Episode 723: June Free For All - With Lots of UKR Drones - Midrats

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an
Eagle one from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore your home
for a discussion of national security issues and all things maritime.
And welcome goard everybody. Glad to have you after a
few weeks off that you're gonna take some time to
join us today for another edition of mid Rats, and
we are live, so if you are with that cohort live,

(00:53):
we'd just like to go ahead and extend the invitation
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(01:13):
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to your convenience and after most of the May doing

(01:36):
what life has equal one glad to have you on board,
to have a chance to talk again.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, it's good to be back. I don't know if
everybody else is missed talking to you, but I've kind
of missed it.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
That's a high compliment.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
It's one of the things that.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
I exchange emails with an individual that I rather value
his opinion earlier today and he said a couple of
nice things like, well, I'm just a guy with a keyboard,
coffee and inability to shut up, and the rats is
always a good opportunity to talk about the things that
are happening. And we picked the right day because the
breaking news on the national security front from the Russia

(02:14):
Ukrainian war, it seems to hit a whole bunch of
hot button items that we've been talking about here on
the show since twenty.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Cent Yeah, it's uh, you know, I love the fact
that people are beginning to extrapolate what the Ukrainians have
done to things that could happen. And I mean, we
can get into a lot of that later on, but
it you know, John Conrad has been beating the drum
about the danger of some of these container ships bringing
stuff in and people have been pooh pooing that because
you know, he was focusing i think originally on the

(02:42):
missiles or you know, club whatever that club thing is,
the pup k the Russians have. But you know this,
these are if you've seen the videos of the drones
that have been used for these attacks, that they're not complicated.
I mean, they're just looks like things you could go
down to your local hobby store and pick up and
strap a a bump to it. You can to wipe
out up a nice air.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Force base, and most of it seemed to be the type.
And there's some really good photos that the Ukrainian government
have already released on how the trucks were configured and
the type of drones that they had there Mark one
Mod zero three D printed with a few other things
that you bolt on afterwards. It is you've got to

(03:22):
tip the hat to the Ukrainians. They're in their fourth
year of war against a nation that has better demographics
than they do, is four times larger than they are,
and already took some of their most strategical land. They
manage to push it back and they are schooling the
rest of the world on what the future possibilities are
when it comes to combat, how these things can change

(03:46):
and adjust, and the you know, more than a golf
clap to the Ukrainians, regardless of where you stand. I
know there are there are some people out there that
are pro Russian who aren't bad actors or just have
interesting ideas, but don't care. You know where you are.
You have to respect the audacity. And the Ukrainian put
out that they've been spending about eighteen months planning that.

(04:06):
I don't doubt that because anybody who before I was
last in Russia two thousand and nine, and the security
getting out of there is not what you would think
in the West. It's still got a little bit Soviet
tends to it. But to get from Siberia to the

(04:26):
airfield that I can't pronounce, it begins with an o
that's up there right south of Murmansk that houses the
Northern Fleet, which originally their indications like they're hitting the
Northern Fleet headquarters, but looks like they're hitting the strategic
aviation at the airfield that's south is there, which makes
sense with the larger effort, and even for those that

(04:49):
have peacetime sensitivity towards attacks. If just back up and
look at the initial primary effect, you would have trouble
picking a better target set, even if you We can
talk about later on. There's some really positive second and
third order effects to this, but the primary effect is
the Ukrainian people on an almost nightly basis, are being

(05:11):
attacked in their cities various locations, and the worst of
the attacks are coming via air launched missiles. It can
only be carried by heavy bombers, the bears, the backfires,
et cetera. And these are high demand, low density assets.
They can only put as many missiles on target as
they can get mission capable birds in the air, and
they're not building backfires and bear bombers like a shoe factory.

(05:35):
So they've taken out a lot of their units that
are really hitting their civilian populations hard. So it's great internally,
it's great from a operational point of view, and it
also begs the question. This gets into some of the
second third order effects, the psychological maybe little SI outs
that they play it right. This also plays right into

(05:58):
a century old Russian fear and why they have no
natural borders and continue to expand they're highly insecure, and
we all remember during World War Two as the Russia,
as the Germans advanced, they would take things apart and
move back into the interior because they have defense and depth,
kind of like how we think we have the Atlantic

(06:18):
and the Pacific oceans to protect us. This undermines that
critical psychological center of gravity for Russia, and I think
internally the Russians are going to react to that in
ways that will also benefit Ukraine and the conflict.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, I'm curious about whether they've I think the Russians
are going to accuse the Fens and the Swedes or
the Norwegians whoever. You know, they have all that border
up there at the top, and if they're attacking Urmask
and they're attacking those air bases to the east of that,
how are they getting the you know, we saw the
drones flying out of the trucks. How are they getting
those things up there? And whose roads were they using

(06:55):
to get them there? So if I were the Russians,
Fens and the Swedes and the Norwa'd be gone.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
And the also, you know, the Russians have got to
be thinking to themselves and I'm paraphrasing for those that
know him and they follow him on ext Joshua Steinmon
what he's been asking for years is we left it.
Let in millions of unvetted people across our southern border,
tens of thousands of them are citizens of the PRC.
How many Savage Hodge teams are already in place here?

(07:22):
So the Russians have to be asking themselves the same thing. Okay,
did did the Ukrainians? Did they fire all of their
capabilities on one day? Or their follow up attacks? And
you can really come up a nation really fast if
you get paranoid about every truck, everybody who doesn't have
a pure Russian accent that you run into down the

(07:45):
side of the road. And I think it's a viable concern.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Maybe you do.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
This was one of those things that the Ukrainians they
had one shot, they were going to take it. But
there's a non zero chance they have other teams and
other targets that they're going to wait and pull that
card out at a time of their conveniences. Have got
to react to that, and there is a really good
lesson for everybody to take in that regard as well.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, I'm sitting there thinking, well, we saw this you know,
they were apparently using fairly large cargo trucks. You know,
a Honda Odyssey could carry five or six of these things,
I guess in the back. And somebody was really determined
to do some damage. Out of the scale of this,
but enough to really affect things. I mean, power stations,

(08:26):
pipelines a little harder, John, because most of them are underground.
But there are the places where they do them up
out of the ground, and they got big storage tanks.
There are whole bunch of players where they are. I
just don't know, you know what systems we see these
guys fly these drones into buildings, in and out of buildings,
down into into caves. You know, that's pretty impressive, and

(08:47):
I'm thinking, you know, if they're that good, what what
kind of net can you put up that protects at
aircraft to the point that how do you get it
out of there without you know, opening up the net
to lingering a lingering drune. You know, these are all
questions that can't be answered right now, but it is
as you said, there are so many things that make
you ponder the what ifs, and a lot of our imaginations.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
One thing that really caught my attention is there's an
interesting video out there. They evidently while their attack drones
were attacking, they had a reconnaissance drone right over the
flight line where a bunch of bare bombers were lined
up as the attacks were going. So they're getting real
time post strike analysis because they have one of their
drones uplinking via However, they're uplinking watching it. Okay here,

(09:34):
you know this is probably a full kill. This is
probably a mission kill. This one they might be able
to fix. We missed this. So they're getting real time
data on what they're attacking. And of course you have
all the syops involved in that as well. And the
thing that popped into my head. Everybody's talking about AI
and how wonderful it is. As these were controlled by

(09:54):
operators located some ways communicating somehow getting their live feed
and some interesting. But we are very close to the nexus,
and I know it's in the lab, and it may
very well be in some secret squirrel location already just
waiting for the for the Jags to give it a
thumbs up. But we know other nations won't be as reclusive.
But we are right on the cusp and we should

(10:18):
assume it's already here, just has it been produced at scale.
The wherewareof of the merger of two things. It's no
longer science fiction, it's no longer military fiction. It's reality
of processing ability is required to process multi spectral imagery
coming off a secret heead with producing those secret heads

(10:40):
in a very affordable way, or coming together such that
you don't even need GPS, you don't need fiber optics.
Back for decades we had the ability to fly Tomawk
missiles through people's windows just with train matching software. You know,
run it off of a equivalent chip from the from
the Night teen eighties. So you combine AI's ability to

(11:05):
think fast, the computers that can keep up with that
think fast, and the data stream that's coming off of
affordable seeker heads, we are reaching very much a point
that you can park a truck somewhere and you don't
have to have a man in the loop. You just
tell the logarithm at this time or under the following conditions,

(11:25):
open up the roof. You're looking for this type of
type of return, go forward and do nasty things. That
is what should really keep people up at night, because
then you're if you can't keep them out and away
from your bases. Then how do you defend yourself from
such things?

Speaker 3 (11:41):
And that's a hard problem. Is a similar.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Problem to your English Army or French Army brigade leader saying,
how am I going to cross three hundred meters in
the face of an interlocking fire of a maximum machine gun.
It's the same type of challenge. There's an answer to it.
I don't think that, at least at scale, anybody has
an answer to this capability that take what you've seen

(12:05):
today and then assume that can happen without a human
and a loop at all. You just flip the switch
from red to green and drive to the nearest border
and see what happens in twelve hours when it goes off.
It's it's the reality is no longer science fiction.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, as you were saying, I remember an experiment be
a skinner. The psychologist was training for the for the
government was training pigeons to peck at pictures of targets
to guide weapons to their location during World worked. I'm thinking, well,
you know how much more I mean that was. You're
not the brightest creatures in the face of the planet,

(12:39):
but you don't have to be that bright. You know
if you can know that the image of the image
of what you're looking for, and I assume that even
these fairly dumb chips can do that. You don't need
to really be super sophisticated. You just need to be sophisticated.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, it's it's just it's a great demonstration. A lot
of times, and we've talked about these issues with a
variety of guests over the years, and it's all in
and will we have this exercise. We have a small
little example. Well, this is something that's real world, very operational,
very hostile environment. It's an order of magnitude more difficult
to get a truckload of attack drones from Siberia to

(13:16):
the outskirts of the Northern Fleet headquarters in Russia than
it is to do the same thing in the US.
And you talk to anybody who does border security where
people hide, you know, fitanol, marijuana, illegal aliens and trucks
and stuff like that. If you have to do more
than a curse research, it gets clogged up tremendously on

(13:36):
your border crossings. Now they have greater border areas to
defend a little more porous, especially in Central Asia and
East Asia. So if you have plenty of time, and
you have a good plan, and you know who all
the coruct people that are easy degrees, you can see
how they got there. And it also had me thinking
about concept that can get some people to roll their

(13:58):
eyes out and can make accountants upset. And I got
to give credit where credit is due. And this I
know this seems like yesterday to you and me, but
it was a while ago.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
In some of his.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Final year or year and a half or so, maybe
the last few months that Admiral Harvey was an active
duty he started beating a drum and I found some
stuff that I wrote about it at the time, back
in twenty ten. I believe it is. I don't know
exactly where it was. I couldn't find the article because
so many of the links back to twenty ten are
dead now. But he was emphasizing the need for strategic homeporting.

(14:30):
If you're looking for secondary lessons we need to take
as we think about this, because we need to look
very very hard at strategic homeporting. And I'll have this
link over on the show page, and for those that
are in the chat room, I'll put it up in
the chat room a second for folks to look at
if you're on X you can see it. Tom Shugart

(14:51):
Eback in August of twenty twenty four. And Tom's really
good at seeing these things. He has for all those
that learned navigation training on the East Coast. Everybody knows
about the Craney Island area and thimble Shoals. Anyway, it's
the Norfolk waterfront. And he asked, all the way back

(15:12):
thirteen months ago, quote, what if I told you as
I type this, there is a vessel associated with the
Chinese People's Liberation Army that could be equipped with many
drones of anti ship cruise or anti ship cruise missiles
and was parked less than four miles from the bulk
of the US Atlantic Fleet. And he makes a few
more comments. From there, I think this and this is

(15:34):
a point that we need to be raised again. Six
it actually got written into law.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
There was.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
A push for strategic homeboarding. If people recall we were
going to have a battleship Service Action Groupe that was
going to be homeboarded in Staten Island of all places.
Going back to your sategic onboarding, because that made sense
when you're facing the Soviet Union and all the little
nuclear missiles fling around, and then there are nineteen nineties
we had that rash of efficiencies and brac closures. There's

(16:02):
a big push for just the opposite master air bases
where we would locate, for instance, in as Jacksonville, it's
a Master ASW base. All the pights and a lot
of helicopters and a lot of other fun things are
located right there at in s Jacksonville, right next to
the Saint John's River.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
It's about three miles wide.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
There you have the fleet concentration areas of Norfolk, Virginia,
as Tom outlined, and you also have you know, look
at everything we have in San Diego. All you have
to do is some goober to have a one of
those penthouse apartments up there least long enough, and like
that shooter in Vegas years ago, have a few days
going up and down the elevator with a few boxes

(16:40):
and you can wreck some sugdicate significant habits. We are
almost inviting exactly what happened to the Russians, but from
a naval perspective. And just look at what is import
on Christmas in San Diego, in Norfolk, and for lack
of veterforate and even in Mayport, especially with our aircraft carriers,
and then play out what the Ukrainians were able to

(17:02):
do to the Russians. We have intentionally and consciously in
peace created an incredible strategic risk two ours that nobody's
talking about. And again I want to give full credit
to ad Mcharvey. He was the last flag officer who
saw this and was able to mention it back in
twenty ten. And it's only underlined and bold and blaring

(17:27):
and red right now that we need serious people and
serious jobs to talk to the accountants, and we need
to look back at strategic homeporting. We back when you
and I were kids, just on the East coast, we
had chips. I think we had like almost a dozen
ships based in Newport, Rhode Island.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
We had them.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
Charleston off of Mayport was much larger. I had two
aircraft carrier. As a matter of fact, I also saw
a link back ten years ago when they were going
to put carrier.

Speaker 5 (17:55):
In fact, I think I have that let me quote that.
Did I save that article? I think I did, but
at the time it was Andrew Crenshaw. Anyway, not important,
I'll put it up on the show links. But they
were going to move a nuclear carrier, and they said
it should be in There should be a nuclear carrier

(18:16):
homeported in Mayport, Florida, with all the accessories required to
take care of a nuclear power ship.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
By twenty nineteen. Of course it never happened. So that
was a get twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, something
like that. So we've we've lost another opportunity to protect ourselves.
I don't know whether it'll get footing our traction, but
here we are given another tap on the shoulder. Will
people that make a difference be able to react to it?

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, I don't know how the aircraft are rate at
at Mayport, but I do know that the aircraft at
some of the we have consolidated all these forces. We
have a bunch of squadrons at an Nassociana. We have
a bunch of squadrons at the base in the middle
of in the middle, but in this in the San

(19:04):
Joaquin Valley, and themore we have a squadron. You know,
we have these different things. But when you go to
visit these sites, or you go to an air force base,
they don't scatter the airplane. And now it looks like
the days of right with the pictures you see of
Pearl Harbor and the Philippines before the Japanese attack, they had,

(19:24):
you know, to prevent sabotage, they clustered all the planes together,
but all that did was making much better target for
the aircraft coming in. And yeah, and your point is
well made. And we do the same thing with the ships.
You know, So if you're on the cruiser destroyer carrier
piers there in Norfolk, that's a that's a very tempting,

(19:44):
I weld think, a very tempting target.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
What is the response that we have to take away
from this? We'll get more information on this.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
I was wondering. I mean, the Russians have a pretty
good jamming capacity, but it seems not to be it
as far back as the bases that got attacked. You know,
they're they're using this anti jamming equipment or the jamming
equipment locally and on the front, but apparently they were
all lax on using it at these more remote bases.

(20:15):
And then you get into the question, well can you
you know, how do you how many free you know,
do you have frequency skipping jammers that you can place
out there to make sure you've covered all your bases?
Do you. You know, as we're talked a little bit to
some people are going, oh, we need nets over all
this stuff. Good, good luck with that. But you know what,
what what are we going to do? And what kind
of sensitivity of radars we have that can pick up

(20:35):
some of these small things? And if you do have it,
what assets do you have to take them down?

Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (20:39):
And then you have how long do you keep those running?
And for every countermeasure, there's a there's a counter countermeasure.
And it's fair to say the Russians have gotten complacent.
It's very convenient to keep all your planes lined up
in an ice straight line were, you know, a couple
of thousand kilometers away from the front. You know, what
are they gonna what are they gonna do? Fly a

(21:00):
bunch of quad copters over us? Actually it's exactly what
they're going to do. And so that's another one of
those lessons I hope we take on board because I've
been hearing this since a station there. We have less
than twenty fully operationally capable B two Spirit bombers, which
we use as a lever all the time. People think
we have a lot more, we don't, and they're homeported

(21:23):
literally right in the middle of the US in Missouri.
It's a very very safe, very very secure place. Yes,
if you're thinking nineteen eighty seven, it is a very
very safe and very very secure place. But is it
in twenty twenty five. I don't think it is. It's
no less safe and secure than any place else. So
going back to the comment about strategic homeporting, so if

(21:43):
you have a strategic asset you do not have a
lot of do you put them all on a location
that is as vulnerable as if it was in Guam
or Japan or any place else, or do you accept
perhaps a little more logistical challenge and a little more
expensive peacetime expenditure. Do you have them on two bases?

(22:04):
And that is one of those things that on December eighth,
a lot of people pointed the finger and.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Said look, look, look, look, look.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
But it didn't make a difference, because on December sixth
everything looked okay. You know, the whole thing with the
attack on Pearl Harbor and what we would see in
nineteen forty one, the warnings were there. It wasn't just
the word games we played, the simulated attack on the
Panama Canal. The games we played in actually attacking Honolulu itself.
But back in nineteen eighteen was the first air raid

(22:34):
by carrier HMS Furious, which is a converted battle cruiser.
It was upset I think it was six or seven
swopped with camels after the German Navy's base near the
Danish border near the Keel Canal, and they had abandoned
the airship base. They actually lost some equipment, but it
took it out. It was I think it was like
April twenty eighteen or so, but that was the introduction.

(22:58):
And of course we even had the bridge attack on Toronto,
which was kind of underlined to the Japanese what they
needed to do in Pearl Harbor a few years before.
So there's there's lots of build up to new capabilities
and war and you get these warnings, but do you
have the right people listening to them? And that's the
one thing that I really take away from this is
some people voices this is a concern, but it's not

(23:20):
a concern of the Ukrainian so to speak. These heavy bombers,
the bears and the backfires their dual use. They're also
part of the nuclear triad for the Russians. So as
you take out more and more of their assets. Yes,
they'll have fewer assets to attack Kiev with with cruise missiles,
but that also makes the strategic nuclear deterrent for Russia

(23:43):
a little less than what would have already was that. Again,
that's all theory. Nobody's going to nuclear war with Russia.
But you know that's part of the second and third
order effects, and you can trace it back to the Russians.
Even though they're in the fourth year of war against
Ukraine and people have they've already seen long range drone
attacks and ones or two. I know that somebody on

(24:04):
the Russian Joint staff had warned and briefed to this
era and was told to sit down and shut up.
Raise a raise a shot glass of vodka to that
man or woman who had done that. But they're going
to have to have to respond to this, both militarily
to make a point, but also I think in how
they can figure what they have left of their long
range aviation.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, it's gonna be it. I mean, it's gonna be
a challenge for them. As I as I put on X,
I don't think if I'm the Russian air marsh or
whatever he is in charge of all these bases and
security and stuff that I've been near any tall built,
any windows and tall buildings the next few months. And
I'm pretty sure the guy who raised his waist and said,
you know, this could be a problem for us and
got told to sit down and shut up is going

(24:45):
to be in that same boat. Because the last thing
you do, and in Russia is oh. I was right
back then, and I was listened to you know, you
kill them both, they both get they both get bounced.
But you know, let's connect some dots. I mean, we
had the the drones flying over Laning, the Air Force base.
We don't know who, who who they belonged to, at
least they haven't officially said who they belonged to. We

(25:07):
have these the giants, as Cant and John had been
talking about. It was the giant balloon that what traveled
across our country before we finally shot it down somewhere
over South Carolina or over the shore line shore off
South Carolina. I mean, what are we thinking? And you know,
we know that the Chinese have a sophisticated surveillance satellites.
It's not like these these balloons and these these other

(25:29):
things are doing it except testing I keep you know,
you keep probing for weak spots, right, you probe here,
you probe there. And and so we've had these Chinese
nationals trying to get onto military bases. We've had, I
mean all kinds of things like that that that when
you look, you know, you go, okay, well it's an
isolated incident. But you know, after you get about thirty
five isolated incidents, then you begin to go, well, maybe

(25:50):
it's not as isolated as I thought. Now, as you
point out for many of our bases there are you know,
we don't do a lot of let's put our base
bases way out in the woods. And now the Strategic
Air Command used to do that. I mean, as my
dad was an officer in the Strategic Air Command, we
we had some really interesting bases that we would we
would go to Guam was one of them. Worksmith Air
Force Base up north up in Michigan, but there were

(26:11):
a whole bunch of them, was a big chain of
these bases. Aunt SAC used to keep bombers in the
air all the time. So there was always some airborne
response group that in this the early days, but was
out there flying around and if called on, would go
forward and do their mission. Now that was a different
kind of war, a different kind of time. We did
used to worry about that kind of sneak attack. But

(26:32):
these these drones, they're small, they're hard to detect, as
John has said, if you know, I'm talking about them jamming.
But if you're got using a terrain guidance system and
you don't, you can fly in low and slow and
nobody's going to pay any attention until you've done your deed.
So we really need to think about, as you said,
dispersing the force, figuring out how we could make it

(26:52):
more difficult for us to be targeted. And I keep thinking,
we've said that so many times about Guam and and
the bases in Japan and everything in the Pacific that
you know, it's like that are people listening to this stuff?
Because why are we doing the same thing over and
over again. I think it's going to get better. Well,
we'll protect Wuam with these, you know, all the assets
the army has, the patriots, the the the the other

(27:15):
missiles that are that are are a little further out.
But you know what, what what is to stop as
we've already said, and innocent looking Chinese instant looking Chinese
fishing vessel. Vessel just have to be floating by and releases,
you know, three dozen drones and directs them towards the
various bases on Guam. It's you know, it's we're not
thinking right.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
I think we're thinking for convenience. For instance, you know
you mentioned Guam Peopley'll say, well, you know, we we
we'll put a fad battery there, and you know, we'll
put the army system there. Okay, fine, how many how
many missiles is that? Let's use around numbers. They say,
we got, well, that gives us twenty missiles. Okay, are
you doing shoot?

Speaker 3 (27:54):
Look? Shoot or shoot? Shoot?

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Look?

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Shoot? How many?

Speaker 1 (27:56):
How many weapons will you be able to quote service
unquote with you have there?

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Another constant in warfare is a defending entity playing runs
out of ammunition. It has to surrender. May not have
inflicted a single bite on the enemy, but the enemy
comes forward. They were only issued three rounds, and they
fire their three rounds and then they look at their
officers and go, I've done all that I can.

Speaker 3 (28:21):
Do, now what?

Speaker 1 (28:23):
And that that is one of the dangers that you
have by putting everything in Guam, Even assuming the political
risk and agency risk of being in Japan or South
Korea or even Australia to the side. If we're putting
everything in two or three locations and we're defending it
on paper, but when you war game and it doesn't
look too pretty, we're kind of fooling ourselves. But I don't
think we're fulling the enemy.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
The enemy can.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Count too, and they've got we've talked about here about
the great unscheduled range time data we've gotten in the
Red Sea the last eighteen months. We have, but the
Chinese have as well. They can also do the math,
and they have very good spies in this data. They
have more access to classified material than probably the people
that are authorized to have it. So they're going to
know that for this many cruise missiles detected, they fire

(29:07):
this many weapons. For an anti shipulet missile, they fire
this many of this type of weapon. For attack drones
on the low end, they use this and they say, Okay,
we have X number of ships out in front of
us that will probably have this load out A or
this load out B or this load out C. How
many weapons do we need to fire at them until
they're Winchester and that's what a lot of people, and

(29:28):
we've talked about it here, have been looking at the
challenge in the Pacific as well, And I don't think
that just packing everybody together on a few locations makes
that map work any better, because I think what it
really does is it gives your your risk level higher
because should your defenses be inadequate on one location and
you've packed all your stuff in this location because you

(29:51):
think it's more secure, then you have a compounded problem.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
It's it's it's ugly.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
But again, we're not the first people to talk about this.
It's been talked about for thousands of years. But you
have to what was the big phrase last decade, distributed lethality. No,
you need to distribute your risk. And this is again
one of those one of those warnings people need to
distribute their risk. And even if you do that, just
on a rough count, I've seen a couple of maps,
it looks like they struck at least three airfields, maybe

(30:19):
more so. The Russians may have had their strategic aviation
assets quote well distributed unquote better than we do, but
that doesn't mean they're not able to get hit. If
you have a well run operation like the Ukrainian side.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah, it's and it's not just I mean, the other
side of it is that if what's you know, you
can you can attack the bases, that that may be doable.
But it's the other it's the infrastructure. We need to
continue to operate the country and provide for those the
base support and all that. Then that is, you know,
that is our weakest to me, our weakest. No, it

(30:52):
is if you want to cut power. We've seen what
happens when the power goes out, you know, and if
it was a multi you know, very large enough attack
took out a few lines that can be replaced in repair,
but that takes time. You know. We've talked about the
fuel tanks, the field storage, all those issues, and we
haven't even talked about the fact that many of our
works where we have the ships like San Diego have

(31:15):
a very limited entrance and exit and difficult to get
out of there if somebody were to do something to
off there off ballast point. I mean, it is the
same thing with San Francisco when we were there. I'm
not sayingbody would would sink the or managed to drop
the Golden Gate bridge, and that it may not water
may be deep enough there that with that wouldn't make

(31:35):
a difference, but it's still a challenge. If somebody was
to come in on one of those Chinese fishing vessels
and lay lay a few mines, and where were mine
warfare assets in that area? Same thing up in Washington State,
same thing in Norfolk. We don't have. Uh, you know,
if you're going to about thimble Shoals and all that
good stuff and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. You know,

(31:58):
if you want to cut down access to our ports
on the East coast, most of them are not exactly
right on the beach. Mayport maybe the actually the easiest
one to get it out of on these.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
That has the best sea and acre detail on the navy.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
And you know that.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
There's a follow up question. Okay, so what do you
do about it? You've got it, you've got to retake,
you've got to refurbish, and you got to rebuild. Where
would we have new bases? Well, the same place to
have the old bases. And we've talked about that here before.
Newport could take or could take ships again, so could Charleston.
If you can stop the people from building condos on
the old base. North Charleston in twenty twenty five is

(32:35):
not North Charleston in two thousand and five. I can
tell you that up and down the West Coast there
are also lots of options, but you're going to run
into all three of those dates, a lot of local
opposition from the political side of the house, But the
federal government has lots of ways to recapture that, and
you will have the arguments that it's more expensive. I'm

(32:58):
happy to have the discussion of people. They'll say, Okay,
I'll tell you what. Just to use round numbers here.
You can have one base with five carriers and twenty destroyers,
or you can have two bases with three carriers and
seventeen destroyers. I'll take the second option every day of
the week, because when you look at that beautiful little
chart that Tom put up thirteen months ago, combined with

(33:21):
what we've seen people can do, and this has been
a concern for decades. Yeah, you can have all your
ships located one place at D minus one, but at
D plus one, you'll be lucky if you have a
third of them left. Because no competent peer adversary is
going to go to war with the US and not
try to take advantage of Norfolk and San Diego.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
It would just be.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
Professional malpractice to the nth degree to be at D
plus one and have those places be quiet. I just
don't see it happen.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Oh yeah, I think I think you're right. We're just
right now. We're just talking Navy facilities. But you know
we also have you know, the the the air bases
are not like Travis, which is a pretty important base,
like Dover Air Force Base. We have, you know, we
have some fighter bases Shaw, a whole bunch, but you know,
the ones we used to have up in the northeast.
I'm not sure we have what we have up there anymore,

(34:13):
if there is anything, and you know, it's it is
a sobering thought to think, well, you know, we need
to spend encourage the various industries to harden themselves. I mean,
with the power companies need to think about how they're
going to harden these long distance transmission lines. You know,
we we we're pretty good on things like the reactors
around electric producing electricity producing reactors, they're they're pretty tough.

(34:36):
It would take quite a lot to knock one of
those things out. That's not that that's not their weak point.
Their weak point is always in the transmission system. So
you know, we need to we need a whole of government.
Here we go again, a whole government approach to this.
We need to have a readiness zar or something. I
need to add more people to the payroll. But you know,
somebody's got to be thinking about these things. And where's
our red team. Where's the red team who's thinking? You've

(34:58):
got to think like the Chinese. We have a lot
of people who've been doing that. We need to put
them in a position where they can they can act
on this stuff. You know, we wait and we keep
going to the same thing. We could do a lot
with less expensive ships and what we have. We but
we have really good expensive ships and we don't want
them to be wasted. And you know, but it is
easy to go Winchester if you have a limited magazine.

(35:20):
And we keep talking about you know, what happened to
the railguns, what happened to the we're late we're a
cool laser gun, you know systems and all that, because
we we need to have those those large capacity systems
that don't run out of out of bullets, you know,

(35:42):
after after fifty or sixty shots, and there are.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Some people who will argue that, or at least try
to make the point that yeah, yeah, we have these
these vulnerabilities, so does everybody else.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
And my answer is that do they.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
A lot of this vulnerability comes from the opening hours
of any major conflict, especially if no changes are made.
China doesn't have that same because I can foresee no
circumstance at which the United States or any combinations and
nations would initiate war with the People's Republic of China
out of the blue. There is no bolt out of

(36:16):
the blue attack coming from the east onto the Chinese
Pacific coast.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
There just isn't.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
So any type of conflict that would come against the PRC.
They would be able to set the table the way
they want and then we would respond to it. So
and are there as many concentrated areas they only have
one coast.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
It's not that long.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
There's a great target set there, but we've got to
get there to service it, and they have a great
ability to also contact. Classic example, the Royal Navy and
the American Navy were huge and dominated the Atlantic, but
it's still almost lost. The war against the Central Powers
in the First World War, who could barely get a
couple of U boats underway by the time the end

(36:57):
of twenty seventeen came around, are the end of forty four.
So maritime powers can completely dominate what little maritime powers
a land power has, but they can take it and
still be able to once they have land to keep it.
So I think it's a different set of concerns, and
I'm not not as concerned about that type of scenario

(37:19):
with Russia here, but I think the Europeans need to
because should the war in Ukraine go south, the security
situation in Europe will be very different than it is today,
and they are well within range of a huge land
border of uncertainty, and they are extremely vulnerable to this

(37:40):
type of attack and warfare, especially with the lack of
control and relative lawlessness you have in the interior of
cottinental Europe. So I know the Europeans have got to
be looking at this really, really, really close, because the Russians,
if nothing like to copy good ideas has to do
the Chinese, though, after they lick their wounds and embarrassment

(38:01):
rage a little bit about the successful Ukrainian operation, they're
gonna go, Okay, how do we do that to our enemies.
I think they already have a lot of the resources
to do that, but but they're going to go down
that path. And I think that's more of a concern
for our European allies it is for us.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, I don't want the most self satisfied group of people.
I've talked to and along people in the European countries.
You know, why would anybody do anything to this? We're
you know, we're just blouse blouse and it's and it's
you know, I'm centered as what I said. When you know,
if I'm Finland and I'm I'm Sweden and I'm Norway,
and I'm looking at where do these where are these
drones that attack, uh the Northern Fleet and Mermansk and

(38:38):
those other those air base Where do those guys flying from?
Because you know they don't have they don't have super
ranges and uh, you know, if I'm the Russians, I'm
gonna be complaining the least complaining and wondering that that
very question. And would they do anything against those those
three Nordic countries? Uh? You know then are they and

(39:00):
you know where else? So they what what would you
do if you were Russia? You know, they've got asset,
they got allies. It is Paris. I think Paris is
still burning today, right, are the mobs still running rampant
in Paris? To uh, you know, it's not like it
was was. You know, all we're the French and we're
only the French. They've we've invited so many uh what's

(39:22):
the right word, disruptive forces into our countries that you
know that that could be a real issue as we
go down the road, especially as you said, you know,
we we we know there were a large number of
military age Chinese people coming over the boarder and you know,
if you're looking for those teams and I've read so
many apocalyptic novels now about excuse me, about what could

(39:46):
happen if those if those guys get active, are activated,
because you know, it is it, it is real. It's
a real question for us. So you know, they don't
have to with us, with our country, don't you know.
Some of the scenarios are always they could grab an
elementary school somewhere, and you know, but we would be
so caught up in that we might forget to do
look for the other things that would be coming down
the pipe. So it's you know, it's really somewhere somebody

(40:08):
needs to be thinking about all this stuff and figure
out how how the response is going to come. I
know that that is part of the planning for for
some organizations, but it's got to be it's got to
permeate down through the system.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
And there you know, all is not completely lost and
worthy of depression, so to speak. One of the things
that I noticed is the old cliche that I love
so much is right when you're sick of saying something
is when people finally start to listen to you. And
you know, one of the one of the things that
we keep harping on about that people say, Okay, what

(40:40):
are you going to do about? It has to do
with our shipbuilding business industry and our ability to repair
what we have. And that's really since the November election,
it's gotten a lot of additional attention, which that's important.
It's one thing for me and you and our small
little conversation coffee clatch to talk about. It's got to

(41:02):
reach a larger audience. And I noticed there on a
few days ago on May twenty, of all the establishment
rags you can think of, and I use that term
with great affection, the Atlantic is on that list, and
Arvin Row from the Welcome to the Party gift inserted
directly here quote who killed America's shipbuilding industry despite being
economically and militarily reliant on shipping US has an astonishing

(41:26):
lack of maritime capability unquote that's the title subtitle Hallelujah.
I mean, it is a little infuriating knowing who the audience,
your average Atlantic reader is, that this would be a
surprise to them, But that's just the reality we live in.
But that is good news is this realization is expanding
beyond our normal talking circle. And you know, it's not

(41:49):
like that article was published on you know, George's feed
and seed in Valdosta, Georgie's newsletter. This is in the Atlantic.
So it's going to ask a lot, a lot of questions.
And they have that classic picture from a Kaiser yard
that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine nine liberty ships lined up in that World War
two yard. You've probably gotten this pushback as well. We

(42:11):
will go and we're not going to be able to
do it, just like World War two todd where you
can find the workers. Well, nobody is asking for you know,
Rosie the riveter to strap on her headband and hop
on board a ship. This is twenty twenty five, and
there are some really smart people that are working on
ways to build ships differently. That kind of echoes a

(42:32):
little bit towards the end of the Second World War
how the Germans were able to build their submarines part
by part. But I what I've been thinking about is,
and I kind of threw some snark at science fiction
people the other day, but science fiction is nice when
it's well written. It gives you stuff to think about.
And the movie that came out over a decade ago,
I think it was Tom Cruise movie that had a

(42:54):
minority report and one of the standard issue Tom Cruise
chase scenes and report they're going through a car factory
this building, and he actually helps in a car right
at the end of the factory and drives off on it.
But it's very interesting when you look in the background
what they were talking about in this, you know, just
on the edge of reality future time point. It's an

(43:15):
automated car factory where you had robotics, highly refined materials
being able to put together in an exact way that
only robotics can be. That there was nobody involved in it. Now,
how do you scale that up to huge ships? I
don't know, but in parts and smaller ships kind of
like the maritime version.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
Not exactly.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
I'm not talking about three D printing ships. We're not there.
But there has to be a way that you don't
have to have nine thousand and Rosy the riveters with
a wrench in their back pocket, climbing all over a
still structure in the middle of the day to build
a ship like modern technology, if it's given a chance,
and perhaps you know, going small, going big, that is

(43:59):
an interesting spot. I'd like to see more work on
the possibility of that and per ton of ships. How
many full time equivalent personnelities that take to build a
warship today and it did in nineteen forty five, And
what would be our goal in twenty thirty five to

(44:19):
be able to build a ship at you know, the
present day is one? Can we do it at point eight?
Can we do it at point seven? Are we just
going to be at point ninety five ten years? Technology
is developing such that there's got to be a smarter,
better way that we could build ships, because that gives
you scalability.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, I always worry about the Atlantic because I have
the feeling many of the reader's food comes from the
grocery store and they don't know any about the whole
eco ecosystem out there that weren't grown and driven to
and all that stuff, you know. So it's it is
a it's a mixed blessing that it's there. But I
just wonder how, you know, are these people going to
really wrap their heads around the issue and what it

(45:01):
would mean to them to have a strong merchant marine
and you know, great shipyards and all that. And you know,
I think John's talking in the in the chat room
about we have twice the population roughly of what we
had in World War Two. I don't know why we
keep thinking we don't have workers. We must. You know,
we could fire everybody from speaking as a as a

(45:22):
as a retired lawyer, but half the people who work
in white collar jobs could be a gainfully employee doing
many other things and pushing a stack of paper from
the inbox to the out box and doing their what's
the thing?

Speaker 1 (45:34):
The TP reports The TSP reports TSP speaking of speaking
of office space, one of my younger employees, she's been
with us about a year now, she's she's great, she's
she's twenty four. And we were talking to her about
cultural literacy and she had never seen office space. So
I gave I gave her an assignment. I was like,

(45:56):
if you need to if you need a log on
and have a have a an hour's worth of employment, fine,
but you've got to watch office space.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
She had never seen that. So some of my I
realized why some of my references weren't quite working with her.
So I had her watch office space and maybe that'll help.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
So she didn't get twenty three schedu either.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
No, but that's okay, that's all right.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
You know, sometimes you got to learn what other people
around you don't know. So anyway that I think, you
know you're comment about The Atlantic a spot on, but
I guess because I am a closet optimist that when
we have somebody from one of our friends from the
General General Accountability Office, not the General Accounty Office, the
General count Accountability Office, are you know, one of our

(46:36):
our great public servants, you know uniforms up there in
Congress and Senate, and they bring up the topic that
maybe somebody go, Yes, I read in The Atlantic a
couple of months ago.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
So maybe it opened the door. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
But the more, the more discussions, the better. But at
the end of the day, it's got to show up
with money attached to it. And you know, riddled me this.
Maybe you can help me with I've seen one of
on for instance, at the Shangri Lau dialogue that Secretary
Defense Hegseth was at, it was brought up. Then it's
been brought up a fair bit in the last few

(47:09):
weeks that we've been talking with our allies about spending
five percent of GDP is the new goal that everybody
needs to be ready for. If members charts are right,
we are only spending about three percent right now. Does
that mean that we're going to spend five percent of
GDP on defense? I sure haven't seen that come out
of Congress.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, don't. I don't think we're going to see that
because you know, there are two are Congress people for
the most part, seem to be very intent on by
spending enough money other people's money to get themselves re elected,
rather than too many of them are that way rather
than worry about what's good for the country. So there'd
be a fundamental shift in the demand curve demands we're
putting on our congress people too, And you know it's

(47:49):
not you know that we want every lobby group that
goes in there, whether it's for farmers growing cotton or
or they know the the honeybee industry. You know, everybody
got something they want Congress to help them fund and fix.
And it's I think that psychology needs a chance. Fortunately,
there seemed to be a number of people, and we've

(48:11):
talked to a couple here who have the kind of
a different mindset. But that's refreshing. Hope that that is
a trend. But you know, it have to be that
people who are not supporting advancing our defense get taken
out at the polls and replaced by people who do
care about what happens to this country.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah. I don't going to five percent of GDP. It's
not all my planning assumptions. I assume that adjusted for inflation,
will be lucky if we maintain the levels of defensements
and spending we have right now. I do think we
run into some danger if we're asking our friends and
allies to spend five percent of GDP what a lot

(48:52):
of a lot of them haven't even reached the two
percent mark yet, but we refuse to grow towards that mark. Well,
I think Poland will probably get there on its own,
maybe a couple of the Baltic states, though I think
a lot of them. They're not big nations. They're like
but are There are one point three million Estonians and
one point nine million Lithuanians and somewhere in between there.

(49:13):
For Latvians, well, they'll probably top out at two and
a half three, which is better than where they historically
have been. If we're not going to go to five
percent two that I don't think we are. I just
don't think financially we're going to be able to do it.
I wrote something last week in a moment of depression
about it. I keep reminding myself, but I think the
planning assumption should be, if we're lucky, that we'll have

(49:34):
constant dollars, which is we have a pretty good constant
dollar amount we're spending on the military. It's just what
we're spending and how we're spending. If you need to
get more money, then you need to get it from
someplace else. Dodge DoD might buy you one more DDG
at the end of the day, but there's larger structural
issues that need to take place, both on how you
allocate the budget but also what you spend it on.

(49:56):
And there is some lot of money out there pushing
for things that I think will soak up too much
of the available money a classic example, and a lot
of people I know disagreeing on that, And that's fine.
I reserve the right to be wrong, but I don't
think I'm wrong here. The whole push to bring back
the nuclear capable submarine launched cruise missile, our surface launched

(50:18):
cruise missile. I was and you remember, you're a couple
couple of months older than I am. But when I
was at JO, I remember all the academic the overhead
involved with having nuclear weapons. It's got an incredible cost
to it. We don't need to be investing in that.
We need to invest in more SM three, more SM six,

(50:38):
things of that manner than bringing back something that the
weird people in the skiff come out and want to
talk about once a fiscal year.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yeact.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
There's a lot of people looking for big ticket, glitzy
items with a high per unit cost and a lot
of overhead and tail that will probably never be used.
Those people need to be invited to a brief later
on in the day and not lead the discussion.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Yeah, I agree, you know, the personnel, the personal reliability program,
all that stuff, all the all the stuff you had
to go through to get into those assets, the constant
guarding of your launchers and stuff like that. It was magazines.
I mean, it just takes a lot of energy and people.
But somebody, somebody asked about the admiral that got fired,

(51:20):
because you know, we talked about a little bit earlier
before the show about PEO of Unmanned and Small Combatants
was relieved, and he's also was the former former in
charge of the constellation program. So there wasn't much said
except a loss of confidence blah blah blah. But you know,
I'm wondering whether is this a good thing? Is they're
going to shake that program up, because that those programs

(51:43):
unmanned and small combatants are where we really need to
be focused a lot of our attention.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
And then usually in those circumstances, it's always bothered me
and I having known people who have been relief for command,
I fully understand the forget the professional impact with the
personal embarrassment that comes with that. However, for the greater good.
I think we need to have more transparency on why
people are relieved. You know, did the guy have a dui?

(52:09):
Did he have a mental break? Did was he found
doing extracurricular activities with people who owned the paperwork on
or was it? Program and competence? Everybody should know that,
especially those that are are coming up for commands, so they.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
Don't do that.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
I think it's healthy, but it also I think.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Encourages the others. If we know that.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
People have been fired for poor program management or for
telling being overly optim How can I say this about
being rude providing overly optimistic expectations on program viability. I
guess it would be a nice way of putting it.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
That's what happened to the was it the A eleven.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
Twelve?

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah, I mean, you know they were they were having
a huge amount of difficulty getting the coding gone, But
the people in charge of the program were not necessarily
being straightforward about the problems they were encountering, and I
think they got fired.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
And eventually, by the time they figured out how they
were going to do it, the plane had become a pig.

Speaker 3 (53:12):
She's just too heavy.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
It's the naway.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
It was the same mentality that brought about the debacle
of DVG one thousand and almost almost bit the forward
all the technology risk. But that's I just realized we've
already gone over an hour. I don't want to abuse
everybody's time, but it's funny. When we started this in
the pre show for the listeners, we said, well, you know,
here's the list of things to talk about, but what

(53:39):
happened today in Russia will probably dominate the conversation.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
That's what it is.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
But Mark, what comes to mind is there's nothing that
happened with this operation that is really new, that's really shocking,
that's really enlightening for those that have been in these
discussions for a long time. Some people quoted, you know,
ghost Fleet, why did that come out a dozen years ago?
But what it does is it provides an opportunity for

(54:04):
those that have been making those arguments, Hey, this is
what we were talking about. This is actually happening. You
need to go talk to person X, Y and Z
and see what our capabilities are to either do something
like this or to defend against it. Because you're not
going to like the answer. You got a great opportunity.
Hopefully those types of hard questions are being asked cause
you know, Bravozulu to the Ukrainians and it sucks to

(54:24):
be a Russian. But this is a great opportunity for US,
our NATO allies, Japan and South Korea to kind of
step back and go, Okay, who do we have focusing
on this and related issues? You know, I want to
brief Tuesday at fifteen hundred for no longer than forty
five minutes, no more than forty five slides, thank you
very much, and see what happens. So hopefully that's what

(54:46):
is being done in a variety of places right now,
because this is a gift if people are willing to
accept it as such.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Yeah, and it's it's a It points out that we
don't need to always buy the most expensive unmanned aircraft
you could by. So predators have been great. The other
many of the other things have been great, but you know,
these guys are basically taking chewing gum and cardboard boxes
and weaponizing them, and we need to we need to
be thinking smaller. We need to not get the big

(55:14):
defense contractors involve. They've got to be a whole room
full of geniuses with these with these drone programs that
could could mass manufacture this sort of thing and it
wouldn't even cause them to break a sweat. We just
need to simplify the acquisition process. They don't have to
be perfect the first five hours to fly to them.
You know, we just need This is another one of

(55:35):
those quantity versus quality issues and we need to get
at it, hop on it hard.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
And for the not that we have anybody on our audience,
but for you screen riders out in Hollywood, if you're
looking for a really what could be a very fun,
action packed modern war moody. This would be a great,
great topic. Maybe one day they'll be able to ride it.
But what a what a great mission, great job by
the Ukrainians, and this how they did this and over

(56:04):
the course of time, who was involved what because you know,
some things went wrong and what went right? You know,
who had their jockstrap left over the sidelines, all those
It's gonna be a great story. I look forward to
reading it one day.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Yeah, one last thing before we go. The Secon NAV
was on Guam and you got to look at some
of the barracks there and for the first time I
remember the second NAV goes, we can't let this happen
that the condition of these things is unsatisfactory. We need
to take care of our sailors, and man's that's good.
We've got nice young people coming into services and we

(56:40):
don't have to treat them like they were going to
the Ritz hotel or something. But we do need to
make it so that they're not suffering from neglect. And
I think that's where we are.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Yep, that's a great thing to end the show on.
Is first of all, Bravosulu to the second nap. We're
going public with that, and can we talk a lot
about people are a number one priority? And everybody wants
to talk about missiles and ships, et cetera and so forth.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
But when you're the second.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Nave and he's coming to the Navy with a fresh eye,
it's the fact that he has the background of walking
in and looking into organizations and find out what's working well,
what's not working well, what needs to be added, what
needs to be ripped out, how do you maximize the value?
And if your people are one of your greatest assets
and he walks in and see how we have some
of them living, that's going to break out to him

(57:27):
because he's he doesn't he doesn't owe anybody anything. He
hasn't overlooked it in the past. For instance, if you
had a sec NAB who was a retired four star
admiral and he came out and made a statement like that,
there would rightfully be a lot of people going, oh, really,
where were you when that was on active duty. So
here we have the second NAV just a few months
into the job, looking at this and going, well, this

(57:48):
is unsat Okay, these three things you brought me. You
want me to sign off to put money, I'll tell
you what, We're going to take that money and we're gonna.

Speaker 3 (57:55):
Do this instead.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
I don't know what that's gonna happen, but that's the
mentality that comes from those types of engagements. And I'll
find a good article on that. I'll put it in
the show notes for everybody to look at. But yeah,
that's really really encouraging. And again, you know what I
want to have the present housing situation for our sailors
in twenty DDG, or what I want to bump up

(58:17):
and modernize and make better living for our people and
have seventeen DDGs. I'll take the seventeen. That's good to
see and hopefully with some action on it. You know,
take take care of your people. Used to be the rules,
radical but true, and we get take care of people.
I think we'll let folks go. Thank you everybody for
joining us. We've had a great chat room today. I

(58:38):
appreciate all the input. We'll catch you next time, and
until then, hope everybody has a great Navy day.

Speaker 4 (58:43):
Cheers me and all leave a friend of becdily for

(59:04):
you being to blame more longly love me silly folding
your name.

Speaker 6 (59:15):
It's a long way to Dipperary. It's a long way
to go. It's a long way to Dipperary, to the
Queen go by becdi Fairwell leftwell, it's a long long

(59:41):
way to Dipperate. But my life, my name,

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Episode 723: June Free For All - With Lots of UKR Drones

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 723: June Free For All - With Lots of UKR Drones