Midrats

This week we were reminded, again, that the world relies on the free flow of goods at market prices across its oceans to maintain a reasonable standard of living.

Most of the world consumes more food and fuel than it can produce locally. Most of the world's people live from paycheck to paycheck, and entire societies' stability rely on the grain and oil that economically can only be moved internationally at sea.In a story as old has time, there are power who are using that need as leverage by threatening - or proposing to threaten - access to the seas they have access to.

In this case it is the Russians threatening grain shipments through the Black Sea, and the Iranians the shipments of oil and gas.Joining us for the full hour to discuss this threat and how to address it will be returning guest Captain John Konrad.

John is the founder and CEO of gCaptain and author of the book Fire On The Horizon. He is licensed to captain the world's largest commercial ships and has sailed from ports around the world. John has built some of the world's most advanced ships and managed billion-dollar offshore construction projects in some of the world's harshest marine environments. John is a distinguished alumnus of New York Maritime College.

EagleOne and Sal pick up last weeks conversation to catch up on the conversation of the latest national security and maritime topics at hand.

As always on the melee format, join us live with the open chatroom and studio line if you have some issues you'd like to discuss. We're taking requests!

Links to items discussed:

• Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, SeaLight.
• Mackenzie Eaglen’s, Buying Power Is the Invisible Shortfall of the 2024 Defense Budget Request. Also here.
• Japan-India BILAT naval exercises.
• UN ship arrives in Yemen to prevent catastrophic oil spill from decaying tanker.
• Luconia Shoals.
• CSIS Island Tracker.
• AUKUS submarine officer training.

It's too darn hot to do anything outside, so stay inside and put your mind to work!

EagleOne and Sal start the show with the discussion of books they plan to use to help overcome the mid-summer heat and then cover some of the latest and greatest on the national security front, at least as we define it!

Books Discussed:

EagleOne’s List:

• Developing the Naval Mind, B J Armstrong.
• Looking for a Ship, John McPhee,
• Jade Rooster: An Asiatic Fleet Thriller, R.L. Crossland
• Raven One, Kevin Miller (
• Chinese Account of the Opium War, (annotated with study guide), E.H. Parker
• The Commodore, P. T. Deutermann,
• Flight of the Intruder, Stepheen Coonts,
• Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk,
• The Caine Mutiny, Wouk
• The Connor Stark Novels, Claude Berube
• The Abandoned Ocean, Andrew Gibson & Arthur Donovan \
• Bridges at Toko-Ri, James Michener
• Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, Arthur Herman

Sal’s List:

• The Castaway's War: One Man's Battle against Imperial Japan by Stephen Harding
• The Political Uses of Sea Power by Edward Luttwak
• What the Citizen Should Know About the Navy by Hansen Baldwin
• Suez to Singapore by Cecil Brown
• Logistics in the National Defense by Henry Eccles
• The White Guard by Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov

Upcoming books by upcoming Midrats Guests:

• Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End by Jerry Dunleavy, James Hasson
• Upcoming book on Task Force Lion by Seth W.B. Folsom

Links Discussed:

• State Department after action report on Afghanistan
• New Zealand’s economic addiction to the People’s Republic of China
• CIA Director William J. Burns’s Ditchley Foundation lecture
• The PLAN’s new Cambodian base.

For generations, a great comparative advantage the United States has enjoyed at sea is the superiority of its submarine force.

It has become simply an assumption in our war planning to the point it is treated as almost a natural part of the environment.Of course, nothing stands still in war. Time and technology usually finds a way to blunt any advantage, leverage any vulnerability.

As the challenge at sea grows, what can the US do to maintain the comparative advantage under the sea?

Returning to Midrats this Sunday is Bryan Clark, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.The starting point for our conversation will be the recent report he co-authored with Timothy Walton this month at Hudson’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, Fighting into the Bastions: Getting Noisier to Sustain the US Undersea Advantage.

By 2030, the People's Republic of China is expected to have a navy of 425 warships, up significantly from their 360 today - already larger than the United States Navy.

In spite of her struggles ashore, demographic collapse, and structural deficiencies, the Russian Navy still maintains a significant submarine force.While the world's strategic situation has changed dramatically, it isn't something not seen.

For fits and starts for over a decade, the US has tried to address the change in a cohesive manner, but in 2023, everyone is still looking for the right response.

This Sunday for the full hour our guest will be, Brent Sadler, Captain, USN (Ret.), senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, to discuss the issues he raises in his recent book, U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat.

Brent served twenty-six-year in the Navy with numerous operational tours on nuclear powered submarines and has been a member of personal staffs of senior defense department leaders and was a military diplomat in Asia.

From the abstract of the article in the Naval War College Review Winter 2023 Edition, Strategy, Uncertainty, and the China Challenge;

"Despite China’s increasing aggressiveness, its intentions are indeterminate, even aligning with U.S. interests in some arenas. Furthermore, China simply may fail in achieving even its foremost national and foreign-policy goals. Given this uncertainty, the United States should not base its policy and strategy on any specific prediction about Chinese intentions or abilities."

Our guest for the full hour will be Jeffrey W. Meiser from the University of Portland (Oregon). We'll dive in to the issues raised in the article and discuss related topics as they come in to the conversation.

You're in for a treat this Midrats with a regular since 2010 returning to the podcast, Claude Berube.

Claude will be with us the full hour to discuss his third novel in the Connor Stark series, The Philippine Pact, bringing back most of your favorite characters from the first two books in the series, The Aden Effect and Syren's Song.

As with all of Claude's novels, his characters always seem to find themselves in the location you find breaking in to the news in the real world.Don't miss it!

Claude is the author of four non-fiction books, three novels and more than eighty articles. His latest, The Philippine Pact, continues the adventures of a private naval company countering China's small wars around the world.

He earned his doctorate from the University of Leeds. He retired from the Navy Reserve as a Commander, serving out of the country in Europe, in the Persian Gulf, and as the Deputy J2 at JTF-GTMO. He has worked as a navy contractor for Naval Sea Systems Command and the Office of Naval Research, as a civil servant with the Office of Naval Intelligence, and as a staffer to two US Senators and a House member. He has taught in the Political Science and History Departments at the US Naval Academy since 2005.

For generations, the US military’s senior leadership in the field had no reason to worry about being on the receiving end of enemy fires at their command posts. Even at the company level but especially at higher echelons, we expected that we would be safe and secure in our command posts. Command posts were where one watched, planned, and executed operations – not become player in one.

One of the defining characteristics early in the Russo-Ukrainian War was the high loss rate of Russian General Officers from enemy action. Part of this was due to the top-down traditions in the Russian Army that required direct, forward, and in person direction and guidance – but a significant part of that was the Ukrainian military’s reaching out to eliminate senior leadership where they led the fight - their command posts.

As precision long range conventional fires and the ISR that supports them become more common on even the most primitive battlefield, is it time for the USA and her allies to reconsider their own reliance on large, static, and “noisy” command posts?

Using an article he co-authored in the March issue of the US Army’s “Military Review” titled “The Graveyard of Command Posts” as a starting point for our conversation, our guest this Sunday for the full hour from 5-6pm Eastern will be Lt. Col. Matthew R. Arrol, U.S. Army, commandant of the U.S. Army Joint Support Team at Hurlburt Field, Florida.

He is a contributing member of NATO’s Integrated Capabilities Group on Indirect Fire. He is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College, and his civil schooling includes a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Michigan State University and an MBA from Eastern Michigan University. His most recent operational assignment was as the deputy commanding officer of the 19th Battlefield Coordination Detachment in Ramstein, Germany, where he served from 2016 to 2020. Previous tactical assignments include battalion operations officer and executive officer, 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment; and G-5 fires planner, 1st Cavalry Division.

It's a maritime and natsec free for all on Midrats!

No fixed topic, open chat room and open studio line for those who are joining us live.

From some rather strange comments in congressional briefing rooms to recruiting woes at home, to some rather interesting riverine amphibious operations in the Dnipro River in Ukraine, what it takes to fire a Russian Navy fleet commander, and whatever other topics come across the transom - a full hour of maritime excellence!

History, heritage, ethos, and institutional culture are more than just books, lectures, static displays, songs, stories and rituals - they are part of a tapestry that define the characteristics of an organization and a people.In a cold, neutral review of individual parts, it can be a challenge to see why they are important, what they really signify ... why we keep, remember, and practice them.

On occasion, events suddenly reveal how that tapestry creates a culture and the amazing things that culture can accomplish. Those events become in themselves a story and reinforce and expand the tapestry.One such event took place 35 years ago this April, the mine strike of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) on 14 APR 1988.

Returning to Midrats to discuss the events of that day and the very real legacy we see today from the ship and her crew will be Bradley Peniston, deputy editor of Defense One and author of the reference book on the mine strike; No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf (Naval Institute Press, 2006), which has been featured in the Chief of Naval Operations' Professional Reading Program.

Brad is a national security journalist for a quarter-century, he helped launch http://Military.com, served as managing editor of Defense News, and was editor of Armed Forces Journal.