Midrats

The generation that will lead Sailors forward over what is shaping up to be the most challenging environment at sea for the USN since the 1980s is just now rolling in to their first shore duty or out of it.

What culture and experiences marked their formative junior officer years? How will they change the fluid culture of our navy? Will their habits in writing, discussing, and experimenting differ than previous generations of officers, or just blend in with long running trends?

Do their view of priorities differ from the mid-level and senior level leadership.

Our guest for the full hour to address these topics and whatever else pops out of the rabbit hole will be Jimmy Drennan.

When he's not masquerading as The Salty Millennial, Jimmy Drennan is a Surface Warfare Officer assigned to U.S. Central Command, and is President of the Center for International Maritime Security.

Wars are full of accidental battles, unexpected horror, and the valor of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Often lost in the sweeping stories of the Pacific in WWII, there is a story that - if not for one man's inability to properly recognize one ship from another - should have never have happened. Because of that one man's mistake, and a leader's stubborn enthusiasm to double down on that mistake, the lived of hundreds of men were lost - and possibly the course of a pivotal early battle changed.

Our guest for the full hour will be author Don Keith to discuss the tale of the USS Neosho (AO-23) and USS Sims (DD-409) at the Battle of the Coral Sea in his latest book, The Ship That Wouldn't Die: The Saga of the USS Neosho- A World War II Story of Courage and Survival at Sea.

Don is an award-winning and best-selling author of books on a wide range of topics. In addition to being a prolific writer, he also has a background in broadcast journalism from on-the-air personality to ownership.

Don’s web site is www.donkeith.com

When this show first aired in May of 2016, we were coming up on the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Jutland. Stop for a moment, close your eyes, and then tell me what image comes to mind.

If your image is of a huge mass of steel coming at you out from the mist at 25-knots belching out sun-blocking clouds of coal-smoke and burned black powder and searing fingers of flame pushing tons of armor-piercing explosives, then this is the show for you.

For the full hour our guest is great friend of the show, Robert Farley. We will not only be discussing the Battle of Jutland, but battleships in general in the context of his most recent book titled for clarity, The Battleship Book.

Rob teaches defense and security courses at the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky. He blogs at InformationDissemination and LawyersGunsAndMoney. In addition to The Battleship Book, he is also the author of, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force.

How are unmanned systems and the increasing use of robots from the kitchen to the battlefield impacting how our personal, professional, and national lives are being run?

What are the obvious and not so obvious places they are already a dominate presence today, and where are trends leading us?

Our guest for the full hour to discuss the issues he raises in his book, "One Nation Under Drones" will be John E. Jackson, CAPT, USN (Ret.).

Professor Jackson has served at the Naval War College for more than 20 years, teaching in the areas of national security decision-making, logistics, and unmanned and robotic systems. He holds the E.A. Sperry Chair of Unmanned and Robotic Systems and lectures frequently. His latest book “One Nation, Under Drones" was published by the U.S. Naval Institute in December 2018. He is the program manager for the Chief of Naval Operation's professional reading program.

Additionally, he serves on the President's Action Group and as chairman of the 9-11 Memorial Committee. A retired Navy Captain, he served in supply and logistics assignments both afloat and ashore retiring in 1998 after 27 years of active service.

During the 2016 election, then candidate Donald Trump ran on building a 350 ship Navy. That number soon moved up to 355.

Two years after his inauguration, the path to get there is hard to see.

There is a movement of navalists who are not just looking for the path to 355, but looking to the challenge of China at the end of the next decade, want our Navy to move north of 400 ships.

To that end, in February a resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives by Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) titled, “Five Ocean Navy Strategy.”

Congressman Banks will join us for today’s episode along with Dr. Jerry Hendrix, CAPT, USN, (Ret) to discuss the Resolution and the need behind it.

We are going to take a clear, cold, and unsparing look at the status of the conflict in Afghanistan and the Long War in general with our returning guest, Bill Roggio.

In a far-reaching discussion, we will touch on the rather unpleasant reality of where we have put ourselves through our own action, and what people should expect going forward.

Bill is a senior fellow at FDD and editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, which provides original reporting and analysis of the Global War on Terror from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, Iran, and beyond. He is also president of the nonprofit media company Public Multimedia Inc.

Bill was embedded with the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army, and Iraqi forces in Iraq between 2005 and 2008, and with the Canadian Army in Afghanistan in 2006. From 1991 to 1997, Bill served as a signalman and infantryman in the U.S. Army and New Jersey National Guard. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Beast, National Review, and The New York Post, and his work has been in outlets including The New Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, Foreign Policy, and Bloomberg.

The best fiction doesn't just entertain, it informs and causes the reader to think.

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern is August Cole, the co-author with P.W. Singer of one of the best received military fiction novels on the last year, Ghost Fleet: An Novel of the Next World War.

August is an author and analyst specializing in national security issues.

He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council where he directs The Art of the Future Project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict. He is a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy (West Point). He is also writer-in-residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management consulting firm focused on government-oriented industries.

He also edited the Atlantic Council science fiction collection, War Stories From the Future, published in November 2015. The anthology featured his short story ANTFARM about the intersection of swarm-warfare, additive manufacturing and crowd-sourced intelligence.

He is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Washington and an editor and a reporter for MarketWatch.com.

From showing the flag in the Mediterranean in the first decades of our republic's history, through Teddy's Great White Fleet, to FONOPS in today's South China Sea - "being there" is a little understood strategic mission.

What is its history and utility in the 21st Century?

Our guest for the full hour will be Dr. James Holmes, returning to Midrats to discuss this and related issues.

Dr. Holmes is a professor of strategy and holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer and combat veteran of the first Gulf War, he served as a weapons and engineering officer in the battleship Wisconsin, engineering and firefighting instructor at the Surface Warfare Officers School Command, and military professor of strategy at the Naval War College. He was the last gunnery officer to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger.

The book he co-authored with Toshi Yoshihara, Red Star over the Pacific, now in its second edition.

Stowaways, poaching, piracy, smuggling, and murder - the global commons of the open ocean is as wild of a place as it is vast.

Using as a baseline his series on lawlessness on the high seas in the New York Times, The Outlaw Ocean, our guest for the full hour to discuss the anarchy of crime and violence on the high seas in the 21st Century will be Ian Ubina.

Ian is a reporter for The New York Times, based in the paper’s Washington bureau. He has degrees in history from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and his writings, which range from domestic and foreign policy to commentary on everyday life, have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

First aired SEPT 2015.

Over 18-months after the deadly collision of the USS FITZGERALD with the Philippine-flagged merchant ship ACX Crystal off the Sea of Japan, from the courtroom to the fleet, we still have not come to terms with latent causes, accountability, or even a full understanding about what happened from a human and machine perspective.

Earlier this year, journalist Geoff Ziezulewicz received a copy of the Fort Report made shortly after the collision by Rear Admiral Brian P. Fort, USN.

Geoff will be our guest for the full hour to review the findings, the reactions to it, and further developments.

Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at [email protected].