Episode 722: China's Overseas Bases & the Transition to War, with T.X. Hammes

The People’s Republic of China continues to expand its already well-established contestation of ownership, access, and control of ports throughout the world.

They have done this in parallel with building the world’s largest navy and a diverse set of military capabilities clearly designed with one purpose—defeating the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific.

Returning to Midrats to discuss this and related topics is be T. X. Hammes.

T.X. is a distinguished research fellow at the Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University. He served 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Show Links

• China’s exploitation of overseas ports and bases
• Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie
• Ares anti-ship cruise missile
• Typhon
• MWI Podcast: The Future Battlefield, from Europe to the Indo-Pacific
• The Eastern Front

Summary

In this conversation, Sal, Mark, and T.X. Hammes discuss the implications of China's global expansion, particularly its military strategy and naval capabilities. They explore how China is leveraging its control over ports and logistics to challenge U.S. dominance in the Indo-Pacific. The discussion also delves into operational planning assumptions for potential conflict with China, the historical context of long wars, and the challenges facing U.S. military readiness. Innovative solutions for naval warfare, the importance of economic exhaustion and sea control, and the role of mines in modern warfare are also examined. The conversation concludes with thoughts on the future of military technology and the potential for leveraging civilian resources in military operations.

Takeaways

• China's global expansion poses significant challenges to U.S. interests.
• The U.S. Navy must adapt to China's growing naval capabilities.
• China's unconventional use of ports can disrupt global trade.
• Long wars are historically common between healthy powers.
• U.S. military readiness is not sufficient for a prolonged conflict.
• Innovative solutions like missile barges could enhance naval warfare.
• Economic exhaustion is a critical factor in long-term conflicts.
• Mines could play a crucial role in modern naval strategy.
• The focus should shift from platforms to payloads in military planning.
• Leveraging civilian resources can enhance military capabilities.

Chapters

00:00: Introduction to China's Global Expansion
02:36: China's Naval Capabilities and Strategic Ports
10:42: Planning Assumptions for Potential Conflict
21:29: Control of the Sea and Economic Exhaustion
30:26: Utilizing Merchant Ships in Warfare
33:27: Investing in Future Military Technologies
35:44: Innovative Solutions for Pacific Defense
40:11: The Role of Unmanned Systems in Modern Warfare
42:57: Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War
44:59: Adapting Combined Arms for Modern Conflicts
48:44: The Importance of Flexibility in Naval Operations
53:10: Building a Resilient Merchant Fleet
55:57: Exploring New Strategies for Warfare
01:00:50: Future Directions in Military Strategy

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander and
the Eagle One from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore your
home for a discussion of national security issues and all
things maritime. And good day everybody, and glad to have
you on board for another edition of mid Rats. If
you are with that esteemed cohort, Live like to extend
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(00:52):
You can go ahead and rolling there. We've already got
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(01:14):
you go over to Spotify, iTunes, Spreaker, wherever you get
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right there and subscribe that way. If you can't join us,
Live will always be available for you at a times
it's best to your convenience. And on today's show, we're
going to dive into the topic of the fact that
People's Republic of China continues to expand. It's already well

(01:36):
established contestion and the space throughout the globe. It's not
just in the Pacific. And one of their lines of
operation is they have work to either full or partially
get ownership, access and control of ports throughout the world.
One of my favorite things to do if you look
where the old British Empire was and then you look
at where the China's trying to expanding their bases, there's

(01:57):
a little bit of an overlap there and it's there
for and they've done this in parallel with building what
is now the world's largest navy and a diverse set
of military capabilities. Is clearly designed with one purpose, and
that is to challenge the position in the United States
Navy in the Indo Pacific specifically, but really on the
global stage. And returning to mid Rats today for the

(02:18):
full hour to discuss this and other related topics, using
his recent issue brief at the Atlantic Council titled China's
Exploitation Overseas and Basis that you'll find linked to over
on the show page is t X Hims, the Distinguished
Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University.
He served thirty years in the United States Marine Corps.

(02:41):
Welcome aboard, good to be here, great to have you,
And I was just speaking of the US Navy Marine
Corps team. I was just looking at the news right
for the show, and it's slipped by this morning. We're
recording this on Sunday, and it is the eighty third
anniversary of the Battle of Coral Sea, that was only
five months after the kickoff of the Last Great Pacific War.

(03:04):
But to the point that when you see actual pictures
of the US aircraft in the Battle of Coral see
we still have the nice little red meat ball in
our round drill that we don't have anymore, but we
did until we painted over after the Battle of Coral Sea.
And it had me thinking a lot about some of
the issues that you raised in your article. But really
popped out to me, TX, is that at the kickoff

(03:26):
of World War two, one thing that Imperial Japan did
not have when they decided to challenge US in the
Pacific is they did not have such an extensive degree
of access, ownership, and control of major ports and bases
all through the end of Pacific up through South America.
But China has managed to do that.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Now China has access to a lot of them. So far,
they're not using them as military bases. They of course
have in the Djibouti they have one. There's also the
port they're using regularly in Cambodia. They claim they don't
have that, but it's a pair of belt specific directly
for pla and ships, and they've used it regularly. The
thrust of this one is not so much the regular
navy using it, but using these ports in an unconventional

(04:09):
manner to pin down US forces actually to do a
counter blockade to interrupt global trade.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, you make a good point that the Chinese are
really good at dual use ships, dual use assets of
many kinds, and one of the things they're looking it
seems to me, and if you'll pardon the pun, it
looks to me like they actually have a plan to
deal with the threat of the blockade. And you point
out that they among the other things they've done is
they have rail trying to get a rail link between

(04:36):
themselves in Europe that doesn't involve ships, but they have
all these other assets. Talk a little bit about what
you see them maybe using some of these ports they have,
how they might use them. I mean you discussed in
the article, because it's pretty extensive, everything from basing drones
to anti air defense systems and also the ability to

(04:58):
send reconnaissance.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
I think the the first thing we've got to understand
is that while China has built rail, it will have
essentially no impact on the shortages of critical materials. The
pipelines will help with energy, but energy is not a problem.

Speaker 5 (05:11):
Really.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
They've stockpiled enough and they've changed their energy mixed enough.
That's not that heavily dependent upon overseas oil. Everybody quotes
seventy percent of their oil comes from overseas, but in
fact it only represents about twenty percent of their total consumption. Now,
the railroads are an interesting investment. They've invested heavily in them,
but the problem is throughput capacity. Railroads managed to ship

(05:36):
in their peak year in twenty twenty two, just before
COVID hit, just for the Ukraine War hit and cut
off a lot of the rail traffic. They managed to
ship percent the number of containers by rail as they
shipped by sea. So even if they co's somehow triple
it massively triple that incredibly long rail line between Kazakhstan
and Russia. The two lines they can use, they'd be

(05:58):
able to get one point eight percent of the material shipped.
So the railroads don't provide a real response. Now, what
they can do with the ports, there's a number of things.
Number one, they've done a great job in developing logging,
the National Transportational Logistics Public Information Platform. It's a very
effective business platform that keeps track of what's in each

(06:19):
container as they move around the world. And about seventy
percent of the world's container traffic is on this. So
first off, this is a intelligence source. You can see
what's moving, who's shipping what, and if need be disrupted
by simply messing with the data. If you change data,
change directions, et cetera, coding, there's all kinds of things

(06:40):
you can do to make sure that the logistics system
jams up. So that's one potential use. The second one
would be rapid establishment A to A D nodes in
proximity major checkpoints with these ports where they either own
a port or more often they own a peer and
operate a port. They know what comes in and out
and control. So as we see more and more containerized weapons.

(07:03):
I mean, the Russians have been doing club ks at
a twenty foot container for almost fifteen years now. The
United States has done it. We've demonstrated we can shoot
a Tea Lamb or the Norwegian missile out of it.
We have demonstrated we can shoot and air missiles out
of it. The Israelis have shot missiles from ships out
of containers. The Iranians have shot missiles from containers. The

(07:26):
Dutch Navy is actually putting containerized missile systems on their
auxiliary ships, so those ships are armed too, So it's
all out there now. Even more alarming is drones, both
relatively and expensive drones like the Chinese Sunflower. Now Sunflower
may seem it kind of looks like a Shahad. The
Iranian drone has been used so heavily in Ukraine, but

(07:47):
it's longer range two thousand kilometers. It also uses the
same type of navigation the early Tea lamb did, where
it compares a digital map to a visual image and
therefore as GPS independent. They're also relatively cheap. They have
not put out a number on it yet. That your
head's built for about thirty thousand. Even if you really
expand the cost of the Chinese system for the electronics,

(08:09):
et cetera, you really owned about one hundred thousand dollars.
Interesting point, it doubles the range of the f so
they can stand off at a distance and come after
our fleets, and we don't really have a response of
a limited number of missiles. And of course, since these
are launched out of containers, once they're all launched, what
you're shooting at as an empty container, nobody has to
stay around, so pop up.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
A two A D nodes.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
The other thing they could do is use it as
a prepositioning force. You build major stock piles, command control, EW,
cyber and ARA and a ship ani arm are all
these Venissians in warehouses, and then you fly in the people,
just like we do with preposition and suddenly you've got
a fairly substantial force stood up. Now what we'll be
interesting about this is because they're trying to deny use

(08:52):
of sea lanes. Rather than seize things, they would limit
the number of maneuver elements so they could have a
lot more more missile and drone batteries. So those are
the three kind of big methods. I can see them
using their control of ports for and frank that we
are not situated well to deal with any of those.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
As an old operational planner, whenever I see something, one
of the first things I have to do and usually
have to find them. They're implied somewhere, and that's looking
for the planning assumptions. And right after your introduction in
your article, you went through and you gave five planning assumptions,
which are great because you look right at them and
you can argue with them as we do in operational planning.

(09:31):
And I'll just I'll read the five and then I
want to come back to the first one because that
was the one that really put a smile on my face.
But assumption one was the war will be long if
there is any conflict in the with the PRC. Assumption two,
China is establishing a mix of overseas bases, ownership of
overseas commercial ports and access to other nations and commercial ports.

(09:53):
Assumption three. China is developing fully autonomous uncrewed aerial vehicles,
uncrewed surface vessels and and uncrewed underwater vessels. And assumption
four China could execute a plan using its Chinese owned
overseas ports and bases with its current capabilities. Finally, assumption five,
the United States cannot predict which nations will allow US

(10:14):
forces to operate from their territories during a war. Therefore,
the United States must plan for various permissions and structure
future forces accordingly. And that's a great bookend too, because
I think what assumption five and assumption one have in
common are two things you think you think, but but
I think is too conveniently waved away by people in

(10:38):
significant positions who shouldn't wave away such assumptions. And the
first one was, of.

Speaker 4 (10:43):
Course, the war will be long.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
We have both seen a lot of people who talk
about a seventy two hour war, mostly before before the
Russians invaded Ukraine in twenty twenty two. But also the
deterrent by punishment mindset. It gives people a permission structure
not to look at the really hard issues, both financially

(11:07):
and politically, of preparing for what a real great Pacific
war would look like against the world's largest population, largest navy,
striving to be largest economy.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, I think this is something I've been writing about
since twenty fourteen, when I did out of shark control.
My lead Assumptionnari was also the war will be long.
And why is that? Well, I'm a historian. If you
look at modern warfare, say start seventeen fifty with the
Seven Years' War, it might give you a hint that
went long. Wars between healthy powers have lasted years to decades.

(11:39):
Everybody thought they were going to be short when they
went in, but they've lasted years to decades. The only
exceptions of this are when a major arising power fights
a collapsing power, the Japanese against the Chinese, the Japanese
against the Russians, the US against Spain. But these are
collapsing communities. We don't have that case down. We've got
two healthy powers that are in position to fight each other. Now,

(12:00):
one of the big reasons everybody says is going to
be over faster, We're gonna run out of amistion. And
that's in fact true. That happened at the beginning of
the US Civil War and the beginning of the First
World War, and frankly, for a significant portion of the
Second World War, the United States was very.

Speaker 4 (12:14):
Short of critical munition and equipment, but we kept fighting.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
And this gets to the cause of it's as primary trinity,
which is passion takes over when chance and reason once
the war starts, dancing reasons are still there, but his
passion is driving it. It's why World War One when
by the end of nineteen fourteen it's pretty clear and
nobody's going to make a breakthrough on the Western Front,
but they keep at it for three more years, and

(12:38):
I think we've got to assume that's going to be
the war. Now you mentioned it prevents us from really
preparing for war. And one of my concerns is even
with this new budget, the Congress is putting out a
big budget, and we're going to buy a couple more
destroyers and maybe another submarine, and a couple of this
and a couple of that. Doesn't matter. In the war
this long, you're going to go through dozens and dozens

(13:02):
of warships. Admiral Smith, when he was a commander of
Pacific Fleet, and this was years ago, before the Chinese
Navy was as robust it is today, said it will
cost us at least two carrier battle groups, not just carriers,
but carrier battle groups. That's the cost of entering. Well,
we can't replace those. We're dicking around with this frigate
and it's going to take us nine years to build
the first one. It's taken us two to three years

(13:23):
to build a destroyer, five years between carriers. We simply
cannot go down the path. For going down f thirty fives,
we will produce twelve to thirteen per month at max production.
We've got to share that. What are we up to now?
Fifteen air forces, two navies and marine corps that are
flying these, So you're in the middle of a war,

(13:43):
but it's just not your month to have an airplane.
We have to rethink, go to small, smart many. Fortunately,
Secretary Hicks started us down that path with Replicator and
some of the big contractors. Intoil has been really good
at this. Fatos has given us a leg up. These
are all systems that are cheaper and we could produce
in large numbers if we forget and just ignore the platform.

(14:05):
The platform is any pickup truck. What's important is the
weapons system. So a missile merchant gives you a way
to get lots and lots of ships at sea. Somebody
mentioned the only way to get missile lonchers at sea
in their terms use existing ships exactly.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
We wrote a piece for I can't remember for it's.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Atlantic Council anyhow, it was again on missile merchants and
naval as supersedings. And the idea is if you take
a merchant ship, maybe fifteen hundred containers so you can
go back and forth through the Panama Canal, and you
mount missiles in the containers, you have your command and
controlling containers. Lacking Martin has already figured out how to
do this. You don't need a lot of living space
because merchant ships only have a crew of about twelve.

(14:44):
Most of them live in private state rooms. You'd only
need about forty people total to run this ship, so
you don't need a lot of building space. For equipped
ships have power, so you could buy one of these
ships and a fifteen hundred ship. Now is because the
market's actually right pretty good before the the terror stick in.
We're going to see a huge decrease soon. But for
twenty five million dollars and with all the missises everything

(15:06):
about one hundred million dollars, you can put a warship
at sea with fifty missiles on it. Fifty big missiles
I'm talking like tomahawks down to you could probably have
three or four hundred of the areas. The new areas
cruise missile and that's the key. Existing ships. People say,
oh no, they're not tough ships, they can't survive. That's
just wrong. Modern container ship is normally double holed, so

(15:28):
that's better than any of our destroyer class ships. If
you look at war Dens Falklands, every cruise missile that
has hit a destroyer or frigate class ship has resulted
in a mission kill. They haven't been able to sink
as many. I mean, they've sunk quite a number of
British ships. But the fact matter is you get a
mission kill. That's all I want. But if one of
these missiles hits a container ship, and remember you've got

(15:51):
about twelve to fifteen hundred containers you can fill with
foam or dirt or whatever, so your armor can literally
be forty to eighty feet thick, are going to be
much more survivable.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
Yeah, I'm a huge fan what I've been calling missile barges.
But the concepts the same, that we don't need to
have sophisticated, completely sophisticated systems. You can have those on
your warships and the missiles could be launched at their
direction or by direction of a modular system. You're exactly right.
I think one of the things you point out in
this article that's scared the heck kind of because I

(16:22):
haven't really thought of it, is that I've thought of it,
but not quite the numbers you put in here. China
currently possesses thirty six hundred long range fishing ships and
fifty five hundred large merchant vessels. And if they arm
those the way we're talking about potentially arming some of
our ships, that's a pretty large number a lot of

(16:43):
missiles they could put out there in the ocean.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, the key is going to be rated production of missiles.
And this is where you go to advanced manufacturing. I mean,
areas is taking a three hundred thousand dollars cruise missile,
they can produce one thousand a year in the one plant.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
So this is the key.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Is you moved to advanced manufacturing, you produce a lot
of this stuff now, just so you don't feel too
comfortab about the five hundred chips or so they have
if they stay inside the South China Sea, the Chinese
ocean going fishing.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
Fleet is two hundred thousand, and that goes a lot
more just the weaponearing point of view.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
You know, I have the occasional conversation with my submarine
buddies who will talk about how great the but don't
worry about it. We'll get our SSNs in there and
we'll take care of it. Like there aren't enough Mark
forty eight torpedoes and all a Christen them to be
able to handle the amount of ships that are going
to be up there. You're right that when you're looking
at these numbers, if you don't look at them, you

(17:37):
can sleep at night. But when you do look at him,
it gets rather humbling and in memory of the Battle
of Coral.

Speaker 4 (17:42):
See. You also have a nice.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Quote on here that I think it's important to go
back to fundamentals, touch it and go Okay, given this challenge,
how do we accomplish it? And it was a quote
by Admiral Spruance quote. I can see plenty of changes
in weapons, methods and procedures in naval warfare brought about
by technological developments, but I can see no change in
the future role of our Navy from what it has

(18:04):
been for ages past. For the Navy to be dominant
sea power, to gain and exercise the control of the sea.
When you're looking at that number of ships and that
large of an ocean, you outline the problem that we're
having with something as simple as a frigate. There has
to be solutions and things that we should be experimenting
right now that gets us volumes of units on the water,

(18:28):
in the air in order to be able to exercise
that control of the sea, because you can't control something
that's an order of magnitude to two order magnitude is
greater than your ability to digest.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
Yeah, I think there are ways there.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
I mean, you have to have control of the sea
as a maritime power, and that's what changes the wartime situation,
whether it's a British blockade of World War One, which
really didn't go in effect on nineteen seventeen, the US
Civil War blockade against the South which cut them off.
Blockade allows maritime powers to slowly squid. Long wars are

(19:01):
generally resolved by economic exhaustion of one of the parties.

Speaker 4 (19:05):
Now you can point to the.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
US Civil War and World War Two and say no, no,
it was occupation in the countries, but when you really
look at it is because their economies had collapsed. They
could no longer feel the force that could resist the
incoming force, so economic exhaustions critical, and sea control is
a vital part of that. The beauty of China is
that they really got screwed geographically. They're behind the East

(19:27):
and South China Sea and there's only really nine major exits.
Most of these exits can be controlled by ground forces now,
particularly now that we're containerizing missiles and drones. Even with
the naval strike missile, which is fairly short range ABO
one hundred and fifteen miles from the northern Philippines, they
can close the Bossi Channel, or at least challenge it.
For merchant ships, you'd have to do a massive escort operation.

(19:49):
The other thing we got to keep in mind is
that we shouldn't be using the navy for blockade. The
Navy's going to have a whole lot of things to do.
The beauty of that is that then you take navy
or you take marine and armed many infantry units who
have all the skills necessary to seize a ship. You
mix them with some helicopters, both for insert and for
fire support, and you can intimidate ships into quitting. Now,

(20:09):
if they start to put large numbers of aunty air
missiles on it. Then it's a different problem. Then we're
going to have to start taking them the other thing
we can do, and the Navy has been abusinally amiss
at this. Perhaps maybe the stupidest decision in Navy history
is to not invest heavily in minds, particularly when you're
facing China. All of those straits are narrow, all of
them can be mined easily from the shore if need be,

(20:31):
and if you use smart minds, they're almost impossible to
sweep right now, so you could really shut it down,
and they're relatively inexpensive now. For instance, the quick strikes
are just five hundred, one thousand and two thousand pound bombs.

Speaker 4 (20:44):
With a kit attached.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
They can be delivered and down into two hundred meter
water depth, so they could make a really big difference.
The first line, of course, is on the first island chain,
but China is pretty much going to make that unfeasible,
I think, with the size of their navy and because
they'll be operator at a to a d umbrella. But
you can fall back to the Malacca Sunda Lombach north

(21:06):
of Australia South of Australia line and most of those
can be covered the southern ones can be covered by
land based forces in Australia, so this is an Army
Marine Corps mission freeze the Navy and Air Force up
to fight the actual PLA fleet and then farther up.
This may finally be a job for the big amphibs.

Speaker 4 (21:24):
I see.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
The big amphib is pretty much useless in an amphibious assault.
It's just a large number of marines neatly packaged for
destruction because we can't defend them. They're big, they're slow,
you can't go within twenty miles ashore. So the good
news on we're beginning to see some experimentation with missile merchants.
The Navy's at least looking at the as Locke to

(21:45):
take a look at it. I noticed Lee said he
hasn't seen it done. In fact, that Dutch Navy has
them aboard ships today and are using them. We fired
them from ships. The Israelis simply took one of their
truck bounded missile systems rapped to the top of a
container ship. We're all out see and engage twice, once
it's sixty miles and once at two hundred and forty miles,

(22:05):
and got two hits. So the key is keep it
as cheap as possible. There's going to be a lot
of argument it's too risky for the crew, But we're
putting people out in the LCS, one hundred people in
LCS with virtually no defensive capability, and if they're hit
there out of action. So why does it make any
less sense to put forty people out on a ship
which has real long range striking power and can operate

(22:27):
from a great distance. If we buy the right missiles,
and we really get serious about buying missiles, which to
date we have not, we're going to continue to buy
yet another carrier for a huge amount of money and
get a system which would be really great if it
were two thousand and five. In fact, when I looked
at the whole marine aviation plan recently, it's a brilliant
plan for the year two thousand and five. It doesn't

(22:49):
recognize what has happened in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah, and the news from Ukraine got a lot scarier
since they've been able to use a small boat to
shoot anti aircraft missiles and apparently at least blow at
least one Russian AIRCA.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
They're claiming two. Now they got two, and then again
we're building these two.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Neroonic now has a boat which goes one thousand miles
worth one thousand pounds. They're working on one to go
four thousand miles autonomously. Submariners are confident that get inside
and sink the Chinese ships. I don't think they're going
to operate inside the South or East China Sea because
you have to pass through a narrow straight and I
don't know if you saw a recent report where Underhill
has produced the three years they built that autonomous submarine

(23:30):
for the Australians, and now they've got payloads where they
can put out a distributed network of sensors, so you
have mobile sensor networks. And of course these straits aren't
very wide most of them. They are complex sound environments.
But I suspect we've got the computing power now to
deal with that. So it could be very very dangerous
for any kind of submarine to attempt to penetrate the
first island chair. And again one of the concepts with

(23:51):
the with ignoring the platform and focusing on the containers
is the idea that you're not building anything into a ship,
which means it's when you want to do something else
we've got to build it into the ship. What you
want is the ability to build containers and missiles, and
then when the war starts there's going to be a
lot of cheap ships available a lot. So the key
is to train navy and merchant marine cruise. That's obviously

(24:13):
a limiting factor right now. The missile teams could actually
Navy reservists. Excuse me if they are. You know, if
you're in Ohio in the Navy reserve, you're an intelligence
or military police or part protection or something, but not
really deep war fighting. But now if you're in a
coc you're in a container. And whether it's sitting in
your reserve center in Ohio or Montana or it's on

(24:34):
a ship, isn't that much difference. Now, once a year
you should take them out put them on a ship,
just so it gets used to the fact that being
at sea is very, very different environment.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
And that's one thing that we've talked about a fair
bit of time on the show here is when you
look at the other services, they do a really good
is maybe kind, but they do a much better job
in capturing the experience of their people who leave active
duty in the reserves, in the National Guard, the Army Reserves,
Army National Guard. You look at the especially the Air

(25:03):
National Guard and the Air Air Force Reserves, Coast Guard,
Marine Corps Reserve, the Navy Reserve just doesn't seem to
have a lot of the ability to recapture that experience
and to have it in what your reserve should be
is in case of war, great glass type of situation
and a lot of the options that you talk about here,

(25:25):
especially with repurposing a lot of the merchant ships available
is something because they don't have to get underway and
have a high readiness cycle, and a lot of merchant
ships that can be kept in a relatively high readiness
state with a low capability you can surge them if needed.
But one of the challenges you have is the fact
that the United States has a very very small merchant

(25:46):
fleet at D plus zero. But one thing you touched
on a little bit before in your article. I was
grinning because I was thinking about my friend Claude Bearabay.
This is one of his favorite topics is if we
had the right people trained and enough team teams ready
to go, there is the ability to take what merchant
ships you want at sea taken to prize courts and

(26:07):
repurpose them. Talk a little bit about that that untapped resource,
almost harvesting a crop at sea, so to speak. If
we needed to grab additional ships we couldn't get otherwise
in order to repurpose them.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
See, I don't think that's going to be necessary, because
once the war starts, container freight or freight of any
kind is going to collapse globally. If we block Hache China,
if we don't block Haate China, we're not serious. We
should just quit now. But there will be literally hundreds
and hundreds of ships with loans, do et cetera that
are a destrict to unload like they do whenever there's
a down surge, they start selling. A few years ago,

(26:41):
there was a drop in trade during COVID, and while
they normally run a ship for up to thirty years,
they were selling ships that were fifteen years old. There's
a large used market available now you can go online
and see, but there's always quite a number available. The
key is how many crews do we have and how
many missiles can we build quickly? And that's where we
should be focused. The our effort is on building missiles,

(27:03):
not this seven million lerasm or anything like that, but
relatively inexpensive cruise missiles. The other thing that can reinforce this.
The Marine Corps has squadrons of C one thirties case
C one thirties. They have actually tested systems that push
out of the back of a rapid dragon I think
is the Air Force code name. They change it periodically
because they don't seem to be willing to invest in it.

(27:23):
But it drops out pods of four cruise missiles as
they break out and they can fly one thousand miles
and hit within a meter of where they're supposed to be.
They actually tested some big ones and these tested successfully.
You can only put four in a SEA one thirty,
but you push about the back and they go four
thousand miles. So you could literally start at the top
of Australia, go out to launchers out and they can

(27:44):
start impacting in the South China Sea well up into
the South China Sea. So a squadron operating from northern Australia.
The beauty of that is a CE one thirty can
use a dirt strips, that can use highway strips, that
can use any kind of commercial airport. It doesn't need
to come back to momb like you have. Thirty five
does about every two days to get its computers tuned,
and therefore you don't have this vulnerable airfield. The big

(28:05):
thing we have not discussed in the US Air Force
is protection of airfields, and the same with the US Navy.
We seem to somehow think the carrier is going to
survive these massive volleys.

Speaker 4 (28:15):
More and more we're realizing.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
We've got to get farther back out, so it's very few. Well,
if you back up very far, you're kind of useless.
The carrier becomes a self looking ice cream cone in
that it's strike aircraft can't reach targets. It was back
far enough for the carrier to survive. The strike aircraft
aren't the game. They'll still be good in a mid
ocean fight. If the Chinese Navy chooses to come out,
I'm not sure why they would. I don't think I

(28:36):
would just keep shooting missiles and sending submarines out to you.
But I think this is we need a complete mental
shift in all the services. It's not about platforms anymore.
It's about payloads or weapons.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah, I was just put up there at all. The
Admiral Greater Arts article from proceedings in July of twenty
twelve called payloads over platforms. I mean, yeah, this is
a concept we've been kicking around now for thirteen years.
You think we get somebody would have gotten the message.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
You buy now, But.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
If there is a platform available, we'll invest money in that.
Whenever we get extra money, what do we do. We
buy a couple more airplanes. We try to put it
forward to a ship. And again it just stuns me.
That's taken us nine years to build a frigate.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
In your article and here as well, you've brought up
what I forgot how many tens of billions of dollars
it represents. But you've brought up the five which when
you look at the challenge of the Pacific, and the
challenge of the Pacific has remained unchanged since Captain Cook
crossed it in his ship hundreds of years ago. That's range,
that's distance that sustainable logistics, and the f was designed

(29:41):
and implemented at a time that as a byproduct of
trying to compromise and make three planes into one. You
can look at it and say this was built for
an European fight, not for a Pacific fight, and for
reasons they can best explain themselves. Our procurement nomenclatura really
has boiled things down to a very few, very expensive,
very low production number of ships, number of airplanes, number

(30:04):
of equipment, sustainability, designed for efficiency and peace, not effectiveness
at war. You know, we've collectively talked about this dozens
of hours, but there's nothing you can do about that
in the past. When we are trying to build systems
now that we've been developing for years, they might begin
to displace water and show up make shadows on the

(30:24):
ramp in five ten years or whatever. What systems you
see people investing time and money and right now that
best meet a lot of the planning assumptions of what
you feel is the greatest need that we have out
there in the Pacific. That if people said, hey, I've
got an extra twenty billion dollars that the Doose kids
have found for DoD where do you want me to
invest that? Where do you think is a good avenue

(30:46):
to put that?

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Well, one would be the XQ fifty eight A the Valkyrie,
And if you had twenty billion dollars, you could buy
about six thousand of them. This is a vertical takeoff
and landing aircraft. It's a drone autonomous drone, stealth configured
and not stealth coded. It's got an internal bay that
will carry two small diameter bombs or two air to
air missiles. If you decide to give up the stealth configuration,

(31:07):
you can also hang two missiles on the wings or
two small diameter bombs. Two thousand mile range, so fifteen
hundred miles out fifteen hundred back. But at three million
a copy, it's cheaper than most missiles, so you can
send it on a one way trip, which means from
the second island chain you can strike China without refuel
And the beauty of no base means you can't just
destroy the airbase. It takes off on a ramp with

(31:29):
Jaedo bottles and then land somewhere else by parachute, So
even though you launch it from one place, there's nothing
to shoot out there except the empty ramp, so this
is a possibility. And again at three million a copy,
you could have three hundred and thirty four billion dollars,
and there for twenty billion dollars you can have about
six thousand arascruise missile comes in at three hundred thousand

(31:51):
dollars apiece. Now, the F thirty five, the asher costs.
I won't say that Lockheed Martin and the program manager
lie through their teeth, but they do strongly just agree
with the Congressional Research Service and the not so has
the Research Service. The folks who do budget, the Air
Force and Locke say it's seventy eight million a copy
for the new ones. The actual report to Congress is
one hundred and thirty million dollars apiece. That's to buy one.

(32:14):
I remember, that's not a complete F thirty five. You
still don't have tech upgrade three, you don't have the
software upgrade number four. So it's not going to do
one hundred percent of what they promise it can do.
But let's say you get one. Okay. The problem is
that their the planned life is eight thousand hours. Current
cost is forty thousand dollars an hour, So that's another
three hundred and twenty million dollars. So your lifetime commitment

(32:36):
for one F thirty five it's four hundred and fifty
million dollars the problem with that is that they've got
a readiness rate of fifty percent or less. Oh do
I lose You guys know you that, So you really
have to spend nine hundred million dollars if you want
one that will do all the tricks full mission capable.
Full mission capable rate is thirty percent, So one point
three five billion dollars per airframe. How does that make

(33:00):
any sense? You can have four hundred and fifty Kratos
for that. You can have a god awful number of
forty five hundred airage crews, missiles. And keep in mind,
the Chinese aren't standing still. The FH ninety seven drone
they built looks very very much like the Kratos and
probably has the same capabilities. And just like Kratos has done,

(33:22):
CHRISTI has developed this thing all on their own money
and actually built the plant that can produce hundreds per
year if we say go and they do built that
in three years, So if we were to give them
money in three years, we could be getting four or
five hundred of these things per year. The other thing
is you don't have to spend all that money on pilots,
maintenance crew, airfields, golf courses, et cetera. Because you've got

(33:44):
a very small crew that fuels this thing and launches
it and recovers it. So those are some options we
can use, and we simply refuse to do it. So far,
the Army or the Air Force is looking at the
CCA Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The version they have picked costs
twenty five to thirty five million dollars. Somehow the Air
Force thinks that's an expendable monition, but that's crazy. You

(34:05):
could get firstly, the same performance from a three to
four million dollar Valkyrie. The problem is the Valkyrie doesn't
have wheels, and the Air Force insists it wants to
launch it from a runway because Jado bottles are too expensive.
But I think they're forty grand apiece. So it takes
you two thousand dollars to launch a Valkyrie, but you
don't have to launch it except for training. A fewer
launch for training, and most are just stored like cruise missiles.

(34:27):
They're simply a long range cruise missile. So we've got
those things out there and we just don't do it.

Speaker 4 (34:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
I keep looking at some of the new unmanned aircraft
that we're talking about. A lot of these are added
you know, they're being manufactured, can be manufactured in great
numbers because of PD printing or additive manufacturing whatever you want.

Speaker 4 (34:46):
To call it.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Are we failing to take advantage of that as we
as we were moving forward with trying to provide this
kind of equipment to our forces.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
This is where Secretary ex fighting through the Replicator did
such a great service to the country. She's stuck in
that job for four years, which is pretty brutal, but
the Replicator was.

Speaker 4 (35:03):
Good when it came out.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Though everybody was thinking one hundred thousand dollars was a
cheap drone, Americans were Ukrainians were thinking four hundred dollars
is a cheap drone. But as a result of that,
it opened it up to these other companies who are
now in the game. Five years ago, I was talking
to DARPA and the DARPA team had developed one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars cruise missile that would go several
hundred miles, and they tried to convince one of the
Big five to manufacture. They all looked at it and said,

(35:25):
there's no profitness, we can't do this. So Andero comes
out with a three hundred thousand dollars cruise missile, and
sure enough, two months later, Lockeed announces they can do
what for one hundred and fifty. I wouldn't trust a
locket cost estament for anything, but the fact of the
matter is it's a competition.

Speaker 5 (35:40):
Now.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
People are looking how do I make small, smart and many,
and so that's going to be the key. One of
the keys is treated as an expendable minition, not as
a platform.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
Expeariment with it.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Try different variations of combination of ships and load outs
and different combinations of ships. I mean, if we ever
get the medium, the medium transport to the Marine Corps watch,
you could put a couple of these things on one
of those. You could put it on fairly small coastal freighters.
I suspect you could actually lunch one off on LCU.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
It would depend upon what happens to the whole of
the LCU in the launch.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
But these are the kind of experiments we should be doing,
and fairly cheaply. Instead of insisting on we're going to
build another another thirty l rasms.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Well of what we've been talking about here. Aligned with
this weekend, I listened over at the Modern War Institute.
One of their recent podcasts had retired Australian General Mick
Ryan on and one thing they were talking about was
what everybody likes to talk about, which is what are
we learning and from the Russia Ukrainian War the Inner

(36:46):
Staff when Hemy grinned when he talked about where there's
a difference between observations, lessons and lessons a word.

Speaker 4 (36:52):
Which is spot on.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
But he also touched on some of the things TX
you've touched on as well, and that has been that
when he talked to the ground commanders fighting the battle
and Eastern Ukraine. One thing they keep emphasizing to him
about the technology and the use of drones is this
isn't replacing what we call combined arms. It's learning how

(37:16):
to integrate the many, few and cheap into the existing
combined arms construct, which you remind me like in World
War One, the machine gun and the airplane weren't the
secret sauce, but those that were able to understand, integrate,
produce and deploy had a huge advantage. I just got
through reading The Eastern Front, the book that just focused

(37:40):
on World War one's Battle in the East, and one
thing the author discussed on multiple occasions is even in
many places where this is earlier on the war and
they were still fighting at full full ability, the Russians
on paper look like they should have been able to
take care of the Germans pretty well. But what the
Germans had is the Germans had a large number of

(38:01):
aircraft that they were using mostly for reconnaissance and were
able to track the movements of the Russians, where the
Russians just did not have enough aircraft to be able
to do the same thing for the Germans. And you know,
that was one of the example of the new technology
that didn't replace the battle actually going on the force,
but was the Germans were able to recognize its ability

(38:23):
and produce them in numbers and use them in the
proper way that it did make a difference on the ground.
That's a lot of what you see with what we're
developing with the Valkyrie and the more affordable cruise missiles.
It's not so much a war is new, but war
can be done better and more effectively. A arrange Is
that a correct assumption?

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Well, mix an old friend and we've discussed this, explain
why there's alignment. I disagree a little bit with what
he says. Yes, it's a combined arms team, but it's
a very different to buying arms team. For instance, in
World War One, they say, well, it was just a
binding arms statement, except the cavalry went away. They just
left because they were all dead. So rail was still important,

(39:05):
but not vital because as you went on the offensive,
truct were developed. So there are those things that are
changing now. One of the interesting things that came from
the I can't remember was a deputy Minister of Defense
or the Minister Defense stated, what you have to understand
is there's very different war. There's a fifteen kilometer dead zone.
And just like in World War One, where there was
a dead zone out to the range of machine guns

(39:26):
and light artillery went out about seventy five hundred meters,
nothing above the serfs of the earth could survive there
because someone will observe it. Someone dug in with overhead
cover with good optics would observe it. As soon as
you moved, you got shot at and killed. So that's
the case we're seeing, except that zone, that beaten zone,
is now at least fifteen kilometers deep. It took several
years for the Germans to come up with a stormthrooping

(39:47):
tactics to figure out how to break through, and then
between World War and World War II, the technology advanced.
You simply applied those same tactics to maneuver units. The
problem now is the depth of these things. I mean,
we're seeing drones getting out to three thousand kilometers relatively
cheap ones. There's a whole new the first family of
cheap drones without about fifteen K. A US manufacturer now

(40:10):
is claiming that they are getting a drone that will
go out to forty five K. So does this cheap drone?
So does this get your beaten zone out to forty
five kilometers? How do you cross that? How do you resupply?
One of the huge problems in Ukraine now is resupplying
the front line troops. There's a period right at dawn
and dusk, about ten to fifteen minutes before and after,

(40:31):
where your thermal sites become less effective before your visual
sides become effective at dawn and the reverse at dusk.
That is the period you can attempt to resupply. Anything
Other than that, you just get hammered from the sky.
And they built these cages and they make tanks better
and everything. So instead of one or two drones killing
a tank, now they're putting ten or fifteen drugs out
a tank. And we're just beginning to experiment with fiber optics,

(40:55):
of course, have taken out a lot of the EW problem.
They're also doing autonomous drones drunes which go to altitude.
The operator sees a target, boxes the target in control
and turns the drone automatic, and it then will track
a moving target and hit it. We are very close
to fully autonomous drones which you simply launch and they
take care of it from there on end. I'm going
to respond to one of the comments from Andy, those

(41:17):
merchants will be like Atlantic Conveyor, two extra sets, and
she was sunk and not going to have damage control
worth the dam extra set. As Narz I can tell
from the damage reports, was not sunk by the extra
sets or the Atlantic Conveyor. She was sunk by all
the cargo she out of board. She was full of stuff.
They exploded and that's a problem. Once the fire started
in damage control couldn't control it. But a container ship

(41:38):
is only going to have a few containers. Missiles you
could put You could put forty eight tubes in twelve containers,
so twelve containers out of fifteen hundred, and if the
rest are foam, were dirt or inert material, it's going
to be very very hard to damage it. And that's
I think one of the things that in comparison a
single extra set sank several escort ships. Ships going to

(42:00):
be some that's a given. The question is do you
want it to be a billion or two billion or
three million dollars destroyer or frigate or do you want
it to be one hundred million dollar converted merchant ship.
Lee has mentioned armored tankers. That's fine, they're tougher. They're
certainly better that the much tougher, but it also means
you got to buy him before the war and then

(42:21):
go to all the help them, all the hassle of
modifying them. If if everything is in the container, the
idea of a container is then is truly multimodal. The
Navy has him. If we get out there and we
find out we've got bases ashore, we can unload them
and operating from shore, either with a naval crew ashore
or both Marine Corps Army are doing missiles ashore. So
I think it's the flexibility you want. So I think

(42:42):
that's the key. But we need to get out there
and experiment with it. We talk about it some. We
had Locke build a sample. I brief the under of
the Navy for acquisition development, and he was very interested,
but administration was in the process of changing. Knows what's
going on. Now, This is the Navy's going to take

(43:03):
the initiative. Is it going to be hard to convince Congress?

Speaker 4 (43:05):
You bet.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
As part of this effort we're doing to re do
the US merchant fleet, why not buy twenty percent of
each new ship and do something like the Civil Reserve
air fleet we did with airplanes to lift for the
Cold War. If we bought a portion of each ship
with the understanding that once a year we get you
for two weeks for training, and the time of war

(43:27):
we get you, that would build up a merchant fleet.
We could build up some of these smaller We don't
need really big merchant ships. I mean a thousand containers,
there's plenty. We don't need something like four or twenty
thousand or something like that. We can do that and
build our own industry, build a con congressional constituency for it.

Speaker 4 (43:44):
Right now.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
If I was in another congression, I mean, the big
ports get all the money.

Speaker 4 (43:48):
What about our guys? And I think we could built
something like that.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, I agree, We did have it one time, as
if I remember correctly, in the Navy, we did have
merchants that the DoD funded to a certain extent that
we're supposed to be available for military purposes. And I
don't remember what that program was called. It was years ago,
but that that did happen at one time. We could

(44:12):
probably revive that. The other thing I've been looking at
is we have all these small boat manufacturers and make
you know, all the bass boats and all that good stuff.
But they're they're highly competent people at making fiberglass and
high speed small craft, and they're all over the country.
They're not just located in the in the shores and
the ocean shores. So you know, you got them up

(44:33):
and down the Mississippi River, youve got them up in
the Great Lakes. Why are we not exploiting that and
getting you know, thousands of these things that you could
outfit with a variety of weapons systems, trot them out
to the far Pacific on amphibs, or tow them on
and some kind of big barge, you know, put them
in the water, and or have them at least be
around where they could be useful by being controlled by

(44:56):
sin marines on the beach or by units like when
I was in the endshore underseived warfare business. You know
it's like that that you know could actually do that
kind of work.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Well, we are kind of moving that way, but there's
a lot of resistance on the aviation side, frank of
the pilots or a problem. I think if anytime you
talk to a pilot, you should remind them as of today,
drones can do almost anything a pilot can do, including
the consistent whining. So start hammering pilots that've got to
get out of the cockpit. They're just protoplasm. That's in
a way of performance and cost. They're hugely expensive on

(45:27):
the surface side. One of the problems is, for instance,
the Marine Corps going back to concresence saying oh, we
got to have thirty eight ships.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
No we don't.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
They are there for the mews, And everybody says, oh,
the mew is your first deterrent, But is it really?
Can anybody prove that is there any statistical or analytical
other than this is a statement of faith. The mews
were used. Two mews were used at the beginning of
the Afghan War to do going to Afghanistan. But first
they had to bring the two together. Then they had

(45:55):
to reinforce them, they had to bring in a staff.
I'm not sure that's exactly a one tight response for us,
other than that we've done a couple of nios, but
is that really worth tying up that much battle force for?
And then, god forbid, if we could get the buship
system out of building ships and make them so god
awful expensive, if we bought less expensive ships and lots

(46:17):
of them, then we would have a much greater capability.
They're building ships that are smaller, they can cross the
Pacific Ocean without refuel they saw them at the Marine show.
And yet we're not buying those where we're going to
invest in a frigate which will be really questionable capability.
As a question about m iuw's in censor packages. Yeah,

(46:37):
In fact, years ago when we were Ukrainian Warfaret started,
the Marine Corps was tasked to send this special unit
that had there was a sensor and observation unit. But
the Air Force kept bumping the load. They said higher priority,
to load, higher priority, so they couldn't get their vehicles.
So the general finally said buy commercial tickets pack your
shit in cases, go over there and rent SUVs and

(46:58):
they did, and then they use civilian support methods and
they operated for a fairly significant amount of time, and
we're able to completely monitor that part of the sea
from shore in nondescript vehicles. That's what we really that's
the kind of sensor system. And that's what I mean
by containerized. It can be on land, it could be
on sea, it could be on a merchant ship, it

(47:18):
could be on a ferry, it could be wherever you
need it to be with whatever is available. Part of
the solution of this, for instance, with missiles and you
movement ashore almost everywhere in the world. Now there's parts
that can handle a twenty foot container, and there are
lots of trucks. If you send the battery commander ashore
with some kind of a black credit card, a pile
of one hundred dollars bills and gold, he can buy

(47:41):
the trucks he needs. And then that gives you your fuel,
it gives you your maintenance, everything that's associated with that.
You can buy your food locally. People say, well, you
can't just dump them in the Philippines. The Philippines have
one hundred and five million people. If you put one
hundred thousand marines and soldiers in there, it won't make
a blip on their food and water supply.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
Also will be a limited amount of medical available. And
then all you're bringing in.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Is your unique weapons and you unique comms equipment and
things like that. And if you more and more to
the concept of design your equipment so it can use
commercial batteries, then we get out of the battery problem too.
We're just not being very creative so far.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
I had a big smile on my face TX just
picturing Give me a couple of thousand highly caffeinated marines
and a car carrier full of Toyota high Lux pick
up trucks and a couple of warehouses, and you probably
conquer most nations of the world just with that that
energy and inventiveness.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
The key is, don't bring the high lucks, buy and
when you get there, there we go. When the insurgents
were good, guys, I was helping insurgents. We're going to
train a group, and you know, with the military, we'd
normally have some kind of enormous extraction package ship standing
off see, et cetera. What they gave us was a
belt with gold coins in it, So figure it out.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
That's the kind of thing we can do.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah, and it's something we have a long tradition of,
and goodness knows, we have enough people with interesting acquisition
theory that I think amazing the results you could get,
the kind of some when I was reading it, it
kind of wanted to flip the script on them you
talked about in the article. I'll just do a little

(49:10):
quote here referring to the Chinese quote. Combined with its
ownership and control of overseas ports, this capability gets China
the potential to create pop up counter intervention nodes near
critical maritime choke points. And then when I read the
Malca problem that the Chinese have, and then I know
you have to be careful with marines asking them about

(49:32):
Force Design twenty thirty. But when you look at some
of the ideas that have come out of Force Design
twenty thirty, smaller, more mobile groups being interjected, and roll
in a little bit with one of the more interesting
things that the army has bought their Typhon system, which
is a shore based basically Mark forty one vlastic can
carry s and six which is dual capable, and what

(49:55):
type of options do you think there are? In the
challenge in the Pacific to build, you'll pop up threat
nodes that can, if not prevent passage, can at least
make some of these dead zones and a more challenging area
to transit for a potential opponent. And when you especially
when you get in the Western Pacific, if you've got
a good enough rangering, you can make a targeting challenge

(50:17):
to get past the first island chain. Pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
That's exactly what the Marine Liatoral Regiment and Army multip
Domain Task Forces are. There are nodes that pop up.
The Army has typhon a good idea, as usually with
the Army, made.

Speaker 4 (50:32):
It way to goddamn big. It'll stick out like a
sort of tarmat.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
It's five huge tractor trailers that are painted grain and
look like an Army tractor trailer.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
So they're going to get killed early.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
The Marine Corps has done better with a much smaller
vehicle and they've figured out how to load and have
fired a single Tea lamb from it. It's either two
nsms or a single Ta lamb. Again I put it,
why bring the vehicle, bring the container because the other
thing you want to be able to do is once
you'd like to be able to set it on the ground,
shoot it and be far away from when it goes off,
because it's going to get hit. And it gives you

(51:03):
the ability to blend. Everybody says if you make a signal,
you will be seen, and if you're seen, you can
be hit, and that is more true than ever. If
you read some of the work coming out of RUSSI
on the sensor arrays that are set up in Ukraine,
it's really scary. They'll see you. The solution that is
you can do one or two things. You can either
get underground, overhead cover inside of building something like that,

(51:24):
or you can play where's waldo? You don't look like
everything else? Well, if you're driving tractor trailers with nothing
on them but a container and your guys are wearing
just coveralls, you look like everybody else, and so that
gives you much greater survivability. It also gives you ability
to back into the buildings. You can unload your container
in the building, put it on a different truck coming
out the other side. There's all kinds of things you

(51:46):
can do to blend into the environment. We need to
do all those things, and you're absolutely right. The beauty
of this is that the straits coming out, particularly at
the southern end of the South of the China Sea,
are really narrow. Some of them can be covered by
or a javelin on a small craft could dominate it.

Speaker 4 (52:05):
So these are all options out there.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
One of the things we got to do again and
stop spending huge amounts of money on systems that are obsolete.
The Administra Defense from Ukraine was invited to talk at
the marine show. He videoed in and he announced the Maraines.
He says, stop doing manned helicopters. They're not survivable. I
am killing them with drones. And this is again keep

(52:30):
in mind, this is a first generation attempt at drones
with some quick modifications over three years as we begin
to get serious about this and really develop it. Like
I said, the recent one with a tripling of range
and payload on drones made in America using advanced manufacturing techniques.
So it's not a lot of guys putting little tiny
screws in drones, it's machines doing this. You have the

(52:52):
potential to put thousands and thousands of these things out there.

Speaker 3 (52:55):
Well, and that thousands and thousands of things. As you say,
they're small, smart and many that that is the key
to a lot of stuff these days. He actually we
used up the whole hour. We never really did get
into some of the stuff that is in that article.
It's a great piece of work and very thought provoking.
I highly recommend it. I've linked to it in the
on the show page here with the or the chat room.

(53:19):
What do we what can we see from you coming
up in the future. I know you've talked about the
you had kind of a missile barge concept, the missiles
on merchants article you had and us N I and
I think you had a previous one that pretty much
covered that same ground at one point. What do we
what can we look forward to from you in the future?

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Before I do that, Like one more thing, I didn't
talk about mine sea minds. If I was a naval
commander for the Chinese Navy before this starts, there would
be smart sea mines all around Pearl Harbor, San Diego, Bramerton,
et cetera. Because I know you can't sweep mines. And
if I even if I just sink a car carrier
in the San Diego Port entry, there it's closed for

(53:57):
a long time, so I think we have been grossing
next on minds. It's probably the toughest problem out there,
so he pretended and ignore it. And the things are
working on since I first wrote about small, smart, many
and twenty fee. But the good news is the Ukrainians
are now convinced people that's a good way to go.
So I think that everybody's exploring now. I think the
next big thing we really have to get serious about

(54:17):
exploring is okay, that's fine, how do you defeat it?
How do you get past it and restore some type
of movement to the battlefield or is movement necessary? Can
you do maneuver by fires? I think that's the exploration
we've got to have next. Because right now it's good news.
Defense is favored heavily at the tackle environment also at
sea out to a certain range from land. Land based
forces are going to dominate naval forces to increasing ranges

(54:41):
from land because they've got magazine depth, they've got camouflage,
they've got armor as opposed to the ships out there, So.

Speaker 4 (54:48):
We've got to figure that out.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
Then we've really got to figure out how to restore
movement on the battlefield and that's going to be my
next big project.

Speaker 4 (54:56):
I don't have a clue right now.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
I'm hoping if they turn to travel back on we
had a small travel budget, and you can stretch it
by doing some interesting things, meeting friends overseas, etc. I
would really like to talk around the world of the
various outfits of trying to figure this out, but I'm
not really confident we'll get in the next couple of years. Well,

(55:18):
txis has been a great hour, and I share marks
frustration we're only able to touch on a few things.
And I would encourage everybody to read the article and
maybe we can do a GoFundMe to get you on
the road trip because I really like what you said,
and I'll let you go in here in a second.
But it's a drum I like to pound on is.

(55:41):
There is so much we not just as a military
but also our civilian leadership can learn from other militaries, allies, friends,
and even non allies that we simply don't get enough
of because we're so focused internally. We had an article
on article, we had an interview with Peter Ribsky about

(56:04):
Finland and icebreakers, and it looks like we'really gonna take
advantage of that. But I hope, I hope somebody can
shake some money loose to get you on the road there,
because I would love to see your product of being
able to get in place and talk to a bunch
of these folks. And I hope it's not too long
until we get a chance to talk to you again.

Speaker 5 (56:20):
T X.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Really appreciate you taking time with us today, look forward
to it. Thanks for the opportunity, yes sir, and thank
you everybody for joining us for another edition of mid
Rats And until next time, hope you have a great
navy and marine corde.

Speaker 5 (56:32):
Cheers, marry me and.

Speaker 6 (56:51):
Friend for your being to blame me soon. It's faulting
your the time. It's a long way to Disperary. It's
a long way to go. It's a long way to

(57:15):
Dipper really, to the Greenes.

Speaker 5 (57:20):
Know.

Speaker 6 (57:22):
Gorb Beckon e fair Well, the not Well, it's a
long long way to differate. But my life, my