S5 E14 - Give Captain Phillips a Gun - No, a BIGGER Gun

Why Captain Phillips Couldn’t Carry a Gun Today | Arming Merchant Ships in the Strait of Hormuz

The episode argues that Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces are illegally boarding and seizing merchant ships in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for roughly 20% of the world’s oil, and criticizes diplomatic “negotiation” and sanctions as ineffective responses to piracy. Using the film Captain Phillips and historical examples—armed East Indiamen, the WWII Liberty ship SS Stephen Hopkins, and Jefferson’s response to Barbary pirates—it claims deterrence works when ships can shoot back. The script contends modern commercial crews are left defenseless because regional ports prohibit weapons, making shipboard arms or private security costly and complex. It proposes placing armed guards, specifically U.S. Marines, on every transiting vessel, reviving ship “hard points,” and potentially deploying Phalanx CIWS as a deterrent, arguing defense is not escalation and would stop attacks.

00:00 Captain Phillips Hook
00:33 Iranian Ship Seizures
02:29 Hormuz And Piracy Law
05:35 Why Ships Are Unarmed
07:05 History Of Armed Merchants
09:47 Private Guards Work
11:46 Marines On Every Ship
13:30 Phalanx Deterrent Option
15:58 Answering Objections
19:28 Wrap Up And Takeaway

#americanexceptionalism #piracy #terrorism #guncontrol #iran

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:11

Captain Phillips was taken hostage by four Somali pirates with a ladder. The only thing that stopped it was a good guy with a gun. Why Captain Phillips couldn't have his own gun today on The Tenth Man. Right now in the Arabian Gulf, Iranian so-called commandos are boarding merchant ships, rappelling down from helicopters or climbing up with ladders, swarming the decks with rifles, seizing cargo, detaining crews, and doing it in international waters in broad daylight. And the crews are doing what international maritime practice currently encourages them to do, nothing, or maybe pointing a fire hose at them. The movie Captain Phillips came out in twenty thirteen with Tom Hanks. Four Somali pirates, Ilhan Omar's cousins, one container ship, and the crew's most effective defensive weapon was a fire hose. The pirates just had AK-47s, nothing special. Yet the standoff lasted five days and only ended when United States Navy SEALs put three rounds through three skulls from a moving vessel in open water, and problem solved. Here's the question nobody in Washington is asking and nobody in the press is printing. What if Captain Phillips had had a gun? There wouldn't have been a movie. Before you share this episode, and I'd ask you to do that, to tell a friend and tell two, this is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis, and let me show you why the answer to Iranian piracy in the Arabian Gulf is not to send another carrier strike group, and it's not a new sanctions package. It's not a strongly worded statement from the UN. It's a gun. And we know this because it's what has always worked. Let's establish what's actually happening out there. The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow neck of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran through which roughly twenty percent of the world's oil supply passes. Every tanker carrying Gulf to Europe, Asia, or anywhere else transits that strait if it's coming from that area. Iran knows this, Iran has always known this, and controlling that choke point or threatening to is Iran's primary lever on the global economy, and they pull it whenever they feel like reminding the world that they exist. Now here's something that should not require saying, but apparently requires not only saying it, but some emphasis. The boarding and seizure of commercial vessels in international waters is illegal, period. It's not a gray area. It's not subject to competing interpretations. It's not a matter of regional custom or diplomatic context. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, under customary international law going back centuries, under every framework the international community claims to hold sacred, the interdiction of innocent passage is an act of piracy. And you hang pirates. It doesn't become something else because the country committing it has a seat at the UN, or a nuclear program, or strong feelings about calling the Arabian Gulf the Persian Gulf just because they're stealing ships in it. And yet here we are watching the United States negotiate the reopening of the strait. Not demanding it, negotiating it. Now, a lot of commentary divides upon along neatly political lines. Trump is either ruthless or just being tough, depending on who's writing the column. But ruthless and tough are both false. He's not really either one because the strait is not a negotiating position. It's a legal right of passage that Iran is currently violating, and you do not negotiate the restoration of a right that was never Iran's to revoke. You make them open the strait. Then if there's anything left to discuss, then you talk. Because negotiating the terms under which a pirate stops pirating is not deal-making. It's paying tribute. And Thomas Jefferson knew the difference, but apparently we've forgotten it Every diplomat, every foreign ministry, every international legal body that has watched Iranian Revolutionary Guard units storm commercial vessels and responded with a strongly worded communique knows this. There's nothing confusing about the law. They've simply decided the law is negotiable when Iran is the one breaking it. That decision has a cost, and that cost is the war we're seeing now. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps uses fast boats and helicopter-borne assault teams to seize commercial vessels. Now, these are not heavily armed commandos conducting a sophisticated military operation. They're not Navy SEALs. Often, these are just men with rifles and grappling hooks who have calculated correctly that nobody on the ship they're boarding is going to shoot back. And why won't they shoot back? Because they don't have any guns. And why don't they have any guns? It's not because they don't want to, but it's because every port in the region prohibits so-called armed vessels. Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, even Oman. International maritime law recognizes the right to self-defense at sea, and that principle is well established. But the moment a commercial vessel enters port with weapons aboard, the host country's domestic law takes over. So your cargo is detained, ship impounded, the crew's arrested. The economics make arming the ship nearly impossible, even though the alternative is leaving the crew defenseless. So they attack you with AK-47s, but you can't have a bow and arrow So the ships sail unarmed through a waterway patrolled by pirates because the paperwork is easier that way This isn't a new problem, but it is a problem that's been solved long ago. Merchant ships have been arming themselves against pirates since there were merchant ships and pirates, which is to say since there have been ships. And the solution has always been the same. Make the target expensive to attack and the pirates find a softer one or go get jobs And these merchant ships weren't armed with just flintlocks and cutlasses and belaying pins either. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British East India Company operated a class of vessels known as East Indiamen, large cargo ships carrying spices, silk, and trade goods from Asia to Britain. They also carried cannons, twelve, eighteen, sometimes thirty-six guns per ship. Not on a warship, on merchant vessels. They were armed enough that attacking one was a serious military proposition. And the pirates of that era were not stupid. They preyed on whoever was weakest. But when the weakest ship had a broadside, all of the math changed. And this principle didn't expire when sail power went away. It was just 1942 when the SS Stephen Hopkins, an American Liberty ship, a cargo vessel, not a warship, it was attacked in the South Atlantic by two German surface radier-- surface raiders, an auxiliary cruiser, the Stier and the Tannenfels. Now, Liberty ships were armed. The Hopkins carried a single four-inch deck gun, a World War I-era weapon, already obsolete, and a thirty-seven millimeter cannon and some machine guns. Now, the crew, a small Navy armed guard detachment, assisted by the merchant sailors aboard, fought the Germans for thirty-two minutes. The Hopkins was sunk, but so was the Stier. An old gun on a cargo ship sank a German auxiliary cruiser Now, Humphrey Bogart tells a version of this story in, um, the movie Action in the North Atlantic, released in 1943. It's a good movie. And it reminds you that the cargo ships crossing the Atlantic under fire were crewed by men, many of them civilians, who fought back. And they fought back because they had guns. Not sophisticated guns, just guns But the only commercial vessels operating in the Gulf today with any meaningful defense capability are those that have hired private security teams. And every country makes that as difficult as possible. Private maritime security companies exist, and they work. Studies done after the Somali piracy peak, roughly twenty eighteen to twenty thirteen, twenty-- two thousand eight to twenty thirteen, showed that ships with armed guards aboard were essentially never successfully boarded. Not because they had a huge military force, not because they were equipped to fight a navy, but just because they were armed. A few men with rifles on deck changed the calculation entirely. The pirates didn't stop being pirates. They were Somalians, uh, after all, but they stopped boarding ships with guards. They found unarmed ships, of which there were plenty. Because the problem with private security is the same problem with the ship's own weapons, port entry. The relevant countries involved require security teams to offload their weapons before entering, so they have to store them in bonded warehouse, retrieve them on departure, and this process, it's a whole cottage industry of companies that do this. It's expensive, time-consuming, and creates its own chain of liability, with the result that many shipping companies simply don't bother. The odds of being boarded on any given transit seem low, while the cost and complexity of arming the ship is high. Gee, it's taken guns from the law-abiding, typical gun control. And it works fine until four men in a skiff come along and climb over the rail with Kalashnikovs, and then the calculus changes So here's what we ought to do instead, and it isn't complicated. Put armed guards on every commercial vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz. And don't make it private contractors fighting the port paperwork. Make it United States Marines. Let a helicopter drop a squad of Marines on each ship. Drop some CONEX boxes for them to shelter in or have shelter material. And they know how to do this. With small arms and a few heavy weapons, that's all it takes to stop other men with small arms. And we know this because the private security companies proved it a decade ago off the coast of Somalia Now, if the threat grows beyond men with rifles on speedboats, drones, fast attack craft, something more coordinated, then you just scale the answer accordingly You know, there was a period in American maritime policy when the federal government subsidized the installation of hard points on commercial vessels built with federal loans. Well, they were subsidizing the building of the vessels, and they required them to have hard points so guns could be mounted. Structural reinforcements, below deck storage, gun mount foundations built into the ship during construction The idea was simple. A merchant fleet built in peacetime could be converted to a defensive one without starting from scratch. And then the Liberty ships, like the Stephen Hopkins, they took that a step further, built during wartime under federal contract, they carried the weapons installed already, which is exactly why they had a four-inch gun on a cargo vessel in the South Atlantic in nineteen forty-two. Well, that program worked then, as we've described, and it should be revived now. And for the modern threat specifically, there's a weapon already purpose-built just for this scenario, the Phalanx close-in weapon system. Yeah, all the guys love the Phalanx. Twenty millimeter rotary cannon, radar-guided, and this is important, autonomous. Just flip it into auto mode, designed to track and engage multiple fast-moving threats, boats, drones, low-flying aircraft, before they reach the ship. The system is self-contained. It could be portable and delivered to a commercial vessel as a single integrated unit. You just strap it down, connect it to power, and the ship has a defensive ca-capability that did not exist the day before On a personal note, back in the 1970s, my ship, the USS Coontz, a guided missile destroyer out of Norfolk, we had the Vulcan Air Defense System fitted, uh, as a, uh, under development when I reported aboard. Now, I never saw it fire. Uh, we went into, into the yard, and they'd done all the testing they needed at the time, and it was removed during that yard period. But this was the direct predecessor to what became the Phalanx Now, the important thing about the phalanx in this context is it would almost certainly never fire a round. That's the point. It's a deterrent, and a vessel visibly equipped to destroy fast attack boats before they get within rifle range is not a vessel the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is going to test. They're gonna try to find a softer target because deterrence, that's what they do. Deterrence lead to peace, and it's not a theory. It's the entire history of military deterrence confirmed again every time a pirate with a skiff pulls along a ship with unarmed, with unarm- with armed men on deck and decides to keep moving. The East India men were not boarded because they had guns. The Stephen Hopkins was not surrendered because a crew with an obsolete deck gun chose to fight. The Somali pirates stopped boarding ships with the private security because two men with rifles on a stern deck made the math wrong. You don't need much. You just need something, and a little bit of something changes everything Now people are gonna object to this. The ju- objections aren't very smart, but we'll, we'll take them in order. The cost. Well, this self-contained Phalanx unit might run $5 to $6 million. That's cheap. That and a Marine security attachment will cost a fraction of what we've already spent on carrier strike group deployments to the region. And that deterrent, again, it's almost certainly never gonna fire a round The 20-millimeter ammunition for the, for the Phalanx, they cost about 30 bucks a piece, and you shoot about 100 per target, so three grand. That's a lot of money, and that's what people will say, but the gun's never gonna fire. Ask the shipping companies that hire private security, then ask the ones who didn't And even if it were expensive, freedom is not free. I love this line. Robert Livingston, the minister to France under President Jefferson during the Barbary pirate, uh, incidents, he was pressed for tribute by the Barbary pirates. Same hemisphere, the same, uh, culture, shall we say, so the same logic, and they wanted money from us two hundred and twenty years ago. And he sent back an answer that you cannot improve with time. He said, "We'll pay millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." Then Jefferson sent the Navy, and the pirates stopped Well, what about danger to the men? Ha, that one will answer itself. The men wouldn't care. The men are gonna volunteer for these assignments. They'll fight for them. They'll compete for them. They'd say it's exactly what they trained for Now, what about the risk of escalation? Yeah, clutch your pearls. This phrase gets deployed every time someone proposes actually defending against an aggressor. And let's examine precisely what this means, because the people using it have the definition exactly backwards. Escalation is an offensive act. Only Iran can escalate. The defender does not escalate. The defender responds or maybe retaliates. Iran boards a merchant ship, that's an a-- that's aggression. We arm the ship, that's defense. And Iran then chooses what they wanna do next. If they want to attack the armed vessel and, and are repelled, then they have escalated. And if they attack and are destroyed, then they've just made a catastrophically poor decision. But in neither case did we escalate. The word escalation has been systematically misapplied for decades to mean any increase in defensive capability that makes an aggressor uncomfortable, and the misapplication serves one purpose. It places the moral burden on the defender and removes it from the attacker, because it's never the Muslims' fault. The only real question in this situation is whether Iranian terrorism, including the nuclear variety they've been developing for thirty years, needs to be stopped, and if the answer is yes, then do what needs to be done, and what really needs to be done right now is simpler and less dangerous than what we have been doing The attack on Captain Phillips ended the way every pirate attack needs to end. A good guy with a gun showed up. Three Navy SEALs, three shots, three pirates, standoff over. The United States government spent millions of dollars, deployed a destroyer, a guided missile frigate, and a nuclear aircraft carrier, and ultimately resolved a confrontation with four men in a skiff, men who, from the moment they came over the rail, could have been stopped by any crew member just with a sidearm The armed ship is never boarded. The crew with a rifle does not become a hostage. These are not complicated military propositions. Those are the conclusions that fall out of any historical engagement when you view it with a little common sense. The East Indiamen weren't boarded. The Stephen Hopkins fought back with an old gun and won. The Barbary pirates stopped when Jefferson stopped paying them and started shooting at them. Give the ships their guns, then give them bigger guns. The Iranian pirates, like every pirate before them, will give up, will turn away. That's what they do. That's what they've always done. The only question is how long we're going to pretend that we don't know that. Thank you for listening