What Hormuz Can and Cannot Teach INDOPACOM About Sustaining Combat Power

I have chartered commercial Mutipurpose Supply Vessels (MSPV) from the Oil & Gas industry for military support and have run marine operations for a global oceanographic research firm and its fleet of vessels. Getting a ship underway depended on more than its condition. Crew changes, flag, and class compliance/regulatory, insurance terms, vessel inspections, QHSE, port services and host-nation permits could each hold it at the pier.

Imagine a scientific breakthrough that could make a nation less secure even if it achieved it first. Now imagine two rival powers, each afraid the other might pursue it anyway. That is the strategic problem raised by the possibility of so-called "mirror life". Its danger lies not only in what an adversary might do with a novel organism, but in what competition itself might persuade otherwise cautious actors to create.

Mirror life does not exist today. It is a hypothetical form of life built from biological molecules that are the mirror images of those found in nature. The distinction involves what scientists call "chirality", or molecular "handedness". Consider your left and right hands. They have the same components but are arranged as mirror images and cannot be perfectly superimposed. Something similar occurs in biology. The proteins of living organisms are built almost exclusively from "left-handed" amino acids, while DNA relies on "right-handed" sugars. Mirror life would reverse these arrangements, potentially producing organisms whose molecular structures are fundamentally incompatible with those of life as we know it. Scientists have already created individual mirror-image biological molecules, but never a self-replicating organism. The danger is that certain mirror microbes might evade immune defenses and national biological controls that evolved to recognize ordinary organisms, thereby potentially allowing infections or ecological disruptions that would be difficult to contain. The likelihood and scale of these dangers remain uncertain at the moment.