Speaker 1: And welcome board everybody. It says sal along with my
Speaker 1: co host Mark, welcome everybody to another edition of mid Rats,
Speaker 1: and I would like to put out the altar call
Speaker 1: for those that are with us live, go ahead and
Speaker 1: hop into.
Speaker 2: The chat room.
Speaker 1: We've already got one person, two person. Everybody's hopping in
Speaker 1: the chat room. That's a great place during the course
Speaker 1: of the show that if you have some questions you
Speaker 1: would like to ask us, are some observations you put
Speaker 1: it right in there. We'll be monitoring it during the
Speaker 1: course of the show. It might even interact with you
Speaker 1: if you have something really pithy and good that you
Speaker 1: want to share. And also if you don't already, maybe
Speaker 1: you got to leave halfway through the show, or this
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Speaker 1: chance to join us live. If you go over to
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Speaker 1: go ahead and find mid Rats and subscribe. That way,
Speaker 1: we will be there with you at a time to
Speaker 1: your convenience. And this is no guest, is just Mark
Speaker 1: and I. Today we're going to cover the waterfront here
Speaker 1: as everybody gets ready for Thanksgiving. And I'll probably repeat
Speaker 1: it at the end of the show. But I know
Speaker 1: everybody's going to have a week full of feasting and
Speaker 1: family and friends.
Speaker 2: I hope.
Speaker 1: If not, well you've got us for an hour, so
Speaker 1: you've got that going forward. So hey, happy pre Thanksgiving there, Mark, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you, sal and hope you have a good time.
Speaker 2: I will.
Speaker 1: I won't have all the kiddies home because they you
Speaker 1: know how that is adult, so have a life for
Speaker 1: their own. We're also trying something new today, maybe a
Speaker 1: couple of y'allur listening. I think I joined took us
Speaker 1: half a decade to get here, but I went ahead
Speaker 1: and hooked up the riverside to my account over at
Speaker 1: x so in addition to live streaming on the Riverside,
Speaker 1: those that had that link also got us live streaming
Speaker 1: on x as well. So hopefully that'll bring in some
Speaker 1: new people who might want to hop on over to
Speaker 1: the riverside transaction and joining the chat room. So that's
Speaker 1: always good to have. Kind Of to kick things off,
Speaker 1: we kind of coordinated in the pre show some of
Speaker 1: the thoughts that we had bounced through our mind, and
Speaker 1: as the kickoff was going, Mark, I was thinking, you
Speaker 1: know the topic that you brought up because at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, national defense it is a people business.
Speaker 1: You have all these great and exciting technologies and machines,
Speaker 1: but behind all of it and the theory, how do
Speaker 1: you execute it. It's the people and an all volunteer force.
Speaker 1: You have a pretty complicated set of variables that being
Speaker 1: able to maintain the excellence of that all volunteer force,
Speaker 1: and that has to do with not just recruiting, but retention.
Speaker 1: And there are a few rumbles in the retention front
Speaker 1: that people should be asking hard questions about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a I think we always say people first.
Speaker 3: I mean that is the military one of the great
Speaker 3: military mantras people first, take care of your people, I
Speaker 3: think was one of the first things I heard when
Speaker 3: I joined the Navy eight billion years ago. The problem
Speaker 3: is that taking care of your people is also understanding
Speaker 3: the problems they face and dealing as well as you
Speaker 3: can with those. What we've seen is that has the
Speaker 3: size of the Navy is as shrunk, then the demands
Speaker 3: placed on the assets we have has increased because we're
Speaker 3: trying to meet the same commitments that we've historically met
Speaker 3: with a larger force. And so that means that the
Speaker 3: people of the Davy and the Marine Corps and probably
Speaker 3: all the other services are getting used They're getting used up.
Speaker 3: We're burning them out at a younger age. They We
Speaker 3: have trouble retaining mid career officers in aviation. We have
Speaker 3: trouble retaining skilled personnel who can find work that doesn't
Speaker 3: involve them leaving home for eight to ten months on
Speaker 3: an inconsistent but regular basis. It is not taking care
Speaker 3: of your people, but that it is the part of
Speaker 3: the snowball effect of allowing your fleet to shrink to
Speaker 3: the size where it can't do all the missions that
Speaker 3: are demanded of it. But we sit won't say we
Speaker 3: can't do that, and so we're trying to do everything
Speaker 3: with people that are already on the ragged edge of
Speaker 3: burning out. And it's a problem if you have a
Speaker 3: shortage of aviation squadron department heads where some in some
Speaker 3: cases people are doing they're double hatted, as in the
Speaker 3: department at World, if you can't keep people motivated to
Speaker 3: when especially when they're facing and it's not about money.
Speaker 3: Somewhere along the way I've read I was going to
Speaker 3: my various degrees that you read about money is not
Speaker 3: a great motivator.
Speaker 2: I mean it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Getting paid well helps, but it doesn't buy happiness. If
Speaker 3: the job is a killers. We keep offering bonuses. People
Speaker 3: are taking the bonuses, but they're not They're not made
Speaker 3: me happier. They're not getting more time off because they
Speaker 3: took the bonuses. They're just having to work harder to
Speaker 3: pick up the slack from all the people that have
Speaker 3: decided to get out and go to work for other
Speaker 3: companies or just start their own business or whatever they're
Speaker 3: going to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and for those that haven't been in the military,
Speaker 1: but the thing to understand about retention is it is
Speaker 1: a zero sum game out there. You have a fixed
Speaker 1: number of ships, fixed number of squadrons, fixed numbers submarines,
Speaker 1: shore commands that need to be manned. With your senior leadership,
Speaker 1: you're going to have a COO and XO and your
Speaker 1: various department heads. And you want to have in a meritocracy,
Speaker 1: which is the military with a blemish here or there.
Speaker 1: It is a bit of meritocracy. We can't mess around
Speaker 1: with evening but the best. Ultimately, you want to have
Speaker 1: a pool of people to choose from. So if you
Speaker 1: have you have ten important jobs you have to fill,
Speaker 1: and you have twenty people to choose from. When you
Speaker 1: get those twenty people in front of you, you can say,
Speaker 1: you know, here's these four absolutely we want they're up there.
Speaker 2: Boom.
Speaker 1: There's four in here that I wouldn't trust to mow
Speaker 1: my yard. So we're not going to consider them. So
Speaker 1: we've taken eight out of our twenty. We've got another sixteen.
Speaker 1: We have another sixteen people to fill, another six billets,
Speaker 1: and you just start filing. Yeah, those other two people,
Speaker 1: they're pretty good.
Speaker 2: Those other two people not too good.
Speaker 1: Then you get into a crunch. Do you have Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got three billets left I have to fill. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I've got six people to choose from in the crunch,
Speaker 1: and they're all about equal. Not everybody gets invited to
Speaker 1: the party. And the end of that very brutal or
Speaker 1: wellly in process. As much as humanly possible, you have
Speaker 1: selected the best. You have mitigated performance risk due to
Speaker 1: low quality, our poor personality mixes, and things go well,
Speaker 1: which is important when you have multi billion dollar equipment,
Speaker 1: nuclear reactors. Things that go boom are very important. Now,
Speaker 1: if you have those ten billets to fill and you
Speaker 1: only have twelve people to choose from. Then you are
Speaker 1: going to bring in some people that probably shouldn't be
Speaker 1: given that opportunity to excel, and that degrades the performance
Speaker 1: of your military. And you have all sorts of problems
Speaker 1: developed from that. So you have to create an environment
Speaker 1: that you retain enough people to pick from. And you
Speaker 1: know the department head problems that people have. When people
Speaker 1: get their commission, whether they go to the academy, rotcci,
Speaker 1: they're usually in their early twenties unless they're prior enlisted.
Speaker 1: So let's just pick a round date twenty two, and
Speaker 1: let's say that the people who have the most obligation
Speaker 1: I believe is still pilots. You're thirteen tens. So let's
Speaker 1: say you get through a flight school at age twenty four.
Speaker 1: Let's say just use round numbers here. I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is right now, whether it's six, seven, eight,
Speaker 1: let's just say eight because that's easy math to do.
Speaker 1: Twenty four plus eight is thirty two, so at thirty
Speaker 1: two you can punch out. That also happens to be
Speaker 1: to years after you have gotten your commission, which means
Speaker 1: it's about time to go up for a department at
Speaker 1: the Green board. So you have all these people that
Speaker 1: are given the ability to get out because they've got
Speaker 1: through with your obligations and surface warfare. You can leave
Speaker 1: a little bit earlier. But let's back up, so you
Speaker 1: have thirty two. Let's back up for the surface guys
Speaker 1: who can get out earlier they want to. When you
Speaker 1: know you get your go to your ship at age
Speaker 1: twenty two, do a year fiddle fiddling around that gets
Speaker 1: you to twenty three. You do a three year tour
Speaker 1: that gets you to twenty six, twenty seven and whatever.
Speaker 1: Between the ages of twenty seven and thirty two is
Speaker 1: one of the most important leverage parts for young men
Speaker 1: and women for a variety of things. That's that's when
Speaker 1: you do mostly your family formation. If you are recently married,
Speaker 1: you're starting to have kids. If you're not married, especially
Speaker 1: around age age thirty, you're getting itchy whether you're a
Speaker 1: male or female, and if you are female, when you
Speaker 1: reach age thirty, biology starts being really mean to you
Speaker 1: if you want to have a family, so you've got
Speaker 1: to be really motivated, and when you do the plus
Speaker 1: and minuses of whether you want to stay in or not,
Speaker 1: that's a real critical juncture to get there, and I
Speaker 1: think one of the things we hurt ourselves is, and
Speaker 1: this is a senior leadership problem, that we haven't had
Speaker 1: an admiral no or really a second NEV and a
Speaker 1: sect death no. That when you tell everybody that an
Speaker 1: eight month to eleven month deployment is going to be
Speaker 1: the new normal, that doesn't just have an effect on
Speaker 1: ship's maintenance. That has effect on retention is six months forever.
Speaker 1: A lot of the listeners here who have done deployments,
Speaker 1: you know six months is tough because you do twelve
Speaker 1: months work up ahead of time. I remember the calendar
Speaker 1: I kept when I was on the enterprise, backing up
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty days from when we got back
Speaker 1: from deployment.
Speaker 2: I was gone two hundred and seventy of them.
Speaker 1: It's more than that six month deployment, and that makes
Speaker 1: people who have free will a lot more desire to
Speaker 1: get out. You know, the circumstances you mentioned where let's
Speaker 1: say you want to have I don't know, eight department
Speaker 1: heads at any one time, Well, if you only have
Speaker 1: five or eight, then you you've had double the duty,
Speaker 1: lower performance, more room for error. I mean, it's great
Speaker 1: for the people who want to hang around the screen
Speaker 1: for command because you don't have as much competition. And
Speaker 1: I think the argument could be made that we probably
Speaker 1: are losing some of our best people too, because I
Speaker 1: know one of the best officers I served with when
Speaker 1: they came up to their obligation, they loved the Navy,
Speaker 1: they loved what they did. But he was offered a
Speaker 1: chance to go to Harvard to get his NBA, and
Speaker 1: he actually thought real hard about it. But this is
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties and there wasn't much love going on,
Speaker 1: and so he took off and did great things in
Speaker 1: other places. That retention is multifaceted. I think you're right.
Speaker 1: It's not just money. If it was money would be
Speaker 1: easy to solve.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a quote from a piece that appeared in
Speaker 3: the Peninsula Press, which I gather is out on the
Speaker 3: West coast someplace back in January twenty four and they,
Speaker 3: you know, they were talking about I'll put a link
Speaker 3: up to it, but the quote is from one of
Speaker 3: the quotes from that is they ask for more every
Speaker 3: year with less and less people. And I don't know
Speaker 3: if that's correct.
Speaker 2: Use less.
Speaker 3: I would say fewer people myself. But that's the problem.
Speaker 3: You know, you as people get out the burden on
Speaker 3: the people who get left, and and if they're quality people,
Speaker 3: they're the ones who are already getting the line's share
Speaker 3: of collateral duties and stuff. Because you know, when you
Speaker 3: look at when you're talking about your lineup of people
Speaker 3: that decide who's going to get selected for the next job,
Speaker 3: the same thing happens in your squadron around your ship.
Speaker 3: You look at the people who can get the job done,
Speaker 3: and the people who get the job done get all
Speaker 3: the jobs, because you don't want to give an ihortant
Speaker 3: job to somebody who's not as competent and won't do
Speaker 3: as good a job as somebody who is competent. And
Speaker 3: we'll do a good job. And that's the way it works.
Speaker 3: But if you're if people are leaving, putting more burden
Speaker 3: on your on your superior performers, now you're grinding those
Speaker 3: folks down a lot faster than than they need to
Speaker 3: be to be ground down. And as you say, it's
Speaker 3: not the the sixth or seven or eight month deployment,
Speaker 3: it is the work up to get there. So even
Speaker 3: on a ship, you're going through refresher training, you're going
Speaker 3: through all kinds of stuff to get ready to go.
Speaker 3: And you know, all of that involves all hands, and
Speaker 3: it involves everybody spending more time at sea. And and
Speaker 3: you know, when I was on a destroyer out of
Speaker 3: San Diego, we were the we'd come back from a
Speaker 3: deployment and then we were the duty destroyer for a while.
Speaker 3: That meant that every time a carrier needed somebody to
Speaker 3: go out for a four day carrier wall or something,
Speaker 3: you know, we would we would be out there following
Speaker 3: along as a as a you know, the destroyer falls
Speaker 3: carriers along. The playing guard is not fun. And it's
Speaker 3: especially if you're if you're in port for you know,
Speaker 3: we're gonna go in port for three days or four
Speaker 3: days and you're gonna one in four one and three
Speaker 3: duty section, which means that you could have the duty
Speaker 3: when you leave the night before you go, and have
Speaker 3: the duty when you get back, and that means you
Speaker 3: have like two days with your family. It is it
Speaker 3: is a It is a not a career enhancing position
Speaker 3: to be in where you feel like that it's you're
Speaker 3: you're giving all and nobody else is really taken care
Speaker 3: of or even contemplating what it means to be in
Speaker 3: that position.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it.
Speaker 1: Does beg the question, Okay, everybody wants to complain about it,
Speaker 1: but what you can do about it?
Speaker 2: There's things you.
Speaker 1: Can do on on the personal level to make the
Speaker 1: suck not be as bad as it is. But really,
Speaker 1: this is a cno sect nov sect problem because if
Speaker 1: we can't find a way to build a large enough
Speaker 1: fleet to meet the demand signal that everybody wants for deployed.
Speaker 2: Then we need to.
Speaker 1: Start saying no, that we are not going to deploy. Yes,
Speaker 1: we are going to gap things because you can extend
Speaker 1: them and keep them now. But this impact that you're
Speaker 1: going to have down the road, not just in maintenance,
Speaker 1: but pretension is pretty bad. And when people push back
Speaker 1: but I need them, it's like, Okay, where were you
Speaker 1: five palms ago when we told you this situation is
Speaker 1: going to take place because we don't have a large
Speaker 1: enough navy, so we're going to have to make decisions.
Speaker 1: You know, what type of prophylactic deployment are we going
Speaker 1: to do to make this present mission? Or do we
Speaker 1: bring people home and start to rebuild our maintenance, rebuild
Speaker 1: our quality of life. And these long employments are also
Speaker 1: quality of work because you start running out of parts,
Speaker 1: that you start breaking things because people machines get tired
Speaker 1: on long deployments. You have additional problems if people come
Speaker 1: home because their family life is not not everybody married
Speaker 1: the person who's best suited to be a Navy wife.
Speaker 2: So we have one of two choices.
Speaker 1: We can either get a larger piece of the pie,
Speaker 1: which we've been asking for for a long time. We
Speaker 1: should assume it's not going to happen. So that means
Speaker 1: that we need to have a different calculus up in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. About who we're going to deploy and for
Speaker 1: how long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's I mean, that's the key
Speaker 3: to this is it. Well, know, if you're going to
Speaker 3: take care of your people, want you want them to
Speaker 3: be as sharp as they can be when they're deployed
Speaker 3: and ready to go should something happen, and then we're
Speaker 3: gonna have to you know, that means that we should
Speaker 3: not be sending the carrier battle groups to do jobs
Speaker 3: that could be done by smaller, smaller units. But we
Speaker 3: don't have enough smaller units. We need to get We
Speaker 3: need to find the other folks in the Department of
Speaker 3: Defense to you know, come pick up some of the slack.
Speaker 3: We certainly send enough Navy people to assist the army
Speaker 3: in its land wars and in various places. Well, I
Speaker 3: think I read the other day someplace and you maybe
Speaker 3: arn more about this than I do, but ninety percent
Speaker 3: of one of the cgtfs was a we're Navy people
Speaker 3: instead of instead of the you know, they're not doing
Speaker 3: Navy things, they're doing Army things. So that you know,
Speaker 3: we we need to call on the Army and say
Speaker 3: you need to if you're going to be coastal artillery
Speaker 3: like it used to be, then it's time to get
Speaker 3: going with this. And you know we need to figure
Speaker 3: out how to work that. And we also need to
Speaker 3: make sure we don't get involved in these endless wars
Speaker 3: where we try and and we know we talked about
Speaker 3: this after Somali. We were not we were not going
Speaker 3: to go in the nation building business, and then we
Speaker 3: went into the nation building business. Everything we've been in
Speaker 3: since then. Really need to if we're going to go
Speaker 3: do something, we need to make it quick. And if
Speaker 3: you're looking at doing something about the hoofies. I put
Speaker 3: up a post on X the other day about have
Speaker 3: anybody looked at a terrain of western Yemmen. I mean
Speaker 3: there are thirteen thousand foot peaks in there. It is
Speaker 3: a rugged place. I'm sure after Afghanistan, we really don't
Speaker 3: I want to go operating in places where the locals
Speaker 3: have all the knowledge in the high ground.
Speaker 1: I responded earlier today to Rebecca Hendrix, who I made
Speaker 1: a little comment on X about the issues that were
Speaker 1: we continue to see about. She was specifically referring if
Speaker 1: memorassures me right, which means she was specifically referring to
Speaker 1: this last minute approval of use of weapons in Ukraine
Speaker 1: and managed escalation And a lot of the problem is
Speaker 1: and I'm going to stand by this because people are
Speaker 1: A policy is the desire to and you mentioned after
Speaker 1: Somalia and you can pull it back even to Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Is this idea of the best and the brightest have
Speaker 1: a great idea on how to use this little lever
Speaker 1: of power, whether it's managed escalation, whether it's nation building,
Speaker 1: whether it's Samantha powers in her group, responsibility to protect
Speaker 1: it made a what Libya's is today today we continue
Speaker 1: from the Pentagon to foggy Bottom. We keep using the
Speaker 1: same set of criteria for the people that we are
Speaker 1: going to write our plans, write our strategy, lead our
Speaker 1: security and national security infrastructure to come from the same
Speaker 1: schools that have the same CV have come from the
Speaker 1: same think tanks, like I saw twice last week, one
Speaker 1: of which was an interview at Brookings with Admiral Paparo
Speaker 1: that maybe we'll come back to where one of the
Speaker 1: guys from Brookings was singing all the prages praises of Petraeus,
Speaker 1: which the time fifteen twenty years ago I said some
Speaker 1: nice things about him as well, But in hindsight, I
Speaker 1: don't care if you got his PhD from Princeton. He
Speaker 1: does a hot mess and did not create a net
Speaker 1: positive for our nation where it stands now in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. But they keep looking to him as if
Speaker 1: he is some sage, and we need to stop and
Speaker 1: think about why we keep repeating these same errors, these
Speaker 1: forever were, or these unresolved conflicts. Another example is is
Speaker 1: the operation going on in Gaza. All those people who
Speaker 1: were asking for a ceasefire in Gaza. Would that have
Speaker 1: made the experience in Gaza any better, any more likely
Speaker 1: to be peaceful and more likely to be resolved, or
Speaker 1: to just create another festering wound. You look at what
Speaker 1: the attacks on Israel in the north by Hesbolah. That
Speaker 1: all derives from the fact that when the Israelis got
Speaker 1: punched in the face hard and withdrew from southern Lebanon,
Speaker 1: UNIFIL and UN was supposed to come in and protect it. Well,
Speaker 1: we've all seen the fact that between UN posts A
Speaker 1: and B you've got rockets from hesbela shooting off. That
Speaker 1: just does not work the template that we think produces
Speaker 1: the best mind and theories for our national security. It's
Speaker 1: doing just the opposite. And we have it our incentives
Speaker 1: and this incentives have been wrong for the last thirty years.
Speaker 1: How you reset that, I don't know, but probably a
Speaker 1: start is to be very direct with these people, and
Speaker 1: maybe talking to different people would be a plus. That
Speaker 1: would be a start. Is except the fact that we
Speaker 1: are not we are not training our best in our
Speaker 1: brightest might be going to the certain institutions and might
Speaker 1: be trained by some great places, but the end product
Speaker 1: is not fit for purpose. And I think the scoreboard
Speaker 1: kind of outlines that fact. Whether you agree or not,
Speaker 1: and that's fine, but look at the scoreboard and tell
Speaker 1: me where I'm wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, It reminds me of when I was taking the
Speaker 3: training to be a mediate. So trouble is when you
Speaker 3: when you start from the position of being a litigation attorney,
Speaker 3: they're you know they're especially when I was in house
Speaker 3: litigation attorney. But there are a lot of cases that
Speaker 3: ought to be you have to try, you have to
Speaker 3: take them to court. Well that the mediation group thought, well, no,
Speaker 3: all these things can be resolved if you if you
Speaker 3: sit down and talk about it. And but the problem
Speaker 3: is that somebody will come along and they let's take
Speaker 3: say you work for a grocery store. You know, they
Speaker 3: slip and fall on a loose grape allegedly, and their
Speaker 3: theory is that they if they sue you, that you'll
Speaker 3: reach some kind of settlement accommodation with them. Well, the
Speaker 3: other side of that is if you've got a case
Speaker 3: like that where somebody is suing you for reasons you know,
Speaker 3: we're totally invalid, but it's going to cost you to
Speaker 3: go to court. Sometimes you still take it. Should take
Speaker 3: it to court, because otherwise you'll get the reputation of
Speaker 3: being a pushover, which is what I think. Exactly what
Speaker 3: you're talking about is that you know that the people
Speaker 3: all rush in after there's a company. We shouldn't be fighting,
Speaker 3: We should be that we should not let these this happen.
Speaker 3: This is this is bad for humanity. You may have
Speaker 3: been fighting worse for a zillion years, and the winners
Speaker 3: used to make the rules. Now we have the losers
Speaker 3: making and saying, oh, yeah, well you know, yes, we're
Speaker 3: gonna We're going to continue to escalate this unless we
Speaker 3: get whatever the reward is they're looking for. And that
Speaker 3: is the problem sometimes. I mean, you know, it's probably
Speaker 3: made me sound like a till of the hunt, but
Speaker 3: until I had the right idea. Sometimes you just have
Speaker 3: to go in and and for what he was going
Speaker 3: for his goals.
Speaker 2: You know, he didn't.
Speaker 3: He didn't leave many people who opposed to his position
Speaker 3: standing after after he roared through. And I think the
Speaker 3: Houthi situation is a good example of that. You're exactly
Speaker 3: right when you look at there's a reason.
Speaker 1: Why the Emiradis and the Saudis were trying to bomb
Speaker 1: their way to the victory against the Houthis. It's a
Speaker 1: little mini Afghanistan. The terrain there is ideal, and the
Speaker 1: culture there is ideal to make any type of Western
Speaker 1: style counter and surgery insurgency operation a fool's errand, and
Speaker 1: that leaves you with a few options, which is an
Speaker 1: essence making the rubble bounce and mowing the ard, knowing
Speaker 1: if you're not really going to fix the problem, but
Speaker 1: maybe you can make it really painful for them to
Speaker 1: externalize their internal problems. That there are no pretty solutions.
Speaker 1: There are no nice solutions, just like for the Gosa operation,
Speaker 1: there's nothing pretty. There's nothing nice. Our solution to defeating imperial.
Speaker 2: Japan was not nice. It was not pretty.
Speaker 1: There aren't these pristine theories that work well. Our shape
Speaker 1: clearhold build in Afghanistan did not work well in the
Speaker 1: real world because in the real world you have politicians
Speaker 1: and you have their priorities on the other side of
Speaker 1: the world that probably aren't going to be patient for
Speaker 1: what you come up with in the planning room. And
Speaker 1: sometimes it's just it's short and it's direct. I think
Speaker 1: it is real. Really is the only people that have
Speaker 1: done really big hits in the ports.
Speaker 2: And you know this.
Speaker 1: The International Criminal Court was in the news today. But
Speaker 1: the international community is sending.
Speaker 2: Food to the Hoothies.
Speaker 1: To feed their army, and the army turns around and
Speaker 1: fights and attacks shipping is in those same lanes that
Speaker 1: their food came in on. I don't know how long
Speaker 1: you can sustain that in a conflict. Nowhere in human
Speaker 1: history has a hostile power under siege been allowed to
Speaker 1: have resources and food come in by the besieging forces.
Speaker 1: It's bizarre, but again it's because it's ugly. But I
Speaker 1: don't think we picked the fight with the Houthis. The
Speaker 1: hoothies are picking the fight with us. Again, there is
Speaker 1: no pretty er good solution, but there are solutions out there.
Speaker 2: Well that you know.
Speaker 3: It's it's when when the Houthis are the proxies of
Speaker 3: larger countries who are more than willing to have have
Speaker 3: the Houthis die on their behalf with no little or
Speaker 3: no risks for themselves, that you know, that's part of
Speaker 3: the prop So when the when the Israelis attack, when
Speaker 3: the Iranians directly attack, is really is Israeli's respond in kind.
Speaker 3: You know, that's that's a different, much different kind of
Speaker 3: worst scenario than than fighting proxies who are getting money
Speaker 3: and and uh weapons from their from their proxy masters.
Speaker 3: And you know that includes the Russians, it includes the
Speaker 3: Iranians and undoubtedly includes the Chinese because the Chinese are
Speaker 3: are providing stuff to both Russia and to to uh Irans.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: It is it is a situation that is, you know,
Speaker 3: we we have become a superpower that is reluctant to
Speaker 3: exercise power, and we don't and we don't. We haven't
Speaker 3: maintained the level of power we should have as a superpower,
Speaker 3: which is the first problem we started talking about. But
Speaker 3: it is, it is a it is one to talk
Speaker 3: about catch twenty two kinds of situation. You know, if
Speaker 3: we if we if we don't want to fight, that's fine,
Speaker 3: we shouldn't fight. Everybody wants us to fight because we're
Speaker 3: the ones who's supporting the the trade corridors of the world.
Speaker 3: So you know, what do you what do you do?
Speaker 3: Then we invite our allies to commit, and that's great
Speaker 3: because it's the European navies have been stepping up in
Speaker 3: the in the Red Sea, and we've certainly been playing
Speaker 3: with the some of the Allied nations up in the
Speaker 3: northern area of Europe off Norway and Denmark and all
Speaker 3: those areas, and that's that's great, But we have to
Speaker 3: be more demanding of our allies too, you know, which
Speaker 3: you and I have talked about had infinitem and some
Speaker 3: of the allies are stepping up. So the Poles who
Speaker 3: are you know, they're they always looking east. They recognize
Speaker 3: where their front is and it's it's not it's not
Speaker 3: to the north or to the south. So that says
Speaker 3: a lot. But you know, we need to we need
Speaker 3: to be aware that that doing things like reducing your
Speaker 3: the size of your forces. And we see this with
Speaker 3: the bridge. They reduce the size of their forces there.
Speaker 3: They don't want to spend money on on the escort
Speaker 3: ships of the carriers they have. They have to moth
Speaker 3: ball a couple of of unwrapped ships. You know, this
Speaker 3: is this is this is the way uh, great nations die.
Speaker 3: They get caught up and and things that matter internally maybe,
Speaker 3: but really aren't doing much to defend their coastlines. And
Speaker 3: I think the British have a problem even greater than
Speaker 3: we have, and that's the fact their political class is
Speaker 3: divorced from security requirements and a lot of it's just
Speaker 3: the pressure of the welfare state that they've built. And
Speaker 3: you would like to make it into a party problem
Speaker 3: like well, it's the Labor Party.
Speaker 2: No, the.
Speaker 1: Conservative Party had power most of the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: and the decline has taken place with them. It's their
Speaker 1: political class. One thing that we do have in our
Speaker 1: representative system that you see it here and there but
Speaker 1: not too much, is we actually have former naval officers
Speaker 1: that are in Congress and Senate and in the reservists
Speaker 1: who are are pretty good at bird dogging those issues.
Speaker 1: I don't think they have the fifty point one percent
Speaker 1: of the support that they need. I think we have
Speaker 1: a little more of a healthy environment because even more
Speaker 1: than we are, the United Kingdom is an island nation.
Speaker 1: They cannot feed themselves. We can feed ourselves if for all,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, if we lost access to the
Speaker 1: Atlantic and the Pacific, we'd have some economic problems, maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit of industrial problem with not getting some
Speaker 1: raw material, but we won't starve to death.
Speaker 2: We might have.
Speaker 1: Reduced crops because we import a lot of fertilizer. But
Speaker 1: the British without access to the ocean, they have too
Speaker 1: many people on their little wet, low production island and
Speaker 1: they'll starve to death. And looking what happened at the
Speaker 1: Royal Navy, it's it's sad. There's there's some people that
Speaker 1: are trying to be optimistic saying that the British will
Speaker 1: get the divest to invest right and it'll pay off
Speaker 1: down the road. I don't see that. I think that
Speaker 1: the argument was lost and it's not going to give you.
Speaker 2: A get back anytime soon. You know where.
Speaker 1: You look at the decline of the Royal Navy since
Speaker 1: the Falkland Islands War. They've got the shell of a navy.
Speaker 1: They have two great conventional carriers, but they only have
Speaker 1: two and they have incomplete air wings. And it's sad,
Speaker 1: and it's also underlines the fact that our allies are
Speaker 1: not what they could have been or were fifteen twenty
Speaker 1: thirty years ago. That we kind of need to reset
Speaker 1: and recalibrate our expectations. The Japanese are going to be
Speaker 1: spending more, a lot of that will show up at sea.
Speaker 1: That'll be nice. Australia and the Pacific is turning two,
Speaker 1: but they've feely kind of plus or minus a million
Speaker 1: people from the state of Florida. You know, they got
Speaker 1: a continent, but they're not a large population. They're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to contribute much. There needs to
Speaker 1: be a lot more hard truth which is one of
Speaker 1: the nice things about Admiral Paparo's like an hour and
Speaker 1: twenty minute discussion that he had over at Brookings is
Speaker 1: he threw a lot of hard facts on the two
Speaker 1: people classic think tankers. I love you, folks, I really do,
Speaker 1: but you live in DC and you live in an
Speaker 1: interesting bubble. Admiral Paparo, he's the guy who's in the
Speaker 1: seat right now that if a war kicks off west
Speaker 1: of the International date Line, he's the one that's going
Speaker 1: to have to fight it. And he put out some
Speaker 1: really hard truths that were good to see because when
Speaker 1: people outline what you and I have been talking about, Mark,
Speaker 1: they okay, well you know we've got depth Secteth Hicks
Speaker 1: has got her replicator program. Or I saw earlier today
Speaker 1: Elon Musk said, uh, you know, look at look at
Speaker 1: all these these drones. These are going to solve all
Speaker 1: We don't need a big fleet. We just have a
Speaker 1: few thousand drones that are all flying together. That that's
Speaker 1: good in a localized, small environment. But he told everybody
Speaker 1: that these are not useful in the in the great
Speaker 1: reaches of the Pacific, from Okinawa to Taiwan to Japan
Speaker 1: down to Singapore. Those are not useful in any way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. He talked about one of one of
Speaker 1: our hobby horses, the logistical truth of the Pacific. He
Speaker 1: was very upfront saying that he was never happy with
Speaker 1: his magazine depth and the fact that the support of
Speaker 1: Ukraine and Israel has a very real impact on his
Speaker 1: magazine depth to begin with. And you can read between
Speaker 1: lines with a few of the other topics he saw,
Speaker 1: and you have you have to sit through a lot
Speaker 1: of butt to get a lot of it to get
Speaker 1: to it. Of that conversation, which I people can find,
Speaker 1: I'll put links.
Speaker 2: In the show page about it.
Speaker 1: We need more Admiral Paparo's out there who are willing
Speaker 1: to go out there and tell their the people who
Speaker 1: are interrogating them that, yeah, replicator, it breafs well in
Speaker 1: d C, and it looks nice in theory. But if
Speaker 1: you're going to ask me to fight a war in
Speaker 1: the Western Pacific, that does nothing for me. That doesn't
Speaker 1: make any friends in d C. But he's got four stars,
Speaker 1: he can afford to make some enemies.
Speaker 3: I wish I wish more four stars would take up
Speaker 3: that baton when he gets it right.
Speaker 2: Ears is.
Speaker 3: If you think he's talking about Ukraine or the Lessons
Speaker 3: and everybody's trying to say, oh, well, you know how
Speaker 3: we got all these drones and all that stuff, he goes, well,
Speaker 3: how are we going to sustain everything else? We would
Speaker 3: completely give up on air and materiy aritime superiority in
Speaker 3: the Pacific. You know, if that's that's the thing, what
Speaker 3: if you don't have it, you can't you can't sustain it.
Speaker 3: If you and if you can't sustain it, you might
Speaker 3: as well not have it. And that's kind of where
Speaker 3: we are. And you know, we're talking about all these
Speaker 3: other programs, and you were right about the Britains or
Speaker 3: UK's problems with its social welfare programs. We're in the
Speaker 3: same boat. One point three trillion dollars. One point three
Speaker 3: trillion dollars goes to social security eight hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: nine billion, to Medicare eight five hundred or six hundred
Speaker 3: and sixteen billion, to medicaidcome security programs four hundred and
Speaker 3: forty eight billion. Those are those are things you can't touch.
Speaker 3: Defense is I think eight hundred and five billion in
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty three budget. Uh, you know that that's
Speaker 3: where your defense money goes. And the total revenues are
Speaker 3: only four point one trillion, and there's a budget of
Speaker 3: six point one trillion, And so that you know, that
Speaker 3: is a formula first disaster, and that's that's how you
Speaker 3: end up like the UK. You can't keep spending money
Speaker 3: on programs that you don't have the and the has
Speaker 3: the boomers people like me retire. I certainly I appreciate
Speaker 3: all the benefits I get, but my goodness, I'm being
Speaker 3: supported by in a Ponzi scheme. I'm supported by a
Speaker 3: lot of fewer people than the boomer supported my parents.
Speaker 3: That really is something we need to take a heart
Speaker 3: hard look at. And I'm hoping Musk and his doge
Speaker 3: plan looks at this stuff with a with a very
Speaker 3: very hard eye, because we can't keep going the way
Speaker 3: we're going. We can't we can't make everybody, can't guarantee
Speaker 3: everybody's income unless you have some major change in the
Speaker 3: way we do things. You know, and back in the day,
Speaker 3: there was the fair tax. The idea was we'd pay
Speaker 3: everybody some kind of basic minimum income and that that
Speaker 3: would they wouldn't have to pay Some people wouldn't have
Speaker 3: to pay taxes on it, but the income, the government income,
Speaker 3: was all from taxes on goods as they entered the
Speaker 3: commerce stream. I don't know what the right answer is.
Speaker 3: I'm not not an economist by any stretch imagination, but
Speaker 3: we can't go on the way we're going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole musk Ramaswami Department of Government Efficiency is
Speaker 1: kind of going to be an irresistible force meets an
Speaker 1: immovable object. That immovable object is going to be the
Speaker 1: blob in Washington, d C, that huge bureaucracy that you're
Speaker 1: going to go in front of these people, a lot
Speaker 1: of whom are pulling down one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: to two hundred thousand dollars and more a year where
Speaker 1: they just can't define what they're doing, and to cut
Speaker 1: significant numbers of those that are so concentrated in DC.
Speaker 1: The amount of pushback and resistance is going to be
Speaker 1: a site to see. And history is full of examples
Speaker 1: of how dangerous bureaucracies can be when they're put under
Speaker 1: a threat. You can look back to the the eunuchs
Speaker 1: of Imperial China, the janissaries of the Ottomans. Eventually was
Speaker 1: resolved at the end of a cannon, which I don't
Speaker 1: think we're going to be able to do here. It'll
Speaker 1: be lawsuits. But if they really want to follow through
Speaker 1: and somebody's going to come in and go, you know,
Speaker 1: we have one hundred ses here in this room. Look
Speaker 1: to your left and your right, only one of y'all
Speaker 1: is going to be here in six months. That will
Speaker 1: create a high warrible inside of DC from everything from
Speaker 1: lobbying to real estate where otherwise unemployable people will have
Speaker 1: to find a job, or you have a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who will have to move or will take to
Speaker 1: the streets. I don't know DC is such a company town.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether the end of what Musk and
Speaker 1: Ramaswami do, how much of that is actually executable are
Speaker 1: maybe a value of that would be here's what we
Speaker 1: want to do, but we can't do it because of
Speaker 1: US Code, empty France, this regulation.
Speaker 2: So Congress over to you.
Speaker 1: If you want to be able to do this, you've
Speaker 1: got to change the following things, and then it has
Speaker 1: to go to the court system because people will sue
Speaker 1: or anything. It might be an interesting exercise in order
Speaker 1: to show where some of the cracks are, But I
Speaker 1: don't know if overnight how much that'll free up. But
Speaker 1: it is an exercise that needs to be done, and
Speaker 1: there is a lot in DoD you know. John Conrad
Speaker 1: likes to talk about the eighty thousand employees over a Navsey. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of that are people that actually are holding
Speaker 1: welding torches and things like that. But I'll guarantee you
Speaker 1: if you start picking apart and looking at that manning document,
Speaker 1: just like you if you look at what was employed
Speaker 1: in your county school system in nineteen seventy five versus
Speaker 1: what's employed now, when it comes to staff versus faculty,
Speaker 1: your head will explode. I think you'll see a lot
Speaker 1: of that too in the bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: But that's okay.
Speaker 1: It's an adventure, it's a cleaning. The civilian sector has
Speaker 1: had to do it. Musk has done it in Ramaswami,
Speaker 1: have done it in the private sector. But in the
Speaker 1: public sector, everything from civil service reform to just the
Speaker 1: density that you have in DC of people who owe
Speaker 1: directly or indirectly their livelihood to the government bureaucracy, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a shock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, say, every now and then you get to you know,
Speaker 3: like many companies, every now and then some somebody comes
Speaker 3: in and says, what are we doing here? What? What?
Speaker 3: What are our goals? I mean they're usually not very
Speaker 3: popular because that questions a lot of the divisions or
Speaker 3: groups in a large company that may not be doing
Speaker 3: anything useful. But that is that is a job for
Speaker 3: the senior management. Let's sit down and get back to basics.
Speaker 3: What is the purpose of the United States government? Gosh,
Speaker 3: it's spilled out in the constitution. You know who does what,
Speaker 3: and then you and then you go from there. But
Speaker 3: but what they didn't remember, or maybe they didn't remember,
Speaker 3: we haven't haven't looked at it was that if politicians
Speaker 3: have access to these ways to spend money to benefit
Speaker 3: their voters, they're going to use that to buy votes.
Speaker 3: And we I mean we see it in this last administration.
Speaker 3: If you're if you're going to promise people you're going
Speaker 3: to cancel student loans, Well there and you've got a
Speaker 3: student loan. Are you going to support the people?
Speaker 2: Say?
Speaker 3: Oh no, you've you've got that loan. You took that
Speaker 3: loan voluntarily and you said you'd pay it back. And
Speaker 3: I'm a welder in in Beaumont, Texas. Why in the
Speaker 3: world should I pay your college loan back that you know,
Speaker 3: that is somebody not sitting down and going what is
Speaker 3: the function of government? Is it to pay off people's
Speaker 3: student loans because they hatored in water basket weaving or
Speaker 3: or whatever the useless degrees are that they got.
Speaker 2: I mean it is.
Speaker 3: It is astonishing to me the way we've let colleges
Speaker 3: and universities because of a lot of federal money, because
Speaker 3: of the FEN a lot of it's federal loan money,
Speaker 3: develop all these programs that don't seem to have any
Speaker 3: useful end. That is, if I were looking at what
Speaker 3: to do at I would start with, you know, the basics,
Speaker 3: what what are we trying to do? And who's who's
Speaker 3: making it work? And if you want to talk about
Speaker 3: educationist Department of Education serve a function, and you know,
Speaker 3: can we combine some of the without creating a larger bureaucracy.
Speaker 3: Is it possible to do the same job by combining
Speaker 3: some of the things that we do? And you know,
Speaker 3: I love my US mail, but I'm not sure that
Speaker 3: the that we couldn't farm that out to Amazon and
Speaker 3: probably get more bang for the.
Speaker 1: Buck probably, And again a lot of it the interesting
Speaker 1: some in in a lot of socio political areas, people
Speaker 1: like to use the US military as a guinea pig,
Speaker 1: which I usually don't like, but in this regard, I
Speaker 1: think it might be interesting. Is these numbers could vary?
Speaker 1: I asked chat GPT because I didn't feel like digging
Speaker 1: around for the issue of proceedings and counting all the faces.
Speaker 1: But I just ask them, you know how many how
Speaker 1: many admirals there are in the US Navy, And it
Speaker 1: says it's a statutory cat for flag officers in the
Speaker 1: Navy across all grades. Grades is typically one hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty two one hundred and seventy officers, one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty rear admirals upper and lower half, thirty vice admirals,
Speaker 1: and five to ten full admirals. That's what they say,
Speaker 1: so statutory cap. That means it's a house in the Senate.
Speaker 1: If so, the President would sign it and he could
Speaker 1: get Senate in the House to do it.
Speaker 2: You know what do we say all services?
Speaker 1: If the number is one hundred and one hundred and sixty,
Speaker 1: make it one hundred. You want to when you look
Speaker 1: at all those especially for your vice admirals and your
Speaker 1: four star admirals, there's a there's a staff and a
Speaker 1: cadre that goes with them.
Speaker 2: There are for instance, do we.
Speaker 1: Really need an lcs ron or could it else be
Speaker 1: lcs RON functions be part of a desron.
Speaker 2: That's a good question. Could it? Maybe? Possibly?
Speaker 1: It would force It would force the name to look
Speaker 1: at its structures, its staffs and go, okay, if we're
Speaker 1: going to go from one hundred and sixty down to
Speaker 1: one hundred by fiscal year twenty six, everybody, get your
Speaker 1: manning documents, how do we do it? It would force
Speaker 1: some change on the system. And if you're going to
Speaker 1: use that as a template, then okay, you go to
Speaker 1: Department of.
Speaker 2: Health and Human Services?
Speaker 1: You know, how do you make make a reduction in
Speaker 1: the staff there without impacting the ability?
Speaker 2: A good question.
Speaker 1: So if it's if it's a statutory cap again, it
Speaker 1: goes back to what Congress is willing to fund and
Speaker 1: it is willing to direct. And I haven't really seen
Speaker 1: the senators are the representatives that are going to ponying
Speaker 1: up put their name at the top of that.
Speaker 3: Well. It used to be fun when Proxmayer would do
Speaker 3: his center. Proxmire used to have is expenditure follies of
Speaker 3: things wasteful top spending, and John McCain did that for
Speaker 3: a while. I mean it's you know, people have been
Speaker 3: looking at things that are waiting. You know that the
Speaker 3: the thousand dollars bolt or kind of remember what it
Speaker 3: was a toilet seat for problem appreciation. Yeah, you know that,
Speaker 3: but it was an expensive it's expensive. Well it's expensive
Speaker 3: because for a lot of reasons, but yeah, it is.
Speaker 3: It is a question that that again, why do we
Speaker 3: have any I mean, these are the questions that we
Speaker 3: keep asking, we keep answering, and I think our our
Speaker 3: answers are different than a lot of other folks. But
Speaker 3: our navy is not here to provide jobs. Our navy
Speaker 3: is not here to provide places for young men and
Speaker 3: women to live while they while they mature. The Navy
Speaker 3: has a function. It's it's to protect this country and
Speaker 3: to fight its wars. And how are we doing And
Speaker 3: you know, to get back where we talked about earlier,
Speaker 3: we're not doing real well when we're not taking care
Speaker 3: of our people. And that that means not burying them
Speaker 3: out and giving them the right equipment to do the
Speaker 3: job and giving them enough equipment to do the job
Speaker 3: so that if we did have to surge forces. We
Speaker 3: actually have the forces to surge, and they won't be
Speaker 3: ships that are not in the best of maintenance. So
Speaker 3: I think that that's important. We see this with the
Speaker 3: us NS stuff. I mean, they're out doing a really
Speaker 3: important job and we have new ships coming online. We
Speaker 3: can't find the cruis demand because nobody wants to do
Speaker 3: the kind of work they're doing, because they're they're they're
Speaker 3: being used really, really hard. It is a I think
Speaker 3: that I would. I'm sure somewhere there's someone who was
Speaker 3: sitting down going, I know, we really need to think
Speaker 3: about this, but we can't do. You know, it is
Speaker 3: the it is the my hands are tied because because
Speaker 3: we can't cut or ask our senior citizens to take
Speaker 3: a dollar ninety eight less per month without causing a
Speaker 3: disruption in the forest and revolution in the street. As
Speaker 3: the seventy five year olds get out with pitchforks and
Speaker 3: and signs that.
Speaker 1: You got up and you brought up the point about
Speaker 1: the the boomers heading out to their their retirement fields.
Speaker 1: That and there's there's a certain school of people in
Speaker 1: this discussion space of national security where they say, you
Speaker 1: know what we need, what we need and we just
Speaker 1: need to get to get the get the budget and
Speaker 1: make it happen. And you know, you found this much
Speaker 1: money for the Green New Deal, you just need to
Speaker 1: find as much more. And I feel that emotion, but
Speaker 1: I think from a realist point of view, it's just
Speaker 1: it's not going to happen so and the pressures are
Speaker 1: going to get worse and worse, but not just for us.
Speaker 1: I saw an interesting graph yesterday about the middle the
Speaker 1: Chinese middle class, because they're dying because their demographics are
Speaker 1: so horrible. And while India's is slowly growing because they
Speaker 1: don't have quite the same demographic their their demographic bulge
Speaker 1: is going to hit a couple of day decades later
Speaker 1: than China's, and that's going to create a lot of
Speaker 1: pressures on their end and on our end. It's that
Speaker 1: budgetary pressure. Pray for peace, because I don't think we're
Speaker 1: going to find a big enough budget to be able
Speaker 1: to do a you know, the Naval Act of nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty six, thirty eight, nineteen forty. That money isn't just
Speaker 1: isn't going to come unless we find people up in
Speaker 1: Congress that are willing to tap the army on the
Speaker 1: shoulder and going, and we've talked about it here and
Speaker 1: we're going to assume a risk on our active duty
Speaker 1: army and we're taking you need to find a way
Speaker 1: to do what needs to be done in the National
Speaker 1: Guard and reserves. Yes, we know about the readiness hit,
Speaker 1: but we're going to assume risk there so we can
Speaker 1: get the Air Force and the Navy assets we need
Speaker 1: to be able to effectively fight west to the International
Speaker 1: date Line unless that takes place. But again I don't
Speaker 1: see that movement taking place. We have the budget we
Speaker 1: have and the only way you can optimize that is
Speaker 1: to look for efficiencies. And that doesn't mean we always
Speaker 1: talk about, Okay, what programs are you going to cut?
Speaker 1: What are you not going to buy? I have not
Speaker 1: seen where we actually look at how we are going
Speaker 1: to cut short staff, how are we going to cut
Speaker 1: people we have that are non deployable. And the Marines
Speaker 1: did something really interesting at the end of the double
Speaker 1: Zeros where if you hadn't deployed, and I think it
Speaker 1: was thirty six months, you were going to deploy and
Speaker 1: if you couldn't deploy, then you will be.
Speaker 2: None.
Speaker 1: I'm invited to leave you separative. Yeah, separating for the
Speaker 1: service general district under honorable conditions for the needs of
Speaker 1: the service, have a good day. That will give you
Speaker 1: a better idea of who you have left. And it
Speaker 1: goes back to what we talked about at the top
Speaker 1: of the hour. But if you're in to do that,
Speaker 1: you need to optimize who you are actually having here.
Speaker 1: And you're not gonna be able to optimize your deployable
Speaker 1: forces when you burn them out, which means you either
Speaker 1: need to get more ships that if you don't have
Speaker 1: more money, you can't get more ships. That you need
Speaker 1: to look at why you are deploying them and where
Speaker 1: you are deploying them, and that that makes hard decisions.
Speaker 2: It's easy.
Speaker 1: It's easy for today to say I, I will have
Speaker 1: two carriers there when you're not the one that's going
Speaker 1: to deal with the secondary effects in four or five
Speaker 1: or six years. And somebody will say, well, if you won't,
Speaker 1: if you won't make it happen, I'll get somebody else
Speaker 1: who will. Okay, I'll retirement eligible, I have four stars.
Speaker 1: Let's have that conversation and you will have something like
Speaker 1: we saw in two thousand and three when General Shinseki
Speaker 1: he lost the argument behind the closed doors and so
Speaker 1: Senator Levin brought him in to open session at the
Speaker 1: Senate and asked him questions, and shin Seki was exactly right.
Speaker 2: When they asked him.
Speaker 1: About force levels required for Iraq. He's like, no, we
Speaker 1: need another one hundred and twenty five thousand people for
Speaker 1: security operations afterwards, because Phase four is going to be
Speaker 1: manpower intensive. And he was exactly right, and he was
Speaker 1: allowed to retire gracefully. But that doesn't quite make up
Speaker 1: for the fact that Shinseki gave the Army the black beret.
Speaker 1: But that was a moment that always sticks out to
Speaker 1: me about somebody who decided, I'm going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and make the statement, and we know why Senator Levin
Speaker 1: wanted him to say that in open session. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, I think history has shown
Speaker 1: that the Rack invasion of two thousand and three was
Speaker 1: not the high water of American state craft.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. And you know, we were talking
Speaker 3: about Vietnam earlier, and when you read the McMaster's book
Speaker 3: on on on the war and and the the idea
Speaker 3: that you were going to use the armed forces to
Speaker 3: send a signal to the world and to the North
Speaker 3: Vietnamese and the Chinese that we were We're gonna, we're
Speaker 3: gonna keep We're going to incrementally increase our forces until
Speaker 3: you agree to stop doing what you're doing, and you know,
Speaker 3: we keep doing that. We're gonna we we send messages.
Speaker 3: We send messages by putting two carrier groups, one of
Speaker 3: the meds, say, one of the Indian Ocean area somewhere,
Speaker 3: and another one you know, homeported in Japan. So we
Speaker 3: have you know, these carrier groups, and they are sending
Speaker 3: a message, but I don't know who's receiving the message.
Speaker 3: It doesn't seem to be stopping any of the bad
Speaker 3: guys from doing whatever they're doing. So, you know it
Speaker 3: is it is time to rethink this message sending thing
Speaker 3: and to think about what the next deploy is because
Speaker 3: it is the While it's important to do the u
Speaker 3: the message sending inappropriate time, just having them there all
Speaker 3: the time is not sending. It's not enough of a
Speaker 3: re turred effect apparently to stop bad guys from doing
Speaker 3: whatever they're doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's also I think it's important to understand
Speaker 1: what looks at who are deploying, how we're deploying, is
Speaker 1: we actually don't have is large of an eighty as
Speaker 1: we think we have, for instance, our litoral combat ships
Speaker 1: r lcs, they're independent steaming mostly, they can't operate with
Speaker 1: the send the carriers forward, they can't operate in the
Speaker 1: Red Sea. Zoom Walk class whole one is actually getting
Speaker 1: retrofitted now to put a bunch of the big conventional
Speaker 1: prompt strike or whatever we're calling it nowadays hypersonics in there.
Speaker 1: But since her commissioning, all she has done is I
Speaker 1: think three or four months going from San Diego to
Speaker 1: British Columbia to Alaska to Hawaii and back. And I
Speaker 1: think before she went into the yard she went from
Speaker 1: San Diego to Hawaii to go on to Japan and back.
Speaker 1: That all those billions of dollars twenty years ago did
Speaker 1: not buy us much of a fleet. So we've got
Speaker 1: for those units that can make effects forward, we've got
Speaker 1: a husband them and their sailors a lot better because
Speaker 1: we just don't have that much of a bench. And
Speaker 1: we saw that with the rotation of the DDGs through
Speaker 1: the Red Sea as well. That's kind of petered off
Speaker 1: a little bit now, but a lot of that has
Speaker 1: to be I would think, is the fact that we
Speaker 1: just don't have the units to sustain what we were
Speaker 1: doing there, except at certain moments in time. But it's
Speaker 1: something we simply just cannot do twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't have to.
Speaker 2: Are we go?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's time to call you know, the Air Force.
Speaker 3: If we're just bombing and targeting things on the ground
Speaker 3: using air power. Hey, the Air Force says that they are,
Speaker 3: they're instant on. They can they and they've come play.
Speaker 3: I mean, they've done some stuff there. So that is
Speaker 3: if we're gonna do it, let's do it jointly. Let's
Speaker 3: use all the tools and not you know what, how
Speaker 3: long it takes to burn out of B fifty two.
Speaker 3: They seem to run forever, you know, if we're using
Speaker 3: B one b's or whatever, let's you know, let's let's
Speaker 3: do that. Let's send the message that way. Nothing like
Speaker 3: writing something on a thousand pound bomb and extillering the
Speaker 3: mess directly.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and hey, we've just used up an hour. Amazing
Speaker 1: but true. A little note here that I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier on that was going to do a little
Speaker 1: bit experiment and do a live stream up on x
Speaker 1: as well, and we managed to get five hundred and
Speaker 1: six listeners with us live on X so those on
Speaker 1: X we will try to do this with all of
Speaker 1: our live shows, because not everybody gets the alert our
Speaker 1: pre show announcements and can come up on riverside. So
Speaker 1: hopefully that gets a few more people in with mid Rats.
Speaker 1: Who if you haven't listened to us before, we're coming
Speaker 1: up on our teenth anniversary in January, and we've already
Speaker 1: made arrangements a gentleman who y'all can blame or thank
Speaker 1: for mid Rats existing, one of the guys that helped
Speaker 1: Mark and I get running on mid Rats. We've been
Speaker 1: going Claude Bearrabey. He's going to be our guest our
Speaker 1: fifteenth Anniverse show, and we're going to talk about all
Speaker 1: sorts of strange and interesting things. So in January at least,
Speaker 1: I hope everybody can join us there, whether you've been
Speaker 1: with us since twenty ten, are you just now coming on?
Speaker 1: And we're going to take a bye week next week
Speaker 1: for Thanksgiving, and then we'll be back in December before
Speaker 1: we take some time off for Christmas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to thank everybody for being here today
Speaker 3: and listening to us pontific eate we only do on
Speaker 3: rare occasions when we have a guest cancel or we
Speaker 3: can't find somebody silly enough to come on and join us.
Speaker 1: And as always everybody, we really appreciate the folks coming
Speaker 1: here and join us live, and until next time, hope
Speaker 1: everybody has a great Navy Day.
Speaker 2: Cheers,