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Speaker 2: Special Operations.
Speaker 3: Cobert SB and I.
Speaker 4: The Teamhouse with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David bark.
Speaker 5: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode three hundred and thirty seven
Speaker 5: of The Teamhouse. I'm Jack, You're with Dave, and our
Speaker 5: guest on tonight's show is Thomas Sugart. Thomas served in
Speaker 5: the Navy as a officer on submarine, going all the
Speaker 5: way up to be the Captain of the USS Olympia. Correct,
Speaker 5: that's right, and then went on to positions at the
Speaker 5: Office of Net Assessment, essentially working in the think tank
Speaker 5: space and really focusing on the Chinese military. So we're
Speaker 5: going to talk to Thomas tonight about his career and
Speaker 5: all about his work today too. So we're excited to
Speaker 5: have you on the show. Thank you for joining us tonight, Tom.
Speaker 3: That's a pleasure. Thanks very much, Jack and Dave.
Speaker 5: So, to kick it off, tell us a little bit
Speaker 5: about like your upbringing and what sort of propelled you
Speaker 5: towards service in the Navy.
Speaker 6: So, I mean, I grew up in Texas and went
Speaker 6: to the University of Texas and was working on mechanical
Speaker 6: engineering and the right around the time of the very
Speaker 6: first golf war.
Speaker 3: And I'm dating myself here.
Speaker 6: But right around the time of the first golf bur
Speaker 6: I was a bit inspired to join up somehow while
Speaker 6: I was in college, and so I went to their
Speaker 6: pretty station. I said, hey, you know, I'm interested in
Speaker 6: helping out. Is there a way I can be like
Speaker 6: a reserve officer or something? And the recruiter said, hey,
Speaker 6: what's your major? I said, in mechanical engineering, and how
Speaker 6: are your grades?
Speaker 3: They're good? Okay, Well I've got a program for you.
Speaker 6: So the Nuclear Navy's Nuclear Power Officer Candidate program, and
Speaker 6: that's a that's a program that still exists very much
Speaker 6: going strong, and it's basically a way that the Navy
Speaker 6: can get enough engineers to be the nuclear trained officers
Speaker 6: on its submarines and aircraft barriers. Because they basically can't
Speaker 6: produce enough engineers out of the Naval Academy and out
Speaker 6: of ROTC. They need to pull some right out of
Speaker 6: college engineering programs and at other technical majors to bring
Speaker 6: them into the Navy specifically to be nuclear trained officers.
Speaker 6: So all of our submarine officers are nuclear trains, so
Speaker 6: they get one supply officer on board, but all the
Speaker 6: other officers on the ship are what we call nuclear trains,
Speaker 6: So they all go through they have some sort of
Speaker 6: technical background. They go through Nuclear Power School, Nuclear Prototype,
Speaker 6: you know, about a year and a half worth of
Speaker 6: training and all trained on how nuclear actors operate and
Speaker 6: and and are and are qualified to operate them as
Speaker 6: as supervisors.
Speaker 3: So I got signed up for that program.
Speaker 6: It is a fantastic program back when.
Speaker 3: I did it.
Speaker 6: So basically what you do is you sign up and
Speaker 6: the day you sign up, and you can sign up
Speaker 6: up to two years before you graduate, maybe two and
Speaker 6: a half. At this point, you get a signing bonus
Speaker 6: and you become active to the enlisted in an eighty.
Speaker 3: Your only job is to go to college.
Speaker 6: Interesting you literally I don't know it works now, but
Speaker 6: I can say I got a letter that said that
Speaker 6: I was both exempt, I was exempted from grooming standards
Speaker 6: and that I was neither required nor authorized the where
Speaker 6: I give, but still could use space available air thinking
Speaker 6: for retirement to your leave while you're in school and
Speaker 6: you're it's full active to be paid benefits.
Speaker 3: Back then it was E three.
Speaker 6: I think it's like a six now six or E
Speaker 6: seven that you get paid and it's not scholarship, it's
Speaker 6: just hey, So you do that program up to two
Speaker 6: years and then when you graduate and go to Officer
Speaker 6: CAMPI school and then Nuclear Power school, and then you
Speaker 6: enter the training pipeline for submarines or surface ships, depending
Speaker 6: on where you're going. So that seemed like a good
Speaker 6: application of my technical background to really utilize that but
Speaker 6: still be able to serve. And I thought submarines sound exciting.
Speaker 6: It was you know, independent operations and you know, try
Speaker 6: to do its own thing. I thought about surface warfare
Speaker 6: being a surface warfare officer, but I kind of looked
Speaker 6: at it as well, you know, the surface ships are
Speaker 6: kind of there for the carrier, and the carrier's kind
Speaker 6: of there for the pilots, and so I'd rather be
Speaker 6: a submarine or where we're kind of doing our own thing.
Speaker 3: Now. I haven't changed a lot since then.
Speaker 6: That doesn't really speak that much the way things are now,
Speaker 6: But so that's kind of that's kind of what got
Speaker 6: me into the Navy in the first place.
Speaker 3: I had thought about going to the Naval Academy and.
Speaker 6: Actually spent a week there in the summer before my
Speaker 6: senior year and ended up being kind of deciding how
Speaker 6: I kind of want the regular all the experience, and
Speaker 6: I'm sure the academy is great for a lot of
Speaker 6: folks able to you know, Austin's a fun place to
Speaker 6: live and any.
Speaker 5: Gradesime in college and then what uh, you know, you
Speaker 5: go through this whole program, you go through college, you
Speaker 5: get into the Navy, and you mentioned all the officers
Speaker 5: are nuclear trained, but I mean, I guess that doesn't
Speaker 5: necessarily mean you are like the reactor guy per se.
Speaker 5: I'm just curious what was like kind of your first
Speaker 5: duty position when you showed up, So junior officers on
Speaker 5: board submarines, the first thing you do when you get
Speaker 5: there is you're you're going back to the endergrad.
Speaker 3: You're learning how to operate uh, all the equipment back there.
Speaker 6: Ultimately that there's a watch station you're trying to qualify,
Speaker 6: which is engineering officer to watch. So you're basically the
Speaker 6: watch officer that is in charge of the reactor plan. Okay,
Speaker 6: you're at the guy that's actually flipped in the switches
Speaker 6: on the panels and all that. There are those really
Speaker 6: smart and listed operators that have a lot more experience
Speaker 6: than you.
Speaker 3: Do that are doing that.
Speaker 6: So so like in the control room for the engineering
Speaker 6: space and you don't have you know, have a watch officer,
Speaker 6: and then you have two or three panel operators depending
Speaker 6: on the type of shift, the ones that are really
Speaker 6: operating the you know, reactor and or whatnot. And then you
Speaker 6: have a bunch of other watch standers that are out
Speaker 6: in the engineering spaces, you know, turning valves and pick
Speaker 6: some pumps and all that other stuff. I watched team
Speaker 6: of about ten or so ten or eleven people total
Speaker 6: back in the Indine Graam. So that's the first op
Speaker 6: racial job you're learning. Is the engineering officer a watch
Speaker 6: So you're you know, and I'll never forget that the
Speaker 6: first time I did start, and I was the guy
Speaker 6: I'm actually on watch. I wasn't a trainee anymore. And
Speaker 6: me and my guys started up the reactor. You know,
Speaker 6: it was trust me, the engineer officer the department was
Speaker 6: keeping an eye on things by all means. But but
Speaker 6: it was cool. And you know, I walk on the
Speaker 6: ingrom like I just started up a Niclar reactor, you know.
Speaker 6: And I was like twenty six years old probably.
Speaker 3: And then then.
Speaker 6: You have your administrative jobs with your or your division officer,
Speaker 6: and you're notionally in charge of you know, ten or
Speaker 6: so enlisted personnel on the division. So it's and you
Speaker 6: start with engineering, so electrical division or reactor control division.
Speaker 3: Or that kind of thing.
Speaker 6: So so you start out in that job as a
Speaker 6: bit of a leadership and over now we all know
Speaker 6: if you spend time in a service that you've got
Speaker 6: some senior n c O.
Speaker 3: And yes, you're nominally in charge.
Speaker 6: But I mean you're the dumb and not take advice
Speaker 6: very carefully from you know, from your chief. And actually
Speaker 6: my first electrical divission chief recently passed away, so I'll
Speaker 6: send to see that. But in any case, that's so, yeah,
Speaker 6: you kind of start back in the injineram is. That's
Speaker 6: the first thing you do when you get there, and
Speaker 6: you gradually work your way forward to where you're eventually
Speaker 6: a Ford division officer like the navigate the communications officer
Speaker 6: or SNI officer or damage control assistant and then watch
Speaker 6: station wise your what your goal is is to be
Speaker 6: to stand officer of the deck, so you're you're the
Speaker 6: guy in the control room in charge in the ship
Speaker 6: on a minute five minute basis, on behalf of the captain,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 2: While the ship is belong And what was the first
Speaker 2: boat you were assigned to?
Speaker 6: That was my first ship was USS Houston, which was
Speaker 6: in San Diego. All of you, all of you, I've
Speaker 6: seen USS Houston. So that was in the Hunt for October.
Speaker 6: There's the scene where USS Dallas comes flying out of
Speaker 6: the water and crashes back down.
Speaker 3: That was actually USS Houston. That did that.
Speaker 6: Wow, that did that. They were the they were the
Speaker 6: star of the show for that. So that was my
Speaker 6: first ship, Yeah, in San Diego, which was awesome.
Speaker 1: Is the the NUKE program for officers and listed is it?
Speaker 2: Is it the same?
Speaker 1: Do they share classes when it comes to like the
Speaker 1: power plant stuff and things like that.
Speaker 6: You don't really share, uh the initial well, so you
Speaker 6: don't share Nuclear power school.
Speaker 3: So nuclearar schools with six.
Speaker 6: Months classroom training and there's there is a it's all
Speaker 6: the same place, but it's separate classes for officers and
Speaker 6: for listed. But then you go to the training pipeline,
Speaker 6: so you go to nuclear power training units. So that's
Speaker 6: supposed we call prototype, and that is a it's an
Speaker 6: actual operating reactor, but it's a training plan, so it's
Speaker 6: a Some of them are an old submarine which has
Speaker 6: been you know, refitted to be a training submarine.
Speaker 3: It doesn't go anywhere.
Speaker 6: It just is tied up and and it just kind
Speaker 6: of churned river waters to be going anywhere. But it's
Speaker 6: a real reactor and really it's really operating. So that prototype.
Speaker 6: There are listed trainees and officer trainees and you're just
Speaker 6: you're each you're each trying to qualify your respective watch stations.
Speaker 6: So they're qualifying and listed junior listed watch stations. You're
Speaker 6: qualifying your junior officer watch station. Now that said to
Speaker 6: be engineering officer to watch, you have to stand watch
Speaker 6: on all of the enlisted watch stations as a trainee
Speaker 6: before you can go be the watch officers, you have
Speaker 6: to at least for a couple of watches, I've done
Speaker 6: their job.
Speaker 3: Not I mean, you're a trainee, it's not for real.
Speaker 6: So it's but you've experienced all the listed watch stations
Speaker 6: before you get to the point that you're supposed to
Speaker 6: be in charge of them.
Speaker 2: And what's uh, you know, you get to your first boat,
Speaker 2: what's it like?
Speaker 3: What's you know?
Speaker 2: What is being on a submarine?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 3: Well, I certainly remember when I showed up to my
Speaker 3: first ship.
Speaker 6: So again I showed up to USS Houston and here
Speaker 6: and my service ress blues up top side and show up.
Speaker 6: I've got my then fuldberger and my white hat on
Speaker 6: a ready goat and they called down and this this
Speaker 6: young guy comes up top side. I won't say his
Speaker 6: name though that he says, who are you? I'm like
Speaker 6: Tom Streetberg, how you know? And I'm I'm John Doe.
Speaker 6: Welcome to Hell. It's like great. So my first ship
Speaker 6: was our commanding officer was largely kind of a terror,
Speaker 6: not not very well regarded along by a lot.
Speaker 3: Of the crew. And this ship was it was, it was.
Speaker 6: We spent a lot of time in the in the dryout,
Speaker 6: which is sounds great, but it's actually kind of awful
Speaker 6: and it was quite challenging. So everything gotten much better
Speaker 6: when I got my next commanding officer. And it's amazing
Speaker 6: how the character of the CEO can completely change the
Speaker 6: quality of life on board of ship. And you know,
Speaker 6: my secting commanding officer showed up and uh he came,
Speaker 6: got all the officers together and said, you know, I
Speaker 6: got to count on all you guys. All of you
Speaker 6: know more about whatever vis you're doing than I do.
Speaker 6: But the whole you know, the bigger picture of your
Speaker 6: individual part, you know better. I kind of it was
Speaker 6: a very different feel and it's accessors, so it was
Speaker 6: it was so you know, as a we were relatively
Speaker 6: short on officer manning at that point, and so I
Speaker 6: was for quite a while. I was what they call
Speaker 6: three section duty, so one and every three days I
Speaker 6: was on duty. But that's on top of your work
Speaker 6: week and do the twenty four hours, and it's not
Speaker 6: beaver duty.
Speaker 3: It is you're on the ship for twenty four hours.
Speaker 6: So if you're a three second for example, we'll say
Speaker 6: a week, your your work week starts.
Speaker 3: On Monday, and you are on duty.
Speaker 6: So you show up Monday at like six to take
Speaker 6: take the watch from the off going watch section. Can
Speaker 6: you get a tour of the ship. You got to
Speaker 6: renewal the logs, you got to reveal all the maintenance
Speaker 6: paper work that's happening, and you've got to turn over
Speaker 6: from the off going watch officer.
Speaker 3: So you're there like six.
Speaker 6: Okay, Now you're on duty for twenty four hours, you know,
Speaker 6: all the way until the next morning, until you get relieved,
Speaker 6: and then then your Tuesday workday starts, you know, and
Speaker 6: you might get maybe four or five hours of sleep,
Speaker 6: and then you're on duty all the next day Tuesday,
Speaker 6: and you got a workday and you go home tired,
Speaker 6: and then you know, Wednesday's kind of a normal work day,
Speaker 6: and guess what, you're on duty again on Thursday. That's
Speaker 6: once every three days now okay through Now you're on
Speaker 6: duty all the way.
Speaker 3: Through Friday morning.
Speaker 6: So you go home Friday from work dead tired because
Speaker 6: you've got you know, didn't get much sleep. And then
Speaker 6: Saturday you get to think about how you're gonna have
Speaker 6: duty on Sunday. So you know, you can't go really
Speaker 6: at prity on Friday if you're tired Saturday night, you
Speaker 6: can't really turn tied on because you've got to be
Speaker 6: on duty the next morning. So really, and you just
Speaker 6: repeat that and you basically never get you never get
Speaker 6: a real weekend that you're totally free because you got
Speaker 6: duty either Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: And and that's why you're important, right, that's that doesn't
Speaker 6: when you're a c.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and I'd be curious to know about that
Speaker 1: because that's one, that's a heavy workload. But two, when
Speaker 1: you guys do get underway, if you're doing a you know,
Speaker 1: a float, you're talking about a few hundred people, I imagine
Speaker 1: in a very confined space. And sometimes from what I've heard,
Speaker 1: like nukes will stay underwater for three to six months
Speaker 1: at a time. Like how how do you manage that?
Speaker 1: How how is all that managed? With personalities, with the workload,
Speaker 1: with everything else.
Speaker 6: I think the most challenging part is, uh is just
Speaker 6: the workload and it's kind of sleep I mean, you
Speaker 6: know it is.
Speaker 3: Depending what the ship's doing.
Speaker 6: It can be quite busy with all the training and
Speaker 6: the drills and and watch standing.
Speaker 3: You see.
Speaker 6: So people say like, oh, you know, Arch, don't you
Speaker 6: get bored or you know, you think about being underwater
Speaker 6: not you're just you're just thinking about how am I
Speaker 6: going to get in the racks, or I can get
Speaker 6: decent sleep and not be dead tired, or when there's
Speaker 6: when's the next set of drills? Or you know, when
Speaker 6: do I have to get this paperwork done? When do
Speaker 6: I have to have this training plan ready? We don't
Speaker 6: have to prepare training for the for the guys.
Speaker 3: What are we doing? You know?
Speaker 6: And it just goes on from there. So I will
Speaker 6: say that only once or twice I bet on the
Speaker 6: submarine where it wasn't part of the crew you know
Speaker 6: what they call a writer, where you're just somebody that's
Speaker 6: on the work. And we'll say that if you do
Speaker 6: not have a if you don't have a job and
Speaker 6: you're on a submarine, it can be a very super
Speaker 6: boring place to be. And because there's nowhere to go,
Speaker 6: there's no in many cas on many occasions, the cruise
Speaker 6: mass which is the one big space being used.
Speaker 3: For training or they're eating or whatever.
Speaker 6: And if you can't get in the ward drone which
Speaker 6: will or the asters saying out because but again stuff's
Speaker 6: going on there.
Speaker 3: There's really nowhere to go.
Speaker 6: There's nothing, there's nothing to do so, so I will
Speaker 6: say that it was actually while I was longed to
Speaker 6: be a writer, when I was a part of Ship's
Speaker 6: company being one when it was like, okay, wow, there's
Speaker 6: really not much to do here if you're not if
Speaker 6: you're not working your stuff.
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Speaker 6: So that that really it was a challenge just just
Speaker 6: to get it all done, to get all the work done,
Speaker 6: get sleep. We've got the summary force has gotten a
Speaker 6: lot smarter over the years. So when I first my
Speaker 6: first couple of ships, you were jet The closet of
Speaker 6: the crew is in a presecon look called three section
Speaker 6: rotation again.
Speaker 3: So but it was six hour watches, so you're six on.
Speaker 6: Twelve off, and so you ended up being all watch
Speaker 6: you know, different all different times of the day on
Speaker 6: a rotating basis.
Speaker 3: So you'd be like pick the.
Speaker 6: Twelve and off until midnight, and then you come on
Speaker 6: at midnight, you'd be until six, and you're off until
Speaker 6: eighteen hundred, and you'd be on at eighteen hundred and
Speaker 6: you'd be off until six. You know, you get the idea,
Speaker 6: six on twelve off. It was really not a smart
Speaker 6: way to do things because we all understand now, sir,
Speaker 6: kadian rhythm, you know, it is really important to not
Speaker 6: being dumb all the time, and we weren't doing that.
Speaker 6: So you basically were continually jet lighted because you're sleeping
Speaker 6: at different times of the day every single day. So
Speaker 6: the sports done a lot smarter about it. They did
Speaker 6: some studies and figured out that that was not a
Speaker 6: great way to do things and shifted to a like
Speaker 6: an eight on sixteen off rotation to again a circadian
Speaker 6: rhythm lost rotations where we're on up, you're sleeping the.
Speaker 3: Same time every day, and that made us a lot smarter.
Speaker 6: I mean, it made it made the cruise a lot
Speaker 6: bit arrested, even if they were busy, even if you're
Speaker 6: being even if you only got five hours sleep, at
Speaker 6: least you're getting at the same time.
Speaker 1: Area, right right, And is it true that because I've
Speaker 1: heard all kinds of like horror stories about you know,
Speaker 1: about nuke subs in particular in the sense of did
Speaker 1: did they enlisted have the hot rock generally or was
Speaker 1: there generally enough space for all of them?
Speaker 3: Well, so it depends on the kind of ship you're on.
Speaker 6: Okay, So our attack submarines, the smaller multipurpose you know,
Speaker 6: they can do sink surface ship stick sink submarines. They
Speaker 6: can launch tamahawk cruse mussiles, they can do intelligence collection
Speaker 6: and O. There's a multipurpose kind of boats. They generally
Speaker 6: will have some portion of the group high racking easily.
Speaker 6: It's usually it's your pretty junior guys. It's E two's,
Speaker 6: E three's maybe and some E fours.
Speaker 3: They maybe a.
Speaker 6: Few E fives, but not not not usually and oftentimes
Speaker 6: your torpedo room is is will have some space the
Speaker 6: sleeping the hull racks where they would have weapons and
Speaker 6: frees up smetter space but when you want to ployment,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of guys on racking because if you
Speaker 6: look at torpedo rooms full when you're on undeployment, you're
Speaker 6: over there for a reason, and and you sometimes will
Speaker 6: have extra riders on board. I'm sure folks that are
Speaker 6: that are being healthy with stuff you're doing undeployment, and
Speaker 6: in that case sometimes six the racking. Yeah, officers don't
Speaker 6: won't ever. That's just it, just the way it is, right.
Speaker 6: It doesn't mean that they're observe necessarily a state room.
Speaker 6: For example, on like a Los Angeles class, there's what's
Speaker 6: called nine man or everything, which is a nine nine person
Speaker 6: bunk rooms just weasly listening on the rings there, and
Speaker 6: you worked their way up to a state room over
Speaker 6: over time. Now, our newer boats like the Ohio class
Speaker 6: summaries they're actually they're not newer, but there are ballistic
Speaker 6: missile summaries.
Speaker 3: They are a humongous submarines.
Speaker 6: They are you know, there are two or three times
Speaker 6: the size in the l A class and so they
Speaker 6: haven't there's no.
Speaker 3: Hot righting on SSP and shinty.
Speaker 6: They have enough bunks for everybody because there's all these
Speaker 6: bunk rooms in the missile apartment in between those huge
Speaker 6: missile tubes. Yeah, there's showing no high righting there. Now
Speaker 6: there's a whole nother rangele Now we have no egg cruise,
Speaker 6: so to speak. We have integrated cruise where you have,
Speaker 6: like on a Virginia class submarines, you have bunk rooms
Speaker 6: that are all female at own mail. I suppose all
Speaker 6: of all the summaries are what was on. None of
Speaker 6: them were built to have women on board, so they
Speaker 6: were never.
Speaker 3: While I was on board.
Speaker 5: Right, interesting, and I'd like to, you know, ask a
Speaker 5: little bit more about you know, you were saying that
Speaker 5: there's a big difference on the culture of your first
Speaker 5: submarine where the captain was a bit of a terror
Speaker 5: where and then the second was kind of a very
Speaker 5: different leadership style. I wonder if you could expand on that, like,
Speaker 5: because you mentioned how big an impact that has on
Speaker 5: the entire life on the ship.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, you know, the CEO has a lot
Speaker 6: of authority on how things go on a ship, so
Speaker 6: there's a lot of different ways that they can make
Speaker 6: life that are worse.
Speaker 3: A lot of it has to do.
Speaker 6: With, you know, so they listen to the inputs that
Speaker 6: they're given by the crew, by their officers, and they
Speaker 6: treat them, I mean it already nice or you know,
Speaker 6: I mean always times that you have to be you
Speaker 6: may not need he pisan all the time, but like
Speaker 6: for example, this this guy, I mean he hes firm,
Speaker 6: is actually going to be the same.
Speaker 3: There's screening sometimes in their shoulders.
Speaker 6: Things weren't smart going away that he wanted them to
Speaker 6: start yelling at people. And I took away from that
Speaker 6: as a you know, as a young junior officer. Here
Speaker 6: is the captain yelling at me or the person next
Speaker 6: to me that just I couldn't really function when when
Speaker 6: he was doing that. So he's trying attempting to get
Speaker 6: better performance out of us. But all I could do
Speaker 6: is what do I need to do to make this
Speaker 6: guy stuff y'all give me? And and not so much
Speaker 6: focusing on on how we do things. So like I
Speaker 6: made it a point that was kind of a lesson
Speaker 6: that I learned at that point was do whatever you
Speaker 6: can then not have emotion.
Speaker 3: You know, in the control room while you're trying to
Speaker 3: operate a ship.
Speaker 6: You know, if you're going to deploy emotion, do so
Speaker 6: in a very planned manner with the goal of achieving
Speaker 6: specific reholes. If you need to make an example or something,
Speaker 6: you know, and make clear you're how important something is,
Speaker 6: you know, do it on a thoughtful way. But that
Speaker 6: the kind of thing that you can do differently that
Speaker 6: I think helps people perform better. If that helps for attention,
Speaker 6: that that guy, I mean, to be clear, the ship
Speaker 6: did really well is going to I mean, they did
Speaker 6: really hard missions and accomplish them, but I think it
Speaker 6: came at an enormous cost of people that were to
Speaker 6: stick around after that. And in some cases, like one
Speaker 6: of the things that can happen in the eighties, you
Speaker 6: can do it's called relistening for orders, so you re
Speaker 6: enlist and before relistening you get a new assignment. And
Speaker 6: so his retention numbers actually could look pretty good sometimes
Speaker 6: because people were reenlistening to get off the ship, and
Speaker 6: so they didn't mean they were understand it. They ne're
Speaker 6: understand in eighty forever. But you know, that can be
Speaker 6: kind of a false indicator, So don't His command tour
Speaker 6: looked really great on paper, and he did really well,
Speaker 6: and he was created it. He went to a major commander,
Speaker 6: but just a terrible, terrible experience for many people on board.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, the tremendous authority that
Speaker 5: a sub captain has, and I'd like to ask you
Speaker 5: a little bit more about that too, because look, I
Speaker 5: know nothing about this topic other than like the Hunt
Speaker 5: for Red October and Crimson Tied a few other moves.
Speaker 5: These they always they always show these subs are in isolation,
Speaker 5: they have no comma with big Navy. They're out there
Speaker 5: doing their own thing, and the captain kind of is
Speaker 5: like the god of the boat.
Speaker 2: Is that true? Is that accurate?
Speaker 3: It is screwed to some degree?
Speaker 6: So I mean I would say that, I mean, probably
Speaker 6: compared to any other farms the military, you work as
Speaker 6: a see you know, your no files command, you're probably
Speaker 6: the most independent. I mean because there are times where
Speaker 6: you're out doing stuff and yeah, you're not communicating and
Speaker 6: you know, and you're conducting can be conducting pretty igh
Speaker 6: stakes operations and yeah, there's nobody to talk to it.
Speaker 6: And certainly when things go south, you're not gonna have
Speaker 6: anyone to talk.
Speaker 3: To for a while, and you really are gonna be
Speaker 3: like grown.
Speaker 6: So I will never forget when I was on my
Speaker 6: on my command tour, I will up to the middle
Speaker 6: of the night to the final army going off, and
Speaker 6: we're hearing a fire announcement, you know, a firefire, fire
Speaker 6: in the engine room, fire, and then this and that thing,
Speaker 6: and I just remember, you know, there I am standing
Speaker 6: in the control room and my pajamas and starting to
Speaker 6: think about well, while the guys are working on the end,
Speaker 6: the fires out very quickly and then they have very
Speaker 6: big deal. But you know, for that thirty seconds, like,
Speaker 6: are we gonna wind up on the surface off of
Speaker 6: Hawaii at night with the crew on the top side?
Speaker 6: You know what one am I going to abandon ship
Speaker 6: if I have to? You know, you start start thinking
Speaker 6: through those things because in that time frame, yeah, you're
Speaker 6: not gonna have your belt, you're gonna be you're not
Speaker 6: going to be able to radio home. Yeah, all that
Speaker 6: kind of time frame to make those really quick decisions.
Speaker 3: That being said, you have a lot of GUIDs.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, the submariners are all about procedures
Speaker 6: and requirements and technical requirements, and so you you have
Speaker 6: beaten into you over years of experience exactly what the
Speaker 6: requirements are for most situations that you'd be in the
Speaker 6: most conceivable situations that you'd be in. There was a
Speaker 6: procedure for whatever the cagalty is. Your people should be
Speaker 6: executing that, you should be overseeing their execution of all that,
Speaker 6: and most of it should be happening, happening, unfolding in
Speaker 6: accordance with some sort of effect. But there is a
Speaker 6: great deal of description requirement and more time, obviously that
Speaker 6: will go up even more, which is why as you
Speaker 6: see much of the military analysts talking about mission command,
Speaker 6: so you know, because communications may be quite constrained in
Speaker 6: a future conflict with China in particular, we're a lot
Speaker 6: of the military is starting to focus on how do
Speaker 6: we deveolove mission command to our commanditors so that they
Speaker 6: can in the absence of communication still find effectively by
Speaker 6: making decisions that I've always said, like you all want
Speaker 6: to do mission command, talk to some reinforce, because we're
Speaker 6: the guys that do that all the time.
Speaker 3: It is in our absolute.
Speaker 6: Marrow of our bones how to do relatively independent operations
Speaker 6: with very little guidance except for we've done before.
Speaker 2: End No, it's incredible.
Speaker 5: And so as you're going through your career here, you know,
Speaker 5: you mentioned that you're going to these different duty positions
Speaker 5: across the submarine and I take it they're sort of
Speaker 5: like grooming you as a naval officer to potentially be captain.
Speaker 5: They must be like looking at you like, you know,
Speaker 5: are you going to be the guy? Can you tell
Speaker 5: us a little bit about like kind of what your
Speaker 5: career progression was like going to these different stations?
Speaker 3: Sure? I mean, so, one.
Speaker 6: Thing that's kind of funny about Submarine Force and is
Speaker 6: that when you sign up for it, there's literally a
Speaker 6: art that shows your entire career.
Speaker 3: It shows it's a timeline.
Speaker 6: It's three years, three years the junior officer, two years
Speaker 6: on short duty, then you go to apartment at school
Speaker 6: for six months and then five months whatever.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 6: Three years of the department head, two years of short duty,
Speaker 6: two years of the night sho, two years of short uty,
Speaker 6: three years in the.
Speaker 3: C And that is what is going to happen.
Speaker 6: As long as you don't fall off the wagon, you're
Speaker 6: going to be somewhere within plus or minus six months.
Speaker 6: Every one of those gates is going to happen on
Speaker 6: your on your on your career, are where which boats where?
Speaker 6: What kind of races are they doing? And then what
Speaker 6: are you doing on surety? So you know, are you
Speaker 6: going to be uh, you know, at a submarine head
Speaker 6: quarters or are you going to be we have warp
Speaker 6: collarge or you're going to be you know and gone.
Speaker 6: And so so that's kind of the flavor. And it
Speaker 6: starts in the division officer tour that I mentioned, and
Speaker 6: then again you go to Shortenny.
Speaker 3: For a couple of times. A couple of years, I
Speaker 3: went to Italy.
Speaker 6: I was on the six fleet staff in Naples as
Speaker 6: the Submarines Operations officer. Fantastic job at the travel all
Speaker 6: over Europe. Can't talk about the boats are doing that
Speaker 6: I was involved with, but you know it was good stuff.
Speaker 6: And then then backed as an apartment head in this
Speaker 6: case that was on an SSPN, a blisting missile submarine,
Speaker 6: and I was the engineer, and then split tour and
Speaker 6: I was then I was the navigator.
Speaker 3: I was sorry.
Speaker 6: I started as the navigator and ended up as the
Speaker 6: ship's engineer for most of my tour. And I was
Speaker 6: in Banger, Washington on the West coast, and then after
Speaker 6: that then posted apartment head. I'm sorry, I totally missed
Speaker 6: the tour, so junior officer, and then I went to
Speaker 6: San Francisco.
Speaker 3: I was a recruiter.
Speaker 6: I was recruiting college students to be a new coauthor
Speaker 6: like Iowan's and then department head Washington and then then
Speaker 6: Italy at Post apartment head, and then I went to
Speaker 6: go be Xo on USS to peek it in San Diego,
Speaker 6: back to San Diego for another tour which was awesome.
Speaker 6: San Diego is incredible. And then after that I went
Speaker 6: to the Naval War College in a part Hode Island.
Speaker 6: Fantastic experience. Got into war gaming there.
Speaker 3: That was a big thing.
Speaker 6: Later so I was part of something that's called the Halls,
Speaker 6: the Alpha group, which in the war gaming group at
Speaker 6: the War College, they are a China or gaming group.
Speaker 6: We can now say that. And that was a fantastic experience.
Speaker 6: And then from there I went to the Joint Staff
Speaker 6: where I was on the I was the Nuclear Brand
Speaker 6: Nuclear Strike Branch chief, which is a fun job. We
Speaker 6: answered the phone nuclear strike and so we were the
Speaker 6: guys that basically did new clear command control. So we
Speaker 6: made we expected all the cuclear command centers around the
Speaker 6: world to make sure that they were able to execute
Speaker 6: nuclear command control in the cords with the Chairman's directives.
Speaker 6: And then also inspect actually expected them. And we also
Speaker 6: wrote the Black Book, so we helped to write the
Speaker 6: Black Books. So the book that goes into football, so
Speaker 6: the President's suitcase known as the Black Book, the Nuclear
Speaker 6: Decision and Book.
Speaker 3: So we took for in that.
Speaker 6: We maintained that book and in the day and that
Speaker 6: was a really cool one. So yeah, no pressure, man, Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's funny. Uh yeah, it's it's a it's an important book,
Speaker 6: is Yeah, it's a humbly experience. So and and also
Speaker 6: training the military's the guys that carry the football with
Speaker 6: the President, so I will train them on nuclear nuclear
Speaker 6: command and control stuff.
Speaker 3: So really fantastic job.
Speaker 6: And then after that it's on that command tour and
Speaker 6: that was in Hawaii, and you know, people say it like,
Speaker 6: what's a great job, in my opinion, one of the
Speaker 6: best jobs on the planet. Rational past submarine community officer
Speaker 6: and wine. It doesn't get much better than that. You know,
Speaker 6: you get under way, there's way, and the weather's always great.
Speaker 6: You know, there's a lot of places where it's not
Speaker 6: very pleasant to stand on top of the submarine as
Speaker 6: as the captain does coming in and out of port.
Speaker 3: But Hawaii is not one of them.
Speaker 2: That was.
Speaker 3: It was awesome. So that was kind of up through
Speaker 3: the command tour.
Speaker 5: And so I've heard I've been told that being a
Speaker 5: submarine captain is maybe the most complex job in the military.
Speaker 5: I mean, would you agree with that, and could you
Speaker 5: tell us why or why not?
Speaker 6: I mean problem maybe, I mean, it's certainly some of
Speaker 6: the most I mean objectively, objectively, I would say that
Speaker 6: it's some of the most training. I mean, you have
Speaker 6: before you can get to the jobs. So first of all,
Speaker 6: you have just been selected over the years. You know,
Speaker 6: you get to keep getting selected. Well, getting selected for
Speaker 6: an apartment that's pretty easy. XO is a pretty seat
Speaker 6: cut to go from three department heads to one XO.
Speaker 3: And then XO C is another cut.
Speaker 6: And what's funny about it is that, unlike a lot
Speaker 6: of other services, like as long as you're a fallen
Speaker 6: off the wagon, the selection boards are what eventually will
Speaker 6: decide to rank, and like the break the motion boards
Speaker 6: are kind of automatic. Like if so, if you get
Speaker 6: selected to go to Coe, you're going. And then if
Speaker 6: you don't get fired during your co tour, you're gonna
Speaker 6: make those six as they say, as they say, if
Speaker 6: the if there's a band of the change of command.
Speaker 6: You're going to make those six dino rewinding your EXISO tour.
Speaker 6: If you successfully contin your EXO, you won't make go
Speaker 6: five And it's kind of automatic. So it's these selection boards.
Speaker 6: You have a long way, but but on that way
Speaker 6: to that COO tour. You know, the training pipeline is
Speaker 6: about nine or ten months between your life or good
Speaker 6: job and and we take command. Yeah, you have three
Speaker 6: months training enable reactors and DC at the headquarters neighbor
Speaker 6: reactor's headquarters are that very like you're literally taking classes
Speaker 6: and talking to the guys that design the reactor and
Speaker 6: that and that you know that are responsible for biging
Speaker 6: out the procedures and everything. So if you have a
Speaker 6: question about ask the merch, you can go talk to
Speaker 6: the design and resolve that. So really intensive training for
Speaker 6: eight hour written exams or multiple oral exam boards where
Speaker 6: you know, we get through all kinds of situations where
Speaker 6: you go to command and then then you go through
Speaker 6: what we call the submarine command course. Now this to
Speaker 6: be clear, this may have changed. This is I'm talking
Speaker 6: twenty thirteen, twelve years ago, but I think it's pretty
Speaker 6: much the same. So Submarine Command Course you're spending a
Speaker 6: month in the books learning about the sonar and fire
Speaker 6: control systems for the ship that you're going to go to.
Speaker 6: And then you're in you're in trainers simulators with other students,
Speaker 6: a bunch of guys that are p xos and pcos
Speaker 6: perspective xos and CEOs that are going to boats, and
Speaker 6: then you go to see groups.
Speaker 3: You ride multiple boats, so you'll ride a boat.
Speaker 6: For several days and then you'll transfer to another boat
Speaker 6: and you and you do all every comp every combat
Speaker 6: or peacetime operation you can think of if you're doing
Speaker 6: all these ships, so you basically kind of get to
Speaker 6: be captain for a day and as they say, drive
Speaker 6: it like you stole it, because you know there's there's
Speaker 6: a real COEO that actually owns the boat, and you
Speaker 6: kind of get to take the reins for twenty four
Speaker 6: hours and practice practice doing it. So then there's the
Speaker 6: Navy Seal Leadership course. You go to that too, although
Speaker 6: compared to the other the submarine Fanning Pipeline that that's
Speaker 6: a relatively tanned course, so it is it is fine
Speaker 6: and training, and then when you get to the shift,
Speaker 6: you have a thirty eight day turner re period with
Speaker 6: the outgoing CEO. So you're on board for a month
Speaker 6: for you to actually take command, which is much longer
Speaker 6: than I think most communities do.
Speaker 1: As they say regular no no, no, no, please finish
Speaker 1: that up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, finish your thoughts.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So that that thirty day Turner reperiod. You know, some
Speaker 6: might say that have been through it, like it's kind
Speaker 6: of the longest thirty days of your life for both
Speaker 6: you and the outgoing guy, because you know, after a
Speaker 6: couple of weeks, you know, you don't have any authority.
Speaker 6: You know, you have zero authority until the guy says,
Speaker 6: so you said, I really do he says, I stand relieved.
Speaker 6: So you're not actually in charge of anything. You're just
Speaker 6: gonna watch it. You're watching everybody does busily. After a
Speaker 6: couple of weeks, you know that the crew will be
Speaker 6: looking to the seat the currincy know, hey, we want
Speaker 6: to do about this for that and he's kind of
Speaker 6: looking at you like, hey man, this is I have
Speaker 6: a horizon ends in two weeks, so what do you
Speaker 6: want to do? You know, But but at the same time,
Speaker 6: you're not actually in charge. So I think by the
Speaker 6: end of that period you're both ready to get over
Speaker 6: with because the the outgoing guy was just ready to go.
Speaker 3: He's kind of had enough at that point.
Speaker 6: So it is kind of a long PERI So when
Speaker 6: all that said and done, I mean I took commands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was. It was like eleven months after I
Speaker 3: left my last job.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the idea of going from five to six
Speaker 1: is pretty pretty sad as long as you don't like
Speaker 1: get fired when you're when you're a captain of a boat.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that we've like been told
Speaker 1: from sort of the infantry minded is that five to
Speaker 1: six can be very political for them. You know that
Speaker 1: there's also a political game to be played a lot
Speaker 1: of times. Do you feel like in the in the
Speaker 1: submarine field that it's it's a bit more pure that
Speaker 1: because you are so isolated times and whatnot, that really
Speaker 1: it's more job based than them doing them playing the
Speaker 1: politics the right way.
Speaker 3: Letting I'm not sure a photo politics, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 6: There are there are further selection boards, you know, like
Speaker 6: so there is a major command selection board after your
Speaker 6: commands or and so that's that's everybody who went who
Speaker 6: successfully completed command, who's going to make those sets. But
Speaker 6: they're not all going to do major commanders, right, So
Speaker 6: your ma, your major commanders are your subarate squadron commanders,
Speaker 6: so you own five or six spots in their CEOs
Speaker 6: or submarine based CEOs or spring tenders or the big
Speaker 6: training facilities.
Speaker 3: So there's there's major commands.
Speaker 6: So there may be you know, there's the selection stuff
Speaker 6: isn't over yet at that point, so there may I
Speaker 6: mean they's want to call politics.
Speaker 3: I mean it is. I would say I would call it.
Speaker 6: More like reputation and okay, and you know who if
Speaker 6: you oppressed or not. Now what what's interesting? I think
Speaker 6: about how things boil down.
Speaker 3: For submariners on your finness of course, for.
Speaker 6: Example, most of what matters is how are you ranked
Speaker 6: by your squadron? So so like there isn't much competition.
Speaker 6: Would you say you have like three department heads on
Speaker 6: the ship, There isn't that much competition between those three guys.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's they have three different jobs.
Speaker 6: They are kind of ranked against each other, but nobody's
Speaker 6: really paying attention to that. What they pay attention to,
Speaker 6: for example, is that like if you're a navigator, or
Speaker 6: are you ranked against the other navigators on.
Speaker 2: The other ships right, okay, in the.
Speaker 6: Squadron, and so the squadron staff and the squadron commodore.
Speaker 3: They will issue they will issue a ranking.
Speaker 6: Letter that ranks who are the top one two three
Speaker 6: navigators in this one, the top one two three xos,
Speaker 6: the top point two three CEOs. That is what goes
Speaker 6: into your fit reps. And that is what the COO
Speaker 6: XO Major Command Selection Board. See, that's how you get
Speaker 6: chosen whether you're going to go on or not.
Speaker 3: Is that process? So is that process political? I mean
Speaker 3: maybe it depends.
Speaker 6: I mean again people say political, but I mean it
Speaker 6: can also be called a reputation that can call a
Speaker 6: lot of things.
Speaker 5: It's fascinating as far as being the sub captain, I know,
Speaker 5: like when we talk about like deployments and missions, that's
Speaker 5: very sensitive. Actually some of probably some of the deepest
Speaker 5: well kept secrets in the United States government is actually
Speaker 5: what you guys do at see.
Speaker 2: But with that in mind, I mean.
Speaker 5: Are you able to speak a little bit to sort
Speaker 5: of like the pressure that you're feeling as a captain
Speaker 5: on one of these submarines, Like the amount of different
Speaker 5: things you're having to think about at.
Speaker 2: The same time. I mean, I must it must be wild.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I mean it obviously you do different things
Speaker 6: depending on what we're part of the world you're in,
Speaker 6: So we can't say much about what we do unemployment.
Speaker 6: I mean it's think they don't call it then calls
Speaker 6: a silence service for nothing, and so much of what
Speaker 6: you do and obviously you do stuff you can't talk about.
Speaker 3: I will say that, you know, in terms of the
Speaker 3: pressure for example.
Speaker 6: So what I can't say is, you know, I went
Speaker 6: I went undeployment, documented that my ship went undemployment in
Speaker 6: twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. We were over there for about
Speaker 6: six months in Western Pacific, and it's just really busy
Speaker 6: water spaces. There's fishing boats everywhere and lots of merchant ships,
Speaker 6: and it's just super duper busy. And so for I
Speaker 6: felt like the entire time I was over there, you
Speaker 6: just can't ever let your guard down. You can't never
Speaker 6: be you can never be paying attention out of the
Speaker 6: cornerary of your eye to what's going on as long.
Speaker 3: As you're over there, because it's just so busy.
Speaker 6: One of the one of the things that we do
Speaker 6: when you're doing operations and that like for example of
Speaker 6: that tractically challenging operations. Is you have basically the XO
Speaker 6: will kind of be the captain interstad you know, while
Speaker 6: you're sleeping, while you're sleeping, so it's you know, we
Speaker 6: have a term for the job that it takes, but
Speaker 6: it's basically your kind of duty captains, so to speak.
Speaker 6: So so you can get some sleep, the XO will
Speaker 6: take care of the normal. Most things that would be
Speaker 6: needed to be a reported to the CEO, they will
Speaker 6: take those reports. Most things that require CEO permission, they
Speaker 6: will grant that permission for the CEO and the CEO's behalf.
Speaker 6: So you can sleep because one of you, basically twenty
Speaker 6: four to seven has to be paying attention to what's
Speaker 6: going on because it's just so busy and things end
Speaker 6: very quickly, you know, get interesting and which you don't
Speaker 6: want for it. You always want to be boring. Signings
Speaker 6: almost never good in that line of work. Yeah, there's
Speaker 6: a lot of pressure and it doesn't stop when you're important.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, but frankly, in many cases I
Speaker 6: was more worried when I was important than I was
Speaker 6: and I was a seat because you're worried about your
Speaker 6: guys getting in trouble out of town.
Speaker 3: You're worried.
Speaker 6: You know, there there's some piece of gear that's break
Speaker 6: down that you need to get fixed so you can
Speaker 6: get back out and do your job. And there's are
Speaker 6: the parts here. How's the repair going? You know, And
Speaker 6: even when you're.
Speaker 3: Important, you never really get the really electric guard down.
Speaker 3: So I would tell you that. You know, when we
Speaker 3: threw the.
Speaker 6: Lines over back in Pearl Harbor and we came back
Speaker 6: from the PLOYMT, it was just such a relief to
Speaker 6: be back to where, you know, my own home for
Speaker 6: and certainly I can tell you it. Actually it started
Speaker 6: before that when the Tungus hooked up to me. When
Speaker 6: they threw their lines over, I felt better because, you know,
Speaker 6: like in many cases and for imports, you never knew
Speaker 6: what you're going to get from tonguess. You didn't know
Speaker 6: if they spoke English very well or not. You know,
Speaker 6: how are they going to operate? One? Are the operational characteristics?
Speaker 6: How well do they understand your ship? And then we
Speaker 6: all back harbor and there's the glorious Stea Chector.
Speaker 3: You know it is this it's.
Speaker 6: About to drive multi drive like super powerful US English
Speaker 6: speaking you know pilot that those harbor lated back his hand.
Speaker 6: You know my ship well, and it's like, okay, we're all,
Speaker 6: I'm safe. We're all said, that was a.
Speaker 3: Very nice skip.
Speaker 5: And another one that I know this gets into some
Speaker 5: sensitivities too, but are you able to speak at all
Speaker 5: about the Russian or Chinese submarines and you know what
Speaker 5: their capabilities are, what the threat level is for like
Speaker 5: you guys as American submariners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I could talk to Sundary about that.
Speaker 6: So we're fortunate and that there was a graph that
Speaker 6: the astome Abel telegonce put out in twenty fifteen. This
Speaker 6: showed the relative noise data noise characteristics of various adversary submarines,
Speaker 6: including Russian.
Speaker 3: And Chinese ones at that point. And you can so
Speaker 3: I could.
Speaker 6: Tell like a twenty bagraph and say, Chinese submarines are
Speaker 6: noisy at least they were in twenty fifteen, and the
Speaker 6: same basic classes or what they're still building to this day. Okay,
Speaker 6: I'm sure they may have been improvements to some degree,
Speaker 6: but the basic ninety three Shang class SSM that's what
Speaker 6: they're building. The type ninety four Gen class SSPN, that's
Speaker 6: what they've been building. So Chinese nuclear submarines make it
Speaker 6: point at as it would be in an a classific way.
Speaker 6: You can point out and say they're they're pretty noisy
Speaker 6: compared to Russian summaries certainly and compared to ours.
Speaker 5: Can you say why why theirs this are particularly noisy?
Speaker 5: Is it something with the propulsion technology that they just
Speaker 5: haven't developed?
Speaker 3: Well, I can tell you that open source.
Speaker 6: History is will tell you that the Chinese the nuclear
Speaker 6: power plant that is in Chinese submarines is a derivative
Speaker 6: of a Russian ice frig or nuclear car plant, okay,
Speaker 6: which you know those were not built for sous islence, right,
Speaker 6: and favorite power plant, So you can imagine that for
Speaker 6: reasons probably associated with that, the power plants just it's loud.
Speaker 3: It's loud, I mean, it just makes a lot of noise.
Speaker 3: For that reason.
Speaker 6: Now they are we keep hearing every year that they're
Speaker 6: about to build entirely and entirely new class in China,
Speaker 6: and so that next class can be radically different and
Speaker 6: could be much wider than the old ones were, which
Speaker 6: could make life much more difficult. Now as diesel submarines,
Speaker 6: some of them can be quite flat because they don't.
Speaker 3: Know that the power plant. You know, they could they
Speaker 3: have a battery.
Speaker 6: In some cases they are independent profulsions, so they can
Speaker 6: be very as it is known to be true for
Speaker 6: diesel submarines worldwide. They can't be very quiet for that reason.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you see? You know, we there was
Speaker 1: recently that issue with crew members on a naval vessel
Speaker 1: using starlink, an unauthorized starlink. Obviously when you guys are
Speaker 1: are at depth, like you're fine, but how do you
Speaker 1: see you know, modern technology off the shelf in the
Speaker 1: hands of you know, anybody can go purchase it being
Speaker 1: a threat to you know, the sign service for instance.
Speaker 6: I think mostly it would be a matter of something
Speaker 6: when you pulled into port that the guys on the
Speaker 6: top side and turn our cell phones go on, you know,
Speaker 6: because you can tell you can tell everybody, hey, don't
Speaker 6: turn it.
Speaker 3: Like let's say you're doing something.
Speaker 6: Where you don't want somebody to notice that you pull
Speaker 6: in somewhere and you're just going in to get parts
Speaker 6: or whatever some brief stop and you're not nobody's getting off.
Speaker 6: You might want to not have anybody turn their cell
Speaker 6: phones on, for example, just in case somebody's tracking cell
Speaker 6: phones that would let them know, let somebody know that
Speaker 6: you'd pull them into the support.
Speaker 3: So you can tell your through that. You just never
Speaker 3: know when somebody's.
Speaker 6: Gonna you know, sort of preciously turn on their thought
Speaker 6: anyways because they think they know better, right. But the
Speaker 6: kind of thing we saw to the starling, there's nothing
Speaker 6: we don't have to worry about that because as a submarine,
Speaker 6: so from starlink on top of the thing and all
Speaker 6: all the antennas that use it at periscope that they're
Speaker 6: all Navy antennants, they're all you know. Now, obviously you
Speaker 6: have to be concerned about you know, somebody told their
Speaker 6: girlfriend where they're going.
Speaker 3: You know, you're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 6: But humans are givens, and so there's always a possibility
Speaker 6: to pop sick. Maybe maybe it's always it's obviously not
Speaker 6: one hundred percent always gonna be perfect. So so that's
Speaker 6: the kind of that, that's the kind of thing I'd
Speaker 6: probably worry about more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And the other thing you had mentioned to us,
Speaker 5: I think before we started the interview was how easy
Speaker 5: it is to get fired as a submarine.
Speaker 3: Captain.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about that, like, and I mean,
Speaker 5: we see with the uh, you know, surface fleet. You know,
Speaker 5: the Navy seems to fire those captains like it's going
Speaker 5: out of style. I mean they don't. They don't really hesitate.
Speaker 5: And it sounds like it's even worse on submarines. I
Speaker 5: shouldn't say worse. I mean, I guess it's important to
Speaker 5: have accountability. But what are your thoughts?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean so, so command is a privilege. You know,
Speaker 6: you're there's no not everybody gets to do it. You
Speaker 6: don't do it forever. And so you know when you
Speaker 6: go to command, like if if you swap paint, or
Speaker 6: if you touch the bottom, or if win shutters dies
Speaker 6: to maintenance, do they get electrocuted or whatever, you were
Speaker 6: going to get fired.
Speaker 3: Like, it doesn't.
Speaker 6: It doesn't really matter what the reasons are, you know,
Speaker 6: it doesn't like it's the ship. It's the ship is
Speaker 6: a collision with somebody and you're in the rack, you're asleep,
Speaker 6: it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: You're still going to get fired. Ye.
Speaker 6: That is the way that Navy us accountability. That you
Speaker 6: were the senior officer in charge, so it doesn't. Now
Speaker 6: while while you're more junior, listened, people might also be
Speaker 6: held accountable for if they didn't do their jobs. You're
Speaker 6: you're you know that you're done something like that, And
Speaker 6: that's just kind of where it is. Like, you know,
Speaker 6: you just as part of your calculous you understand that
Speaker 6: if you if you have a collision, you're done. You're
Speaker 6: done as CEO if you have a collision. I've never
Speaker 6: seen anybody's reminded.
Speaker 3: That I have so.
Speaker 2: Okay on a on a surface ship.
Speaker 1: But I think I think that they had a sea
Speaker 1: daddy that that took care of it.
Speaker 2: It was crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at least at least I can say the years
Speaker 3: of my career, I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't know if any submarine CEO in my career
Speaker 6: that touched the bottom or a swap paint that didn't
Speaker 6: get fired. Sometimes it took a little bit, you know,
Speaker 6: they do the investigation. But as I mentioned, yeah before
Speaker 6: the show, like the CEO is literally the easiest person
Speaker 6: on the ship to fire because like let's say, let's
Speaker 6: say you're a CEO and you want to you want
Speaker 6: to get rid of an apartment head or even a
Speaker 6: chief mm hmm, you have to have documented like that
Speaker 6: that they were as you told them, here's what you're
Speaker 6: not doing right and you gave them a get well planned,
Speaker 6: you know, letter of instruction or whatever, and you counseled
Speaker 6: them and you know, multiple attempts failed. And then once
Speaker 6: you do all that, you can put together a df
Speaker 6: just uh df C package here the stands for something
Speaker 6: for cause anyways, all on paperwork, AOLF for you as
Speaker 6: the CEO of the common orders and sides. I've lost
Speaker 6: confidency here and you're boom, You're gone. There's no there's
Speaker 6: no DFC package, there's no All I had to say
Speaker 6: is i've lost confidence you're in your ability to can
Speaker 6: and you're done, so no paperwork required.
Speaker 1: Would that be like if that happened, would that be
Speaker 1: the end of their career? Is there a way for
Speaker 1: them to redeem themselves in future assignments or is that
Speaker 1: pretty much they've fallen off the wagon in terms of
Speaker 1: like the promotion, the timeline and that's it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if you're a really from command, you're you're you're
Speaker 6: you're made, you your final rank.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you're not like fired fired like I
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 6: So Like one thing I respect is that when civilians say,
Speaker 6: like you say something like you got fired. Being fired
Speaker 6: in pavilion means like you lost your paycheck, right, And
Speaker 6: when you're fired and you know, lose your paycheck, you're
Speaker 6: still in oh five, right, You're still You're just gonna go.
Speaker 6: Who like to say, you're going hand out basketballs at
Speaker 6: the gimate til you're retire or whatever you're you're going
Speaker 6: to go. There's gonna be some job you go to
Speaker 6: saff and maybe you'll do valuable work, Like maybe you'll
Speaker 6: do good things in that job, happy, very talented, dedicated
Speaker 6: offers in many casions, A bad days and just the
Speaker 6: stars aligned and it was your day.
Speaker 3: It wasn't your day.
Speaker 6: And doesn't mean they're not in great people, they're not
Speaker 6: really can't do good things. And and quite frankly, I've
Speaker 6: seen I've seen guys that I know got fired from
Speaker 6: command that have then gone on to really successful civilian
Speaker 6: careers right on the outside. So it doesn't mean you're
Speaker 6: a bad person and doesn't mean you won't try your best,
Speaker 6: but it is that's just the way it is, is
Speaker 6: why it navy works.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so presumably you survived your time as sub captain,
Speaker 5: what was the next stop for you career wise after
Speaker 5: that command?
Speaker 6: So after that command tour, I signed up for the Uh.
Speaker 6: So I applied for the Navy's fellowship program, so that
Speaker 6: that's like a think tank fellows program. And I actually
Speaker 6: didn't get in. Initially, I was on an alternate list. Uh.
Speaker 3: And I actually was going to retire and go be
Speaker 3: an airline pilot.
Speaker 6: Really yes, And I had got my police license and
Speaker 6: uh and my instant rating and really enjoyed it. And
Speaker 6: I put in my retirement papers. I was gonna my
Speaker 6: change a command. I was going to retire at my
Speaker 6: change of command. It was going to get a combined ceremony,
Speaker 6: and then I was gonna follow my also activity wife.
Speaker 3: A different service.
Speaker 6: But I was you know, OLIVERR and airline pilots and
Speaker 6: a good good job if you want to commute, like
Speaker 6: you can live one place and and your job can
Speaker 6: be somewhere else.
Speaker 3: So that seemed like a good thing to do.
Speaker 6: And then after a couple of weeks of they turned
Speaker 6: down for the fellows program, I got selected off the
Speaker 6: alternate list to go be an a fellow at the
Speaker 6: Center for a New American Security, which is a really qual,
Speaker 6: really good quality excuse me, DC foreign policy and defense
Speaker 6: related think tank. And so I said, all right, that
Speaker 6: sounds great. I can maybe I can do something with that.
Speaker 6: And I pulled my retirement papers and went to CNAs
Speaker 6: as an Avy fellow.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: And before I got there, I knew I wanted to
Speaker 6: focus on China because I had seen again for my
Speaker 6: time at that Halsey Alpha Group at the Naval War College,
Speaker 6: I had what I think was a little bit of
Speaker 6: the head of the curve understanding of the military threat
Speaker 6: that China was going to pose. Also from me, my
Speaker 6: ship was a specific fleet ship, so I'd been thoroughly
Speaker 6: briefed on all the things that PLAEA was doing and
Speaker 6: progress they were making. So I was excited to go
Speaker 6: to that think tank and be abble to buy some
Speaker 6: of what I knew and learn new things and really
Speaker 6: focus on helping to understand the China the military threat
Speaker 6: that was coming from China at that point starting to
Speaker 6: appear from.
Speaker 3: China at that point.
Speaker 5: And so I mean, there's a whole bunch of like
Speaker 5: subtopics under that we can talk to. But at what
Speaker 5: point did the Office of Net Assessment come up on
Speaker 5: their radar?
Speaker 3: So that was a couple of years later.
Speaker 6: So I did my thing at CNAs for a year
Speaker 6: and I wrote I wrote some reports there I first
Speaker 6: wrote a report about China. South China, see the South
Speaker 6: China see islands, the big artificial islands they were building,
Speaker 6: so that one was at that point the kind of
Speaker 6: the party line was that those were not militarily significant facilities,
Speaker 6: at least for Squether's back to the United States.
Speaker 3: So they didn't. They were just an airstrip and a reef.
Speaker 6: And I'll never forget when I was there, I started
Speaker 6: looking at Google Earth and looking at those things, and
Speaker 6: because I thought too, like, it's just just a reef
Speaker 6: with the with an airstrip on it, you know, I wonder,
Speaker 6: I wonder.
Speaker 3: What's up of these things?
Speaker 6: And at that time csis the Center for Strategic and
Speaker 6: International Studies. I've been doing some great stuff with imagery,
Speaker 6: and it showed what they were building on these islands,
Speaker 6: and you could see these huge towers on each corner
Speaker 6: of the island with multiple like places that looked like
Speaker 6: turrets would go on them. And so I'm starting to think,
Speaker 6: maybe these things are a big deal. And then I
Speaker 6: measured one of them. I've been mischief brief and I
Speaker 6: and I measured the lagoon. It was like three or
Speaker 6: four miles across, and I thought, yeah, that is that's
Speaker 6: really big. And so I went on a Google Earth
Speaker 6: and I looked at the District of Columbia, and I
Speaker 6: looked at Mischief brief walked into kind of putting out
Speaker 6: a copy of each and I walked into the office
Speaker 6: of our executive vice president, Sean Brimley, who's now deceased,
Speaker 6: for feeders, and and I placed on his desk, so
Speaker 6: this is the one of those island air bases they built.
Speaker 6: This is the District of Columbia, and these are at
Speaker 6: the same scale. He was like, oh my god, these
Speaker 6: things are huge. And so I wrote an article saying,
Speaker 6: as you master the obvious, these islands are huge, they
Speaker 6: are a big deal, and they matter militarily each one
Speaker 6: of them. Treat them as a full sized air base,
Speaker 6: because that's what they are. They have bardened, they have hangers,
Speaker 6: they have munition storage, they have ardened underground fuel tanks.
Speaker 6: This salt being built at that time ten thousands with runways.
Speaker 6: They're full sized air bases. And I think that that
Speaker 6: started to change the conversation. A little bit later on,
Speaker 6: I looked at the PLA Rocket Force, which again is
Speaker 6: some viewers may not be familiar with this The PLA
Speaker 6: Rocket Force is an entire arm of the Chinese military
Speaker 6: that is built around long range, pursued and strike missiles,
Speaker 6: both nuclear and conventional. And we could talk more about
Speaker 6: that later, but I was really fascinated with that, and
Speaker 6: I got to learn a.
Speaker 3: Lot about them while I was there. I wrote about them.
Speaker 3: I wrote about the threat that they post to our
Speaker 3: faces in the Asia.
Speaker 1: What the uh so our during World War two? Like
Speaker 1: our war in the Pacific? Moving across to Japan, it
Speaker 1: seemed like it was for a lot of the tolls,
Speaker 1: a lot of inconsequential islands. Is that at all like
Speaker 1: remnant reflective on like these these artificial islands that China's building,
Speaker 1: I know, it's in.
Speaker 6: Some ways, it's kind of similar. In some ways, it's
Speaker 6: pretty different. I mean, uh, they're definitely definitely they are
Speaker 6: mostly for peacetime. I mean, like, so, let's say you've
Speaker 6: got lots of viewerselves said, well, we'll have seen on
Speaker 6: the news these giants Chinese postcard ships water you know
Speaker 6: water canyoning is Philippine boats.
Speaker 3: Uh, and you know the aisles of.
Speaker 6: Those post wardships were all operating out of those island bases.
Speaker 6: The not all a lot of them. That's one of
Speaker 6: the places they operate from. All these Chinese maritime militia
Speaker 6: fish fishing boats. They're not actually fishing obviously, they're based
Speaker 6: out of those island bases.
Speaker 3: So they are crucial in peace time.
Speaker 6: They are a crucial facility that supports long term operation
Speaker 6: in those in those water those contested waters, whereas we
Speaker 6: just kind of the US will kind of make these
Speaker 6: episodic trips down there, show the flag dofone OPS, their
Speaker 6: navigation operations whatever. But then we then we leave, right
Speaker 6: and so then the locals they're kind of on their
Speaker 6: own again, where the Chinese are there all the time.
Speaker 6: They are able to do that because of those bases.
Speaker 6: In wartime, those bases would help the Chinese to protect
Speaker 6: the South China Sea approaches to the to their major
Speaker 6: ports Shanghai, Hong Kong.
Speaker 3: Those control the approaches.
Speaker 6: To those ports, which really matters, and their ability to
Speaker 6: maintain the their you know, their supplies of oil and
Speaker 6: national resources and all that open. So it's a little
Speaker 6: more of a static thing war time. Can we roll
Speaker 6: them up and move across that part of the world.
Speaker 6: I mean, maybe it's going to be very different challenge
Speaker 6: than the Japanese were.
Speaker 3: We have to remember with Japan.
Speaker 6: Was even the Japanese knew that when they launched the attack
Speaker 6: on Pearl Harbor, that we had this salute tsunami of
Speaker 6: naval ship building that had already started in nineteen thirty
Speaker 6: eight nineteen forty a huge ship building program, and those
Speaker 6: ships of ours were going to come online nineteen forty two,
Speaker 6: forty three, forty four. They saw that company that our
Speaker 6: ship building industry was way larger than theirs was, and
Speaker 6: that they were all they could do ope was to
Speaker 6: hold on. Now find this shipbuilding industry is literally hundreds
Speaker 6: of times larger than ours is. We built seventy thousand
Speaker 6: tons of shipping and twenty twenty four I believe, and
Speaker 6: China built twenty six million tons of shipping. I mean,
Speaker 6: the numbers are standing. The Japanese mercier marine we sank
Speaker 6: to World War Two, it's about nine million times of
Speaker 6: shipping when the war started, and that we whittled it
Speaker 6: down to the essentially nothing by the end of the
Speaker 6: war kind of has right now more than three hundred
Speaker 6: million times of shipping. So it is the numbers are incredible.
Speaker 6: It's a very different situation.
Speaker 1: What can you tell us a little bit, because I've
Speaker 1: read bits and pieces of this that our like, our shipbuilding.
Speaker 2: Is really.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a travesty at this point, and it
Speaker 1: hasn't been addressed at all until recently.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's not going well, Midge put it bluntly. So
Speaker 6: there's a lot of different reasons for why that's the case.
Speaker 6: I mean, in general, in general, the United States, the
Speaker 6: defense industrial base in general is having lots of issues
Speaker 6: because we have turned into mostly a service economy, so
Speaker 6: we're necessarily the best anymore at building things. More specifically
Speaker 6: the submarines worst. You know, at the end of the
Speaker 6: Cold War. We add this huge drawdown in the size
Speaker 6: of the Navy at the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 6: and so while I can't state to specifics on surface ships,
Speaker 6: at that point, we basically stopped buying submarines for about
Speaker 6: a decade. We bought one or two submarines over over
Speaker 6: a decade, and so the workforce at the stift yards
Speaker 6: that build our submarines just collapsed and there was a
Speaker 6: lot of consolidation, and so we've really parted building submarines
Speaker 6: again in early two thousands, but we are still paying
Speaker 6: for that that kind of short sighted, huge contraction.
Speaker 3: In a submarine and industrial base. It's still taking time
Speaker 3: for us to do that.
Speaker 6: And what we have is happening right now is we
Speaker 6: have this at the same time that we're trying to
Speaker 6: build more attack submarines to be able to deal with
Speaker 6: China because they are one of the few survival platforms
Speaker 6: that can operate within range of China's and missile forces
Speaker 6: on a regular basis in wartime. We're also replacing all
Speaker 6: of our ballistic missile submarines bioclass, so they're being replaced
Speaker 6: with the Columbia class.
Speaker 3: So the blistic missile submarine that is.
Speaker 6: That is the nation's number one highest priority building program,
Speaker 6: so it can it crowds out the attack submarines for
Speaker 6: no reason because it has to be the priority because
Speaker 6: if you don't have nuclear deterrence on the other side,
Speaker 6: if you don't have a nuclear deturne youth rely on,
Speaker 6: then you're out of schwits at that point. So that's
Speaker 6: and and the submarines are the survivable part of our
Speaker 6: nuclear triad. The part that twenty four seven, three sixty five,
Speaker 6: there's multiple submarines out at sea are the nuclear weapons
Speaker 6: that will never be taken by surprise that have plenty
Speaker 6: of time to shoot back, and our infistration to know that.
Speaker 6: So there's this huge coming together of all of that together.
Speaker 6: So they're trying to build more attack submarines both for
Speaker 6: US and also now for our Australian allies on the
Speaker 6: Office program, in combination with the recapitalization and replacement of
Speaker 6: our Biot class submarines. Now, to be clear, the SSPN
Speaker 6: program is not an expansion. There may be there are
Speaker 6: sometimes the anti nuclear folks that will say, oh, we're
Speaker 6: expanding a nuclear tria.
Speaker 3: No we're not.
Speaker 6: We're replacing fourteen boats with twelve. Each boat only has
Speaker 6: sixteen tubes instead of twenty four the previous class. It's
Speaker 6: not an expansion. It's alike for like with fewer numbers,
Speaker 6: replacement of ships that just happen to be replaced as
Speaker 6: at forty plus years old.
Speaker 1: And are we do we have the manufacturing ability to
Speaker 1: do this? Are we outsourcing a lot of this? What
Speaker 1: is our government like, what's our capability and our plan?
Speaker 3: I mean, so there's lots.
Speaker 6: Lot there's really very complex plans for making this happen.
Speaker 6: There's not really much outsourcing in the sense of going
Speaker 6: overseas for any of this work. But they are building
Speaker 6: new factories like I think hostiles shipbuilding. This starting to
Speaker 6: open our new factory down on the Gulf coast that
Speaker 6: is going to start to build modules like those that
Speaker 6: go into submarines. So they aren't There is a huge
Speaker 6: amount of investment in the US industrial days to try
Speaker 6: to make to get these programs, keep trying to get
Speaker 6: them back on track. There a little bit behind them
Speaker 6: are more some more than others, and trying to get
Speaker 6: them fully Again. Things are a little different in the
Speaker 6: surface ship world. I think there that our destroyer program
Speaker 6: is generally coming along pretty well arly Burkmass to Shroyers.
Speaker 6: This is in contrast to the LCS Fulteral combat ship
Speaker 6: and the zoom Wall class, which both of which were disasters.
Speaker 6: Those were ships that a little different flavor than the submarine.
Speaker 6: Contraction is that the surface force. They kept building surface ships,
Speaker 6: but there was this decision the deft of the Cold War,
Speaker 6: We're going to build these ships that are going to
Speaker 6: operate close to shore, probably not against the peer competitor.
Speaker 3: So we're going to have this transformation. We're going to
Speaker 3: have these lightly crude.
Speaker 6: Highly automated multi purpose ships, and it was it was
Speaker 6: a master I mean lcs. We built two different classes
Speaker 6: in the ships, totally different classes, which made no sense.
Speaker 6: I think we made a lot of sacrifice is that
Speaker 6: they can go really fast even though they don't actually
Speaker 6: need to go faster their missions. And then the zoom
Speaker 6: wall classes, you know, we built three of them instead
Speaker 6: of building to thirty. They were so when you when
Speaker 6: you all of your development costs are crowded into three
Speaker 6: ships because you cancel the rest of the class, that
Speaker 6: each one's worth six or seven million dollars. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: then you and then you cancel. I don't think it's
Speaker 6: more than six or seven. It was just an incredible amount.
Speaker 6: So it just kind of always sideways. And and of
Speaker 6: course none of those ships are really, at least in
Speaker 6: their original form, are are really appropriated for a peer
Speaker 6: competitor like China.
Speaker 2: What's uh?
Speaker 5: You know, while we're on this topic of ships and shipbuilding,
Speaker 5: get a little bit deeper into the rocket issue that
Speaker 5: you you talked about how the rocket program is kind
Speaker 5: of the crown jewel of the Chinese military and that
Speaker 5: would be the you know, primary threat that I presume
Speaker 5: our navy would be facing in a potential war in
Speaker 5: the South China Sea, it would be one of them.
Speaker 6: I mean, so what the PLA Rocket Force does is
Speaker 6: so first of all, it wasn't its own service until
Speaker 6: twenty fifteen and twenty fifteen season paying elevated. The play
Speaker 6: Rocket Force would be equal to the other branches of
Speaker 6: the Chinese military.
Speaker 3: So it's equal now to the.
Speaker 6: Air Force, it's equal to the aren't to the ground
Speaker 6: force in the Navy. And what they've done, it's remarkable,
Speaker 6: is you know, twenty thirty years ago, all they had
Speaker 6: was nuclear weapons. So the Peli Rocket Force was kind
Speaker 6: of equivalent to our you know, we have ICBMs too,
Speaker 6: we have submarine blistic missile.
Speaker 3: They're all nuclear tipped. They're just for nuclear deterrence. Right,
Speaker 3: that was what they had.
Speaker 6: Then they also had a few very inaccurate conventional missiles,
Speaker 6: kind of like the scuds that we saw in the
Speaker 6: you know, in the Desert Storm.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: They they're not really useful against military targets. Maybe you
Speaker 6: get luck every once in a while and hits some pit,
Speaker 6: a barracks or something, but they're not they're conventional weapons.
Speaker 3: They're not if they're not accurate then' not nuclear then
Speaker 3: they can't really do that much.
Speaker 6: What China brought from the table over the last twenty
Speaker 6: years is apparent ballisticness like you're a single digit number
Speaker 6: of meters because we can see the impact points on
Speaker 6: their impact britages where they can punch a hole in
Speaker 6: the top of a building or aircraft shelter or whatever
Speaker 6: using a ballistic missile. That is a unique combination of
Speaker 6: a new combination of the capabilities because now it means
Speaker 6: it can reach out one thousand, two thousand and three
Speaker 6: thousand miles and strike targets with precidon. And this is
Speaker 6: to be clear, this is not what we saw from
Speaker 6: a RAM when they when they struck Gibert right. Ram's
Speaker 6: weapons were not very accurate. There weren't any of them.
Speaker 6: They didn't really as far as being I don't really
Speaker 6: have an ability to get around ballistic missile defenses.
Speaker 3: China is far more capable of that.
Speaker 6: Uh and appeally rocket forces is that's what they own
Speaker 6: and there's no there is no equivalent service in the
Speaker 6: US military that does that.
Speaker 3: We have.
Speaker 6: We see bms in the hand with the Air Force,
Speaker 6: but they're all nuclear tips the Army, the Army is
Speaker 6: now starting to have some long range conventional ballistic missiles,
Speaker 6: the jazz Tiphon system.
Speaker 3: You know, not people. The numbers are very small, so
Speaker 3: they've been in development.
Speaker 6: I think there's a few devloid operationally because the are
Speaker 6: very small numbers as opposed to the Elie Rocket Force
Speaker 6: five hundred intermediate range ballistic missiles that can reach law
Speaker 6: that are almost all conventional and they also have ANNI
Speaker 6: ship gave aboise.
Speaker 3: They also can be swapped for an A shipboard heads.
Speaker 6: They have thirteen hundred medium range ballistic missiles now, according
Speaker 6: to the DoD the last China Military Power Report, I
Speaker 6: can strikes all of Japan essentially and the Philippines.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, it's like, what else are these things?
Speaker 5: Former than a record basis an Asian right. I think
Speaker 5: we fired a couple of jazzm's that Uncle Asad just
Speaker 5: to proof that they work. But the number of them, yeah,
Speaker 5: aren't the numbers we have that are published. It's like
Speaker 5: in the hundreds of which ones the JAZZM.
Speaker 6: Well, Jasmin is an air launch uh christmastle, I believe
Speaker 6: in yourself airplanes, So they got those two?
Speaker 3: Trust me. The PLA Air Force has too.
Speaker 1: So out of curiosity, And something we've talked about on
Speaker 1: the show before is the level of Chinese espionage and
Speaker 1: our inability to stop it in the States and how
Speaker 1: really the Chinese don't have to They don't really have
Speaker 1: to have a strong development program because anything that's developed
Speaker 1: in the US is immediately in the hands of the Chinese.
Speaker 1: Is that something that you've seen, Is that something that
Speaker 1: you've spoken to, Is that something you believe?
Speaker 2: Can you give us like basically your take on that.
Speaker 3: So espionage certainly is a very real thing.
Speaker 6: We have seen in the last couple of years, We've
Speaker 6: seen multiple instances of in some cases service.
Speaker 3: Numbers that have been caught spine of the Chinese.
Speaker 6: Certainly there's been penetration of in particular of the US
Speaker 6: Department Fits contractors have been penetrated by by the Chinese,
Speaker 6: sort of a full typhoons thing that's happened more recently.
Speaker 6: And so for sure, Chinese faber penetration out.
Speaker 3: Of US organizations, and it's a huge problem.
Speaker 6: What I would say is becoming less of a problem
Speaker 6: is for many years we had this impression that they
Speaker 6: were mostly copying our stuff, right, so they have the
Speaker 6: the twenty helicopter looks kind of like a black cop
Speaker 6: They're CHANGE thirty five, which is kind of like F
Speaker 6: thirty five, although it's not the same.
Speaker 3: There are some major difference. It's not a copy, but
Speaker 3: it is similar looking. So they're adv cases.
Speaker 6: Where they were, and I'm quite frankly a lot of
Speaker 6: their weapons systems are at brushing derived where copies are
Speaker 6: Brushian weapons. That's becoming less true now, so China is
Speaker 6: now they're now innovating. They're doing their own things. You
Speaker 6: have the J thirty six, the new Delta Wing, huge
Speaker 6: long range strike fighter that doesn't look like anything we have.
Speaker 6: You have the the new invasion barges that make the
Speaker 6: guys that floating pier right like a bunch of tinker toys. Right.
Speaker 6: They have the Rent High Cruiser that's probably the most
Speaker 6: powerful surface combatant on the planet at this point. It
Speaker 6: doesn't look like anything in the US has. You have
Speaker 6: a new class of submarines, the Type forty one. This
Speaker 6: is one that the Department of Defense says, actually the
Speaker 6: first one is saying con Peer last year Rick Laumas.
Speaker 6: They also said it was like a hybrid nuclear diesel
Speaker 6: type propulsion system. First of it's kind of the world.
Speaker 6: You have the type seventy six do Amphibius assault ship
Speaker 6: that has a catapult. I've never seen that before. Anthems
Speaker 6: don't have catapults. And then anybody else's navy, so they
Speaker 6: can launch its own drones, have its own strike strike
Speaker 6: aircraft as part of the thirty's AsSalt ship.
Speaker 3: So there's there's a lot of things.
Speaker 6: And that's not of course, that's not to mention the again,
Speaker 6: hundreds of hundreds of anti ship ballistic missiles, which these
Speaker 6: have a few of those that they've they've lost in
Speaker 6: our ships that they were way behind the Chinese, I'm
Speaker 6: sure nowhere near sophisticated. So the Chinese invented that weapon system,
Speaker 6: nobody else on the planet that anti ship holistic missiles
Speaker 6: or they did.
Speaker 3: So the days of them just copying what we have
Speaker 3: that was true for a while, but it is very
Speaker 3: much less true now. And how do you think the us.
Speaker 1: UH can keep up or match because we used to
Speaker 1: be known for our innovation, right like we used to
Speaker 1: be on the cutting edge of military tech?
Speaker 2: Are we still have we fallen behind? Like what's your
Speaker 2: what's your sort of assessment of that?
Speaker 3: Would like to think that things are turning around some
Speaker 3: I mean we have.
Speaker 6: There's certainly tremendous effort that do do you try to
Speaker 6: innovate faster, to develop reformed acquisition processes, to prome ute.
Speaker 6: It's kind of incubators for new technologies, to try to
Speaker 6: to try to embrace uncrewed systems and smaller systems and
Speaker 6: more disperged and disperse operating forces, to try to get
Speaker 6: away from those small numbers of large bases and large platforms.
Speaker 6: So I think there is an effort a foot for sure.
Speaker 6: Is it as urgent as I think it needs to be.
Speaker 6: I don't think so. I think it's hard to get
Speaker 6: away from a lot of entrenched to be to some
Speaker 6: degree in trench officer communities that are kind of used
Speaker 6: to doing things one way, one way, as well as
Speaker 6: congressional interest groups and defense primes that are haven't you know,
Speaker 6: are invested in the things being the way they are.
Speaker 6: So I do worry that some cauthoritic and that will
Speaker 6: have to happen to really break break loasi of the
Speaker 6: old ways of doing business. But you know, we certainly
Speaker 6: can innovate. I mean, there are there are incredible things
Speaker 6: we're doing. I'm sure with AI and which we learning.
Speaker 6: There are big things for doing, for sure, But I mean, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's not all a good news story.
Speaker 3: That's that's that's for sure too.
Speaker 5: One of the topics that you mentioned that I'd like
Speaker 5: to make sure we hit up is that you had
Speaker 5: written an article where you found an impact range that's
Speaker 5: modeled off of an American naval facility. Can you tell
Speaker 5: us sort of what that what that was, and what
Speaker 5: it means strategically, like what the conclusion was from this?
Speaker 3: So yeah, this was again, this was during my time
Speaker 3: at CNIS the first time, and it's better. I'm back
Speaker 3: at CNAs.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to retired and now jumped sheer fellow at CNIS.
Speaker 6: So I have affiliation with them to this day. I
Speaker 6: re established after I retired from an eighty. But so
Speaker 6: what I found there was I was looking at Google
Speaker 6: Earth and I knew I was interested in the PLA
Speaker 6: Rocket Force and seeing what they were doing.
Speaker 3: And I found on the Internet the coordinates.
Speaker 6: To one of their impact ranges in Western China's where
Speaker 6: they this is, this is where they test the missiles
Speaker 6: on targets like that, theyically shoot them from eastern China.
Speaker 6: They go all over China and the impact in the
Speaker 6: desert in western China. And so I found the coordinates
Speaker 6: for one of these impact ranges, and I'm looking at
Speaker 6: it and I'm seeing some shapes and fake fake so
Speaker 6: the mock runway and airfield and you could see uh
Speaker 6: hardener aircraft shelters, and so you can see them testing
Speaker 6: against various targets that people had seen before, and that were,
Speaker 6: you know, kind of thing you would expect that they
Speaker 6: were working on. But then I saw this shape. It
Speaker 6: was like a long skate and a long shape and
Speaker 6: the multiple multiples of them, and I'm looking at it
Speaker 6: and I'm like, is that is that a ship? Is
Speaker 6: it like an ashorer? And so I magnered this thing
Speaker 6: and it's about five hundred and twenty feet long something
Speaker 6: like that. I wonder how big a US Army bird
Speaker 6: classes story areas it was basically the same size, like, oh,
Speaker 6: this is the ship. These are ship shaped targets that
Speaker 6: they're shooting at, presumably for like warhead. I would guess
Speaker 6: it was for warhead terminal seekers like the electroptical secrets
Speaker 6: orself some kind of image recognition thing, Okay, but it
Speaker 6: could be somebody else's destroyer too. The other countries have
Speaker 6: the shorters that size. Also, notice this black line that
Speaker 6: was going around these shapes, the kind of a black outline,
Speaker 6: And I thought something in that back of night, gad thought,
Speaker 6: it kind of reminds me of the Enter Harbor in Yakoska, Japan.
Speaker 6: That's the headquarters and the seventh Fleet is where a
Speaker 6: carrier's based out of. And so I looked on Google
Speaker 6: Earth and I found the Cosca and I looked at
Speaker 6: this impact range and they were a mirror image that
Speaker 6: the black line on the chart on the on the
Speaker 6: ground in western China was a mirror image of the
Speaker 6: Inner Harbor Ya Cosca. And you could get that articles
Speaker 6: and I wrote an article about that. The kind have
Speaker 6: a lot of attention. Look like look because if you
Speaker 6: think about it, they're practicing on multiple ships in a port. Well,
Speaker 6: how do you catch multiple ships in a port? You
Speaker 6: strike my surprise, right, that that's how you do that.
Speaker 6: Otherwise they're going to be at see if they have
Speaker 6: warning that attacks coming.
Speaker 3: So here they are practicing.
Speaker 6: Essentially, I'm just saying what looks like surprise attacks against US,
Speaker 6: specifically a US base. So that I've got a favorite
Speaker 6: of attention now and a couple of years after that,
Speaker 6: I also found that the same impact range mock up
Speaker 6: of an E three ax in aircraft. So it's a
Speaker 6: spitting image at an E three AX Uni stakeably that
Speaker 6: that airframe. We're the only country in the Western Pacific
Speaker 6: that operates those, So that was clearly about us. And
Speaker 6: then later a year or two later, I had a
Speaker 6: Japanese reporter reach out and say, hey, I found this
Speaker 6: airplane target. Can you tell me at a different impact
Speaker 6: range the same idea?
Speaker 3: You tell me?
Speaker 6: Who recognize it? And so I look at this and
Speaker 6: again it's an AX airplane, you know, with a big
Speaker 6: radar on top, big round rado. This only has two engines,
Speaker 6: which I thought, that's weird and ax Rix three.
Speaker 3: And I look at it and sure out through like
Speaker 3: one airplane. Only one airport warning aircraft.
Speaker 6: On the planet that has those, and that's the Japanese.
Speaker 6: Since the East seven to sixty seven, it's only operated
Speaker 6: by the Japanese. This kid was like a finance supporter
Speaker 6: for for Nicky Asia and he's just just interested in
Speaker 6: this stuff. And I said, oh, my friend, you've got
Speaker 6: a story at Grands here the Chinese are testing against
Speaker 6: the specifically Japanese target at their impact ranges, so you
Speaker 6: can see some interesting things checking those out.
Speaker 2: I know that you you know, your specialty is sort
Speaker 2: of the military side of it.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to, you know, kind of put
Speaker 1: you on the spot talking about economics or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But like some of the arguments we've heard against China
Speaker 1: utilizing some sort of forst strike or actually wanting to
Speaker 1: engage in near pure warfare, is there economic investment and
Speaker 1: reliance on the United States things like that. To the
Speaker 1: best of your ability or however you're comfortable, can you
Speaker 1: speak to what might be right wrong about that or
Speaker 1: what you're seeing in sort of China's movement towards a
Speaker 1: more military style you approach the United States.
Speaker 6: Well, so I would say that, I mean, I agree
Speaker 6: that I think if trying to get what it wanted
Speaker 6: and out fighting a war with the United States, they
Speaker 6: would want to do so for sure, I mean, I
Speaker 6: agree with this that ideally would be what they would
Speaker 6: want to do to accomplish their goals, you know, reunification
Speaker 6: with Taiwan or not that, not that Taiwan has ever
Speaker 6: been part of the people Republic of China.
Speaker 3: Mind you they wouldn't say that, but.
Speaker 6: Whether it's so, whether it's seizing Taiwan or whatever, they
Speaker 6: would they would prefer to do that without finding the
Speaker 6: United States. I think that, you know, one of the
Speaker 6: things they may hope by building up this really oodent
Speaker 6: and the goal to being intimidating force, is that I
Speaker 6: think they would probably hope that the US would choose
Speaker 6: not to get involved and we would decide to costs
Speaker 6: for too high.
Speaker 3: But I wouldn't take too much.
Speaker 6: Comfort from the idea that there could be an economic
Speaker 6: cost for them for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 3: One is that she didn't paying.
Speaker 6: As a leader, has made crystal clear that he's willing
Speaker 6: to take economic hits or China on China's behalf for
Speaker 6: the security interests of the CCP of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 6: You have seen him cut down Chinese billionaires to size.
Speaker 6: He refuses. They're apparently willing to just watch TikTok and
Speaker 6: go just disappear rather than sell it.
Speaker 3: There's a number of different signals.
Speaker 6: That we can see from now that he's not he's
Speaker 6: not he is a Marxist. He really is, like he's
Speaker 6: a believer, and if you give him the choice of well,
Speaker 6: I can unify with Taiwan actually if it works, and
Speaker 6: maybe I'd take a ten percent economic hit that I
Speaker 6: could gain back in a few years. He's going to
Speaker 6: take that hit. He doesn't care if it costs funds
Speaker 6: of dollars. It's he doesn't look at things. I think
Speaker 6: the same way as democratic leaders do. You have to
Speaker 6: remember also he's an authoritarian leader. He doesn't he doesn't
Speaker 6: have to pay attention and what does people want?
Speaker 3: To some degree likewise, we've seen the kind of seen
Speaker 3: this before.
Speaker 6: There were people in nineteen fourteen who wrote quite confidently
Speaker 6: that there was no possibility that the English and the
Speaker 6: Germans would go to war because the markets are too intertwined, right,
Speaker 6: everybody will lose too much money. And what happened anyways,
Speaker 6: I mean, so the Kaiser again I'm authoritary leader with
Speaker 6: a rising militaristic power, makes the decision to get involved
Speaker 6: in a war that's going to cost us people. But
Speaker 6: I mean he decided to do it anyway. So I
Speaker 6: do agree that there are lots of good reasons for
Speaker 6: them not to embark on military aggression. But they're putting
Speaker 6: pretty tremendous resources into building the capabilities the kind of
Speaker 6: capabilities you would build to be able to do it.
Speaker 1: And then you know, we talked a little bit before
Speaker 1: the show about the Belton Road project and things like that.
Speaker 1: Can you speak to that and how that aids their
Speaker 1: economic military expansion.
Speaker 3: So the thing you have to remember about China is that.
Speaker 6: The key underpinning, one of the key underpinnings for China's
Speaker 6: growth in military capabilities is what they call military simil
Speaker 6: fusion so MCS. So this is their idea that they're
Speaker 6: gonna they're going to leverage their civilian, industrial and scientific
Speaker 6: UH and infrastructure investments to also support military purposes.
Speaker 3: And were in the roads part of that.
Speaker 6: So people will say, for example, oh, look, the US
Speaker 6: has eight hundred bases around the world, which, by the way,
Speaker 6: that number is complete nonsense. So if you just go
Speaker 6: look on Twitter, look for me and bases and you'll
Speaker 6: see there that number the guy who did the study
Speaker 6: like counted like so for example, there was a dog
Speaker 6: cemetery that was kind of as a base. You actually
Speaker 6: go into the screensheet and think, I used to create
Speaker 6: that list like naval based blobbing like twelve bases. It's
Speaker 6: just completely ridiculous. Three hours lenders and basins eight hundred
Speaker 6: and even close. So anyways, they don't have that many
Speaker 6: official overseas military bases.
Speaker 3: They have one in Jibouty, they just built one into
Speaker 3: the Cambodians and Reincambodia.
Speaker 6: What they do have is probably dozens of these built
Speaker 6: and road facilities where they built a port, they built
Speaker 6: an airfield, they built a highway, and so you've got
Speaker 6: all these key facilities all around the world that are
Speaker 6: built by Chinese companies two Chinese standards. Who knows what
Speaker 6: else they baked into the to these facilities that are
Speaker 6: maybe monitoring surveillance and maybe they can shut trains down
Speaker 6: if they want to, maybe they can see what we're doing.
Speaker 6: So they are extensibly civilian, but they're they're built by
Speaker 6: Chinese companies. Which you have to remember is that in particular,
Speaker 6: Chinese state owned enterprises are not normal companies. They are
Speaker 6: arms in the CCP. And one way you've.
Speaker 5: See this that I always find interesting, the bigger ones
Speaker 5: also have an actual you know, PRC representative Communist Party representative,
Speaker 5: like in the corporationsone's.
Speaker 6: Gonna explain to seeing there are there was many times
Speaker 6: I filled different Chinese state ow and enterprises where if
Speaker 6: you go look at the English language version of the
Speaker 6: company website and this is like not a communication construction company,
Speaker 6: it's the construct company that's going to contract all over
Speaker 6: the world. They also are the guys that built the
Speaker 6: South China Sea Islands. You've got a costco shipping which
Speaker 6: has you know shipping. There are are ports all the time.
Speaker 6: You see these companies and you look at the English
Speaker 6: language version on the website, it looks totally normal. It's
Speaker 6: able built of the staliation plans in Kosovo. We you know,
Speaker 6: we're working on getting helping our customers. Here's our here's
Speaker 6: our fair men, vice chairman YadA YadA ad. It all
Speaker 6: looks very normal. Then if you go look at the
Speaker 6: Chinese Chinese language version of the website and just machine translated,
Speaker 6: there will be.
Speaker 3: An entire sections that aren't an named is like the.
Speaker 6: Party building section where it talks about the company news
Speaker 6: now is shooting and paining thought and party members did this,
Speaker 6: and party members did that. And the org chart they
Speaker 6: used to say chairman and vice chairman now shows party secretary,
Speaker 6: deputy party secretary. And it's like crystal clear that all
Speaker 6: of this company leadership is dual added as CCP members
Speaker 6: that the company is at they are an arm of
Speaker 6: the CCP, that they are committed, like their their leadership
Speaker 6: goes and no kidding, like goes to party meetings and
Speaker 6: studies shooting pain thought and I mean they are there.
Speaker 6: They are arms of the CCP. And for many of
Speaker 6: these stay on enterprise. So now it's not true of
Speaker 6: all Chinese companies, like some are just kind of private companies,
Speaker 6: but many of the ones we care about that are
Speaker 6: doing infrastructure, shipping. And as for they absolutely are dual
Speaker 6: purpose companies in many cases.
Speaker 1: And Thomas that to add to that, because this is
Speaker 1: something I think that it can be alarmist or at
Speaker 1: toro realist.
Speaker 2: And I don't know what the answer is.
Speaker 1: But Chinese company control of some of our ports, Chinese
Speaker 1: companies buying up, you know, land around military bases, are
Speaker 1: those innocuous? Are those just people participating in capitalism or
Speaker 1: are those things that we should be worried about?
Speaker 6: I'd say at both, I mean so there, I'm not
Speaker 6: I would never say like that every investment, every Chinese
Speaker 6: investment in the United States is is some threttning thing.
Speaker 3: It's not.
Speaker 6: I mean, there, let's face it, I mean, we we
Speaker 6: run a huge trade deficit with them. They get they
Speaker 6: have a lot of dollars in their hands, more.
Speaker 3: Than the flow the flows the other way.
Speaker 6: So those dollars have to come back, and so they
Speaker 6: use them to buy names over here, whether it's cheggery,
Speaker 6: bills or property or whatever. And I'm sure in many
Speaker 6: cases it may be innocent, but I think there's surely
Speaker 6: been plenty of cases where it doesn't seem, like I said,
Speaker 6: in a set like why did this happen? To buy
Speaker 6: property these these locations, you know, they can can get
Speaker 6: quite fishy.
Speaker 3: And for borts, I really do.
Speaker 6: I do think that there is a strategic plan on
Speaker 6: the part of China to dominate the port sector, to
Speaker 6: dominate shipbuilding. It's I mean, it's good for economically, but
Speaker 6: I think it's also it helps them in the long
Speaker 6: run on a very much a you know, we're going.
Speaker 3: To run the world someday. I mean, people have to understand, like.
Speaker 6: China is, by every measure but one, they are the
Speaker 6: premier maritime power in the history of humanity. They are
Speaker 6: by far the largest shipbuilders, They have the largest merchant marine,
Speaker 6: they have by far the world's largest fishing fleet by
Speaker 6: far the world's orangest coast guard. Now they now have
Speaker 6: a navy that has the most ships in the world,
Speaker 6: that has warships. In the US Navy, there's only one measure,
Speaker 6: and that is sheer naval tonnage, and that's because the
Speaker 6: average US Navy ship is bigger than the average Chinese
Speaker 6: Navy ship.
Speaker 3: But they are catching up there.
Speaker 6: So I've done the mass and over the last decade
Speaker 6: on a tonnage basis, China has also helped the US Navy.
Speaker 6: You buy it off fifty so they're they're catching out
Speaker 6: there soon.
Speaker 3: So they're the.
Speaker 6: World's largest trading nation. They have the most ships. We
Speaker 6: should expect they'd have all most of the ports too.
Speaker 6: It's just it's all connected.
Speaker 5: One of the things that you mentioned before we started
Speaker 5: the interview is that, you know, kind of the topic
Speaker 5: or a topic you're focused on, is, you know, the
Speaker 5: things we've been talking about, but leading into how do
Speaker 5: we avoid going to war with China? And so I'd
Speaker 5: like to kind of specifically put our finger on that
Speaker 5: topic and ask, you know, how do we deter war
Speaker 5: with China. I'd like to avoid World War three. I'm
Speaker 5: sure many other people would too, And how do you
Speaker 5: think we're doing with that? Like what grade would you
Speaker 5: give us so far as the United States trying to
Speaker 5: accomplish that?
Speaker 6: So yeah, so So what I had mentioned earlier was like,
Speaker 6: since I retired from the Navy, it's not like my
Speaker 6: number one goal is to do whatever I can to
Speaker 6: help avoid help us to avoid a war with giant
Speaker 6: because I think it would be, you know, one of
Speaker 6: the greatest disaster in the history of humanity. Probably maybe
Speaker 6: the Second World War might still be. Who knows, it'll
Speaker 6: be close super bad. So different people have a lot
Speaker 6: of different ways they that they might want to go
Speaker 6: about that. There are some folks they may call themselves
Speaker 6: the traders sometimes who would choose to maybe make accommodations
Speaker 6: with giants.
Speaker 3: You know, we'll let you have a sphere of influence.
Speaker 2: Panda huggers your words, What did you say, Panda Huggers.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm gonna take a face by that the
Speaker 6: Americans that represent recommend those kinds of measures, or that
Speaker 6: they're honest people that they will best.
Speaker 3: With the method.
Speaker 6: I don't think that's the way that I would prefer
Speaker 6: not to do that, in part because you don't know
Speaker 6: where they're going to stop. I mean, you've got to understand.
Speaker 6: And I don't mean like China's going to invade the
Speaker 6: United States. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm not
Speaker 6: worried about invade in the United States but the Chinese.
Speaker 6: But what I will say is that a world that's
Speaker 6: the way that we want it, where people speak out
Speaker 6: about human rights, that people speak out about democracy, that
Speaker 6: is not a world that's safe for the CCP.
Speaker 3: They don't want.
Speaker 6: Anyone in any other country to tell them. It's to
Speaker 6: tell them that it's wrong for them to not let
Speaker 6: their people vote, to tell them that it's wrong to
Speaker 6: suppress human rights.
Speaker 3: And then that's not the world I want to live in.
Speaker 3: Where we're not able to say those sorts of things.
Speaker 6: We don't have to guess that that's how they would
Speaker 6: be about it, because they already did it to Australia
Speaker 6: a few years ago. They inflicted trade restrictions in Australia
Speaker 6: because strength.
Speaker 3: Think tanks were saying nasking things. They basically have a
Speaker 3: list of demands that you need.
Speaker 6: Your politicians need to get their mouth shut and their
Speaker 6: think tanks to not speak up about this and that
Speaker 6: stop talking about the leaguers. I mean, Australia would have
Speaker 6: to not be a frequent ry wharf to be able
Speaker 6: to make the Chinese happy. We should expect to see
Speaker 6: that kind of thing continue at a greater scale.
Speaker 3: So that's not a world that I want to I
Speaker 3: want to live in.
Speaker 6: So I don't think that's the answer to avoid wars,
Speaker 6: to give them what they want, because we have to
Speaker 6: also remember that if China really does gain naval superiority,
Speaker 6: they will have the ability to coerce our allies. So
Speaker 6: we've got to remember all of our allies in the
Speaker 6: Western Pacific were all island nations. South Korea might as
Speaker 6: well be. They've got ocean on three sides and Kim Jong.
Speaker 3: Un on the north. They're all dependent upon maritime trade.
Speaker 6: So if China has naval superiority and cut off that trade,
Speaker 6: then their economies but the pleasure of the CCP, and that's.
Speaker 3: Not a well they want to be a part of.
Speaker 3: So how do I think we deter China.
Speaker 6: I think we have to when I said in testimony
Speaker 6: several times, is that we have to create uncertainty in
Speaker 6: the minds and that these China's leaders that their military
Speaker 6: action will succeed.
Speaker 3: That's the only way to insure them.
Speaker 6: You can't just inflict costs, like if you if you say, hey,
Speaker 6: we're gonna inflict costs and create off rames, so we're
Speaker 6: gonna yeah, then take those costs if you if you
Speaker 6: hang a price tag on Taiwan, you will probably pay it. Yeah,
Speaker 6: if he thinks it's it's gonna cost a trillion dollars
Speaker 6: with two trillion dollars or whatever, Hey, I don't think
Speaker 6: he would. If he knew that we were gonna stand aside,
Speaker 6: I think he would pay that price tag. So you
Speaker 6: can't just make it cost if you have to make
Speaker 6: them think we're not sure this is gonna work, that
Speaker 6: this may not work.
Speaker 3: So how do we do that?
Speaker 6: I think there's a lot of things you could do.
Speaker 6: I mean the good news for US is then invading
Speaker 6: Taiwan would be really hard. I mean, if the these
Speaker 6: assaults are very challenging, you have to have complete air
Speaker 6: enable superior ority to do it. You can't have anybody
Speaker 6: shooting at sure for these assault ships on their way in,
Speaker 6: and you can't have fighters coming in, so they have
Speaker 6: to have a lead securior ARDEA.
Speaker 3: To do it. So it's high bar to do that.
Speaker 6: So you know, I think it takes lots of survivable
Speaker 6: anti ship weapons, So inner ship cruise, missiles, minds and
Speaker 6: those things have to be survivable on a day to
Speaker 6: day basis, because kinda is obsessed with structing by surprise,
Speaker 6: and it's not talking just here about what I saw
Speaker 6: on Google Earth. If you read Chinese doctrine, go read
Speaker 6: the two thousand and six Sciences of Campaigns and just
Speaker 6: go control f and search for things like surprise suddenness.
Speaker 6: They mentioned it dozens of times and the documents. They
Speaker 6: are obsessed with structing by surprise. So if all your
Speaker 6: missile brought for all the parking lot somewhere, guess what,
Speaker 6: you're probably not going to get to use them fifteen
Speaker 6: minutes into the war. If you have if you're counting
Speaker 6: on minefields, if you haven't already laid those minefields, you're
Speaker 6: never going to get to lay them. You know, like
Speaker 6: people say, well, say what was my that Taiwan is straight? Well,
Speaker 6: so like Taiwan has bought mind Lane ships. They look cool,
Speaker 6: they go fast, whatever. But if China has decided they're
Speaker 6: going to invade Taiwan, they're not going to watch the
Speaker 6: Taiwanese lay the minefield. That's going to stop them. So
Speaker 6: all of this stuff has to happen at peace time.
Speaker 6: Our air bases, our aircraft to be dispersed on a
Speaker 6: day to day basis, or they will be destroyed on
Speaker 6: the ram. China has more than enough missiles to do
Speaker 6: it hardly, because we have not barned our air bases
Speaker 6: than they have and just released the whole report a
Speaker 6: couple of months ago about air based hardening. They built
Speaker 6: hundreds of new partner shelters at their air bases. We
Speaker 6: built twenty two in the whole region, and most of
Speaker 6: them are out of range.
Speaker 3: I did some enough. China has.
Speaker 6: More enough concrete, building hardened shelters, adding grand aria at
Speaker 6: the air bases, adding runways that you could you could
Speaker 6: pave a four lane interstate highway from Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: To Chicago as over the last ten years that same
Speaker 3: webs they've done.
Speaker 6: So. So those are the kinds of things we need
Speaker 6: to do to be ready to prevent this conflict from
Speaker 6: breaking out.
Speaker 2: The So in addition to just the.
Speaker 1: Hard aspects of a warfare, when you look at the
Speaker 1: soft at the propaganda at China, is I think really
Speaker 1: successful sort of propaganda efforts within the United States and whatnot,
Speaker 1: whether it's through social media or whatever, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are lining up in support of China
Speaker 1: and support of fifteen minutes cities and things like that.
Speaker 1: Are there ways that we can combat that without without
Speaker 1: giving up who we are, without giving up the First Amendment,
Speaker 1: without you know, becoming country that we don't want to be.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean you can start, well, for example, you
Speaker 6: can start with the enforcement of TikTok Dan, so not
Speaker 6: having a Chinese Chinese company with directions from Beijing and
Speaker 6: controlling the algorithm that decides what people are going to
Speaker 6: see and their social media feed.
Speaker 3: That because to me, that's what this is all about.
Speaker 6: Like, I don't care about China getting I mean, it's bad,
Speaker 6: but I'm not worried about China getting personal information about
Speaker 6: Americans from TikTok Like they don't they don't really care
Speaker 6: about And I'm not that worried about them knowing your
Speaker 6: you know, where.
Speaker 3: You live or whatever.
Speaker 6: What I care about is what is if China is
Speaker 6: the one deciding what it is that you're going to
Speaker 6: see and what you know. So so if you have
Speaker 6: a crisis breakout that China, you know, China being the
Speaker 6: one to decide what messaging entire the American public is getting.
Speaker 6: That is the last thing we want to have happening.
Speaker 6: And that's why it TikTok cannot be controlled from China.
Speaker 6: We cannot let that happen like one of the major
Speaker 6: sources of information for our people. That's step one. So
Speaker 6: let's let's enforce the law that was already passed. That's
Speaker 6: already Oh, by the way, these folks haven't notice. I
Speaker 6: did the math yesterday. The seventy five day extension that
Speaker 6: President Trump gave them run down on Saturday.
Speaker 3: So we'll see what happens with that point.
Speaker 6: So that's that's one thing we can do. We need
Speaker 6: to to force you know, foreign agent registration requirements. You
Speaker 6: know that some of that was starting to happen.
Speaker 3: People shouting to get in trouble for that. That's good.
Speaker 3: We can't we can't shut down forwarders coming.
Speaker 6: There a thing I don't that's not I don't think
Speaker 6: that's a good idea for a future for you know,
Speaker 6: almost so much of our best innovators and the people
Speaker 6: to drive the industry that allow it gives us the
Speaker 6: income we need to buy you know, to fund our
Speaker 6: defense a lot of these immigrants.
Speaker 3: So I don't want to someone to do that. But
Speaker 3: it is a real challenge. And but we faced the
Speaker 3: challenge for form right.
Speaker 6: I mean during the Cold War, we had a we
Speaker 6: had an open society relatively compared to the Soviets, and
Speaker 6: we sold one.
Speaker 3: Right, So it is it is possible.
Speaker 1: What do you how do you feel about like, for instance,
Speaker 1: you know American you know, high power American lawyers representing
Speaker 1: like DGI drones against the government and.
Speaker 2: Things like that.
Speaker 1: Is that part of the American process? Is this something
Speaker 1: that needs to be looked at more as a national
Speaker 1: security issue?
Speaker 3: I never tell me if the playership is everything, I mean,
Speaker 3: every every entity.
Speaker 6: In the United States, you know, that's the way it's
Speaker 6: system is supposed to work.
Speaker 3: And no matter what you did or that, you deserve
Speaker 3: the right to a lawyer.
Speaker 6: I mean ever since John since John Adams, you know,
Speaker 6: defended the guys, the three the British soldiers that that
Speaker 6: in the Boston massacre. That's a key part of who
Speaker 6: we are as Americans. And so I don't and there's Manussary.
Speaker 6: I want to go out to dinner with the guys
Speaker 6: that do that right, and I think they have they
Speaker 6: have a legal right to pay people to defend them
Speaker 6: in court. Uh, you know, but but I think there
Speaker 6: there's can't and should be limits on and what you know,
Speaker 6: I know there are I'm trying to get anyone here
Speaker 6: with legal legal stuff. You know, there could obviously should
Speaker 6: be some limits on foreign money being used to conduct
Speaker 6: influence operations in the United States. I'll just I'll believe it.
Speaker 3: That fair enough.
Speaker 5: But Thomas, thank you very much for this interview and
Speaker 5: sharing your your expertise with us. Is there anything that
Speaker 5: I didn't ask? Do we and do we have questions
Speaker 5: for Thomas from Marcello?
Speaker 8: Are there any differences in the data day and culture
Speaker 8: from attack versus missile subs?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Uh yeah, I mean that's it's a very different mission.
Speaker 6: I mean, so you know, as posting muscle subs had
Speaker 6: to say fie with pride, right, So your your your
Speaker 6: job is to remain undetected, to be so that you're
Speaker 6: available and survivable to be able to launch missiles. So
Speaker 6: that's a bit different than attack submarines, which are you know,
Speaker 6: forward leaning, forward deployed in many cases multipurpose and sometimes
Speaker 6: you might get detected doing it. Like if you start
Speaker 6: sinking shifts, you're probably getting there's a good chance you
Speaker 6: may be detected doing it. So it's a little different
Speaker 6: mission set. I think attack submarines are kind of a
Speaker 6: little more a little more swash buckling so to speak,
Speaker 6: you know, pointy end of the stick type platforms. However,
Speaker 6: doesn't mean that being an SSPN stator is easy. It's
Speaker 6: you know, obviously Nickla weapons are a very zero definct.
Speaker 6: Has to be one hundred percent right every time I
Speaker 6: have the mission, so it's certainly enormously important. One key
Speaker 6: difference between the platforms is that missile boats have two crews,
Speaker 6: so you have a blue crew and a golf crew.
Speaker 3: That allows the shift to be at sea more of
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 6: So basically come in and swap out the cruise, do
Speaker 6: some mainta men, swap out the cruise, and so one
Speaker 6: crew gets the wave goodbye to the boat. It goes
Speaker 6: out to sea with the other crew on board. That's
Speaker 6: a big quality of life difference, I'll tell you that much.
Speaker 6: You know, to be in that off group period when
Speaker 6: you don't have a boat that you're worrying about all
Speaker 6: the time, that is a that is a significant improvement,
Speaker 6: which is why you know, when I finished my first
Speaker 6: tour Division Offer tour, before we sign up to go
Speaker 6: back to see I love it.
Speaker 3: Then riding that was long to this is to ben
Speaker 3: because I've been I've been a.
Speaker 6: Road hard and put away wet on my first tour
Speaker 6: and I wanted that in a little bit more relaxed lifestyle.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I bet another one from m Corbon. What were
Speaker 8: the best and worst meals on the boats?
Speaker 2: Let's see.
Speaker 3: So there's kind of a routine to get in.
Speaker 6: So you have uh, Friday after Friday lunch of sliders,
Speaker 6: you know, so burgers and fries and chocolate chip cookies
Speaker 6: and ice cream. Saturday nights generally pizza night, and so
Speaker 6: you'll sometimes like the beefs will make the pizza.
Speaker 3: Sometimes the officers will make the pizza.
Speaker 6: You know. Sometimes we'll have different folks make the pizzas
Speaker 6: and it's generally quite good. Oftentimes Saturday night's poker night.
Speaker 6: You know, some guys will play poker in the wardrobe.
Speaker 6: Sundays sometimes surf and turf, so you know, grab legs
Speaker 6: and and steak generally generally staked dinner. Sunday night and
Speaker 6: then talk for Tuesday. You know, you got faidas and
Speaker 6: then tacos and went on Tuesday. It's very easy to
Speaker 6: get fat on the Submary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we had always because I
Speaker 1: was a hard hat diver when we dove on some
Speaker 1: of the subs, and one of the things that they
Speaker 1: had said is it like the chow on subs was
Speaker 1: always top notch and they brought in the best like
Speaker 1: cooks that the Navy had to offer, just because it
Speaker 1: was a.
Speaker 2: Major morale point. Would you agree or disagree with that?
Speaker 6: I do think the food is my understanding, is quite
Speaker 6: a bit better, but you think the reasons might be
Speaker 6: a little different.
Speaker 3: One is you just get more money per person.
Speaker 6: So because you get a certain amount of food money
Speaker 6: that the supply offser can spend on ingredients for a person,
Speaker 6: and it's more on some breeds. So is this considered
Speaker 6: be a hard chip duty so you're supply out there
Speaker 6: is a little more money to spend on the ingredients.
Speaker 3: That's part of it.
Speaker 6: But I would say probably one of the biggest reasons
Speaker 6: why the food is better is because it's all the
Speaker 6: same food for everyone. So on a surface ship, for example,
Speaker 6: right the crew could you know, you have like an
Speaker 6: officer's mess, and you have a chiefe mess, and you
Speaker 6: have a listed mess, and so it's different cooks looking
Speaker 6: different food for the different groups. You know, submarine, it's
Speaker 6: the same food. So if if the food sucks, the
Speaker 6: captain eats the food.
Speaker 3: That sucks and that forgets to hear about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a sub there's no officers mess.
Speaker 3: There is an officer's mess, but it's the same food.
Speaker 3: So it's literally so it's the it's it's coming off
Speaker 3: the same line.
Speaker 6: It's all that's happening is that it goes into a
Speaker 6: little soilber dish, you know, and you've got a good
Speaker 6: guy that brings it into the wardroom and you pass
Speaker 6: it around.
Speaker 1: See.
Speaker 6: The only difference is that's probably tolder is the officer
Speaker 6: food as opposed to coming hot off the line.
Speaker 3: But it is the same food.
Speaker 6: So it's that what the E three is eating is
Speaker 6: bad than what the captain's eating is bad too, and
Speaker 6: then correct corrective action will be taken.
Speaker 2: Fascinating.
Speaker 3: That's probably the biggest deck, right thing.
Speaker 8: We got a couple more from sim which is more
Speaker 8: realistic quote unquot portrayal of life on a submarine Crimson
Speaker 8: Tide or the Hunt for Red October or Boot.
Speaker 6: So you know, they're kind of all a little different.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't think I mean, how far Otilbrain
Speaker 6: doesn't really portray life that much on a submarine. Well,
Speaker 6: you do have a John b who is an E
Speaker 6: three I think mounting off to the chief of the boat,
Speaker 6: which is probably not very accurate in that sense. Crimson Tide,
Speaker 6: I mean, there was a lot of there's some realism
Speaker 6: there some of them obviously, some of them wasn't not
Speaker 6: all realistic, I mean, and things have changed.
Speaker 5: In Stiff Yeah, Like like Denzel is jogging in the
Speaker 5: submarine for PT at one point, isn't he?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you can't.
Speaker 6: You can't run around them. There's a there's a tread
Speaker 6: they have a treadmill. So and actually that rewinded that
Speaker 6: that's one of the benefits to the SSPM.
Speaker 3: There's a lot more.
Speaker 6: Exercise equipment because says the end way roomy or there's
Speaker 6: so much larger ship, so you have like a little
Speaker 6: gym in the thisipal part where you have like a treadmill.
Speaker 6: Eleptical on a blist on attack submarine you know, your
Speaker 6: treadmill is outboard. Their reduction tears in your room and
Speaker 6: there's like a pipe right in front of your face,
Speaker 6: and you know you run in trying that it's it's
Speaker 6: it's a much more pramped spaces.
Speaker 3: But I don't know, I'm not sure that answers the question.
Speaker 3: I mean, my.
Speaker 6: Understanding of probably the most realistic submary movie is probably
Speaker 6: dust Boot. Now I wasn't on a on a World
Speaker 6: War II submarine, so I know, but my impression is
Speaker 6: that's probably the most accurate.
Speaker 2: Cool from Big Tuna, which is hilarious.
Speaker 8: What dynamic of subsurface nuclear warfare has grown significantly in
Speaker 8: the last decade.
Speaker 2: What's fallen off?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 6: And I think I think as in if you and
Speaker 6: many other parts of the military imprud systems are becoming
Speaker 6: much bigger deal. You know, those aren't nuclear, they're well
Speaker 6: at least not of ours is a record one that's
Speaker 6: a very nuclear power. But are u these are all
Speaker 6: they're all electronic form deep all electric. So the the
Speaker 6: growing part of undercive warfare is is those and also
Speaker 6: UAVs that could be launched by submarties. So the ability
Speaker 6: to send you a these up to get targeting.
Speaker 3: Information or whatever that being said.
Speaker 6: In some ways there's not quite as much change as
Speaker 6: in other parts of the of the military. So for example,
Speaker 6: if you read about quad coppers in Ukraine, you red
Speaker 6: an arcle what those and ninety nine percent of them
Speaker 6: only go about twenty kilometers. You know that they can
Speaker 6: reach that far because they're limited by linus and communication.
Speaker 6: So most of what you see isn't very long range.
Speaker 6: If you look at the ocean, twenty kilometers is not
Speaker 6: very far. It's not much of the Pacific Ocean quite
Speaker 6: frankly in the submrainforest and also in the surface. Maybe
Speaker 6: we've dealt with drones for generations. We call them an
Speaker 6: I shipped cruise missiles. That's kind of your original you know,
Speaker 6: one way attack drone or homing torpedoes. There's a kind
Speaker 6: of a U U attitude, so to speak. So that's
Speaker 6: probably the biggest area of change I would say is
Speaker 6: like crew.
Speaker 2: Systems, all right, we have one more from a tax squirrel.
Speaker 8: What role do autonomy autonomous platforms from companies like an
Speaker 8: Agil General Dynamics play. Are they a danger to our
Speaker 8: own forces or allies? Examples such as Darbu's thing right.
Speaker 6: Uh so, if so in terms of the danger, I mean,
Speaker 6: so the Chinese are definitely working on crew systems in
Speaker 6: a big way, dance some pretty advanced platforms that they're
Speaker 6: working on. Longer jaircrafts us have been spotted on the pier.
Speaker 6: There's not a lot of details at this point, but
Speaker 6: China has a very robust well, I mean, they are
Speaker 6: the world's more more drum insact first by far, I
Speaker 6: mean like far in a way they build most of
Speaker 6: the world's drones.
Speaker 3: So in that sense, they're.
Speaker 6: Going to be a superpower in the in in that
Speaker 6: kind of that kind of drone warfare. How much of
Speaker 6: a threat are they? So if we're talking about the
Speaker 6: undersea in particular, I think sometimes the threat from you
Speaker 6: these two submarines can be a little can be a
Speaker 6: little overblown, maybe because it's just physics. I mean, so
Speaker 6: unless you have a nuclear power plant, so if you submerge,
Speaker 6: you're on a battery or you're running a diesel engine.
Speaker 6: So there's no drone on the planet that's going to
Speaker 6: keep up with a nuclear submarine for any significant distance.
Speaker 6: So while drones might be a threat like close to
Speaker 6: a work for submarines and any kind of a glorified mind.
Speaker 1: Open ocean not really a threat, Thomas, what do you
Speaker 1: think would be you know, sort of in a a
Speaker 1: sci fi corner kind of futuristic idea, What do you
Speaker 1: think would be an interesting and beneficial way for the
Speaker 1: US Navy to move, whether it's subject can go deeper,
Speaker 1: subs that can go longer, weapon you know, ideas that
Speaker 1: maybe that aren't practical or or haven't been experimented on yet,
Speaker 1: but ideas that would be beneficial to us.
Speaker 6: Well, and I'll tell you I wrote a whole artful
Speaker 6: about this in twenty seventeen. So I proposed and I
Speaker 6: still think it's a good idea. And all you av
Speaker 6: aircraft carrier, So this is and what I mean by
Speaker 6: all I don't mean to carry itself is unprude. I
Speaker 6: just mean that all that carries is on fruit aircraft
Speaker 6: because I think that I don't think that drone, you know,
Speaker 6: UAVs at C are ever going to get where they
Speaker 6: could be as long as they're as long as the carrier. Well,
Speaker 6: I don't think I'll ever get more will be as
Speaker 6: long as it's bringing along all the liabilities associated with
Speaker 6: mand aviation.
Speaker 3: So like imagine that's a good way to pay.
Speaker 6: Imagine ship this kind of you know, much smaller twenty thirty,
Speaker 6: forty thousand times. It's kind of stealthy looking, and all
Speaker 6: the drones are inside of it, and instead of having
Speaker 6: a regular flight deck, like you're hurling these things out
Speaker 6: off of catapult, you know, with g forces that no
Speaker 6: human pilot could ever withstand.
Speaker 3: Let's say they come in and they land. You know,
Speaker 3: they can land tail.
Speaker 6: First because they were computer controlled and can land in
Speaker 6: ways that human pilots couldn't really do. It's like they
Speaker 6: land tail first, then they kind of go onto like
Speaker 6: an assembly line inside the ship. You could send them
Speaker 6: on one way missions, you know, double the range if
Speaker 6: you had to. You could keep them aloft up in
Speaker 6: the air for far longer than human pilots could could
Speaker 6: could could take, could deal with. So I think that
Speaker 6: is that hasn't been my idea of last year's is
Speaker 6: let's build a carrier that is one percent optimized for
Speaker 6: my crewed aircraft. It really takes advantage of them. What
Speaker 6: kind of all the liabilities associated with manned aircrafts? Well,
Speaker 6: guess who went and built a drone carrier?
Speaker 3: The Chinese? Difficult, less complete, not not not quite what
Speaker 3: I propose.
Speaker 6: It looks like they're mostly for exercise support, but they
Speaker 6: have built all u AV carriers.
Speaker 1: Interesting and when it comes to submersibles, if we got
Speaker 1: rid of the human uh you know, vulnerability to pressure,
Speaker 1: if we could flood compartments with you know, with water whatnot?
Speaker 2: Are are there electronics?
Speaker 1: Are there systems that could survive at deeper depths and
Speaker 1: we can imagine and sort of create the same sort
Speaker 1: of capabilities.
Speaker 6: They're definitely advantages to be had with you use these,
Speaker 6: one of them being like, you don't have to have
Speaker 6: a pressure ball, it's right, I mean generally you of
Speaker 6: these do you still have a pressure ball, you know,
Speaker 6: to heavy electronics and stuff like that inside it, but
Speaker 6: it's much smaller.
Speaker 3: Most of the boat could be free flood.
Speaker 6: It doesn't have to the same safety requirements the same
Speaker 6: you know, you don't have to spend as much money
Speaker 6: to do the same thing. Which is why if you know,
Speaker 6: there are some reasons they're very good. They can be
Speaker 6: very good for it. They'd go deeper than an advanced
Speaker 6: submarine can go. They could be used for mining missions
Speaker 6: that you would never send a human you know, a
Speaker 6: man submarine in for and shallow water, you can get
Speaker 6: into riskier places.
Speaker 3: So to be clear, there are lots of advantages to
Speaker 3: use these.
Speaker 6: I just think that I think there are some people
Speaker 6: that have these ideas that they're going to be joined
Speaker 6: on a submarine warfare the shoot torpedoes and all that
Speaker 6: kind of stuff, And I think that's a long long
Speaker 6: way to do that kind of thing, because submarine, like
Speaker 6: just just facifying what you're listening to can be really
Speaker 6: really hard, even with lots of humans with experience and
Speaker 6: a room full of computers. I mean, there's just there's
Speaker 6: just a lot of noise in the ocean, right, you'd
Speaker 6: be surprised just a harder and even know what you're
Speaker 6: looking at sometimes as opposed to I can very much
Speaker 6: see like you've got some this UV out there.
Speaker 3: Let's say it's got tomawoks on board.
Speaker 6: You know, you send it a message, shoot at this target,
Speaker 6: this time, this target package. You know.
Speaker 3: I don't think there's any engineering miracles required to do that.
Speaker 6: That sounds like something that could be do with HORB
Speaker 6: go to this place, drop minds in this location, or
Speaker 6: you know, hang out here and if somebody drives by,
Speaker 6: come up and send a message. You know, I could
Speaker 6: see a lot of things that could be very useful.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating.
Speaker 6: And so.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want to make this political, and
Speaker 1: I'm not like here to promote must but I'm going
Speaker 1: to say that, you know, a private company was able
Speaker 1: to do something that a long standing government contractor was
Speaker 1: not able to do with the rescue is And you know,
Speaker 1: when we've talked, like Alex Holng's about these small companies
Speaker 1: creating these you know, hypersonics and things like that, is
Speaker 1: the government willing to look at these companies that are
Speaker 1: not like the traditional defense contractors and take on board
Speaker 1: what they are able to do or what their ideas
Speaker 1: are or are is that that sort of military industrial
Speaker 1: complex is so.
Speaker 2: Firm at this point that it's tough for them to
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: I mean, there we certainly have seen some new entrants.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, nobody ever heard of angerill before,
Speaker 6: you know, not that long ago, so there's a lot
Speaker 6: about it.
Speaker 3: I think there are a fair number of other smaller
Speaker 3: startups that are.
Speaker 6: Working on some pretty interesting stuff, and I mean it's
Speaker 6: it's a challenge for sure, and the trime.
Speaker 3: I mean at their place, I mean, this is part
Speaker 3: of thee.
Speaker 6: Yet again, one of those post cod War things is
Speaker 6: if you look at there used to be like thirty
Speaker 6: or forty major defense contractors and now there's five. So
Speaker 6: if we can get those numbers back cups on them
Speaker 6: and get and get some more new blood, I think
Speaker 6: that would be a good thing.
Speaker 3: You know, is there a model in SpaceX.
Speaker 6: Let's be clear, space X is part of it too, right,
Speaker 6: I mean there's death the military applications for a lot
Speaker 6: of that kind of lash stuff that SpaceX brings to
Speaker 6: the table, and it's very much a defense contractor. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so you know, good good. You know Tesla bring new
Speaker 6: capabilities to military vehicles.
Speaker 3: I can I can. I can imagine they really could.
Speaker 3: I mean, they're amazing vehicles.
Speaker 6: So again I say again that I think that necessity
Speaker 6: will be the mother invention in many ways. I think
Speaker 6: we're I think we're now facing such a severe rent
Speaker 6: from China and hopefully hopefully it will drive us forward
Speaker 6: to make some progress and these sorts of things.
Speaker 1: Are you seeing that in the government side, Republican Democrat
Speaker 1: regardless that that military, like, are people starting to wake
Speaker 1: up to this threat?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I mean I think Congress, we have a pretty solid
Speaker 6: by by partisan understanding.
Speaker 3: Of the threat. You know, different people have different ideas
Speaker 3: about how to deal with it, obviously, sure, and.
Speaker 6: But I mean I certainly in every every testimony that
Speaker 6: I've ever given, you should Senate Formulations Committee or the
Speaker 6: US China Commission.
Speaker 3: I mean, I get generally the same. It doesn't feel
Speaker 3: any different what's coming from both sides, right, And there's.
Speaker 6: There's seems certainly certainly with the like folks like in
Speaker 6: the SASK and the and the Intel committees, like they're
Speaker 6: getting too details and there is no ignoring the details
Speaker 6: once you understand them. You know, there there are people
Speaker 6: who are not aware of the China threat because they're
Speaker 6: just not aware of it. Once you understand the scale,
Speaker 6: once you understand the numbers, it's no denying.
Speaker 3: I mean like that, that's like I.
Speaker 6: Tell people, like sometimes some people may think I'm alarmist.
Speaker 6: I give facts, provide facts. If the facts are alarming,
Speaker 6: then they are they are what they are.
Speaker 2: Right, tom Where can people go to find you and
Speaker 2: find your work?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 6: As I said, I'm a junk c or fellow the
Speaker 6: CNA S so my my work is so of it's
Speaker 6: on their website. You know for the various articles I've
Speaker 6: been quoted in or whatnot. You'll see me some from
Speaker 6: time to time in various media. Let's be my interview
Speaker 6: for this and that you can lead about the Chinese military.
Speaker 6: I on Twitter, T shirt gret three. That's where I
Speaker 6: do most of my talking, and that's where I part fampions,
Speaker 6: where I do a lot of my what to find
Speaker 6: things I take, I talk about them there first. So
Speaker 6: the new things I see in Chinese shipyards, you think
Speaker 6: about seeing them on marine traffic or whatever is going on.
Speaker 6: Sometimes the returning my other people, there's kind of about
Speaker 6: a labor saving device for me is rather than have
Speaker 6: to go write an article, I'm just on Twitter and
Speaker 6: then if somebody wants to write an article about if
Speaker 6: you can.
Speaker 3: So that's probably my my number one outlet.
Speaker 6: I also most often when I do write articles, you'll
Speaker 6: find them in a War on the Rocks. If you
Speaker 6: get to war the Rocks dot com and look under
Speaker 6: my name, you'll see all the articles that are written
Speaker 6: for them, which are.
Speaker 3: Were most of my articles have been. Tom.
Speaker 5: Thanks, thank you so much for spending your evening with
Speaker 5: us and walking us through a whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker 5: I didn't really know anything about before. Yes, fascinating. We
Speaker 5: really appreciate your expertise.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you, Jim. I appreciate your interest. I mean
Speaker 3: I watched I watched some of your videos and I know,
Speaker 3: just in frame different content than you you typically have.
Speaker 6: And I hope, I'm I hope I've kept your kept
Speaker 6: your viewers interested in something that's pretty different than than
Speaker 6: than really really quite frankly exciting and exotic things you
Speaker 6: guys usually easily talked about.
Speaker 2: This is pretty exciting and exotic.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think too.
Speaker 2: It's all new to me too.
Speaker 5: I learned so much when I talk to guys like
Speaker 5: you that are kind of outside that you know framework.
Speaker 5: So yeah, again, thank you Tom and everyone else. We
Speaker 5: will see you again next week. Okay, thanks Jelen, appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Let me get you care.
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