staviris was my Commodore. I'm talking about, we need to have prize crews for this thing. He's like, you are a prize crew.

You just don't get a prize. You have a paycheck every two weeks. That's great. So we've referred to this raid in Caracas a couple times. So far we've most of been talking about stuff that happened on Wednesday of this week. But of course, Saturday we had this incredibly dramatic raid into Caracas. We had Elliott Abrams on the show earlier this week to talk about it. Mostly talked about the sort of grand strategic diplomatic dimensions of things, future the Venezuela opposition, things like that.

Obviously curious, your take, big picture on where this goes. but I'm very curious about the execution of the raid itself. We learned from the president just after the raid wrapped up pretty much that there was a cyber dimension. He suggested that we turned the lights off in Caracas. There was obviously anyone who was watching the videos, which, you know, some of which I saw which were set to a fortunate son, which was pretty badass, could see that there was a suppression of enemy air defense dimension.

And, you know, just judging from the YouTube videos, some of it looked ad hoc and responsive. You know, they took fire and returned fire. Some of it looked pre-planned to me. So tell us about, just start really big picture, but everything that goes into this raid before the actual team is on the ground seizing Maduro. And I don't so much mean the planning. I mean, how do they get the heloes from the ship

to the objective, mostly unscathed? Because it seems like there was some skating. So first, I do want to, you do have to talk a little bit about planning. I think Ray's in General Crane, the chairman averred about three months worth of planning. That sounds about right. You know, enough time to build a model of the house or the bunker that they live in, you know, so that they can practice that several, you know, several hundred times probably the actual tactical movements

inside the house. And that's, here's a, you know, here's the message for everyone. Don't call the United States and say, we'd like to meet you on a street corner in six months. You're probably going to get your ass kicked because we, we are the military that can do that. When you want us to You know, we have a lot of strengths. One is we can be extremely reactive. Like, you want to strike tomorrow night. We can dial up, you know, we have a place in, you know, at Wright Patterson that can do up a strike targeting. We can launch a B2, tell it the information on the way to the target. In 32 hours, you can be eating at Jasmine ER. But, or Jasmine, you know, but we also are the best military for this kind of large scale, you know, planning and execution of a mission. So first,

we do have to acknowledge that and we have to acknowledge that the three months was very useful, and that's good patience by the president, right, to allow that to play out. And there's a couple elements to this. One is the suppression of enemy air defense. So growler aircraft from the, most likely from the carrier strike group, they could have been augmented by some that flew. You know, we have land-based growlers as well. Those are E18G jamming aircraft. They also launch high-speed anti-radiation missiles that strike S-300 radars that are foolish enough to turn on during the event or near the event. We also have precision strike munitions that hit last known locations of missile launchers, command of control facilities, things that are really not mobile.

You know, they advertise as mobile but aren't. So I'm confident they cut through a hole because in the end, the helicopters don't have great suppression of enemy air defense systems. They can sometimes, you know, maneuver, not the Chinooks, but some of the aircraft could maneuver around a missile with enough alertment, but in reality, you need to suppress that defense. So there's that mission. It's augmented with apparently a cyber strike. I think that's an important thing to note that the integration of cyber into normal kinetic

operations, this is where we've been trying to head for 25 years since Kosovo, you know, when we first tried to do this, you know, in 1999, we've been working hard to do this. It's tough to get commanders to take a cyber solution over a kinetic solution. I'm very good at battle damage assessment of kinetic. Like I look at a photo, I go, not going to function today. A little hard for me to look at it. picture of a network, you know, of a building that has a server in it and know that it's not working, or it just hasn't been turned off and turned back on soon. You know, so there's a, you know,

there's a recoverability factor in cyber, you know, in response to a cyber attack that you have to account for. And then, you know, kind of most importantly is in the end, the thing you can't account for, and which, you know, give us a little snake bite is tactical air defense. You know, if they had had Stinger, you know, PA, Russian equivalent of Stingers, or in the end, they had machine guns, and they did damage to a plane and they wounded, you know, the strike lead pretty seriously. And it's, as you and I've talked about, there's a good New York Times article that describes the exact incident as it played out. And heroically, they got the aircraft back and a different set of aircraft were used for the extraction of the ground force. My point on this is,

you have to integrate each of those. And they did, I think they did a very good job. because every service has to be involved. I'm sure a global strike provided some B2s that, you know, they're fantastic. They carry a ton of jazz. I mean, I can't tell you enough how nice it is to have two B2s overhead. I mean, that's that's a hundred dimpies probably, maybe slightly less than that. But, you know, that's a hundred strike points. That's, you know, that's a nice comforting thing to have.

And so, you know, everyone's involved in this. I'm sure Space Guardian somehow ensured the networks, you know, stayed up, you know, position navigation and timing. So overall, a good mission. I do need a couple caveats here. These were S-300s. If we didn't know this already, Israel explained to Iran and to Russia and China, your S-300s aren't worse shit. And then, you know, I think in general, the S-300s have struggled a little bit when operated by the Russians and Russia. When they've done okay for the Ukrainians, although they're pretty tapped on missiles at this point.

And the other thing is the cyber. Look, in the context of no one's where they want to be, where they're the, equivalent of a major league, like a large market major league baseball team. China's like a small market major league baseball team. Venezuela in the cyber world is a single-A minor league team in like, in, you know, in Biloxi, right? I mean, they're not, you know, taking down Venezuela does not mean, well, China's next, right? You know, in cyber, it means we took down Venezuela. One thing that's interesting is even three months is not a lot of time for cyber target development, unless you've worked over that type of target before. So when you're talking about electrical power grids, there are

very electrical power grids that are very similar to Venezuela's in some of our other adversary countries. And I imagine we had done the targeting for them and we're able to pull those tool sets over for use in Venezuela. So on the cyber side of things, how focused or targeted is the cyber element of the operation? That is to say, if I'm sitting here as a planner, there's obviously things that run on power in Caracas, assuming that power is the core point of manipulation here. I want those things dead. I don't really care if the convenience store across town

also loses power. Do we have the capability to go in and really narrowly, not out of generosity and consideration for everyone else losing their power, but just knowing, no, no, no, no, we took the power out in these places and it matters because we know their generators, they're going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

or is it really just, we're going to kind of shut off the lights broadly here because it's just going to introduce a chaos factor, which will generally be helpful. Like, which is it or is it somewhere in between? Yeah, I think it's yes and yes again. I mean, you know, I'll throw another one in, right? Part of this is, let's say I'm going to take out an S300 system. I'm going to put kinetic weapons on the generators and distribution boxes associated with the direct power associated with the missiles, radar, and commanding control. In addition, as backup, in case one of those missiles misses, I do the cyber strike. So it's an enhancing.

It enables by introducing, as you said, chaos. It enhances by saying, even if I somehow missed, I've taken down all the power. And the beauty of that is, I've also taken down power, by the way, to hospitals, schools, convenience stores. The reversibility, right? Six, 12 hours later, they're able to bring it back up and the hospitals and schools get their power back. and the remains of the S-300 site that was hit kinetically get their power back. So it's an enhancing force. I'm not sure we're at the point yet where we would run an air mission in that used

no kinetic suppression of enemy air defense and just relied on cyber. That would be a pretty unusual strike mission. It is striking. Did we see cyber, CED as it were, CED being the acronym for suppression of enemy air defense in the 12-day war, were the Israelis doing this? They were doing cyber and they were doing CAD. I think it's fair to say they were probably doing cyber in the same way that enabled CED like this. In other words, and for the same reason, by the way, the chaos reason as well, right?

You want people, right? When people, when power goes down, they immediately bring up a generator, therefore revealing a, you know, a node for us, for the Israelis. So, I mean, you know, there was, there's part of this is also helpful. It helps with target discrimination and things like that. Because the only people who get power after you lose power in Tehran, the only people who get emergency power back are the people you probably want to strike. Right? You know what I mean?

So there's a little bit of an element of that to it as well. But I don't want to go so far as to say there was a simultaneous Seattle and cyber on one side without knowing that for a fact. So back to the broader question of risk and the raid. You made reference to this New York Times story we were discussing earlier. It is a harrowing tale. it seems like the lead pilot, possibly in the lead, Hilo, that was a little bit more obscure to me. But the lead, the commander, the air commander of the package doing the insertion, was hit three times in the leg, the story.

It wasn't totally clear to me what exactly that meant. If you say hit three times, that sounds to me like he was shot, but I guess it could have been an explosion as well. Maybe you know more. But, you know, it's kind of a harrowing moment. And obviously, and here the word heroism really does come into play. Like, they take that Hilo into the objective, and then they get it. it back intact to the ship, which is a long way away, that's pretty incredible. That all said, it is worth reflecting on. And I, you know, I share your view and what seems to be the view of a lot

of people that the whole, the whole raid overall was incredible and an incredible display of American military capability. That said, you're never really that far off from a, from a, from a, catastrophic moment as a consequence of tactical air defenses, as you put it. You know, it seemed, the upshot of this New York Times story to me was that we were, you know, we were not that far off from a from a moment like that terrible mission back in Afghanistan where we lost that whole seal platoon when their helo went down. I mean, this would have been a, you know, a platoon of Delta Force guys. How do you think about risk with things like this? This administration has rolled the dice a couple of times now on really high profile, dramatic military operations, which have come out just

spectacularly, you know, one day that may not be the case. So just help us think through those dimensions of the problem. So it's interesting. So, There's different types of operational risk. So when you think about the Soleimani strike, one, the president highlighted in his discussion and he's like roundabouts of great things I've done as president, that did not have operational risk to the UAV pilot who put that weapon into a convoy of cars, right? Because it's a different mission on a kill, you know, on a kill, no capture mission like that, you know, there wasn't that much risk. If this had just been kill Maduro, I'll revert back to those B. B-2s. You know, do a couple things that cause him to identify his exact location and put him on there.

And if you want to get rid of all his Cuban friends, you know, feel free to do a couple more strikes in the immediate vicinity. But that wasn't this mission. If you have a capture mission like this, there's going to be this kind of risk. If you have to insert forces, or in the case of the CILT when you're talking about, a recovery mission, you know, if you're going to have to insert people, the risk is going to go much higher. You know, my wife was a helicopter pilot. Helicopter. fly low, slow, and they don't have great missile evasion technology like a fighter jet does, and they don't have stealth usually in the way that a fighter jet or bomber does. So, you know, these are challenging, these are by nature. These are risky missions. And look, the president deserves

credit for swimming the risk. I will tell you, if that plane goes down and 25 people are killed doing this mission, he and Marco Rub would be scrambling. And Pete Hacks had to be scrambling right now. they would be a lot of questions being asked in a much more aggressive way by both parties, both chambers, and the American public. So there is a risk in this. And so they deserve credit for assessing the risk and probably raise in cages. There's a lot of credit for explaining to the president. Here's how, here's the risk.

Here's how we mitigate it. Here's the worst case. Here's the likelihood of it. I'm sure there was a brief that said one helicopter, part of their risk said, I'm sure there was a case where they said, one helicopter takes some hits and we get some wounded or one or two dead. And that's kind of the one they ended up in. And luckily, no dead.

Like Secretary Hanksett said, very fortunate. And most importantly, no dead. But, you know, there's two seriously injured people. Maritime policy has also been in the news this past week plus. And I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this. As you pointed out, not to understate it, but to understate maybe just a little bit. What do we learn from the raid over the weekend? but we learned about what we can do against Venezuela. China, perhaps different story,

Russia even perhaps somewhat different story. There are other questions, other challenges that countries like that pose. And obviously with China, there is a question of scale and naval capability. This administration seems aware of it. The president just issued an executive order regarding shipbuilding. Our Navy has not been on a good trajectory on this front for some time. help us understand the broader state of the Navy and the industrial base that supports it and what the administration is trying to do here. So to perfectly leverage it off the story we just had, the Navy has two big issues, one's shipbuilding and one's readiness, the ability of the current force to be modernized

and ready to go for a conflict. After October 7th, we put a ton of ships in the Middle East, carrier, destroyer, submarine, Air Force squadrons, and Army Air Defense. But just sticking with the Navy, that didn't. wind down. I mean, that's Ford going into staying in the Mediterranean, you know, two years later and then being pulled. So we finally were winding down from that commitment, which is going to have an impact. Those extra ships being unplanned in the Middle East means a few years from now, we will have less ships ready as there's this knock-on effect on maintenance and training.

That was amplified by, instead of recovering from it, literally a week after that commitment it kind of ends. We start up a Caribbean commitment of the largest forces in the Caribbean in 40 years. And, you know, really, most of the time, we've had more forces operational underway in the Caribbean than in any other AOR. I mean, Indo-Pacom competes with it, but pretty close. And then we have a terrific shipbuilding problem, which the president did identify early on in his administration saying we need to, he understands we need that if you're going to be a superpower, you have to be a sea power. and you're going to need a Navy, and you're going to need a maritime industrial base. I heard the Secretary of Navy talking yesterday with Brett Baer, and he said something very true.

The shipbuilders are as important as the sailors and the Marines in the national security of the United States. They are as important an element of our national security enterprise. And the president yesterday put out an executive order, which I love. I'd written an opette a couple weeks ago saying, hey, these big companies, these five or six big shipyards are getting lots of orders, and they have back orders. They have 36 to 40 months worth of back-ordered ships. That means ships they can't even start. But what it is is investment in their yards, they could leverage that future revenue to get loans to do modernization, which one or two of the yards did do. But the majority, and no one did it all the time, which they should have been.

And many of the yards instead used that to leverage dividends and stock buybacks. So they used our taxpayer, our future, our commitment to future taxpayer money, our current taxpayer money for future work, to get wealthy. And I will say some of the shipyard CEOs had fairly exorbitant salaries for an organization that collectively was underperforming. Now, look, I know an American corporate world underperformance does not necessarily mean underpayment. But, you know, when you work for the U.S. taxpayer directly like this, I kind of think there should be so. So the president wrote an executive and said, I'm done with this. Stop taking him.

Then he kind of like ad hominum ripped into Raytheon about, you know, three hours later with a true social tag. I'm not bitching. I think he's right. And I think he's got the right instinct, the right vision. We've got to build the ship, you know, the right ships. Where I start to verge, you know, part company, is the kind of plans he's getting from his subordinates.

He's getting weird, like the battleship. So we're in the middle of a war, with China, you think about China. What I want to do is distribute my missiles into different platforms, my radars and command and control into different platforms, so that I can absorb conflict with China. China's going to sink a lot of U.S. Navy ships. And I don't say this easily. My son's on a ship out in Japan. China's going to sink a lot of Navy ships. I'm afraid the U.S. Army might sink a Navy ship, and I'm afraid that Taiwan might shake a U.S. Navy ship, but we don't get a right together. But China is definitely going to sick a lot. Okay, when you buy the battleship, it's the cost of three to five

of our flight three DDGs we're building right now, Arlie Burke destroyers. So we'll just take the middle number four. Four DDGs are one battleship. One battleship, I get 128 cells, 140 if I count the prompt strike ones. Four DDGs, I get 388, you know, 98 cells. I like 388 more than 140. I think the president does too. He's pretty good at math, right? I'll take that. I can have one ageist system with one spy, six or seven radar, or I can have four. Again, President knows math. One of those is better. And I'm almost at the same number. I'll have slightly more people on four DDGs and on a battleship, but we've been working hard to reduce the number of people on ships, and here we come up with this battleship with a lot more. So that's a bad

idea. Can I ask me, I want to hear the rest of your thoughts, but just on this question of the battleship, other than, you know, spectacle and branding, if we had the, if we had the advocates for this project on the show with us right now. What is the operational case for it? Well, spectacle and branding. Okay, fair enough. Look, there was no naval advocate for this. I see. Okay. There's one advocate. The president, I've said this before. I say to get, look, the president's view of the aesthetic pleasure of the ship, of the line of a ship is worthless. We don't need it. That is not how you pick a ship. Look, if my son's on a ship, I don't give a damn if the president thinks it looks good, I give a damn if it's stealthy and can avoid missiles and has missiles

to shoot it down. This is where I, so I'm worried because he has decided that the Arley Berks don't look good. They're our fleet. We have 80. We have 10 under order to get to 90. We should have 100. This is the most beautiful ship in the world. It's the most capable ship in the world. And with the new modernizations will be for the next 25 years. And the beauty is we built 80 to 90 to 100 of them. That's called defraying unit level costs. The life cycle maintenance of DDGs is so cheap. By the way, we have another ship called the DDG 1000, three of them. It's a waste of money. We paid between $7 and $10 billion to copy. A little bit more about what it is. It's the DD2,000 is a ZoomWalt class. It was designed initially to be a land attack destroyer.

We're going to build 20 to 30 of them. We built three. They cost now $7 to $10 billion apiece. But also, only one of them get underway to time. We have to train. parts between them. Their maintenance is so expensive. If you put the Navy on a lie detector, they'd say, get rid of them. So I'm telling you now, get rid of them. Take that money and put it in a DDG modernization. Modernize the older early bird. Say I'm saying things the president doesn't like. Modernize older ships. That's what makes the Navy great. That gives you 10 to 15 more years from another, from 15 to 20 more of these ships, these older ships. But he thinks the ships are ugly and he wants to get credit for building a new one. Take the win. Take the better Navy

that kicks the Chinese ass. This is the core ship that does it. It does ballistic missile events, air defense, anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare, sinking other ships. It does everything, does it well. And I'm not saying this because I commanded one, although I did. And I had a carry strike group full of them. I did.

It's a kick-ass ship. And the Chinese know it. The only winner from this battleship plan is the Chinese Navy. And the president's being misled on this. Because he said he wanted it, And this is a function of a Trump presidency because he said he wanted it. We're twisting metal and twisting facts to make it the argument to him. But something, if he got the honest argument, you said, sir, if you want a Navy, if you want to be

remembered is the John Lehman, Ronald Reagan of 30 years or now of your time, modernize the DDGs, get rid of the old DDG 1000s. This whole frigate idea, okay, Constellation was getting way over cost. Don't take the two you built. We're going to have three DDG 1000s, two Constellation, frigates, one of these kind of like bastardized Coast Guard cutter, like that Monroe, the customers of other, National Security cutter. So low numbers. You can't defray costs across one, two, and three ship classes. And this frigate that the SECNAF signed up, the new

Secretary of the Navy signed off on, the new frigate has no ASW capability, no vertical launch, no air defense, and it's the noisiest ship in the fleet. Because the Coast Guard doesn't care about sound noise in the water, because they don't have thinking about submarine sinking them. It is exactly what I would not build as a frigate. Literally, again, the only winner from this decision making is China. So we've got to sit back and design the right fleet. And there are a lot, not just FDD, but other think tanks have thought about this. And none of them came up with the plan and the Navy, two or three times has thought about it. And no one's come up with the plan the current Secretary of Navy has. In fact, I suspect the Office of Management Budget doesn't

agree with them. I suspect the Deputy Secretary of Defense doesn't agree with them. You know, the professionals who are looking at these programs don't agree with them, but the Secretary of Navy has a relationship with the president, and the two of them are cooking this up. And I think the president's instincts are right, but the implementation plan is being given is completely wrong. And the people who will suffer will be Navy personnel in 2030, 2031, 232 who are fighting China. What are the odds this battleship ever actually gets built? Well, zero. I'll go zero degrees Kelvin, whatever that's 400 some degrees, minus Fahrenheit. Total cessation of movement.

That's correct. It's not going to happen. No future president is going to continue this. I'm not even talking about the Trump class, which is unusual. I don't care. That's fine. The problem is the concentration of forces in a low-number ship class. We can't defray.

The Navy can't continue this bad, this bad operational and maintenance trading. And look, we got to fix the submarines. We've got to fix a good sixth generation unmanned fighter. or manned or unmanned fighter. But we've got to get the Surface Navy right, and this is our big chance. Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, it's always fantastic to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Hey, thanks for having me here.