Midrats

Especially for the Royal Navy, it was assumed the military leaders, politicians, and the general population understood that they were island nations and that their security and prosperity depended on a strong navy and civilian maritime commerce. 

Even the greatest naval power of the last century, the United States of America seems to be unable to have people understand why it needs a strong navy. What happened?

Focused primarily on the core of the issue with the Royal Navy, our guest for the full hour to discuss the scourge of seablindness will be Dr James WE Smith, the Laughton-Corbett Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

He completed his PhD in ‘War and Strategic Studies’ that focused on studying the organization of defense and defense unification in the UK and US and how that impacts strategy and strategic thought. This has complemented a broader research effort which has taken nearly fifteen years about the devaluation of sea, navies and maritime strategy in nations and strategic thought from seabed to space.

Links:

• 'Seablindness' and the Royal Navy Today
• The US Navy versus Seablindness: par for the course for America?

You can follow James on X, or his substack.

Feel like the chaos from the Black Sea, Red Sea, South China Sea and various places ashore seems just too much to keep track of?

Well, if you need an hour to catch up and ponder as Sal & Eagle One will take you from the Houthi's sinking their first ship, Darwinism at war, to the US Navy heading in to Haiphong witih guns blazing ... for peace.

From the February 12th guest post over at Sal's substack, our guest today opened with a firm point;"..the combat performance of U.S. Navy destroyers in the Red Sea against a variety of weapons employed by the Houthis from Yemen stands as a monument to decades of brilliance, hard work, and dedication across generations of naval officers, government civilians, industry executives, talented engineers and technologists, assembly line workers, and shipbuilders. THIS—is the military-industrial complex, and it works."

Returning for another visit to Midrats to dive into his arguments about where the Military Industrial Complex puts "Ws" on the board and related topics will be Bryan McGrath, CDR, USN (Ret.).

Bryan is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC, a defense consultancy. The opinions expressed here are his.

The vulnerability of aircraft carriers is nothing new. They are vulnerable not just because of how they are designed - really just a thin hulled ship full of fuel and explosives - but because of what they do.

At peace and at war, there is no other platform that can project power and national will on a global scale at sea than an aircraft carrier. As such, everyone either wants one, or wants to sink one - or both.While many people think of the Pacific wars of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam as places where the US Navy's aircraft carriers could operate at will and dominate everything, that really was not the case until late 1944.The reality was quite different before then. Proper use of carriers was mostly about husbanding carriers’s limited resources while still getting max value out of them.That will be the topic of today's show with returning guest Dr. John T. Kuehn.

John is Professor of Military History at the Army Command and General Staff College. He served in the US Navy as a naval flight officer flying in EP-3s and ES-3s, retiring in 2004.

He has authored or co-authored seven books and was awarded a Vandevort Prize from the Society for Military History in 2023 for his article “Zumwalt, Holloway, and the Soviet Navy Threat Leadership in a Time of Strategic, Social, and Cultural Change.”His latest book from is Strategy in Crisis (Naval Institute, 2023).

Feel like there is too much going on in the national security world to keep up with?

Well, let your heart not be troubled. Mark & Sal will deliver a full hour of discussion of not just what's breaking in to the news in the last week of January 2024, but whatever else pops up.

Iranian proxies causing American military losses from Jordan to the Horn of Africa; Iranian drone carriers to America's need for some inventive ideas to bring more VLS cells forward sooner - with some ASBM pondering thrown in for good measure.

If we are approaching the end of the almost century-long age of the aircraft carrier, for the United States Navy, what are some of the options we could have in fleet designed to execute the Navy's mission in its place?

Challenges, opportunities, and compromises - we'll dive into it all with guest Jeff Vandenengel, CDR USN.The reference point for our conversation will be his new book, Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy.

Jeff completed three tours on fast-attack submarines. Winner of the 2019 Admiral Willis Lent Award for tactical excellence at sea, he deployed to the Western Pacific three times and to the Atlantic at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

While everyone is focused on the Red Sea or the goings on in Ukraine, there are serious developments between The Philippines and the Peoples Republic of China that is not going to wait for the other world's problems to finish up their time in the sun.

If the main game is in the Western Pacific, then The Philippines are the center square.

Returning to Midrats to discuss this ongoing story will be Ray Powell.Ray is the Founder and Director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, California.

Ray served 35 years in the U.S. Air Force, including posts in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Qatar, as well as combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served as the U.S. Air Attaché to Vietnam and the U.S. Defense Attaché to Australia.

From moving grain to the world markets from the Black Sea to global trade through the Red Sea, and the People’s Republic of China’s unabashed bullying of The Philippines and the nations surrounding the South China Sea – the US Navy is not large enough to carry the burden of maintaining the international order at sea.

We have a series of alliances with most of the top-10 maritime powers on the globe, but are they being effectively harnessed toward maintaining this order? Are we an ally that instills confidence in our friends and respect from our challengers?

Returning to Midrats to discuss these and related topics in a wide-ranging conversation will be Kori Schake.Kori leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Safe Passage: the Transition from British to American Hegemony, and a contributing writer at the Atlantic, War on the Rocks, and Bloomberg.

With a few exceptions on the sidelines by Japan and France, what has been clearly apparent in the last two months has been the absence of the International Community's presence in the Red Sea to enforce the International Order everyone seems to consider of utmost importance to the economic system that gives us the standard of living the globe is accustomed to?

Once again, it is the U.S. Navy that seems to be the force of choice, or the only real option to do the bare minimum to keep lawlessness at sea at bay.

Is this sustainable when we have allies closer to the threat with equally deployable assets? The U.S. and her Navy have larger concerns much closer to its core national interests that are already under resourced.

Our guest today to dive in to this and related issues is Elbridge Colby, Principal at the Marathon Initiative. Former Pentagon, 2018 National Defense Strategy player and author of Strategy of Denial.


Recorded December 8th.

With Thanksgiving behind us and another month of the Holiday Season to go, it's time to catch up on the goings on at the waterfront with a special guest calling in who we decided to hijack and keep for the rest of the show - returning listener favorite Mark Vandroff.