Mark Montgomery

You know, we're not ready for the deal yet, nine.

And we'll be up towards 25 pretty quickly because that's how they negotiate.

Two things that you're right about.

One, you know, we could convoy.

But the real issue, even today, is that what's an acceptable risk for the U.S.

Navy, where we've had ships go back and forth through the straits repeatedly.

Yeah.

It is too much risk for the maritime shippers.

And this was not the case in the 1980s when I did convoys.

In the 1980s, we said, it's good to go.

And everybody got in line.

And in fact, on our very first convoy op, the Bridgeton merchant ship hit a mine because we weren't ready.

And then we said, okay, okay, sorry about that.

Three weeks from now, let's go.

And everybody went with us.

I mean, in government, somebody said sorry about that.

But the point was that they listened to us, that we set the risk, the risk tolerance.

That's not the case today.

Today, risk tolerance is set by the merchant ship owners and the insurers.

and they're not willing to take the risks that we are.