Welcome to mid Rats with Sal from Commander Salamander and Eagle One from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues and all things Maritimes. And welcome board everybody. I am the aforementioned Sal along with my co host, the Aborgini Eagle One of Eagle Speak both with you today and we are live. So if you are with that esteemed cohort that made the extra effort to arrange your schedules to be with you, I'd like to be
with us. I'll I'd like to invite you to scroll down to the bottom of the show page. That's where you will find a link to the chat room. We've already got four folks in there that'll be glad to welcome you on board. And if that is a great venue. In case you have any questions you would like for us to address to our guests, or you just have some observations you'd like to share with everybody else during the course of
the show, that is the perfect place to do it. And on today's show, it's going to be a great mid Rats because we're having one of our friends come back to talk with us and we're going to talk about a subject that if you ever find yourself at a table full of navalists, if they're the right kind, you roll out this one word and you got at least a forty five minute conversation out of it, if not longer, depending on how many adult beverages you have on the table. But we're going to
talk about presence today. The know everybody says it's a naval mission. It's gone by that various names for a few thousand years, but in the modern context, that's what we refer it to. We'll dig in a little bit of the history over the course of the next hour about what it meant, what it means now, and what we need to look at towards the future if this is something that is important for the world's premier naval power, depending
on how you measure it going forward for the rest of the century. And we'll also probably touch on things that you can do to properly resource that if it's not properly resourced the way you want it to. Right now and join us today is returning to guest doctor Jerry Hendrix, Captain US Navy, retired. He is a president of Hendricks and Associates and on the show page, you'll find a link to the document that he authored recently with some assistance with
a good group of folks. You can read about on the inside cover for the Sagamore Institute titled Measuring and Modeling Naval Presence. Jerry, welcome back to Midrights. It's great to be here, and it's great to be with this particular audience talking about the report, because I think that if anyone is going to have one a grasp of what I was trying to accomplish, and also the ability to pick it apart, it's not only these you two hosts,
but also your your audience. Well, we will do our best to meet that high standard. But it's always great when you have somebody who's authored a book, a report like this, because the opening questions, at least the easiest for the hosts to do, give you a chance to step the table, some tell us about your report? What will the reader find it? Well, So I set out and proposed almost two years ago now to actually the Smith Richardson Foundation that we find a way of measuring the value of naval
presence. We say it's important. The Regional Combatant Commander says it's important we've written about it for the better part of fifty years now as a mission of the Navy, and yet when we say, well, what is it worth,
how do you measure it? It's it's it's so much as a hand wave or the ultimate These aren't the drawings you're looking for type of moment, you know, it's it's more ephemeral, even than the idea of those definitions of a pornography that the Supreme Court would say, you know, I'll know it when I see it. And so I thought that there should be something
more to this. And despite the fact, as an analyst, I had been looking for, you know, beyond just a definition of naval presence, but some means to measure it, whether there was a model of it for the better part of the last five years, and I did not find it. So I made this proposal that to Smith Richardson Foundation, that I that I would set about to go and try and create a model that could be you know, placed into a computer simulation and we could then try to determine
the value of various different platforms or formations of Navy ships. Smith Richardson found it very intriguing. They enthusiastically embraced it. I will tell you that we went back and forth several times on this because originally I proposed that I would come up with a model of the presence for the new Constellation class frigate, which has always intrigued me. But due to members of the reviewing committee at Smith Richardson, we actually came back and said, no, you will.
You will model the arley Bird class destroyer, the ubiquitous sort of centerpiece of the US Navy, and and and then you know, go forward from there and also try to figure out, you know how you know, if you're modeling, you know, you have to model it against something else. And so we very carefully looked at the lu Yang two from the People's Liberation Army Navy, and then the more I got into it, began to realize that you can't really create a model without also trying to find some way of measuring
the environment, because there's various different types. So anyways, I underwent about eighteen months of research where I reviewed the historical literature associated with this. I interviewed six former regional combatant commanders, three Navy, two Army, one Air Force to get their views on naval presence and then also with several modeling and simulation experts, individuals from Purdue University, the Naval Postgraduate School, as well
as the Santa Fe Institute of Modeling and Simulation. I also talked with a sort of a very ancient wargamer who had actually created some of the original Atari software and then did some models and simulations in the nineteen nineties on diplomacy, and then out of that generated this that's got, you know, an algorithm in it that runs through and we were able to sort of run through the bird class versus the lou Yang in several different environments, uh and sort of
test some of these things. So it was a very long drawn out process. It was very uncomfortable for me as a humanities major to do this, but in the end I was quite pleased with the final report. Yeah, I think, uh. I think when I first looked at this, Jerry, that I was stunned by how audacious you were and taking on this stas because I don't know, I didn't see any way to measure presence uh as
a as an end result of this. Now I think I think, uh, some of this was driven I guess because I was reading Bob Work's uh piece from Proceedings about our our over the navy's over over zealous approach to presence and and Adam Fogo's response to that. But I think what you've done is really provide a tool, as I understand what your goal was. You're not necessarily a complete answer, but a tool for someone to use. And who
is that someone? Well, so a great you know, first of all, great observation and if you you know, for those who get a chance to read the report, you will note as I go through the literature review that I talk about those who are for naval presents and there those against and and Bob Work gets about two and a half pages of the report for his essay on the slave slavish devotion to naval presence and how it's breaking the Navy, which which I I know mister Work. I respect him tremendously. I
consider him a mentor and friend. But I disagreed with that essay, and so in many ways, this proposal Smith Richardson came out of my response somewhat knee jerk emotional response to that that essay and Proceedings, But in reality and your your perceptive to point out, I don't actually come up with the conclusion. In this report, I don't suggest what the alternative fleet structure and architecture should look like because I wanted the model to be there and in the hope
that someone else would pick it up. Now, who is that someone else? I can tell you that the three entities I would like is one N eighty one inside the Pentagon's OPNAV staff that would they would pick up this model
and fund having it run through a succession of iterations. I would also suggest that either Fleet Forces Command or the US Pacific Fleet pick up the model, fund it, adapt it, you know, work with the staffs at the Naval Postgraduate School or or any other modeling and simulation academic centers, you know,
to build this out and then run these tests. I was quite frankly frustrated that no one had done something like this before, and then as I moved my way through this, I came away somewhat suspicious that perhaps someone had, and that the results of running these models in the past may have not come out in line with current fleet architecture and budgetary decisions. So I believe that this type of work needs to be done. I believe that the fleet
could look significantly different and perhaps even have a different price point. If someone were to pick this model up and run with it and the three entities I mentioned. Quite frankly, I think maybe the second half with his new analysis
shop, could be another entity could pick this up. But you know, I did this really with relatively little financial resources, and I think you know, if someone took it and put a larger team and more financial resources be it in a little time in a supercomputer, they could come up with something that would be quite illuminating. Yeah, for those that have again, the link is at the show page. If folks don't have the report up towards
the end, we're maybe geting ahead of ourselves. That's okay, it's our show. We do what we want to. But you get to the modeling portion at the engineering I thought, what was nice about this is, yes, there is math there that our friend Mark Vandroff would would like to roll around in. There are little little delta signs and a couple other Greek numbers in there, but it's understandable. You don't have to have one hundred pound math head to understand it, because you know, I'm like you, I
come from the other side of the brain. But in this discussion that we have about naval missions and presence. I think what was nice about this and where this can be used as a tool by others. There's a lot of this, and we talked about this on other subjects and offline as well. A lot This is telling a story. And humans are right brain or left brain people. They're They're not better or worse depend upon how they look at
things. Are just different, which is which is great. Some people they need to be told a story and that's where you know, the liberal arts side of explaining things. But also there is and especially in a highly technical area like like the Navy, there are people who think in numbers, they think in graphs, and they need to have it explained with some metrics.
And this offers a tool. And I think well meaning people can look at what's offered here and say, you know this variable is off by you know, it's not four point six, it should be a five point seven.
Okay, fine, argument, But you've created a structure here, and I think you're right that you know, people can can take this model and they can customize it as they wish, but at the end of the day, it can bring on additional conversations additional storytelling, so you're able to communicate to people who think both ways, both one side of the brain and the other, because you mentioned for the last forty years, and another valuable part that
you find in the early part of the report is there's some history here. The Presence mission as it's modernly constructed goes back to early nineteen seventies and Stansfield Turner, but you rightfully point out and I like how you structured the errors of the last ers of the last century, where we went from command of the Sea to the Cold Cold War power projection era from the sea era and what we now call presence. Different generations of people thinking about the navy and
naval power. They use influence, showing the flag, demonstrations and then finally at presence and the one thing that came up, and I think it's a byproduct of the critique that you brought on. I know Varney Rebel and Bob Work who you just mentioned, with two of the critics of it, and having they both prior guests on mid Rath, I might want to say up over the years and talk to them a lot of their critique. I think a lot of the critique of the presence mission really is, and please tell
me if I'm off here. It's almost a byproduct of the frustration that we can't do it simply because we don't have the numbers and something if you do a letter search in the document, but you don't have to because it's so obvious. A number comes up constantly, which I think is related to Rubbel and works critiques about, you know, wearing out a navy that goes from from readiness focus to a deployment focus. And that number is between one hundred
and thirty and one hundred and fifty ships at sea. That keeps coming up in your research and your discussions. Talk a little bit about that number one two fifty and when you reverse engineer that where that comes up with some numbers. It should be familiar to most listeners here on the rests Well, I mean, the history of this is, first of all, naval presence as
a mission has almost always inherently been there. In fact, there is a great quote that I used from Oliver Cromwell that a line of battleship is perhaps the nation's best ambassador. So this idea of using ships as a means of messaging or influencing was right there. I mean, obviously, you know,
even Mahind's seminal work. The influence of seapower upon history is about influence, this idea of our ability to manipulate or massage the environment around us through the introduction of naval platforms and hints, the introduction of our interests, demonstration of our interest in a particular region. The reason my presence came out in a more articulate way in the early nineteen seventies, first with Stansfield Turner and then
also from Edward Loopwalch's early paper on suasion. The idea of naval presence as a suasion is because the Navy leadership at that time elmar Zumwalt and then his very close acolyte, Lieutenant Stansfield Turner, then president of the Naval War College, We're looking at these declining number of ships, and so you know, we had come out of World War Two with a thousand ships. Eisenhower sort of nexus down to about nine hundred. We kept that nine hundred through about
nineteen sixty eight. But as the cost of the Vietnam War started to mount, those ships also started to age. We began to see the size of the fleet decline. Well, the problem was is during the Cold War in the nineteen fifties, sixties and to the seventies, the Navy either had signed
up for or had been volunteered for a number of these presence missions. You know, these regional combatant commanders, whether it was Pacific Command, or whether it was Yukam, or whether it was any other things that started to grow up, they all wanted these ships to show up, and they'd set these schedules and put in their requests, and so we had to maintain about one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty ships at sea at any given time
during this time period in order to service these requests from the four Stars around the world. And also the political leaders had begun to really lean on the Navy for messaging and you know, and of course the ultimate case was the Cuban Missile crisis, where we used the Atlantic Fleet combined second in six fleets so essentially send this dramatic message to Khrushchev. And there was a lot of control over the political importance or the tone that was set even with that.
But there were all these other different incidents where we were using ships to send signals and so in seventy three, Turner and zoomwald A like, hey, look, the fleet's coming down. I still got this demand signal to be out here with one hundred and thirty of one hundred and fifty ships on any given day, and I don't have the ships to do it. Something's going to have to give. And so, because we had never spoken of presence
before, suddenly we start speaking about it. It was a clarion call to the political leadership that if you find value in this, in using the Navy
in this way, you're going to have to invest in the navy. Well pretty soon someone did you know, when Ronald Reagan runs in nineteen eighty, you know he runs explicitly on a six hundred ship, maybe because he had, you know, his trustee deputy there, John Lehman, who had spent the four years between the Carter administration coming in and Reagan coming in sort of getting his ducks in a row about what size the fleet we need and how
we would use it. And so we built that maybe back up to five hundred and ninety four ships, and we were out there to meet that one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty ships. And this audience knows, you know, to keep you know, one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty ships at sea, you need about four times in number ships, so that's
six hundred. So that's the reason why these arguments started being laid out, is that we had to come up with the fleet behind the one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty per day, and so that's that's where that
came from. Well, let's talk a little bit about a definition of presents and what you used to work through to get to the formulas you developed in your work, because presence means a lot of different things to different As you talked to your cocoons, they all seemed kind of nonplussed, maybe the right
word to have to answer that question. I mean, we assume a lot of stuff about presents, but what did you find in your work is what a good definition of Well, before I get into the good definition, let let's talk about the interview with the co coms first, because that was an eye opener for me because when I jumped into this, you know, one, I wanted to make sure I spoke with several co combs. The second thing I wanted to do was I was kind of interested to see how they
viewed it based upon their service backgrounds. And so, you know, I interviewed three, you know, three retired Navy admirals, William Fox Fallen, Harry Harris, and Jim Stavardis. But I also interviewed Mike Scaffriotti, Army General, Carter Ham, Army General, and Phil Breedlove Air Force General.
What I found in asking them their questions, and I gave the same twelve questions to each one of them in order just to keep a standard in the way that I was approaching them, was that in many ways the Navy guys gave with the exception of Savatus, in many ways gave me sort of more of what I would almost turn canned answers. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's that they had grown up in this culture, they
had grown up with this terminology. They were talking with me, a retired Navy captain who they are familiar with, and so in many ways there was sort of a hand wave and a shorthand conversation back and forth about a lot of these talks. In many ways, the conversations with the Navy retired COCOMs were shorter in terms of length than they were with the Army and Air Force.
What I found with the Army and Air Force was that because this was a new tool for them, this was and it was something that they had had to study, they were much more articulate about their answers to this.
They had taken the time later in their career intellectually to grasp the concepts of presence how they would use it. When the Navy staff would come in and brief them about presence missions, I got the sense that they were more engaged, and so they were taking the time and not to mention they knew who I was, retired Navy Captain PhD. And I think they wanted to demonstrate to me that they had a grasp of this topic that we were going to
talk about in this hour hour and a half long conversation. And so I found it interesting that they were willing to dive down and again be much more articulate in this. Now, the idea of the definition of naval presence, you know, is very much you know, this idea of both you know, active and latent presence. This idea the presence is there to provide influence in the region, to it, and presence is really measured in the reaction
of the environment to your arrival. And so presence in many ways is is defined by you know, who you are and what you're bringing to the area, and also whether you're you're coming in a proactive or in a reactive manner.
And so we get into that, you know, within the literature review section of this, and it also shows up later when we start building the model about because there's, you know, a physical characteristic to presence, but there's also an ephemeral characteristic to presence, and we had to find a way of sort of measuring both and then integrating them along that vein you know of presence and showing up. One of the things that that had me thinking about
something I was like, God, why not thought of that before? Is as you discussed about the reaction to presence, it's it's not a binary thing where where you're there're not and there's just a nuance, you know, the old argument, you know, can submarines do the presence mission if you can't see them? Type of thing is deeper than that, it's psychological.
So it really is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding this. Because you outline a bit that it's just not you're there as a presence, but who you are. Are you from a nation that has a three hundred ship navy? Are a fifty ship navy? You know, the Japanese versus the American Arlely Bird class destroyer. You know, on paper, same ship. But you know what is that that addition to that modifier. But you know, so that's what you bring with you when you show up and where you're coming from.
So a lot of the it sounds harsh to call it a coping mechanism because I actually believe part of it. But the discussions of a thousand ship navy are being able. You know, yes, we only have X number ships, but our allies have navies like this. One does not equal one in that regard when you're looking at the presence mission describe a little bit how those
variables can change. When if you look at a map it just says there are two blue destroyers there, that doesn't mean that number really equals too. Yeah, So you just raised up about four things there and let me kind of cycle back and go through them, because they're they're all interesting points of the conversation. The first point is is sort of talking about the impact and the presence isn't just being there, but in fact presidence has a bow wave.
There's an anticipatory aspect of presence, of temporal and it also has a residual that after a ship leads. You know, I actually compared it to a radioactive height half life within it. There are incidents, you know, for instance, the visit of the battleship Missouri to Turkey and Constantinople back during the nineteen forties is still spoken of today in that broader Black Sea region. Same thing with the passage of the carrier Shrik groups through Taiwan Straits in the
mid nineteen nineties. Although that occurred some thirty five years ago, thirty eight years ago, that still has a residual effect. So there's very much like this isotopial half life aspect of these things, depending on how you do it.
The second thing I would say is interestingly enough, in a lot of the research and review of the professional literature is that a lot of the thinkers who had written about this in the past made the point that the arrival and departure of ships almost always has a bigger impact than ships that are just there.
So Ken Booth and Edward Lukewalk both in their treatments of presence, talk about the fact that, for instance, the FDNF force in the Western Pacific may not be as influential as let's say, a fleet surging out from the from the west coast to surge over and arrive into the arena, that that would have more presence because it's causing a change in the environment, is perceived as a change in the background ambient noise in the environment, rather than the
fact that Desron fifteen simply by its existence there sort of has faded in the background noise. It is part of the status quo, and that presence is very much about changing the status quo. And so you you know, you know, you get into a lot of these different types of conversations about what is effective naval presence, you know, in the way that you present it. And we have to be in many ways much more articulate about the way that we use our assets. Yeah. I'm sitting there looking at at a
map that discusses one of that discuss It shows where our ships are. And you know, right now we've got the Ford and the Eisenhower in the Middle East. The Eisenhower was there or any the ford showed up recently or vice versa. I can't remember the order, But did the impact of bringing that in your view of presence? Did the impact of bringing that second carrier as a has a message to the neighborhood, is that that had more impact than
just we had a carrier kind of there already. Well, what was interesting about that is that Eagle one is that the research showed, and this even predates in the nineteen seventies, there was a number of studies on this, is that moving from one carrier in an area to two carriers did not double your naval presence value in that region that it was It was more it was more of like a moving from a one point zero to a one point five
in the way that it was perceived. However, three carriers in a region demonstrated in an exponential rise because there was a perception or an understanding that three large deck aircraft carriers provided you with an opportunity to go twenty four to seven with carrier operations, and the day were aware of this. They knew that one deck had an ability to essentially fly ten to twelve hours a day, two decks had the ability to perhaps go twenty four hours a day, but
perhaps only for five days. But three decks gives you ability to cycle those carriers in such a way as that you can now provide twenty four to seven. So when when we searched four strike groups over to the Middle East after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in ninety that was seen as a shout, very loud shout in the international environment. But surging one carrier into a region is
not necessarily a big deal. So what I would say is that stationing the Ford off the east coast, off the west coast of Israel certainly got someone's attention. But when the word was out that the Ike was coming over the
hill, well, then suddenly people are beginning to get nervous. And then when I think it was Carl Vincent took off from the west coast, that it's either Vincent or Stennis that started moving out across the west coast, and everybody started to watch, i think in the international arrival, to see what's the deal with that West coast carrier, what's going on with that deployer,
where's it going? Because if the Americans start showing up with three point zero, well hey, game on at that point in time, and that's the way that's perceived even within the model. Yeah, I'll go ahead and quote from the report for you kiddies who have your hymn handy. It's at the
top of page forty seven. It's a quote Modern policymakers understand that if four carrier strike groups operating together is a war cry, one amphibious ready group is a growl, and a surfacing submarine in the right place is a terrifying lethal whisper unquote. I thought that was a great outline. I played on using that in the future. But you also brought something something in that I think
goes into that. Again. You know, numbers don't matter what they are an intent, but also there's the perception of it, and I believe it or not, there's there's something about dinosaurs and everything. But you brought in the concept of something you learn from your daughters that you I don't know if you coined it, but it's the serotopian impact or in advanced Serotopian advantage I
think it is. Yeah, so this is actually I get more reaction to this part of the paper, this one page that I wrote up about my daughters and their their online gaming community. Almost everyone notices it. So I
have two daughters, both are adults, you know. One is a practicing paleontologist at a dinosaur museum in North Dakota, and the other one is a sophomore this year studying wildlife biology up in me And so, but these two sisters get together online like every night and they play a game called the Visa Bermuda, which is a dinosaur and they have dinosaur avatars in the game.
And so I'm listening in on them because they talk with each other on discord and no one, no one messes with the Hendrickx squirrels in this in this environment. But one of the things that they I found was that they first they prefer to play as ceratopsians, essentially large horror fores, the the cows as it were, of the of the dinosaur community, rather than sort of the larger, more sexy, more lethal Tyrannosaurus wrecks or velociraptors with everyone seems
to pay attention to. And I finally said, well, why are you doing that? And they said, well, because the ceratopsians, each one of them has a very inherent intimidation or in tim score, and that if we operate together, everyone stays away from us because, you know, acting as a herd, we can intimidate them. And in fact, if someone messages with us, we get a large enough herd and we'll just circle this carnivore diet or this carnivore dinosaur and we will kill them through intimidation. And
it's like, wow, that's pretty amazing. So my key thing was is I wanted to know how in that computer game did they mathematically model intimidation. How did they actually write the code into that analogue to be able to do that? And I started trying to work with them as well as the game
designers to figure that out because they found that really intriguing. But this idea of maintaining the piece through lethal you know, intimidation, the ability that that I don't want you to mess with me, but I need to be large enough and strong enough, and that I need to combine my effects in such a way that you won't jump ugly with me. And so that particular game really convinced me that in fact, this thing naval presence, actually can be
modeled, and so that had encouraged me in my own research. Yeah, I was laughing at that part, because I was thinking, you know, we often are sending things like lcs's into areas where we want to intimidate, and I can't think of a less intimidating ship right now. So you know, I think one of the good aspects of your research is that somebody on one of these staffs has got to think should be thinking, well, yeah, I got to add in intimidation, and we need to add something bigger
and better than an LCS out there patrolling an area. Can I stopped you right there, because one of the things that's important to understand is that, up until the early nineteen eighties, in none of the literature dealing with either influence or presence or suasion or any of the different words or phrases we used,
no one spoke about the naval presence value of destroyers or cruisers. Up until the nineteen eighties, it was either if you talked about presidents, you were either talking about carrier strike groups or you were talking about marine amphibious ready
groups. Carriers are ours. And then suddenly in the nineteen eighties, then we started talking about destroyers like Spruance class destroyers or Titano Roga class cruisers or quite frankly, you talked about the battleships as well, and why was that? And it was because, and I went into the literature, I reviewed it, it was explicitly because of the integration of the Tomahawk lot Land Attack
missile into the inventory of those ships. And so the moment that you put a power projection weapon on board a vessel, and then I would submit that lcs could actually have a presence capability if in fact you had an ability to project power from it that actually held your competitor's interests at risk. But if you have a vessel out there that essentially is just a seagoing vessel that can only operate our influence the immediate water area around it, it does not exert
a presence on the environment. You really need that power projection capability to, you know, to make the other guy stood up and listen to you or pay attention to you. So it was Tomahawk that I think changed the way that we valued presence in the fleet, and the spruit cans and then the typos and ultimately the birds are all considered to be presence vehicles today, despite
the fact that they would not have been during the sixties and seventies. Yeah, it goes back to something that I think we could do an entire show one And you know something you and I Jerry talked about before range matters, it's it's it's underappreciated and so many things involving the Navy, but we talked about, you know, let's go back to the original seventies. And for the listeners, they're probably aware of Stansfield Turner. They could remember to google
some of the stuff that he wrote. It's all available online. We've discussed Zoomwalt, but there are two other people who are part of this discussion. They're kind of on a similar school that I would encourage the listeners to look up and I wanted to get your your take on their perspective of it.
And that was in nineteen seventy one. There was James Cable's Gunboat Diplomacy and also Commander James McNulty at the time, he had an initial reply to Stanfield Turner's earlier work on Presence Mission where he argued, for you know, we can see echoes and influenced squadrons here. The value of more numerous ships for the mission vice just these large you know, nuclear era Cold War units that
most people were thinking about when they talked about presence. Well, so Cable wrote an entire book on gunboat diplomacy and did a really great study and mostly of the of the British Empire and its use of small vessels and medium sized vessels and cruisers to sort of uphold its diplomacy. And obviously he made the point that this term gunboat diplomacy cuts both ways. It's a two edged sword
because it was viewed both positively uh and negatively. So you know, the idea that you know, we're going to, you know, put these gunboats up on some of the rivers of China. There's a lot of imperial over tones that go along with that that were viewed very negatively. But I think he did a great job of fimly historically sort of reviewing some of these policies.
By the way, I think that Captain VJ. Armstrong out of the United States Naval Academy has just recently done this as well with his book about American naval operations in nineteenth and early twentieth century and looking at presence missions there.
I think that Vj's kind of come alongside cables book and sort of provided an addendum, an annex further exploration of it, which is not surprising because VJ and I actually worked on a paper on naval presence almost a decade ago when I was at the Center for New American Security called the Presence Problem,
where we started to first map out our interest in this topic. Now McNulty looks at this and again he's critiquing this idea that you know, a out what the implications are here, which is numbers, And you know, I think that he's actually calling calling us out about that isn't just an argument for
for for numbers at this point in time. And then he also wants to understand that, you know that the modern world was fundamentally different than the pre World War two world because of nuclear weapons, and he wanted to make sure that we were understanding that the oceans were no longer barriers but in fact part of a global environment that we're all operating in. But he thought that the
Navy was making wrong headed decisions. Then that at presence was what we were going to be doing our our investment in more technical, high end ships that we were starting to make huge investments in in the Taekwondo roga and Egis at that time was going to price us out of the ability to do the presence mission in the long run. That we needed a force that had a lot
of cheaper vessels that we can buy in bigger numbers. If you're really going to do presents, you really needed to pay attention to the low end of
the high low mix. Yeah, that that strikes me. I mean, here we are talking about surge being important, that if you can surge forth power, you know, I'm thinking, well, you know, the easiest and least problematic way to have a force that surges is if you have nuclear powered shifts, so the carriers the days when we had power nuclear power cruisers, I think nuclear power destroyers a few of them, but we had a
whole bunch of of those new cruisers. You know, that seems to me you could if the concern is that work had, which was that we can't maintain our force and use it at the same time, that if you're gonna if you need a force you can surge that you want a force that you can send that doesn't have a big logistics train behind it. Those those types of ships would would be very important to that. But and I would think that that somewhere would be worked into your formula as a part of the environment.
Yeah, so it's it's actually there. So in in the in in the formula there's an area that deals with sustainability sustainment, so it's part of the ephemeral side of the equation, but the ability of a nation to support
it's it's four deployed forces at sea for sustained periods of time. And I actually raised the point that the US that that really the ability to do underway replenishment, specifically replenishment alongside is sort of the you know, where you can figure out who the major LEA players are versus Triple A and Double A, and that one of the things that I'm really disturbed about is that China's increasing
proficiency and underway replenishment and the growth their ability to just add replenishment ships and
tenders and sustainment because of their large shipbuilding industry. So when I scored that out, you know, I made the point that you know, while we are very good at underway replenishment and we have a strong tradition with sustainment, we're facing the problem in that the percentage of the sustainment part of our fleet is getting smaller and there's more stress upon it, and that we're not paying
enough attention to that side of the fleet equation. And so you know, China is looking at that as much as we are, and I'm looking as much at their the size of their sustainment fleet and their ability to have overseas bases and hubs of logistical support hubs UH to support their operations. So yes, sustainment and logistics is a is a very large portion of the ephemeral side
of the conversation. I think something else, you know, we're talking about explaining this problem and we have the war gaining, for lack of a better phrase, that that as you try to work this out and gain the system, look at the different various variables that were going in. But there's also trying to visualize it because it's part of telling the story and an interesting way to look at it. A lot of people who look at a variety of
statistics. One way they graft things is a thing you know, heat maps, looking at UH, you know, crime rates, for instance. You can pull up a city and has the various heat maps and you came an interesting way as you you know, come through this this algorithm that you've developed, which you know people can be can fiddle around with it. They want, you know, how do you visualize this? How do you explain this? And you know, going back to interdisciplinary ways of explaining things, you
actually tapped into the meteorology side of the house. What are other ways of visualizing the outcomes of this exercise you think might be useful to help more people understand what you're trying to explain to them. Well, ultimately, the model that I'm using is an agent based model, and so there's a number of
characteristics of that particular modeling that are important. But the key thing is is that I settled on a concept that's called emergence, which is that it's nearly impossible, you know, to one for one model every aspect of of of an environment, and so you have to focus on certain key characteristics of the environment and say that I'm going to zero in on this, I'm going to
measure that, and those factors will be representative. So, for instance, you know, the weather is perhaps you know, the most complex thing on the planet, very difficult, you know, to try and model if you try to go one for one because there's just so many variables. However, meteorologists for years have noted that if you look at temperature and wind direction and speed and humidity, that in fact you get a fairly representative model of the
weather. And by you know, so you get temperature, barometric pressure, whend direction. It's feed. So so those things right there are going to tell you, you know, what that weather looks like. And we see that every night on the six o'clock news in the last ten minutes, so as I started to bring this out, and by the way, there's a couple of other things that emerge, you know that would be very similar.
Like there's a model that was done on forest fires, and based upon the density of a forest and how many trees and how close they are, you can create that and you can see what the what the proclivity of a particular forest is to kind of have on a flash fire that cannot be controlled, or for that matter, there's some other things that do modeling dealing with earthquakes that based upon the number of volcano reactions you can tell what the likelihood is
of an earthquake in an area. A lot of small volcano reactions will lead
to a lesser of large earthquakes. And vice versa. So there's a number of these emergence factors that I came across when I was doing the reading, and so that allowed me to try and form in my own mind both sort of broad categories of the physical characteristics of naval presence and then also some broad categories of what we would call the non corporeal or the ephemeral characteristics of naval presence and so and those were what I used to kind of drill deep.
So, for instance, you know, on the physical characteristics, I looked at the lethality, the awareness, the rediness, and the range of the platforms of the navies carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and corvettes or the loatoral combat chip. Lethality is essentially a measurement of how much ordinance you know is onboard, how much hurt can that particular platform visit upon someone else.
Its awareness is the sensory awareness around it, both in the air, in space, under the sea, How aware of its environment, how far can that awareness stretch out? And so I assigned scores to that. The readiness of the platform obviously that goes to training of the crew as well as the material condition of the vessel itself and then of course range, so what is its ability to exert lethality at a distance? And so I use that to
generate platform scores for all these things within it. And then you turn, because that's just the physical characteristics, you have to then pass those characteristics through what I call the national lens, which are these more ephemeral characteristics things like national will, combat credibility, the size of the fleet, UH, the sustainment ability of that fleet, the economic security of the nation, and ultimately
an alliance score. So what what can it draw upon in the international environment. And bringing all these things together with way to to average across those characteristics, then you then you then take those two things physical and non physical characteristics,
and you have to compete them in the environment. And I actually defined UH six environments on the ocean UH in which we competed, and those environments have different levels of resistance or what I would call viscosity, you know, that are helpful to us UH or are helpful to the other guy, and you sort of have to factor in those scores, you know, as we did. So, so that got into that aspect of the model and agent based you know, characteristics of how to approcess. Yeah, I was looking
at it, at this stuff. I'm thinking, Okay, where are the the the where do you add in threats like the shore based anti ship cruise missiles that exist now? And what factory? What factor do you use for our own air assets? You know those Air Force guys who are worldwide operators. Of course you know in certain environments, where where does your factor those in? Is that also part of the environment stuff? It is? And in fact that goes to the oceanic environment. So you know, not everyone
seeing this, but I just point out to you Eagle one. You know, page sixty five of the report, we started talking about the oceanic environment, and there's a graph there where we talked about oceanic influence of viscosi and friction. And the idea is that if I'm starting out in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and I'm beginning to move towards the Chinese, you know, I moved from an environment that's very helpful to me and my shifts or carrier strike
groups or independent sailors. But as I get closer that there is a turnover point, as it were, where I'm entering China's sphere of influence and as I move deeper into that sphere of influence, whether that's their range of their weapons or their sensory awareness, then in fact I am encountering greater and greater
resistance to the flow of my influence into that region. And yes, there are aspects of you know, whether I'm going to get support from inorganic assets and so on, that can lessen that resistance or friction in support of me, But there also is an idea that there's a temporal aspect of that that
that's cyclic. They're not going to be there always, and so that in many ways what determines my presence value is simply my presence and how well I'm able to sustain that presence as I get deeper and deeper into the influence of the Chinese environment. Now, the one thing I can say, and it's and it's in the graph that deals with this when I'm talking about the different oceanic is that when I'm operating in proximity to an ally, even though that
ally is based deep inside the other guy's sphere. So for instance, Taiwan, let's let's view Taiwan or Japan as an ally, that when I'm operating in close proximity to them and their forces. To the degree that their interests are aligned with me, uh and mine, then in fact I'm going to pick up some aided you know, lessening of the friction to my presence there.
I think certainly the idea of us moving through the Taiwan Strait is aided by the fact that the Taiwan Taiwanese are interested in us and supportive of those operations, and so that sort of lessens the in those waters. Yeah, Lee and Commas just mentioned something that kind of bounced off what you were just talking about, you know, those things near in the far far western Pacific
that are closed to China. And it ties into a brief mention that Admiral Fallon had in your interview, is there weren't any ships available at all, but he was trying to create some positive effects in the Philippines not unimportant, especially in the early part of the zero zeros of where I think we both have a mutual friend who was actually there with the Special Forces in the Southern
Philippines. There was a lot going on there and he wanted to get some naval presence to get there, and he wanted to send Well, if you can't do anything else? Can you deploy a hospital that ship from San Diego to me? And he mentioned, you know, big navy just quite get it, and it's not amorphous blob. You know, we talk about national will. A lot of national will derives from understanding and we hear, you
know, big Navy thrown around a lot. And it's also it's fun to hear that phrase used by a four star because to ninety eight point seven percent of people, he is big Navy. So when there are important leaders, like a Navy four star who's trying to get an important ally further inside our lifeline, who's under stress not just from an Islamic consurgency, but from a surgey in China and quote big Navy unquote is throwing blocks in the way.
Who is this big navy that can thwart four stars who are trying to do the right thing in such important areas well? I think the deck comes down to opnav staff or for that matter, of political leadership that that's involved in this. And yeah, that the exis samples of using the hospital ships. You know, they bring a tremendous amount of influence and they have a very
strong form of presence and they influence in the local environment. So yes, they still talk about the hospital ship's visits to the Southern Philippines, and it's
something that we've continue to do in the years hence. So I don't mean to say that hospital ships don't have presence because they don't have Tomahawk, but I would say that their presence, you know, has a different flavor to it, and also the half life or or or the impulse that comes off from that presence mission has a lower amplitude than those the presence that comes with
the ability to project power. So I would fully use the two hospital ships, but I only have two hospital ships, and really I only have the crew for one hospital ship to send it out there, which is one of the limiting factors, gentlemen, Because I know that we're coming up the end of the hour here in just a few more minutes, I didn't want to highlight that in the conclusion that this report was deeply troubling to me as I got to the end, because you know, I think it's suggestive in fact
that the value of our naval presence is really on on on a nice edge right now, that because of declining perception of our national will and the combat credibility. Let's face it, it's been, you know, seventy years since there's been a major Navy sea battle, and also the declining side of our fleet, that in fact, the value of our presence may be coming to an end. And I think that that that should be deeply troubling to policymakers
and to navalists alike. Yeah, that's that's a great point, and I think I think that from you and Bob Work and a bunch of other folks have the same concern, which is, the overuse of the fleet is not the fleets from not the Navy's problem. It is a department or defense problem. Somebody has to say no to the cocombs and that's the only guy that can do it, and that not saying no is causing a lot of the
problems that we're discussing, including the one you just mentioned. Yeah. The thing that I worry now is that we actually may have had the moment when naval presence declined to the point that it no longer is effective. And that may have occurred some time ago and we just haven't noticed yet, but it will quickly come to our attention. The first time that tiny Chinese type fifty five cruiser comes alongside of Burke and just push us us out of the way,
and it says, what are you going to do about it? You know, this is my water. You need to go away and don't come back. The point here is that we no longer have the numbers to to service all of the requests that are out there for naval presence, and that yes, we are breaking the fleet trying to do that. But until the Navy says no, are the CoCom say more and more and more, give me more shifts, then political leaders are not going to free up the funds.
And right now, obviously you and I and everyone else knows the industrial base is not there to just pour it on and start, you know, building more destroyers and submarines tomorrow. And so you know, we need to kind of come to grips with where really is naval presence crucial? You know, I would submit that we need naval presence in the Western Pacific quite consistently.
We need to create a fleet to provide presents in the Arctic, for instance, but we need to kind of look at other regions of the world. You know, I think right now eight of the eleven aircraft carriers are at sea, which means I am burning aircraft carrier utility right now. Everyone's gonna have to go back in the ure in order to be ready for a real contingency. If we don't start hurling some airplanes and weapons at the Iranians soon, we're going to need to get a reset in the carrier strike group.
But we need a reset and across the entire fleet, and Jerry kind of to end up the hour, we actually have a caller here, a friendly neighbor from area code seven three. You might bring a little bit of a joint flavor Area code seven oh three. You are with Jerry. I have a question, Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. I kind of had too, and it's in the same theme, the first being Captain Hendrick. Sure you pointed out of how presence works episodically with a CSG or
are coming and going into a given the theater. But what about the persistent presence of either the Army's Multi Domain Task Force or the MANE Force stand in force having those sensors intruders granted, knowing that the range of certain systems might not necessarily always be in the best interest of that Naval Task Force. But how does that kind of get pulled into the calculations when they come online are
truly deployed, especially in the first island chain. Well, it's an excellent question, and it actually came up in some of the studies of these operations other than war, and again there was a growing perception that in fact, it's the mobility of the force that sort of gives a sense of its fragility
or its vulnerability as well as its legality. And so the more land based you are, specifically in the archipeologic areas of the Western Pacific, the more vulnerable you are perceived, and so the idea of presence declines under those cases.
So that's that's not just me. That was actually there was these two studies that came out that looked at these operations other than war that sort of suggested that, you know, the concept of quote unquote army presence was stretched, you know, in terms of its effectiveness, whereas the ability to rapidly
enter and depart was viewed more positively. So the Navy and Marine Corps team was viewed as having more presence and influence because of its mobility, whereas the Army in many ways was viewed as less present and more of a factor of being there, and the hints fading into the background noise because of the perception of their immobility. So to the degree that the Army today demonstrates that can move and move quickly and remain mobile while also operating that I think its presence
score goes up. Well, Jerry, good answer. We've used up here the hour pretty pretty thoroughly. I think. Before we go, though, tell us what you're working on, where people can find what you're doing, and what's next. Well, you know, the beauty of my situation as both a consultant and as a senior fellow is you know, I've got about nine nine ms in the fire right now. I'm currently working on another analytical
product for an office inside the Pentagon. I'm also got some proposals out to some grant grant you know, issuing agencies on some other things I would like to study. I'm actually trying to broaden my base a little bit right now, looking not just at the industrial base in the Navy, but looking at some of the larger questions about defense policy and strategy. You know, you know, I'm getting I'm getting up there in years, and I'm getting tired
of talking about the same old thing. So I'm actually trying to grow and stretch as I tried to grow and stretch with this paper by doing math, which was hard for me. So so right now I've got a full book for not only this year but next year of analysis and research. And I'll let you all know when the next paper comes out, and make sure that sal and you get early copies of it there there too. Well, Jerry,
thanks a lot. It's been absolute pleasure join you with you again, and I hope you and yours have a great holiday season and look forward to next time. I look forward to it. Thank you both, Eagle one and Commander Salamon. It's a pleasure to talk with you and your audience. Well, Thank you, Jerry, and thank you everybody for joining us for another edition of mid Rats. And until next time, we hope you have
a great Navy day. Cures Mike my loney want to marry me and a friend of Becaumily, for you'll be to blame love hold me, said folding all the name. It's a long way. It's a long way. It's a long way to the enemy. Pick it well lived, well, it's a long long way to differ. But can you imagine rising for work before the crack of dawn tending to hundreds of acres of land before dusk. Well,
that's what happens on forty seven thousand Florida farms every day. Florida's farmers work hard to grow nutritious food for you and your family, and you can help support them by enjoying delicious fresh from Florida produce. Look for the sunny Fresh from Florida logo where you shop, or visit Fresh from Florida dot com to learn more. Don't forget that your skin is your largest organ and the
sun can be your skin's worst enemy. Dermatologists recommended Nutrigena products offer the ultimate protection for your skin, from makeup remover white to hydro boost water gel facial moisturizer. VJs has your entire lineup of Nutrogena skincare products, and now through December third, save four dollars on any Nutrigena product at BJ's. Love your Skin Back and save now through December third only at BJ's