Midrats

Looking back over the archive, this episode from May continues to be one of our most popular, and for good reason.  Enjoy.

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How do you intellectually prepare combat leaders?  If you are given a young man or woman at 18, how do you best educate that person so they have the cultural, ethical, technical, and historical knowledge to make the right decisions for the right reasons, and lead others to do the same?

What are unchanged, timeless fundamentals, and what new things are coming over the horizon that today's Ensigns and Second Lieutenants need to have inculcated in to their intelect so they have the best foundation to become this nation's Admirals and Generals for the mid-21st Century?

Join milbloggers Sal from "CDR Salamander" and EagleOne from "Eaglespeak" and their two guests this Sunday to discuss this critically important subject.

Their guest for the first half of the hour will be Vice Admiral Michael H. Miller, USN, the 61st Superintendent of the United States Naval Academy.

For the second half of the hour we will have Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, PhD, author, professor, nationally syndicated columnist, and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

From todays operations off Libya tothe closing days of WWII - what are the lessons of using military power to create the effects ashore? 

For the last 6-months, conflict once again brought the question often forgotten in the quiet times; where are our carriers?  As was covered well in last month’s Proceedings by Dr. Norman Friedman, the essential effectiveness and efficiency of the CV/S/N. Land based air has its place – but any distance makes the ability to provide persistent effects from the air over the battlespace prohibitively expensive compared to a carrier off shore.

For the first half of the show we will have Dr. Friedman on to discuss.

For the second half of the show we are going to go back in time to the waning days of WWII with author D. M. Giangreco, the Arthur Goodzeit Award for Best Military History Book of 2009 awarded by the New York Military Affairs Symposium for his book Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947. We'll reflect on VJ-Day and what could have happened without the ultimate game changing weapon - the nuclear bomb.

Military professionals understand the intelligence requirements of the Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Level. 

Each level of command has their own set of reconnaissance and surveillance requirements.  In the truest sense - data needs to flow up and down in order to ensure that the National Command Authority has the best information available when forming policy.

They also understand that on top of them all is the Political Level. The Political can be national, alliance, or international.  Is there an even more critical level that should inform the Political and effect its direction and guidance?

What about Earth monitoring - the Environmental Level?

The history of the Earth is a constant story of changing climates from temperature, sea levels, deserts and rain. These changes drive migration and wars. Are we monitoring this to the level we should?

To discuss for the full hour will be Research Associate and Joseph S. Nye Jr. Internship Coordinator at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), co-author of the policy brief, Blinded: The Decline of U.S. Earth Monitoring Capabilities and Its Consequences for National Security; Will Rogers.

Rogers’s research focus spans unconventional security challenges, and he has authored or co-authored a range of publications on energy, climate change, environmental cooperation in Asia, and cybersecurity.  He is a co-editor of and contributor to the Natural Security Blog.

When you mention books on naval history, there are but a few authors whose work immediately come to mind, and our guest is one of them.

Unquestionably one of the finest writers of naval history of the last half-century; James D. Hornfischer.

We have talked about his books on a regular basis both on Midrats and over at our homeblogs; The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors &  Ship of Ghosts.  He has a new book out, one that will be required reading for his fans - Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal.

We will have him for the full hour, so don't miss the discussion of the U.S. Navy in the opening of WWII, the lessons we should take from history, and the importance of the study of naval history for both the professional and amateur.

Energy independence and energy security are not just buzzwords.  From the car you drive to the food you eat and the heat that makes winters livable and power that makes summers productive to our urban culture; energy and power are what makes our civilization possible.

If you don't have secure energy, you do not have a secure nation. The areas of the world that have the greatest energy supplies are neither stable or natural friends of our Western Democracy.  That is a problem, and explains why most of our wars have been fought where they have been.

Is new technology helping to change the national security equasion?

To discuss for the full hour will be Amy Myers Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies, director of the Energy Forum at the Baker Institute, author, and associate director of the Rice Energy Program at Rice University.

An encore presentation of our Valentine's Day Eve show on Russia.

Join milbloggers Sal from "CDR Salamander" and Eagle One from "EagleSpeak" this Sunday with their guest, Dr. Dmitry Gorenburg, Senior Analyst at CNA and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. You can follow his lastest thoughts on Russian Military Reform at his blog at: (http://russiamil.wordpress.com) For the full hour we will look at where Russia stands in the 21st Century and how its domestic politics, demographics, the rise of China, and the evolution of its relationships in its near abroad will challenge this important nation.

It's that time of the year.  Bring your questions, comments, observations - chat or heck; we'll even take phone calls.

 

Join Navy milbloggers Sal from "CDR Salamander" and Eagle One from "EagleSpeak" for an hour on the top issues in maritime and national security.

This nation has been served by those who come home, and those who never make it back.

Some have had their stories preserved and celebrated within living memory, some are almost unknown.

This weeks episode will cover both sides of our military experience.

For the first half hour our guest will be best selling author Laura Hillenbrand to talk about her latest book Unbroken; an incredible story of survival of Louie Zamperini - olympic athlete, B-24 Liberator bombardier, survivor of being adrift at sea for months and the as a POW under the Japanese.

Unbroken is presently #9 on Amazon in general, and #2 in Military History.  Laura's previous works include Seabiscuit.

Our guest for the second half of the hour will Michael R. Caputo of  The Intrepid Project - people doing all they can to bring some shipmates home.  He is here to talk about 12 Sailors who have been abandoned in a mass grave in a mass grave in Libya.

After dying at sea after a failed mission, when their bodies washed up on the shores of Tripoli on 04 SEP 1804, the bashaw had dogs to devour them as other American prisoners of war looked on. These 13 heroes are buried in two mass graves in Libya. One of those graves is unmarked and underfoot on the Tripoli plaza where Gaddafy has held anti-America rallies for decades. They want to bring them home. The Navy doesn't.

If you look to the performance of the US Navy in World War II - those ships came in the shipbuilding programs of the 1920s and 1930s.  At a time with no computers or modern communication equipment - and working through the naval treaty limitations as well as the Great Depression - we saw incredible innovation and steadily improving ship designs.  Why?

A lot of the credit is given to something the Navy had then, but does not have now; The General Board.   What was The General Board, what did it do, and is the Navy today suffering for the lack of one.   Join hosts Sal from the blog "CDR Salamander" and EagleOne of "EagleSpeak" to discuss the issue and more with John T. Kuehn, PhD.  Dr Kuehn is a former naval aviator  who has completed cruises aboard four different aircraft carriers. He flew reconnaissance missions during the last decade of the Cold War, the First Gulf War and the Balkans. CDR Kuehn has served on the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College since July 2000, retiring from the naval service in 2004. He earned a Ph.D. in History from Kansas State University in 2007. He is the author of the Agents of Innovation and Eyewitness Pacific Theater with Dennis Giangreco.   He is currently an associate professor of military history at the US Army command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

We are having a "best of" for this weekend with one of our best shows this year.

For anyone interested in history, politics, or national security - there are two books that should be on your short list for 2011.  Both authors will be on Midrats this Sunday.

Join Sal from "CDR Salamander" and EagleOne from "EagleSpeak" with their guests; former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to discuss his book Known & Unknown: A Memoir for the first half hour, and then author Bing West to discuss his latest book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.