For more now on the U.S. enforcement of the Strait of Hormuz blockade.

We turn to retired Admiral Gary Ruffhead.

He was chief of naval operations from 2007 to 2011.

He's now a distinguished military fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Thank you for being with us.

And I want to start with this.

Your reaction when you learned the U.S. Navy fired on and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz as part of the American enforcement there.

I was not surprised. The blockade had been put in place, and as ships were moving in and out, if there was not enforcement of the blockade, it would be viewed

as a paper tiger. So stopping a ship and boarding it was not unusual to me, given the circumstances.

Where does firing on a vessel rank in the U.S. toolkit for enforcing a blockade like this?

I would say it's ranked pretty high. Normally, and you heard in some of the videos that were

released by Sentcom that there were verbal warnings to the ship to stop, whether or not there were some shots fired across

the bow to signal intent to use hostile force. I don't know. I've not seen anything on that.

But disabling fire is quite high up the ladder, but the fact remains that the blockade was enforced.

The Marines boarded it, and my understanding now is that they're searching the containers that are on that ship.

How operationally challenging is it to enforce a blockade and a body of water like that, given

the size and the different entry points into it?

Right now, I'd say it's not very hard.

I mean, the intelligence that we have, the ability to be able to track ships, knowing

where they're coming from, where they're bound, and the limited number of ships,

because what we're doing is we're stopping either ships that have called at an Iranian port

or are bound to an Iranian port. So that number is fairly slow. The sea lanes that are fairly low.

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