Sea Control - Sea Control 597: Iran Escalation Scenario

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Ross Hill is the founder and CEO of Insight Forward (IF), a Geopolitical Risk Intelligence advisory service specializing in corporate intelligence. He has over 15 years’ experience in public and private sector intelligence. Dr. Treston Wheat is currently the Chief Geopolitical Officer with Insight Forward specializing in geopolitical risk and red teaming. Dr. Wheat is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University where he teaches intelligence analysis.  J. Overton is co-host of the Sea Control podcast and edited the essay collection “Seapower by Other Means: Naval Contributions to National Objectives Beyond Sea Control, Power Projection, and Traditional Service Missions.” Links - Insight Forward Iran Escalation Scenario: What a humanitarian-framed intervention could mean for regional stability and corporate risk Pestle and Mortar newsletter Boardroom Statecraft

All right, welcome aboard Sea Control fans. This is Jay. We're recording this on March 3rd, 2026, just a few days after the U.S. and Israel launched a major round of attacks against Iran. And then Iran counterattacked in various ways at U.S. and Israeli positions and interest around the Middle East, even into the Mediterranean. Now, as of this recording, the conflict is very much ongoing. I'm sure even by this airing, there'll have been developments. But rather than a sort of news analysis or attempt at reporting on specific naval topics, we thought we'd speak with some experts on what all this could mean or how it could and will impact what CIMSEC means, which is, of course, international maritime security.

and therefore today my guests are Ross Hill and Dr. Treston Wheat from the UK-based geopolitical risk company Insight Forward. We're going to discuss a report that they put out in January 2026 titled Iran Escalation Scenario, What a Humanitarian-Framed Intervention Could Mean for Regional Stability and Corporate Risk. So without knowing the specifics of how this conflict was going to begin with and what the initial moves and counter moves were, this report from a couple of months ago we thought could offer some things to consider about what we may see and experience in the coming days and weeks possibly even years in the broadly defined maritime realm gentlemen great to have you here could you start off telling us a little bit about

yourselves and your backgrounds and a little bit about your company please yeah sure thanks thanks Jay. So I'm Ross Hill. I founded InsightForward about two and a half years ago now. The company is a geopolitical risk advisory service. We primarily look to work with multinational companies and other organisations on understanding geopolitics, how it impacts them and how they can make better decisions for their organisation around it. My background, I've been in private sector intelligence, I think more than 15 years or so now. I spent a long time with a Fortune 50 technology company, leading the intelligence team there. And then I worked for a security risk management company as their director of intelligence before founding Insight Forward.

and then i started my intel career with the metropolitan police in london very cool thank you trustin uh hi i'm dr trustin wheat i'm the chief geopolitical officer at insight forward i have a about a decade experience in private sector and intelligence analysis from travel security to geopolitics to red teaming analysis and kind of everything in between um but i've been a long-term analyst and academic and i'm an adjunct professor at georgetown and intelligence analysis um and researcher in the role of corporations impacting geopolitics very cool thanks again for both being here i can't think of two better people i'd like to have on in this at this interesting time in history that we're all going through um so i don't want to get too

much into like the the tactics and techniques that if uses but anyway since you talked about just intelligence analysis on that sort of thing um could you just go into a little bit how you guys put together a report like this one on iran would uh yeah i'll start and then tristan can maybe jump in so everything we do starts with a couple of things in in the kind of the thought process so i always start with a what's the question we're trying to answer or what's the problem we're trying to solve and the question normally starts off quite broad and Tress and I will normally discuss it in a call or something we'll get together and I'll start talking about you know I think we should do something about Iran or I read this report is there anything we

should do about that and sometimes the question will start really broad and then we'll start to sort of narrow down the scope uh so that we can kind of stay on target because our focus is businesses you know i start with that question and i'm always thinking about okay what are the commercial implications and so whatever the question is we're trying to answer the the main thing at the end is okay and how do we link that to the business environment to corporations and what it means to them anything else on that tristan yeah and so you know we start with the question but this comes down to the kind of like war gaming analysis where okay so now that we have a question we want to create an answer we're not trying to say this is exactly what's going to

happen because scenario planning is different from forecasting analysis sure scenario planning is really about trying to assess potential pathways and so you know the fun term we usually use is like threat ideation um so what's the kind of decision pathway that this could take us down that we could help corporations in particular understand how they could respond to a particular geopolitical scenario and so it's about plausibility more so than even just possibility because you want a realistic scenario um in order to to be able to plan it and so it's that kind of laborious technique of scenario development where it's saying okay what is the most likely pathway for you know in this particular scenario we did like israel in the u.s to do this

so they're obviously not dropping a nuclear bomb so we can move away from that one sure um and you know they're not going to send a strongly worded letter so we can move from those pathways interesting that's fantastic i mean there's obviously we've got decades of i guess uh the west hypothesizing what would happen if the you know if the u.s struck iran and going back to the revolution at some point there what and of course there was a naval build-up has been going on there for a while um what sort of prompted then in january was it basically the the talk from the trump administration saying if they shoot more protesters we're going to do something was that kind of what spurred on we need to we need to put something like this together now

yeah yeah i think that that's really the that was the triggering point for tress and i to just start discussing it right um because we know with the trump administration and we know with israel that that this had started to become a greater possibility you know israel had already targeted iran the us had already targeted iran earlier and it for israel certainly there are a lot of political opinions there that that was still unfinished business and a lot of pressure to to really continue to go after iran and then both i think both trump and netanyahu made similar statements around if iran starts killing protesters then in humanitarian response you know we should then target iran to prevent that from happening

and in in today's geopolitical world those are not empty threats you know that they are you know realistic statements from leaders that are prepared to carry out that kind of action when you think about it in that way that that's what prompts us to kind of then ask that question okay well if they were to do that that then how does that actually play out sure and along those lines i think it's also important um we knew netanyahu and trump wanted to target iran uh they have for a while they've done it previously and so with a public statement basically creating its own justification it became increasingly likely and you know it happened a couple months later, but it became increasingly likely that some sort of kinetic action would take place

because they clearly wanted to, they just needed the casus belli and a humanitarian intervention would have provided that, that justification. Right. Excellent. All right. Thank you. I think most of the listeners to Simpsons Epic are going to be really focused on, or are, you know, the naval aspects of this at this right now, this is possibly, thankfully a mostly naval and air war. It's being done, conducted from, from offshore there um and of course the uh things like the straits of hormuz um the the mining of of that area that's something on the minds of a lot of our our listeners and readers there um but the since you're focusing on geopolitical impacts there um and we're just that we're thinking a lot

about shipping but i guess i'm going to tease out your your um scenario there what are some of the other business factors there that that you see could be impacted by this um that we're just maybe as a result of the shipping issues, maybe even not something totally separate from that, but just we're not thinking about? Well, for me, the biggest thing is market instability. So over the last couple of days, the Nikkei index, the FTSC 100 in London, all have declined across the world. And that's been a huge issue because AI is responding so quickly to this.

There was a slight uptick, which, you know, again, comes down to the AI use in stock trading because it's like buy low. And so you saw a small jump. But the much bigger issue is going to be energy, of course, because that's the huge part of going through the Strait of Hormuz is the amount of oil. But U.S. manufacturing had already saw increased inputs before the spike in energy prices. And Brent crude, as of this recording, was ten dollars up from Fridays, which is a huge jump for oil prices and how it's unlikely that oil prices are going to immediately stabilize. they're likely to over the medium term. But the causes of this has secondary and third order effects when we're talking about markets geopolitically in particular. Now, it's increasingly unlikely that the Fed or the European Central Bank are going to cut interest rates, you know,

before September, maybe even not even the rest of the year, depending on how the energy markets play out and their input costs for what's going on. And then we're even seeing, you know, a yield increase across the curves when it comes to treasuries because you know there's less um uh belief in in the the utility or strength of the markets that are going on so all of this is having reverberating financial effects already um especially even on like the futures because the dow futures is down too even with the small uptick that we saw from the immediate buy low and all this is coming together so the straighter hormones is so important to global trade and energy that a massive parts of the the global markets are already sort of

destabilizing with it interesting because again i think from the focus of most of our readers we're just familiar with like oil going in and out and then it's bad if it shuts down and then you know there could be issues with uh insurance and that sort of thing but this this really goes a lot it's so much wider now that i think and myself and probably a lot of our other folks don't necessarily take into account so fascinating and the the insurance issues are obviously a big one and that's extending beyond shipping now into just insurance general just general conflict and war insurance in the region with with premiums there and and as we're looking at the gulf in particular trying to diversify its economy away from energy uh you know tress and i've been

talking about okay what what are maybe some of the longer term implications they're a bit more difficult to work out at the moment because we don't know how far this conflict is going to go and how how long it's going to go if we believe the trump administration four to five weeks could be slightly shorter that's probably what we're going with at the moment as it goes longer than just that overall confidence in the region in its ability to diversify its economy in in a strong sense that's going to attract business to the region you know pushing tourism in that region for a long time you know i'm imagining tourism is going to be down for quite a significant period even after the conflict ends because there'll be a lot of confidence in that

in in that industry for sure but then the high tech sector that's trying to be developed so there's potentially some kind of longer term consequences to think about as well as like the immediate things that well tresson and then the second authority third order effects tresson talks about sure yeah as of this this is as of this morning to again to increasingly time stamp it there is a generally like all u.s citizens evacuate the middle east is a isn't almost i'm seeing that on blue sky things coming out from the u.s state department and and then also says like essentially the state department can't really help you with this so you know yo-yo yeah so yeah Well, that's something we deal with, you know, in corporate security all the time is, you know, a sudden geopolitical event breaks out.

What sort of extraction capabilities do you have? Does your team have? Are you contracted out for this? Right. You know, because when government people are doing this, they're like, oh, we can just call in the Marines. But, you know, when you're a corporation and then you're suddenly stuck in Tel Aviv for two weeks now because they can't get a commercial flight out. Sure. What happens to the business?

Right. Yeah. And many of those countries, we're not talking about a few dozen Americans here or there. We're talking in the multi-thousands there that will spread out. So, yeah, that's another level of security. I guess, when you put the report, which is great, your reports are out there for everybody to see. They're not, you know, I mean, you all do them, but everybody can see these. For this one in particular, was there a particular audience, a particular sector?

um you were sort of aiming that for or do you just just kind of go this is you know for anyone doing business or any of us investing in stocks or bonds or anything is that just something we need to all think about i guess um yeah i think this one certainly had a fairly broad audience in mind one because of the potential implications that we're actually seeing now a broad target audience was probably the right idea sure it does depend on the the scenario we're looking at sometimes if we see something that's affecting a particular sector we might do something that's a bit more targeted but certainly with a lot of our our content that we're we're putting online for everybody to read quite often we're taking a broad stance there and especially because a

scenario like this is going to impact so many different sectors um it would be really hard to write you know something specific we could do something say like on maritime like more specifically but even within maritime are we talking you know transportation um and then you know are we talking about the moving of manufactured goods are we talking about energy because they're all going to have slightly different impacts uh for for what's going to occur because some corporations say like maersk um after last year's issues in the gulf they just made a policy like okay just go around africa like we're just not dealing with this just just go around it not all corporations are large enough or have enough capital to be able to just make that kind of decision

and then you know once this broke out so many ships even though they all weren't being targeted they just dropped anchor okay well now you have a backup kind of thing and so the kind of analysis you're going to do on even like the maritime aspect of like who's going in first because you know this isn't just an easy water highway like decisions have to be made on who gets to go and win and that kind of thing as well right and i think too i'll keep going back to our our many of us in these sort of maritime naval world tend to look at like are they mining the straits of formuz is that is like that's what's going to cut off or firing missiles and and i know lloyds of london just like if they raise rates or a ship be coming he goes we're not going there then

it you know happily no ships are getting sunk but it has the effect of it's being cut off out of a out of an abundance of caution i guess so seeing business yeah i just thought of that yesterday how much business really affects the things that we think are purely naval or you know this is yeah yeah i mean yeah like you say iran doesn't need to cut off the straight of hummers to actually cut off the straightforwardness. Just the conflict in itself has had that sort of effect.

Right. Which has also inspired me. I was happy to have you guys on because that's something I think a lot of us don't necessarily take into account. So that came out, the report, I assumed you guys worked on it for a few weeks beforehand. It's been out a few months.

What, now that this, again, has been going on for only four days, were there things you're like that was something we hadn't anticipated um anything like that i know it's i know it's early but yeah for me it was the actually funny enough to be on this podcast it was the naval aspect okay um and working on the scenario i was really expecting um targeted uh killings of sort of you know irgc people and then bombing of strategic sites in iran um so like the naval aspect of how much epic fear operation epic fury has focused on that and then in addition targeting

senior leaders and by that we mean the supreme leader and other heads of major government so those two were actually a little bit surprising to me and and not part of like the original scenario development all right interesting yeah i think i i was i don't want to say surprised as such But the Iranian response to the previous attacks by both Israel and the U.S. was pretty weak in comparison to what we've seen now. And I know Iran makes a lot of calculations in how it responds to various different things, very different activity against it. But the breadth and the intensity of their response, particularly in the Gulf, I didn't think that they maybe would go that route first. I thought they might go energy infrastructure before they went into kind of like airport infrastructure and things like that in the Gulf countries. So that was interesting to me, the way Iran has chosen to respond.

And that's something I'm looking at closely in terms of how we think this might play out. Fascinating stuff. It's, again, we're cursed to be living in an interesting time. So we are indeed. Really appreciate you guys coming on to give us a broader context. We're going to put, I encourage everyone, this was all sort of a teaser, read that report. I think you will, at least at this stage. It was not meant to be predictive, as they point out,

but they go into a lot of the second, third, fourth order impacts, I think, that we might expect to see, or if not, we're already. So check that out. That will be in the show notes. Anything else you guys are working on right now that might be of interest to SimSec readers and listeners? You all put out a whole lot of stuff from IF. We do put out a lot of stuff, yeah.

Yeah, so we have a free weekly newsletter. We have our own podcast that will be included in the show notes. I know that's so people can sign up for those. And Tress and I were chatting yesterday. We are going to do an updated Iran scenarios report over the next few days or so. Because we don't want to get too much into too many if this, then that rabbit holes. Right. So we're trying to keep it narrow in our focus

because there are a whole lot of unknowns. But we will be releasing an updated report in the next kind of week or so, I imagine. And along those lines, because something I kind of want to emphasize, I'm glad we're talking about scenarios and everything. I'm a huge advocate of using this kind of stuff for preparation, not just, say, militaries.

because you know we're talking about naval stuff so we could go back to war plant orange of the 20s and 30s um but even for the private sector when you're talking about like maritime trade and business and being able to really think through potential actions by threat actors or major geopolitical events because being able to think through the problem test your assumptions and come up with potential mitigation strategies can save you tens of millions of dollars um and that's why Ross and I really tried to do these kind of scenarios, again, not about prediction or forecasting per se, because that's other types of analysis. But the reason this kind of scenario stuff is so important, especially for something like the Iranian scenario, as we talked about

throughout this, is Iran didn't even have to cut off the Strait of Hormuz to cut off the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, what kind of scenario planning does that goes into what you can do for that? So if it's not actually shut off, how would you respond over the short, medium and long term? And if you have that plan in place, it makes your life so much easier as a corporation. You know, this isn't just a government thing that has to be planned for. Right. Right. Fascinating. It's really good stuff. And it's helping me understand a little bit more what's going on, even from my lowly bench here.

So thank you guys both. Appreciate all your work. All your work, as mentioned, the links to their podcast, Boardroom Statecraft, newsletter, Pestle and Mortar, and their website, and all that will be there. And they're pretty accessible. And anyway, there'll be more good stuff coming from them, so please check that out. To the rest of the Sea Control listeners, we thank you for joining in, and we will talk to you next time. Over and out. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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