The ocean is a great place to lose a boat.

You’d think, in an era where we can zoom in on a backyard shed from a satellite while drinking a lukewarm latte, that a three-hundred-meter slab of steel carrying a million barrels of crude would be hard to miss. It isn't. The Indian Ocean is currently hosting a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, and the US Navy just dragged another "fugitive" tanker back into the light.

CENTCOM didn’t provide much flourish in the press release. They rarely do. They just noted that a boarding team from a guided-missile destroyer intercepted a vessel that had gone dark—tech-speak for "turned off the transponder and hoped nobody noticed." It’s the third such interdiction this month. Another day, another rust-bucket trying to bypass sanctions by pretending it doesn't exist.

We call these things "ghost ships," which sounds much cooler than the reality. The reality is a "dark fleet" of aging, decrepit tankers with peeling paint and questionable insurance. They operate in the digital shadows, using a trick called AIS spoofing. AIS is the Automatic Identification System, the maritime equivalent of a digital license plate. It’s supposed to tell the world who you are and where you’re going. But if you’ve got the right hardware and a complete lack of ethics, you can make your ship’s signal appear in the middle of the South China Sea while your actual hull is offloading Iranian crude near the Gulf of Oman.

It’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech dragnet. And it works. Mostly.

The friction here isn’t just about the oil. It’s about the math. The US is currently burning millions of dollars in fuel and manpower to chase down cargoes that might be worth $80 million on a good day. We’re sending $2 billion Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to play traffic cop for ships that are, quite literally, held together by spite and multiple layers of shell companies.

Think about the trade-off. We’re using the world's most sophisticated surveillance apparatus—P-8 Poseidon sub-hunters, satellite arrays, and signals intelligence—to find a boat that’s basically shouting "I'm not here" in a very loud, very fake voice. It’s an asymmetric headache. For the smugglers, a lost ship is just a line item in a ledger, a cost of doing business. For the Navy, it’s a constant drain on resources in a theater that’s already stretched thin by Houthi drones and the general instability of the Red Sea.

The tech world loves to talk about "supply chain transparency," but the maritime industry is built on a foundation of opaque bureaucracy. These fugitive tankers don’t fly the flags of major nations. They fly "flags of convenience." They’re registered in places like the Cook Islands or Palau—nations that couldn’t regulate a lemonade stand, let alone a global shipping fleet. When the US forces interdict one of these ships, they aren't just fighting a crew; they’re fighting a labyrinth of paper trails that lead nowhere.

It’s a kludge. The entire global economy relies on these massive vessels, yet the system for tracking them is essentially an honor system that everyone stopped honoring five years ago. We’ve built a digital world on top of a physical one that’s still governed by 19th-century pirate logic. You turn off your light, you paint a new name on the bow, and suddenly, you’re a new person. Or a new boat.

The Pentagon likes to frame these intercepts as wins. They’re "enforcing international law" and "ensuring the freedom of navigation." But every time a boarding party slides down a rope onto a greasy deck in the middle of the night, it’s a reminder that our shiny, interconnected world is actually quite easy to break.

We can track a DoorDash order to our front porch with meter-level accuracy. We can see our stolen AirPods in a different zip code. But apparently, we still can’t figure out how to keep a 300,000-ton tanker from simply walking out the back door of the global economy.

How many more of these "interdictions" can the 5th Fleet pull off before the sheer volume of the dark fleet makes the effort look like trying to empty the ocean with a fork?