Speaker 1: Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander and
Speaker 1: Eagle One from Eagle Speak at seer Shure your home
Speaker 1: for a discussion of national security issues and all things
Speaker 1: maritime and welcome aboard everybody. This is the aforementioned Sho
Speaker 1: along with Egle One here today and we are live
Speaker 1: fun little twist today. Because I'm a bear of little brain,
Speaker 1: some of those who are checking the email are actually
Speaker 1: getting the link as a guest, so we can see
Speaker 1: Slugo and Mark and Steven their early adopters before I
Speaker 1: change that link. So we look like we have lots
Speaker 1: of guests, but it's just Mark and I today in
Speaker 1: the audience link. Thank goodness, I hope went out to
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people on X.
Speaker 2: But that's all right. You're all welcome aboard.
Speaker 1: But we are live right now unless you are listening
Speaker 1: to the podcast, and today we are having our September
Speaker 1: free for all, which means that our topic list is
Speaker 1: so open that before the show and Slugo, who was
Speaker 1: the first guy across the unsecured door, no, we didn't
Speaker 1: even coordinate our topics ahead of time, but that means
Speaker 1: it's open board. And if you're with us Live. We'd
Speaker 1: like to invite you to go into the chat room.
Speaker 1: Does Mark and I pick up the subjects that we
Speaker 1: find the most interesting today. If there's a topic you
Speaker 1: would like for us to address to, whether it's on
Speaker 1: our list or not, we'd like to be invite you
Speaker 1: to go in there and just pop it down there.
Speaker 1: Mark and I will both be watching the chat room
Speaker 1: as it scrolls along for those that wish to play,
Speaker 1: and if you're just here to listen, that's great. So hey, Mark,
Speaker 1: good afternoon. Let's see whether there's surprises.
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is this is a lot of
Speaker 3: fun actually, So I hope, I hope slug Oh and
Speaker 3: Steven and Paul enjoy their enjoy their status as guests.
Speaker 2: Well, they've all been.
Speaker 1: With us for a regular basis, especially Paul, so they're
Speaker 1: they're more than welcome to you know, I was I
Speaker 1: was talking to somebody who were remained nameless who was
Speaker 1: interested in, you know, starting a podcast. I've talked to
Speaker 1: a few people through the year, so he just wanted
Speaker 1: a few hints and he was really kind of concerned
Speaker 1: about production and careful planning and didn't know whether he
Speaker 1: to do it live and you'll appreciate this. Maybe you
Speaker 1: have a better answer than I do. But he's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: how do you deal with with going live? You must
Speaker 1: do a lot of preparation and scripting. And I literally
Speaker 1: just laughed, Well, we've been doing this is twenty ten
Speaker 1: and we we actually just literally make it up.
Speaker 2: No, you can't just do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, you don't have any control. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's the way we do it. It saves us whole lot
Speaker 1: of time. So this is kind of the pinnacle that
Speaker 1: it keeps you humble. Lets you know that you never
Speaker 1: know what's going to happen on midrets.
Speaker 3: Nope, so let's see. You suggested talking about the red
Speaker 3: sea to begin with, So start off with the red seat.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, in honor of our guests last two weeks ago,
Speaker 1: the last time we had a show, sal Marcagliano, he
Speaker 1: had a rather unfortunate exchange over on X with some
Speaker 1: of the usual left wing trolls on there who just
Speaker 1: they don't contribute, They just like to throw throw mudd
Speaker 1: at people. But it was an interesting to see that
Speaker 1: in some sidebar conversations with some of the points that
Speaker 1: Sal actually brought up, because here we are coming on
Speaker 1: on eleven months since the attack on Israel on October
Speaker 1: seventh of twenty twenty three, and then the extra little
Speaker 1: effort gave by the Iranian proxies and the hoo Thies
Speaker 1: that we've talked about quite a few times here in
Speaker 1: the course of the last eleven months here on Metraps
Speaker 1: and the great naval power that is the US and
Speaker 1: her allies and friends. And you can look at the
Speaker 1: open source information on where our fleet is deployed right now.
Speaker 1: It's in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Golf, whatever you want
Speaker 1: to call it, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Trying to keep
Speaker 1: Iran actual back inside her box a little bit because
Speaker 1: of what's going on still in Israel and Gaza and
Speaker 1: with Hesbla and the Red Sea is still it's worse
Speaker 1: than the wild Wild West because there's not even a
Speaker 1: good cavalry patrol. There's just the occasional element here and
Speaker 1: there that is going up and down and at will.
Speaker 1: The houthis are able to attack international shipping and one
Speaker 1: of the most critical junctures in the world when it
Speaker 1: comes to trade, and it's just amazing that more people
Speaker 1: are not and a lot of It may or may
Speaker 1: not have to do with the fact that this is
Speaker 1: an election year, and I always try to keep that
Speaker 1: in my back pocket when I wonder why things are
Speaker 1: or are not being talked about. That might have something
Speaker 1: to do with it, maybe not, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: there is a in the national security arena. Mark there's
Speaker 1: a large arena of people who love to come into
Speaker 1: the conversation about international law, the rule of law. They
Speaker 1: want us to be signed on to the Law of
Speaker 1: the Sea treaty that we haven't signed on to. They've been,
Speaker 1: especially in the last nine months, very quiet. You also
Speaker 1: have those that above all, and there's a non zero
Speaker 1: percentage of people in the leadership at d D who
Speaker 1: think that climate change is the most important thing, and
Speaker 1: people in the arena like Salamar Cogliana who worked that segment,
Speaker 1: they've been very open about the additional hydrocarbons that are
Speaker 1: being injected into the atmosphere from having to go around
Speaker 1: South Africa as opposed to going through the Red Sea
Speaker 1: for those ships that decided they don't want to have
Speaker 1: the insurance premium. And you also have from a strictly
Speaker 1: American point of view, is we have not had a
Speaker 1: good record the last fifteen to twenty five years of
Speaker 1: burnishing and reinforcing hour which is our greatest deterrence, which
Speaker 1: is our reputation and our credibility on the world. Saint
Speaker 1: and the fact that here we are. I would not
Speaker 1: have thought back in February or so that you and
Speaker 1: I would be talking in September where we still have
Speaker 1: these ability to go into onto tankers who were carrying
Speaker 1: four times what was leaked, and by the Exxon Valdez
Speaker 1: attack the ship, stop the ship, forced the evacuation of
Speaker 1: the ship, and then with a multimedia presentation blow it
Speaker 1: up right in the Red Sea. But here we are,
Speaker 1: I don't see. And there's a real interesting and we
Speaker 1: did mention a couple of weeks ago, but there's been
Speaker 1: some echoes of it. Ward Curl's interview with the former
Speaker 1: commander of the Eisenhower Strike Group and what he had
Speaker 1: to say about the decisions. There are some secondary and
Speaker 1: tertiary effects of the lawlessness in the Red Sea. I
Speaker 1: don't know who's going to resolve it or when it's
Speaker 1: going to be resolved, but it's going to take a
Speaker 1: lot law back to center line, because I think the
Speaker 1: international order for lack of a better phrase, has been
Speaker 1: damaged more than of people appreciate by US, the imperial
Speaker 1: US not.
Speaker 2: Doing anything about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think people have to remember a
Speaker 3: couple of things. One is that the Suez Canal was
Speaker 3: closed from nineteen sixty seven, I think for several years.
Speaker 3: I think six years, maybe maybe not quite that long,
Speaker 3: but at least sixty seven to seventy two.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: So this is not should not be a world shaking event.
Speaker 2: We've been down.
Speaker 3: This road before where the Seuz Canal could not be used.
Speaker 3: And the question, you know that I think many people
Speaker 3: ask is why would we do we have to be
Speaker 3: the world's share all the time. There are other nations
Speaker 3: that are really thoroughly impacted by by what is going
Speaker 3: on with the Huthis and the Red Sea. And you know,
Speaker 3: I mean even the Chinese are apparently sending some of
Speaker 3: their ships around the Northern Route instead of through the
Speaker 3: Red Sea area, even though for a while apparently they
Speaker 3: were under some kind of immunity from attack by the Houthis.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So the I think fundamentally we have to ask the
Speaker 3: question how much of our how many of our people,
Speaker 3: how many of our large ships, how many of our
Speaker 3: aircraft do we want to risk to get involved with
Speaker 3: the Houthis? And in this case, I mean, if we're
Speaker 3: going to pursue this vigorously, then you really and you've
Speaker 3: already touched on we have to go after i Ran.
Speaker 3: We cannot sit back and let Iran continue to supply
Speaker 3: it seems to be an unlimited amount of weaponry to
Speaker 3: the Houthis. And the question is does anybody want to
Speaker 3: take on Iran right now? And this administration in particular
Speaker 3: has been pretty soft on them, and a lot of
Speaker 3: the money that has been turned over the last few
Speaker 3: years to the Iranians has helped pay for all this weaponry.
Speaker 3: And and we're also seeing I think reports of Iranian
Speaker 3: influence campaigns that to a lot of the anti Semitic
Speaker 3: activities have been going on the various parts of the country,
Speaker 3: included college campuses and stuff. You know that they're funding
Speaker 3: a lot of this stuff, so that you know, we
Speaker 3: we have pretty good reasons as we as usual to
Speaker 3: go after a RAM. But I don't know if anybody
Speaker 3: has the stomach to to go into another big This
Speaker 3: would be a big war in the in that region
Speaker 3: of the world, And whether we need to. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, we will pay additional cost for the the
Speaker 3: shipment of oil and goods around Africa. But you know,
Speaker 3: we've we've done that before. And I don't I don't.
Speaker 3: I just don't know if anybody really wants to get
Speaker 3: involved the way we'd need to get that said. We've
Speaker 3: already put I think one of our guests as he
Speaker 3: has a son who deployed with VFA.
Speaker 2: Thirty two.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of other squadrons that getting ready
Speaker 3: to go out there, and uh on other on on
Speaker 3: yet another carrier, you know, and it has as somebody
Speaker 3: pointed out, it just takes one hit by the Huthis
Speaker 3: on one of our warships two to you know, they'll
Speaker 3: they'll consider that a major a major victory if they
Speaker 3: did some damage to one of our d d gs
Speaker 3: or or cruisers or.
Speaker 2: Carriers.
Speaker 3: And uh and I and I don't think I would
Speaker 3: want to be I guess and we'll find out. I
Speaker 3: don't think the president wants to be in the chair
Speaker 3: if that were to happen. And uh, but you know,
Speaker 3: I think it's a risk question whether we're willing to
Speaker 3: risk it, whether it's our nation's job to risk it,
Speaker 3: or we you know, we we we are believers in
Speaker 3: international law. These are people clearly violating international law. But
Speaker 3: as with all international law, you always have to ask, well,
Speaker 3: who's who's going to enforce it? Who's enforcing the international
Speaker 3: law against the Chinese intruding on the Filipino uh Exclusive
Speaker 3: Economic Zone and rent ramming their their coast guard ships
Speaker 3: into the end of the Philippine Coast Guard ships?
Speaker 2: You know there?
Speaker 3: Who was the Is this is this a job from America?
Speaker 3: Do we have some other force that can can do this?
Speaker 3: I think these are questions that are are fundamental to
Speaker 3: our national security and our our our strategic greater strategic
Speaker 3: uh plants. You know, do we have a grand strategy
Speaker 3: and does it and geopolitical strategy and does it involve
Speaker 3: getting involved in these kinds of the affairs?
Speaker 1: And you know, you brought up a good point. And
Speaker 1: I think you know this existed while the Cold War
Speaker 1: were still going on. Is now you remember better than
Speaker 1: I do because I was too busy being a college
Speaker 1: kid during the last part of it. But we may
Speaker 1: just be seeing some of the and it's been accelerated
Speaker 1: by the events in Ukraine and also in Israel. But
Speaker 1: kind of the last gasp of some of the illusions
Speaker 1: by well meaning people who are being taken advantage of
Speaker 1: by not well many people about international organizations quote international
Speaker 1: law unquote. You know, what the UN was doing in
Speaker 1: Gaza that's been uncovered kind of speaks for itself in
Speaker 1: that regard, and it's it has to do with national
Speaker 1: will and things that you could do. And you know,
Speaker 1: you mentioned going after Iran, and I don't think that
Speaker 1: though it's on the spectrum of things you can do,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of non kinetic things that we could
Speaker 1: do against Iran. And you know, you also alluded to
Speaker 1: something I've been real proud of us in the fourteen
Speaker 1: years plus that we've been doing mid Rats that we
Speaker 1: talk about policy, not politics, and we do our best
Speaker 1: to keep politics out of it, as we should. But
Speaker 1: people are policy and people are appointed by politicians that
Speaker 1: are elected. So it's it's tangentially arranged that. And the
Speaker 1: people that we have making our national security decisions right
Speaker 1: now are the same people that were with during the
Speaker 1: Obama administration, and they do have, if not a pro
Speaker 1: Iranian lean review, a non confrontational and excessive optimism about
Speaker 1: what could be had with the Iranian regime. I think
Speaker 1: if the if we didn't have the present regime we
Speaker 1: had in Iran, as we happened before the Mola's got
Speaker 1: charge of Iran, we all get along great here. I
Speaker 1: grew up with the kids of Iranian refugees, and one
Speaker 1: of the largest Iranian cities in the country is Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: They're they're finding, they're great people. It's just the government
Speaker 1: the policy they're pursuing. And you also have to face
Speaker 1: the fact there's people who've heard me here and and
Speaker 1: have read my stuff over the years. Knows I'm not
Speaker 1: an interventionist, piny stretch of the imagination, but there are
Speaker 1: some things that if not us, who And when you
Speaker 1: talk about the free flow of market goods across the sea,
Speaker 1: lions of communications, the open seas, the free seas, the
Speaker 1: safe sees. If not the US Navy, people will look
Speaker 1: towards the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy and the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom have been for well over eighty years the
Speaker 1: give or taken incident or two have been our best
Speaker 1: and most reliable allies. We work best with them. But
Speaker 1: there is a graphic that made the rounds this week that,
Speaker 1: as I pulled the thread on. Its pretty accurate and
Speaker 1: I'll post it in the show notes afterwards. It's how
Speaker 1: most of our naval fleet is out of action. It's
Speaker 1: for the Royal Navy's major warships, of its attack submarines,
Speaker 1: and it does active or inactive, which I think from
Speaker 1: rib operational or non operational.
Speaker 2: Of their.
Speaker 1: Five astute and one remaining Trafogar class submarine, the Trafalgar class,
Speaker 1: the HMS Triumphs, she's coming back from a deployment and
Speaker 1: the newest I believe it's the newest astute class, the ants,
Speaker 1: and she's still in posts production trials, So they have
Speaker 1: none of their submarines that are are ready to really
Speaker 1: deployed anywhere. Both of their aircraft carriers are fine, they're construction,
Speaker 1: they're lpds, they're ones in refit and ones inactive. Of
Speaker 1: their Type forty five guided missile destroyers, which are their
Speaker 1: most capable, you only have four of their six that
Speaker 1: are four of their six are inactive. And of their
Speaker 1: Type twenty three multipurpose frigates, you have ten of them,
Speaker 1: nine correction and only five of those nine are deployable.
Speaker 1: And it'd be interesting to see the US Navy's outlay
Speaker 1: of that, but we're better than that. So if something
Speaker 1: does come up, our most capable ally, the Royal Navy,
Speaker 1: is simply not there, and our other allies, their navies
Speaker 1: are really really thin. Some news did come out this
Speaker 1: week the new Dutch government announced, in addition to bringing
Speaker 1: back their heavy armor they're bringing back they're going to
Speaker 1: order I think twenty or so new main battle tanks
Speaker 1: from Germany Leopard A two six is where it is,
Speaker 1: and they're also going to be building two additional of
Speaker 1: their multipurpose they call their ASW frigates, which would be good,
Speaker 1: but again it's not that large. So if it's not
Speaker 1: going to be us, who is it going to be,
Speaker 1: And it's not going to be them either, then we're
Speaker 1: going back to a situation where locally, the international community
Speaker 1: is just going to have to accept that we're going
Speaker 1: to lose free access to certain bodies of water, which
Speaker 1: we can do if Egypt, the local powers Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 1: Iran decide that's what they want in the local waters.
Speaker 1: I guess that's their decision, but that's moving away from
Speaker 1: I don't know, Mark, when do you think it's a
Speaker 1: shame we don't have claud in the chat room he
Speaker 1: could answer this force. When did the Royal Navy really
Speaker 1: draw a line on the calendar and said we've got it?
Speaker 1: Was it right after the Napoleonic Wars, after the US
Speaker 1: Civil War? But whatever that line is in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: until very recently, somebody was guaranteed free access to the seas.
Speaker 1: And if the Red Sea is allowed to be uh
Speaker 1: a little ink blot across an important flock, when when
Speaker 1: is the next lock up gonna come?
Speaker 2: And where?
Speaker 3: Well? I think you know we've got The world has
Speaker 3: changed a lot since the Brits and the and the
Speaker 3: US Navy controlled all the sea lines of communication. And
Speaker 3: and one of those things that that people have been
Speaker 3: warning about for years, you see it in the in the.
Speaker 2: Fleet tactics books.
Speaker 3: You know that that one of the concerns has always
Speaker 3: been the anti ship missiles which have become commonplace now.
Speaker 2: And we saw this.
Speaker 3: We saw it when the has Bull of shot sympathy
Speaker 3: at the Israeli ships during one of their set tos.
Speaker 3: We've we saw it during the Gulf War when when
Speaker 3: we saw some and during the Tanker Wars when we
Speaker 3: saw the silk worms and other whatever the Iranian version
Speaker 3: of those things is and the Iraqi version. We saw
Speaker 3: those being fired. If it hadn't been for a written destroyer,
Speaker 3: I think one of the silkworms may have gotten through
Speaker 3: to I don't know what had done any damage, but
Speaker 3: I think that one of the battleships was targeted. You
Speaker 3: know this this these these Chinese missiles the sea eight
Speaker 3: oh two's, eight O one's whatever they are.
Speaker 2: You know, the pictures changed.
Speaker 3: And and now that that what we've seen in in
Speaker 3: in Ukraine and with the who thies is that these
Speaker 3: unmanned uh uh surface vessels uh with which are loaded
Speaker 3: with with explosives. You know, they're they're hard to stop
Speaker 3: unless you are really making the effort to do it.
Speaker 3: And and I think that that, you know, there has
Speaker 3: to be a sense of realism about about what has changed.
Speaker 3: You know, it was different from the days when the
Speaker 3: range of of a gun determined the three mile limit
Speaker 3: or the twelve mile limit that we we had for
Speaker 3: for our coastal waters. Because you know, the guns now
Speaker 3: and the and the missiles now are much more rain
Speaker 3: have much more range than those than those old canon did.
Speaker 3: And it's just one of those things to be aware of. Now,
Speaker 3: we keep spending a lot of money and effort trying
Speaker 3: to shoot these things out of the sky and at
Speaker 3: great cost to the taxpayers and at high risk to
Speaker 3: a lot of our people. Or we can do, as
Speaker 3: I have urged on some occasions, we could engage in
Speaker 3: a opptunity expedition to try and take out these hoothy things.
Speaker 3: But I don't know what the population is that's involved
Speaker 3: in Yemen, in the in the hoothy movement. But that
Speaker 3: would mean, you know, if we were to take the
Speaker 3: eighty second and the one oh one airborne and drop
Speaker 3: them in there and then have them fight, We're gonna
Speaker 3: have to sustain them. We're gonna have to provide the food,
Speaker 3: the AMMO, all the other stuff. And you know, we
Speaker 3: can do it because we're a great power. But it
Speaker 3: is a challenge to to mount that kind of attack.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's not one of those things where
Speaker 3: you're going to land the the Marine Corps landing force
Speaker 3: and the and the airborne guys and uh and get
Speaker 3: them in there and then sustain their operations. I just
Speaker 3: you know, we modern warfare is a lot more complicated
Speaker 3: than than when we drop the Marines off Tripoli and
Speaker 3: add them run to it in run around and help
Speaker 3: solve the the piracy crisis in the in that part
Speaker 3: of the Mediterranean. So you know, we can bomb them,
Speaker 3: we can we can shoot down their planes. But I
Speaker 3: go back to if you're going to really control the land,
Speaker 3: you have to put troops on the on the beach.
Speaker 3: If you're going to do that, then you really have
Speaker 3: to think of the consequences of putting them in that
Speaker 3: environment again, and and how long what's it going to
Speaker 3: take to support them, and what are the risks involved
Speaker 3: in that? So you know, somebody, somebody much higher up
Speaker 3: in the world than I will ever be, and and
Speaker 3: who's thinking about this stuff, is really trying to figure
Speaker 3: this out. And you know, and I think what I'm
Speaker 3: saying comports with what the former UH Task Force commander
Speaker 3: for that area talked about that you know that you
Speaker 3: can't just do it from the air, and we knew
Speaker 3: that from from Korea. You know that that you just
Speaker 3: can't go on this way and you can't, So what
Speaker 3: do you do? I mean my suggestion is that we
Speaker 3: just we if they want to, if they're content to
Speaker 3: do this, and people UH just get sick of it.
Speaker 2: The folks that's costing money.
Speaker 3: The Egyptians So by the way, I just noticed are
Speaker 3: canceling F sixteen or has been buying Chinese jets instead
Speaker 3: of US jets.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, they're the people who who who are are
Speaker 3: suffering from this because they're they're losing revenue, they're losing
Speaker 3: billions of dollars. And you know that's not one of
Speaker 3: the world's wealthiest countries anyway, but you know it, I
Speaker 3: would think would it would be incumbent on some of
Speaker 3: the local nations to to partake in the activities and
Speaker 3: not just leave this to the US forces. And that's
Speaker 3: not to say we can't bring true groups into Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3: You could do a desert storm, I guess if you
Speaker 3: wanted to. But you know, this country of Yemen is
Speaker 3: not exactly the fold to gap it is. You know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of bad terrain, a lot of bad
Speaker 3: conditions for troops to operate in, and you know, the
Speaker 3: sustatement is going to be an issue because then you're
Speaker 3: gonna have to bring goods around Africa and or in
Speaker 3: through the Indo Pacific region to resupply them wherever the
Speaker 3: troops start out from. So I think that's the challenge.
Speaker 3: I think that's the risk. And somebody's weighing these and
Speaker 3: at least right now saying and I think somebody said
Speaker 3: it in the in the in the chat room that
Speaker 3: I don't think anything's going to happen in the next
Speaker 3: next sixty days. Now. You know, if we had capable
Speaker 3: lateral literal combat ships instead of the ones we have,
Speaker 3: you know, those, that's about the right things to bring
Speaker 3: in there. I would bring Mark five boats and to
Speaker 3: you know, challenge these unmanned armed you know, you us
Speaker 3: vs and and work on that. But you know, otherwise,
Speaker 3: you know, you just get in a place where the
Speaker 3: situations have changed over the years and this is a
Speaker 3: lot more complicated than it used to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the interesting thing about Egypt is for those that know,
Speaker 1: they're archaic Egyptian history history at least in our lifetime
Speaker 1: and plus a little bit. I mean, they've they have
Speaker 1: they've been involved in northern Yemen before they even use
Speaker 1: chemical weapons there back in the nineteen sixties. And that's
Speaker 1: their hesitancy is is I think multi layer to want
Speaker 1: to do anything there. And occasionally you'll still see people
Speaker 1: say what about you know, UAE and Egypt. Well, they
Speaker 1: were fighting the Hoho Thies until a few years ago
Speaker 1: when people in the US decided to h tut them
Speaker 1: to death. And I think we've talked about it before.
Speaker 1: Fou was the Saudis and the Emiratis, I would be yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of tough. It's a shame that y'all made
Speaker 1: us stop fighting them because they were trying to get
Speaker 1: them on the ground. It's a tough answer. I think
Speaker 1: you know, you touched on it, and the Israelis gave
Speaker 1: a little hint. You just got to you've got to
Speaker 1: bomb them. And there's also the fact that in the
Speaker 1: hoothy controlled areas, there's a lot of international aid that's
Speaker 1: going in there that's paid for the America by the
Speaker 1: American taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. And you know, we
Speaker 1: didn't let grain shipments into Imperial Japan during the Second
Speaker 1: World War, but we haven't declared war on Yemen either.
Speaker 1: So it's a tough nut. But I think the longer
Speaker 1: term implications of everybody doing nothing, it's probably not too good.
Speaker 1: And a lot of that in action may just be
Speaker 1: the assumption, well, America will do something. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's an accurate assumption anymore, for a whole
Speaker 1: host of reasons. And not only is there nothing is
Speaker 1: going to be done in the next sixty days, I
Speaker 1: think regardless of what happens in the next election, I've
Speaker 1: seen no indications that there's any desire to do something else.
Speaker 1: So it may just be a situation that's gonna have
Speaker 1: to work itself out, just like Sue has canal was
Speaker 1: closed for years, and maybe this would just be a
Speaker 1: situation where until you have the right set of circumstances
Speaker 1: and things are right that that it will just have
Speaker 1: to be something everybody will have to deal with and
Speaker 1: we can still have goods flow around. It's just gonna
Speaker 1: cost more money. And that's just just the nature of
Speaker 1: the decisions.
Speaker 2: People have made.
Speaker 1: And I noticed in the chat room and we said
Speaker 1: we would listen to stuff where people were interested in
Speaker 1: and Riggs mentioned about the relief of the CEO of
Speaker 1: the USS, john S McCain. Only thing I'll say about
Speaker 1: that is I've seen spotty reporting the last thirty six
Speaker 1: hours or so because some people thought because he was
Speaker 1: a few months ago, it made it on dvids and
Speaker 1: everything a picture of him firing an M four I
Speaker 1: believe it was, and whoever his armor was, had installed
Speaker 1: the scope on backwards and he was still firing it
Speaker 1: as if it was a functional gun. People were saying, oh,
Speaker 1: he must have been relieved for that. No. I think
Speaker 1: what I've heard in the last thirty six hours is
Speaker 1: there was a condition with steering. It almost led to
Speaker 1: a collision during unrepped. I'll wait for more information on
Speaker 1: that because it's either an equipment issue. I've seen some
Speaker 1: reporting that it was a known equipment issue for those
Speaker 1: that recall the John McCain was involved in the incidents
Speaker 1: in the summer of twenty seven, part of which was
Speaker 1: related to steering and the interface thereof. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we're gonna have to wait for more information to
Speaker 1: come out.
Speaker 2: But yet he wasn't.
Speaker 1: Relieved because of the fact that he didn't know literally
Speaker 1: what end of the tube of the round came out of.
Speaker 1: But he's a skipper of a destroyer. It's not his fault.
Speaker 1: If he's been in the Navy eighteen years and the
Speaker 1: Navy hasn't taught him how to use him for, it's
Speaker 1: something else. So that that kind of made more sense
Speaker 1: to me why he had have been relieved. But we'll
Speaker 1: just have to wait for more information. The good thing
Speaker 1: is nobody pringed into the side of a replenishmentship because
Speaker 1: we don't have that many.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a One of the things we ought to
Speaker 3: talk about too, is that there are a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of things that the Congressional uh call themselves ok uh
Speaker 3: compity in the future of the Navy. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean one of the things I was talking about is
Speaker 3: getting these the navy. One of their reports talks about
Speaker 3: the Navy buying some more light oilers Navy light replenishment
Speaker 3: overs and uh, I don't know anybody's seen this, but
Speaker 3: it's a it's a report and it and it talks
Speaker 3: about what these things are going to do, and it
Speaker 3: is a a an important asset that we we should
Speaker 3: invest in. These are I think twelve new lighter ones.
Speaker 3: Are talking about two different kinds of of of oilers,
Speaker 3: ones a slower, more typical one and the other one
Speaker 3: some kind of fast servicing. Anyway, it's just it's just
Speaker 3: it's time and and and there's another report I think
Speaker 3: is which I saw. I was talking about the Chinese
Speaker 3: little a minute ago about there going north. It's embarrassing
Speaker 3: to say that the Chinese have put three ice breakers
Speaker 3: into the Arctic, and uh, we don't have. I think
Speaker 3: we're just getting one back on line after after the
Speaker 3: Polar Star, after some some service life extension program has
Speaker 3: finally been completed. But absolute it is a disgrace, and
Speaker 3: we've got to remember that once the Chinese start something,
Speaker 3: they view themselves what is the quote here, they view
Speaker 3: themselves as a near Arctic power. I don't know what
Speaker 3: a near Arctic power is. So they don't have any
Speaker 3: common border with the Arctic Ocean as far as I know,
Speaker 3: but it is a it is a challenge once they
Speaker 3: get once they get their nose under the tent, then uh,
Speaker 3: you know, we're going to see a lot of them
Speaker 3: up there. And we have some pretty u vital concerns
Speaker 3: in that area are easy as pretty large. We've got
Speaker 3: a huge oil resource up there in the prude On
Speaker 3: Bay and and uh, you know, things that countries that
Speaker 3: need that, the fisheries that are up there, there's all
Speaker 3: kinds of stuff that I would prefer them not to
Speaker 3: not to be messing around with. But if they can,
Speaker 3: if they can find a pinnacle to build an island
Speaker 3: on and suddenly to cleare themselves, you know, in a
Speaker 3: neutral area out there that is played by the Danes. Well,
Speaker 3: even I don't think they care, given their treatment of
Speaker 3: South China. See, you know, we'll see one of their
Speaker 3: islands out there and then they'll they'll be claiming that
Speaker 3: they are are they now have protection of the of
Speaker 3: the This is just China being China. But it's a
Speaker 3: it's annoying, and.
Speaker 1: It's a fundamental I mean, you and I first talked
Speaker 1: about this a decade ago on here. It had to
Speaker 1: be at least.
Speaker 2: It's just.
Speaker 1: It doesn't hold up to the following question unless you're
Speaker 1: only talking to the accountants. Why we have it been
Speaker 1: readily producing ice breakers and ice hardened vessels is And
Speaker 1: if people need a modern data point, fine, I'll provide
Speaker 1: them a modern data point. But you have such a
Speaker 1: critical facility. And again, even if national security isn't your interest,
Speaker 1: maybe it's environmental protection that's located up on the northern slope.
Speaker 1: And if you want to severely impact US production, look
Speaker 1: at what the Ukrainians are trying to do to the Russians.
Speaker 1: Impact their oil sector, impact their oil sector, impact their
Speaker 1: oil sector.
Speaker 2: So that's.
Speaker 1: That is something that you need to have a good
Speaker 1: ice breaker capability in order to be able to deal
Speaker 1: with and we don't have that. The Chinese are not
Speaker 1: an arctication nation, but watch what their intentions are. Their
Speaker 1: intention is to make themselves one.
Speaker 2: Here we are.
Speaker 1: One of our most important assets we have is Alaska,
Speaker 1: and we are an ourtic nation. And lo and behold,
Speaker 1: we are surrendering without a fight in many ways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's a there's another Congressional Research Service puts
Speaker 3: out a lot of good stuff and they have a
Speaker 3: really good report I'll put a link up here to
Speaker 3: in a minute, but about the emergence of the new
Speaker 3: uh great power competition with with the Russians and Chinese.
Speaker 3: And you know, you can throw a couple of other
Speaker 3: countries into that if you want to. But the big,
Speaker 3: the big bad guys for us are the Russians and
Speaker 3: the Chinese. It you know, it talks about about our
Speaker 3: need to have a grand strategy. When you have a
Speaker 3: grand strategy, then that drives your force planning center, which
Speaker 3: means the number of ships you it need to have,
Speaker 3: the size of your military, and a lot of other things.
Speaker 3: You know, we we went from being able to have
Speaker 3: handle two major con contingencies and and have a little
Speaker 3: bit left over for some uh regional areas are we
Speaker 3: called back in the day, and now we're I don't
Speaker 3: think I don't know what we would have to do
Speaker 3: to even get one regional contingency under control. And uh
Speaker 3: it I think that that is it's really important American
Speaker 3: people understand how how important it is to have a
Speaker 3: strategy that says, this is what we stand for, this
Speaker 3: is what we're going to do, and we're not going
Speaker 3: to be bullied by either the Chinese or the or
Speaker 3: the Russians, and we're going to match them as we
Speaker 3: did back in the eighties. We're going to match them
Speaker 3: and exceed them so that they can't And we have
Speaker 3: trouble this with China, a pretty wealthy country all things considered. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know, they can't match our expansion and and our
Speaker 3: growth of our military. And it means that you know,
Speaker 3: we're we're if we're going to do the guns and
Speaker 3: butter routine again, sometimes you have to be guns and
Speaker 3: not just all butter and.
Speaker 1: Not even you know, being bullied is sometimes it's becomes
Speaker 1: self evident when they're there and you are not. You know,
Speaker 1: if we're getting close to a conflict with the People's
Speaker 1: Republic of China and off of the North Slope, you
Speaker 1: all of a sudden have two Chinese.
Speaker 2: Icebreakers.
Speaker 1: You're just hanging out there and get on the phone
Speaker 1: and say where's in there is us ice breaker?
Speaker 2: Say about two weeks away.
Speaker 1: You know, play that out for.
Speaker 2: A little bit. It wouldn't be the first time.
Speaker 1: At D plus zero, a ship or two is a
Speaker 1: sacrifice for a greater mission.
Speaker 2: We've done it ourselves.
Speaker 1: It's you don't need to be Tom Clancy to play
Speaker 1: these things out, and we are. We've We've surrendered large
Speaker 1: parts for reasons again that have to be explained up
Speaker 1: the chain, and a lot of it just has to
Speaker 1: do with thinking. For instance, I'm with you. I love
Speaker 1: the idea having the the smaller oilers out there, simply
Speaker 1: because it plays in to one of my hobby horses,
Speaker 1: which is everybody likes talking about distributed lethality.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about distributed risk.
Speaker 1: It's great to have these big, beautiful replenishment ships. They're
Speaker 1: really efficient. They can do a lot, and they can
Speaker 1: transfer a lot, and like I can see salas the
Speaker 1: other Seal has joined us live and you know, we
Speaker 1: talked to him about, you know, the tremendous work that
Speaker 1: the replenishment ships did in the course of the last
Speaker 1: year to keep the Eisenhower and the I forget which
Speaker 1: which Marine and Expeditionary Group was in the Eastern met anyway,
Speaker 1: one of those come out of commission, you've got a problem.
Speaker 1: But if you have three or four smaller ships and
Speaker 1: one of them gets dropped out of commission, you're working harder,
Speaker 1: but you can still make mission. You don't have to
Speaker 1: pull back from the front because you can no longer supply.
Speaker 1: Plus that gives us the ability to maybe utilize reserve
Speaker 1: assets and in a more effective way. And if you're
Speaker 1: looking west at the International date Line in the Pacific,
Speaker 1: not only are the distance is huge, but the difference
Speaker 1: between the different distances you have to go. If you've
Speaker 1: got to go northeast of Taiwan to do something that's
Speaker 1: equally important to something that is due east of Papua
Speaker 1: New Guinea, that's a huge bit of distance that you're
Speaker 1: going to need multiple ships to be able to cover.
Speaker 1: And you also had a system that we did during
Speaker 1: World War Two where you had your most capable replenishment
Speaker 1: ships forward, but as opposed to them having to return
Speaker 1: to a major port to top off, they would have
Speaker 1: lack of a better phrase, you might know that the
Speaker 1: technical term shuttle tankers that could bring up top off
Speaker 1: those tankers that are serving the four deployed ships, and
Speaker 1: they would go off and it just made more efficient
Speaker 1: having those numbers. You have the ability to do that,
Speaker 1: but that requires somebody to be able to counter the
Speaker 1: accountants brief because if you the accountant gets up there
Speaker 1: with a spreadsheet, he's going to tell you that's not
Speaker 1: very efficient, and you have to have the Like in
Speaker 1: many things, you have to have the effectiveness argument, and
Speaker 1: nowadays yours have to argue with them. Okay, you're seven
Speaker 1: hundred short siv mars right now, where are you going
Speaker 1: to get the other five hundred? You need to have
Speaker 1: your your cute little toy tankers running around. That's a
Speaker 1: hard question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like a lot of other things. There's
Speaker 3: another report that Congressional Research Service put out. It's a
Speaker 3: very brief thing, but it's talking about the replicator approach,
Speaker 3: which is the initiative that we're supposed to have low
Speaker 3: costs attributable at triatable.
Speaker 2: Systems to.
Speaker 3: Provide a lot of distraction, but a lot of things
Speaker 3: for the other the bad guys to worry.
Speaker 2: And it is a.
Speaker 3: The magic in that is that apparently you don't have
Speaker 3: to provide fuel for these things. You don't have to worry,
Speaker 3: you know, if you have enough of them, you just
Speaker 3: you send them out there and then they run out fuel,
Speaker 3: they sank or whatever they do. C mind, are supposed
Speaker 3: to turn themselves off in a certain period of time
Speaker 3: according to international law. So you know, it's it's designed
Speaker 3: to swarm you at the navy right now, is you know,
Speaker 3: looking at funding this stuff and it is it's an
Speaker 3: issue about how many actual ships man ships do you need,
Speaker 3: how many of these smaller unmanned units do you need?
Speaker 3: How do you control them? I mean, you know it is,
Speaker 3: but that's the magic. We're gonna We're going to deal
Speaker 3: with the size of the Chinese Navy apparently by having
Speaker 3: lots and lots of these swarming replicator uncrewed systems out there,
Speaker 3: and they're going to do all kinds of wonderful things
Speaker 3: from intelligence collection too, uh you know, I guess taking
Speaker 3: out the opposing forces. It's going to be really interesting
Speaker 3: to see how this works, because uh, you know, we're
Speaker 3: seeing some of it work in the in the Black Sea,
Speaker 3: we're seeing some of it work in the Red Sea, which
Speaker 3: are pretty much contained bodies of waters and not all
Speaker 3: that uh uh you know, not like the Pacific where
Speaker 3: you get some pretty rough conditions. So it'd be interesting
Speaker 3: to see how they would work in the Strait of
Speaker 3: Taiwan and and some of those other areas where things
Speaker 3: are not quite as smooth as they were in the
Speaker 3: in those in those Black Sea areas.
Speaker 1: You know, one thing is speaking of of dealing with
Speaker 1: unmanned systems that's kind of broken above the background noise
Speaker 1: later that I thought it would, so I was maybe
Speaker 1: too optimistically pessimistic before with unmanned systems. Of course, the
Speaker 1: one of the weakest links besides having autonomous engineering capable
Speaker 1: ability have he good navigation, et cetera, et cetera, has
Speaker 1: been what traditionally, uh, the the Russians were thought to
Speaker 1: be very good at, and they're getting good at again,
Speaker 1: is electronic warfare. It's gotten to the point in Ukraine
Speaker 1: that they're developing they no longer have the reliable access
Speaker 1: to electric magnetic spectrum many areas, so they're they're bringing
Speaker 1: back as opposed to copper wire, they're using fiber optics,
Speaker 1: so they're basically pulling a pulling a fiber optic cable
Speaker 1: behind their drones, which takes out the electronic warfare, but
Speaker 1: it makes it much more difficult to counter these these
Speaker 1: systems because you can't jam them, which means you can't
Speaker 1: do a soft kill. You can't do a soft kill,
Speaker 1: you gotta do a hard kill. Uh. There are other
Speaker 1: technologies out there that if the app the spirits allow,
Speaker 1: you also can get around jamming. Though I maybe maybe
Speaker 1: it has and it just hasn't broken out of the
Speaker 1: the skiff yet, but it's not really practical. But wire
Speaker 1: guidance is making a comeback. And know something off of Taiwan.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're expecting to to counter hundreds of
Speaker 1: ships coming from west to east cost Taiwan's traits by
Speaker 1: a bunch of drones circa twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: In Ukraine, the Chinese.
Speaker 1: Are paying attention and if if you can make their
Speaker 1: navigation and terminal guidance, if the at sea, you've got
Speaker 1: to have again risk risk mitigation. Okay, what's your what's
Speaker 1: your backup weapons plan. There's no magic means, as Tom
Speaker 1: Shugart likes to say, but that interesting development because of
Speaker 1: the logistics production and the cost of having to shift
Speaker 1: your drones from electromagnetic control I mean control via electromagnetic
Speaker 1: spectrum to fiber optic guidance. That just brings out all
Speaker 1: sorts of interesting questions, most of which in a lot
Speaker 1: of the static lines, it's like a spider web after
Speaker 1: a while with all the fiber octic cable laying all
Speaker 1: over the place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've always assumed that the better approach would be
Speaker 3: some kind of laser guidance for some of these things.
Speaker 3: But even then you're gonna have you know, on a
Speaker 3: cloudy day, you're gonna have a rough time, I guess
Speaker 3: unless you know, I don't remember which lasers can cut
Speaker 3: through some of that stuff.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's this is this is.
Speaker 3: Modern warfare, as I was talking about earlier, with things
Speaker 3: have changed, it's no longer been able to send your here.
Speaker 3: You know, we always worried about submarines, and we worried
Speaker 3: the destroyers came about because of the the fast torpedo
Speaker 3: boat that they were meant to go out and challenge
Speaker 3: and uh, you know, you just get you get caught
Speaker 3: up in some of the stuff. And it sounds really
Speaker 3: fantastic if it if it works, but you're you're running
Speaker 3: a fairly high risk if if a third of your
Speaker 3: force becomes unmanned, fairly large unmanned vessels, unless they're being
Speaker 3: used in connection with things like you know, we talked
Speaker 3: about this before, where you have.
Speaker 2: A d d G.
Speaker 3: He's got three or four unmanned uh missile barges with
Speaker 3: him that he can connect to and and fire those
Speaker 3: missiles too. I mean, that's that's that makes perfect sense
Speaker 3: to me. And that that, you know, again an idea
Speaker 3: of stolen from the the Honor Harrington system, you know
Speaker 3: that that approach auto work and and we've got the
Speaker 3: technology to do that. But I I you know again,
Speaker 3: I'm it's not that I'm against a lot of small
Speaker 3: little things out there containing carrying something which can do
Speaker 3: damage to somebody, But I question if you want to
Speaker 3: rely a whole lot on that, because you know, there
Speaker 3: are ways to feed them. And we've seen picture images
Speaker 3: at least from the Red Sea of people on board
Speaker 3: that the some of the ships have been attacked, you know,
Speaker 3: taking a machine gun and shooting away with those things
Speaker 3: until the unman surface things, until they blow up, and
Speaker 3: that you know that that does work. It's not elegant,
Speaker 3: but it is. It is a solution.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of those things is not just what we
Speaker 1: would like to see, but what we already have being repurposed.
Speaker 1: And I saw this weekend something that may be grin
Speaker 1: I'll I'll admit my initial reaction was how could I
Speaker 1: be starky towards the army? But then another one of
Speaker 1: my personalities started talking in my head and said, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no, this is exactly what you like to see.
Speaker 1: Be nice, keep reading, and that had to be The
Speaker 1: US Army has asked Japan for the next six months
Speaker 1: to deploy, and it's great to see they're actually deployed,
Speaker 1: and I find out a few details I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Mid range capability missile launchers that they're calling the Typhoon,
Speaker 1: which is great to see somebody actually calling a weapon
Speaker 1: system a name and not an acronym. So Bravozulu to
Speaker 1: the army. That is what you and I think we've
Speaker 1: talked about maybe once or twice in passing here. That
Speaker 1: is the basically quad packed Mark forty one VLS cell
Speaker 1: on the back of a tractor trailer, the trize tractor trailer,
Speaker 1: you know what those things look like.
Speaker 2: That that means and it's designed to.
Speaker 1: Keep to carry either TEA lamb or s M six
Speaker 1: which has a real sexy anti surface capability for those
Speaker 1: that know. So basically, each tractor trailer has four Mark
Speaker 1: forty one VLS cells with whatever mix of Tea, lambs
Speaker 1: and s and six as they have. Now the army
Speaker 1: has bought four batteries of these. Each battery has four
Speaker 1: launchers on it, so each battery has sixteen missiles, so
Speaker 1: you have a total you know, sixteen times four sixty
Speaker 1: four VLS cells. Just for comparison purposes, a flight two
Speaker 1: at two Alpha or a flight three hourly Burt has
Speaker 1: ninety six VLS cells and a spruance has sixty one
Speaker 1: VLS cells. So that's Claude's dog.
Speaker 2: We can hear everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Claude also got one of my guests, Leeks, so
Speaker 1: hold on for a second.
Speaker 2: There we go.
Speaker 1: Well Claude exited. All you had to do was mute Claude.
Speaker 1: You'd have to exit anyway live live radio. Well, I
Speaker 1: thought by fault for sitting in the wrong link out everybody,
Speaker 1: and that's okay. We're all one big happy family here
Speaker 1: at mid Rats. So basically the Army has bought if
Speaker 1: a spru if the old spruances it had the vlsls,
Speaker 1: they had sixty one vlsls which were fun to play
Speaker 1: with during Desert Fox. They've bought three cells, more than
Speaker 1: a spruance. But you can take those batteries and you
Speaker 1: can spread them around where you can't spread around the
Speaker 1: VLS cells in a spruance or Harley Burke, well, we
Speaker 1: don't have any spruance anymore, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: So you've distributed a risk there.
Speaker 1: Yes, they're on land and there's a limited number of
Speaker 1: roads you can send them on. But if you're looking
Speaker 1: at complicating the targeting by the People's of Republic of
Speaker 1: China the Army with their Typhoon missile system, I kind
Speaker 1: of like it.
Speaker 2: I wonder if the Marines.
Speaker 1: Have looked at or if it's probably too heavy for him.
Speaker 1: I think it needs a C seventeen to move around
Speaker 1: our ship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the the Iranians had something like that. They think
Speaker 3: they had some seetle ones or it was on the
Speaker 3: back of some of their trucks that they're experimenting with.
Speaker 3: And that was a long time ago, so I'm not
Speaker 3: too surprised that somebody isn't. We've got these m l
Speaker 3: r S things which the High Mars, you know, whichever
Speaker 3: one that that the Army Ukrainians are using to great success.
Speaker 3: And you know, those are not complicated weapons in the
Speaker 3: in the sense that you don't have to worry about
Speaker 3: terminal terminal guidance at all, but you better be pretty
Speaker 3: accurate as where you think you're shooting them. And you know,
Speaker 3: we we we talked to Wayne Hughes about this a
Speaker 3: long time ago. You know, the Navy keeps insisting on
Speaker 3: building bigger, better, more heavily armed ships rather than UH
Speaker 3: and which you know, as he pointed out, just mean
Speaker 3: you've got more worries that if you lose one of
Speaker 3: those ships, because they're supposed to do a lot of
Speaker 3: things anti submarined, anti aircraft, anti surface warfare and UH
Speaker 3: and now land attack. So uh you know, having more
Speaker 3: many more mobile platforms that can launch systems and and
Speaker 3: eased on on the larger ships.
Speaker 2: Is important.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: You know, that's not to say that.
Speaker 3: New there is a new d d X plan which
Speaker 3: would allow for outfitting them with the uh, the energy
Speaker 3: weapons that we all keep waiting directed to our weapons
Speaker 3: we all keep hoping for, and we've hoped for since
Speaker 3: I think I first started reading Flash Gordon about eight
Speaker 3: eighty million years ago. You know, we want that, we
Speaker 3: want those systems. We want them to be very successful
Speaker 3: in knocking things down out of the air and in
Speaker 3: the water, and uh, you know we've been. You know,
Speaker 3: it takes a lot of power. Then then it's time
Speaker 3: to bring back the nuclear powered cruisers and destroyers and
Speaker 3: looks really gen these things up to be the protective
Speaker 3: systems they're meant to be and allow smaller, heavily armed
Speaker 3: VLS type ships out there to go out and really
Speaker 3: do some damage on land based stuff while they have
Speaker 3: the protection of a larger ship nearby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the more the merrier, I think. You know,
Speaker 1: Brian McGrath once was talking about what does he want
Speaker 1: for Christmas or something like that. It's like VLS sells,
Speaker 1: the BLS sells VLS cells and that really and that
Speaker 1: is also one of the lessons from the Russia Ukrainian
Speaker 1: War that we've seen is you just need to have
Speaker 1: more launchers with greater range, and then you have to
Speaker 1: look at what your enemy can do. Yeah, electronic warfare
Speaker 1: is one of the big lessons, but you also have
Speaker 1: to look you look at Sevastopol. Sebastopol from Odessa is
Speaker 1: just one hundred and sixty two nautical mile and you
Speaker 1: know the for a few centuries, it's always been said,
Speaker 1: don't put your bases under the reach of your enemy's artillery.
Speaker 1: And if your cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are a
Speaker 1: branch of artillery, then they've seen that in spades, uh
Speaker 1: and s. Best of all, even and my, my Slavic
Speaker 1: friends will just have to tolerate my inability to pronounce
Speaker 1: any Russian word with more than two syllables. But their
Speaker 1: backup base on the other side of Crimea, across the
Speaker 1: curse straight on Novurshka Novo Rushka. However, however, you house
Speaker 1: that it's a little bit further away, two hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety two nautical miles from Odessa, but especially if you
Speaker 1: have any any ability to get a weapon in the
Speaker 1: air or from the sea, that's way too close. So
Speaker 1: the Russians have had to learn they've got to back
Speaker 1: their bases off more and more Ukraine. Obviously they can't
Speaker 1: they can't back up anywhere from where they are, so
Speaker 1: that the importance of range in both defense and offense
Speaker 1: has really come up to the four And it's nice
Speaker 1: to see the Army and at least the Navy has
Speaker 1: appreciated the problem more of needing to have those additional
Speaker 1: VLS cells to carry weapons available, but.
Speaker 2: Where you put them and.
Speaker 1: How you build them, that's another factor when you look
Speaker 1: at what we're producing, what we can have out there
Speaker 1: in the next you know, five, five to ten years.
Speaker 1: But you can carry a lot on aircraft. But again,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the other shoe drop, and I saw
Speaker 1: where the last week the US Air Force their next
Speaker 1: generation fighter there. For whatever reason, I guess the perfect
Speaker 1: is winning out over the good again they've gone back
Speaker 1: to the drawing board. So who knows if when we'll
Speaker 1: ever see that next airborne platform On the Navy side
Speaker 1: of the house, I haven't seen an update recently that
Speaker 1: the guys in Navira keeping a pretty good.
Speaker 2: Little on it. I don't know if if.
Speaker 1: You've seen or anybody in the chat room is seeing
Speaker 1: some information on the Navy's latest offering in the air
Speaker 1: because the first thing I'm going to look at is
Speaker 1: going to be range.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think that's important. I think Andy
Speaker 3: Wong in the in the chat room has been been
Speaker 3: talking about mine warfare something else to remember. I mean,
Speaker 3: the B fifty two's a lot of the strategic bombers
Speaker 3: can deliver minds that would be a serious problem that
Speaker 3: in the Taiwan's traits to any any force attempting to
Speaker 3: make an amphibious assault. I don't but the water depths
Speaker 3: aretain issues. So you know, it really depends on the
Speaker 3: capabilities of the systems we can we can use. If
Speaker 3: we went to mine warfare, and we've talked about mind warfare,
Speaker 3: it is you know, it's another one of those unsexy
Speaker 3: but really really important to parts of the of the
Speaker 3: Naval service that gets ignored until you you have to
Speaker 3: clear a field of them, and then you then you
Speaker 3: have to think real.
Speaker 1: Hard if people of whenever somebody brings up unmanned systems,
Speaker 1: and the one thing I tell them that I always
Speaker 1: get excited about is you're talking about the you know,
Speaker 1: the large unmanned subsurface capable units that look like little
Speaker 1: midget submarine so to speak. My take has always been
Speaker 1: make those mind layers, because if you know that, that's
Speaker 1: different than a lot of the other real complicated missions.
Speaker 1: If you have good navigations and good engineering, you can
Speaker 1: rig those up to lay minds. Now you have my attention.
Speaker 1: How you're going to transport them from point A to
Speaker 1: point b.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of nice already in production auxiliaries that
Speaker 1: could boy carry out a whole bunch of them forward.
Speaker 1: But that's that's one thing. When it comes to unmanned
Speaker 1: systems going into mind warfare, it really gets my attention
Speaker 1: because is everybody body knows is you blow up one
Speaker 1: ship and you deter the entire strike group. Mine sit
Speaker 1: there and they wait, and the minute their presence is known,
Speaker 1: even if they don't wind up damaging a ship, everything
Speaker 1: comes to a full stop because next to a submarine
Speaker 1: in the middle of your of your group, knowing that
Speaker 1: you're in a mine field, that's that's terrorized sailors for
Speaker 1: a couple of couple of centuries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's a it's anyways, the perfect weapons system
Speaker 3: that I have always assumed without knowing for sure that
Speaker 3: those large uh u on us what is it large
Speaker 3: unmanned subsurface vehicles are the u l U u vs.
Speaker 3: I think we got to find a better thing to
Speaker 3: call them. Yeah, I always thought that that was there,
Speaker 3: that was one of their mission areas, just an assumption
Speaker 3: of my part. But you know again, it's it's uh,
Speaker 3: there's all world of stuff out there that has probably classified.
Speaker 3: We even if we knew about it, we could talk
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I just time flies when you're talking with
Speaker 1: fun friends.
Speaker 2: Just Robs coming on the top. They are.
Speaker 1: One last thing that I wanted to talk about is
Speaker 1: I don't know how how many other people have seen
Speaker 1: these little breadcrumbs lying around. But we talked for a
Speaker 1: little bit. You mentioned earlier, we really didn't dive into
Speaker 1: it much. You mentioned that the same thing that I
Speaker 1: saw in my scan this weekend that Egypt. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's their first or maybe it's their largest,
Speaker 1: but they had, you know, the equivalent of the Paris
Speaker 1: Air Show. They had that in Egypt, and the People's
Speaker 1: Republic of China had a very big presence there. They
Speaker 1: were showing off their Y twenty transport, which is roughly
Speaker 1: two thirds of the C seventeen. Maybe it's close to
Speaker 1: the European A four hundred and its airlift capability and
Speaker 1: their J ten fighter that they put out as being
Speaker 1: an F teen equivalent. Who knows, they had a pretty
Speaker 1: big presence there.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: They also announced that the chief of the Egyptian Air
Speaker 1: Force will be headed to Beijing soon. Be interesting to
Speaker 1: see if there's an announcement there or he's just going
Speaker 1: there for the fine dining with a succulent Chinese meal
Speaker 1: in Beijing, But we'll just have to find out what
Speaker 1: that's going to happen. And then you had Turkey, which
Speaker 1: sadly every year fades further into shadow, announcing that they
Speaker 1: wanted to lead a great Muslim opposition to Israel, with
Speaker 1: not shockingly involving most of the former Ottoman Empire. So
Speaker 1: you have the Eastern Mediterranean at the top and the bottom,
Speaker 1: and of course Syria is what it is and Lebanon
Speaker 1: is what it is. That whole area east of Crete
Speaker 1: has never been the most secure place in the world,
Speaker 1: but you can almost you could almost draw a scenario
Speaker 1: out circa twenty thirty four or so that the Eastern
Speaker 1: Mediterranean becomes is less of a friendly place that we've
Speaker 1: seen since you know, you were off the coast of
Speaker 1: Vietnam many moons. That would be an unfortunate development, especially
Speaker 1: for our European friends, even if we fixed the problem
Speaker 1: in the Red Sea.
Speaker 2: At the I think between what they're do looking at
Speaker 2: in China.
Speaker 1: And what we seen that they were doing in Gaza.
Speaker 1: For those who have been following the argument of why
Speaker 1: Israel does not want to leave what's called the Philadelphia
Speaker 1: or Philadelphia Corridor, which is basically the border between Egypt
Speaker 1: and Gaza that has a huge, huge it's to keep
Speaker 1: people from getting out of Gaza, but underneath it's these
Speaker 1: huge truck sized tunnels that were being used to smuggle
Speaker 1: in weapons pre October seventh and after October seventh coming
Speaker 1: from Egypt. The hope that a lot of people had.
Speaker 1: I saw one person say that if the Chinese, if
Speaker 1: the Chinese succeed in becoming the primary supplier to Egypt,
Speaker 1: that is pretty much the end of the Camp David era.
Speaker 1: That would be It's a pretty bold statement, but we've
Speaker 1: seen stranger things. But I think that whole Eastern Mediterranean
Speaker 1: area already gets a lot of attention. But I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be a very interesting decade between the
Speaker 1: trends that we're seeing in Egypt and Turkey.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the world. The world continues to change and people
Speaker 3: who were once allies may not be quite as strong
Speaker 3: an ally as we once had, and that's the way
Speaker 3: it goes. We have used up an hour of everybody's time,
Speaker 3: and we could probably go on for several more hours,
Speaker 3: but uh, I think we we've exhausted me and I
Speaker 3: don't know everybody else.
Speaker 2: It's exhausting.
Speaker 3: There is there is so much going on in the world,
Speaker 3: and we need to keep getting good guests in here
Speaker 3: to talk about it. I appreciate everybody who joined us today,
Speaker 3: and Andy, thank you for your mind warfare of stuff
Speaker 3: because that taking a look at your article looks pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: We need to get we need to get people thinking
Speaker 3: about that stuff.
Speaker 1: We sure to do and speaking a great guest. Next week
Speaker 1: we still need to confirm it, but we should have
Speaker 1: Toshi Yoshihara on, which was uh just one of the
Speaker 1: one of the best thinkers.
Speaker 2: That we we have available on China.
Speaker 1: Uh. For those that have been with us for a
Speaker 1: long time, No, We've had Toshi on many times in
Speaker 1: the past, so we're really looking forward to that. And
Speaker 1: for those that are still with us. I haven't. I
Speaker 1: haven't made this ultra call in a while, but we
Speaker 1: appreciate those that join us live and also get to
Speaker 1: us on the pot cast. And if you're all the
Speaker 1: way through here, that means you're a fan of mid Rats.
Speaker 1: If you haven't already, go over to iTunes, Spotify, spreaker,
Speaker 1: wherever you are, and go ahead and give us a
Speaker 1: five star and give us a nice review, not a
Speaker 1: four star, not a three store. Give us a five
Speaker 1: star review. Not that we have tender egos that each stroking,
Speaker 1: but if there are other people that are interested in
Speaker 1: getting podcasts that cover national security issues, the way the
Speaker 1: logarithms work is the nicer reviews, and the more reviews
Speaker 1: you have, the more you show up in the search,
Speaker 1: so other people will find us and I have an
Speaker 1: opportunity to enjoy mid Rats as much as you do.
Speaker 1: So thank you very much everybody for joining us for
Speaker 1: another edition of mid Rats. And until next time, I
Speaker 1: hope everybody has a great Navy day.
Speaker 2: Cheers.
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