Episode 698 - The Music Stopped at MSC, with Sal Mercogliano

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folks have. Now today we're going to It seems like an esoteric topic when we started off, but the last ninety six hours especially, it's kind of broken above the background noise. And depending on how closely you've been tracking Navy and military selift issues, you're probably on the spectrum of shocked, dismayed, or perhaps which is kind of where I am. When the news came out this week that the Navy will reportedly sideline seventeen vessels due demand power shortage,

and our friend Samula Grone see I even mention your name now and then Sam he's the one that broke the story, And in the last ninety six hours a lot of people have picked it up. A lot of people have reached out to me, and I'm sure my co host and our guests as well, because these aren't just ships that nobody needs. These are high demand, low density assets. We're looking at a fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead class expeditionary fast transports, and two four deployed Navy

expeditionary sea bases. Over seven hundred impacted mariners will be reassigned to other ships and the This is affecting a lot of these ships. Some of them are mixed ships, but they're mostly USNSIE merchant mariners. But there's also some US Navy personnel that can be impacted as well. The Chief of Naval Operation supposedly is calling this a quote great reset. Well is it really? And that's what we're going to talk about today with our returney guest doctor

salam Marcogliano. He is the chair Department of History, Criminal Justice, and Political Science Campbell University and host of the must watch YouTube channel What's going On with Shipping? Sal Welcome back to mid Rats.

waxed your apple. But there have been a lot of people through the years, and I'm sure you've heard it as well, sal who go, Well, it's kind of initial, there's not much of an interest. Well, you have the right background, the lot, right personality, and the right collection of shirts that you've really accumulated the right audience over there at YouTube, and I think that's helped everybody because

you don't play to your audience. You're covering those issues that I know you've always covered and it's really increased U increased the awareness out there, like a lot of us have wanted for a long time. So before I get into the h get into the questions, I just wanted to to thank you again for doing that and to congratulate you on the great success you've had over at YouTube.

I got to do something. What do you think happened that finally reached us to this point?

counted in. About one out of five ships in the US Navy have merchant mariner cruise on board USNS or hybrid cruise where it's a mix of navy and civilian on And you know, I could take it back a long way to do this, but I'll take it back to the nineteen eighties where I think this really started. You know, in the nineteen eighties, there was a decision being made that really started this trend to what we're

seeing today. You had the Cold War, the plan was to go for a six hundred ship navy were coming out of Vietnam and so the Navy was very focused on the six hundred ship navy. And this had two impacts. Number one, we saw that you know, we closed down the Navy shipyards. We transitioned four of the yards to just repair facilities. Weren't going to build ships in them anymore. So that meant Navy ship construction was going to go into commercial yards. That means that commercial ship building was

going to go overseas, and that's what happened. The commercial ship building went over to Europe, to Korea, to Japan. But the US also decided to cut back on the subsidies for the international fleet. We had already seen a decrease in the domestic fleet because of the interstate highway system, the interstate pipeline system, so the JONZAC fleet, that coastal fleet reduced. And then with the loss of construction and operational differential subsidies, you don't have to build ships in

the US anymore more. Because you think you couldn't because it was going to be too expensive, So ship operators went overseas, and US Navy contracts kind of flooded into the shipyards. The second element was coming out of Vietnam. Because we were increasing the size of the Navy and we had manpower issues in the US Navy, there was a decision made to start transferring over some of the auxiliaries to what was then MSTS to Military Sea Transportation Service.

It transitioned over to Military Sealift Command, and you see the first vessel of the Teluga come over in nineteen seventy three, and you slowly began transitioning auxiliary vessels over to what are called sivmore civilian merchant mariners. These are merchant mariners in the employ of the federal government. And that was the process. Then you win the Cold War.

And the winning of the Cold War was fantastic on one hand, but terrible on another hand, because now all of a sudden, you don't need that six hundred ship navy, and we go down to a three hundred ship navy. And that three hundred ship navy means those shipyards that were counting on six hundred ships don't have them anymore, and so we have loss of quality and loss of construction in the shipyards. A lot of the issues we see today in shipyards that you've talked about on this

show quite a bit can be traced to there. But then at the same time you see a reduction in the size of the Navy. You have issues like operational tempo perse tempo, and so we need to keep ships forward deployed longer, and there's a plan put afoot to basically transfer all the auxiliaries over to Military Sealift Command. There were studies done, and while some people think it's cheaper to do it with a civilian crew than a

Navy crew, it's not exactly true. The thing you get is you free up those Navy personnel to go on combatant in warships, and most importantly MSc crews aren't impacted by operatingational personal tempos. You can send them out to sea and they can go out for nine, ten, fifteen months, doesn't matter. You can send them out there, and as long as you had a pool reservoir of merchant mariners

to dip in, you can. Nineteen eighties, the merchant marine was four hundred and fifty ships well fast forward to the modern day. Let's go to the you know, twenty tens. All of a sudden, what we begin to see is the diminishing of both the US Navy and the merchant Marine. We go from a four hundred and fifty ship merchant marine down to one hundred and eighty ship merchant marine. And the process that Military Sealift Command uses to crew

its personnel operates under the federal guidelines. I sailed as a merchant mariner for MSc, and I was amazed when I came ashore and I got a job working at MSc headquarters that my leave policy on the ship was basically the same leaf policy I had ashore, which is fine when I'm a sure you know, when I'm home every night, I'm home on weekends, get my holidays off, get a snow day once in a while. In DC, I can do a compressed work schedule, work gnawing out

of ten days during two weeks. You can't do that on a ship, and it just didn't work. And when I first sailed with MSc in the eighties and nineties, you were six months on in maybe two months off. If you were lucky, you got two months off. MSc went to a policy of well, we're going to do four months on two months off. But the problem has been the pool. They just don't have sufficient mariners to

do it. And what has happened is that the mariners that are out there aren't doing four months, they're doing six, they're doing eight months. They're not getting off in the time a lotted they have And Sam quoted this in his article, they have fifty five hundred mariners for forty five hundred positions. That doesn't allow you to do four months on two months off. To do four months on two months off, you need one point five people for every billet. They have one point two, and that creates it.

But I think the gall the thing that really has been the thing that has set this off more than any other issue was COVID, and COVID impacted Military Sealift Command in a way most people don't understand. The commander of MBSC at the time, Admiral Wetlawfer, decided to issue what's called a gangway up order. It's infamous in that Military Seal of Command. One day he sent out in order to all the ships that the gangways are up. Nobody comes on and nobody comes off. You're on the ship.

You're stuck on the ship. You can't get off, and he held everybody on the ship. Now, some ships were in dock in Norfolk and San Diego and Pearl and other places, and some of the crews were you know, you have apartments ashore, They go ashore every night. They had their cars on the dock, and all of a sudden, they're stranded on the vessel. But the worst part was is not just that they were stranded on the vessel, but navy crews and contractors could come and go as

they like, and this created huge bad blood. It's one of the few times I can tell you that all the maritime unions got together and wrote a joint letter arguing about these actions, and mariners answered with their feet. They just quit. They just left. And now we're in a situation where if you go to the MSc web page right now, they are advertising for every position in MSc short of master and chief engineer, and they are

throwing money at this issue. They are literally just offering massive signing bonuses trying to get anybody to come to see right now because they're churning through personnel and they actually have a problem on the backside of this in that the senior officers, the mid and senior officers, second made, second assistant engineers and higher are working so much that they can't get off that they're actually hitting the federal

cap in pay. They can't get paid anymore because they're making as much as I forget what the cap is, but they've hit the cap, and so now they're accruing leave instead of pay, but they can't get to leave, so they're kind of trapped on board. And this has created a massive problem in MSc. Now we can talk about what Animal Sobek is doing with the solution, but I'll stop here because I just gave you a lot.

straits they're in now. So I mean they're looking for everybody to in and that's what's generating this big issue in that they need more personnel. They just don't have the personnel and they're leaving. And so what Admiral Sobek has decided to do is, you know, he needs more personnel. But the problem is now you have created such bad blood.

You've created such a bad work environment. Again, this is not Aermald Sobac animal, Soovik just inherits this, but you've created a work environment where it's very hard to get people to come work for MSc. And so how do you increase your labor pool? And the way he's going to do it is by choosing these seventeen ships, twelve fast transports to expeditionary support bases, to akees. These are logistics support ships that are over in the pre positioning

role and one fleet oiler. He's going to take those crews off put them into the man power pool so that now he can increase the pool for reliefs. The problem is that this man power pool he's pulling those ships from. A lot of those crews aren't very familiar with underweight replenishment. A lot of them went over into those ships because they didn't want to do underweight replenishment.

They liked the schedules they got with an EPF or with a expeditionary support base or with the prepositioning ships. So it's not exactly clear that these seven hundred crew members are going to provide the relief he wants. And then you've got to have this sandwich with a program

to bring more mariners into it. Right now, they're at the lowest level they've ever been for recruiting merchant mariners out of the state, and Federal School Military Sealift Command has sent one of their captains over to King's Point, the Federal Merchant Marine Academy, to be there on a permanent basis so that he can recruit for MSSE constantly.

few reasons. Some are easy to fix, some or not. It's pay where they found they can pay money someplace else, Quality of work, quality of life. People are willing to have a quality of work, quality of life if it's a calling like a doctor or a sailor or a mariner. But that has its limits, especially when you want things like a family and a life, and there's also the leadership in the environment. The easiest thing there to fix

is your pay. And you know, you mentioned something to me that had me modify a question I was going to ask later on, but I want to fold it into this. You talked about when you went on shore duty that you leave on the same on shore duty is the same as it is at sea. And you know, we look at the seven hundred mariners put to the sideline. There is no shortage of bureaucracy on both the Navy

and the military sea lift commands. Side of the house ashore who don't deploy that are making good money, making good policy, and the promising one thing and doing another. It reminded me in some ways of a certain mindset that I don't know how we get around it. For the Litoral Combat Ship, their initial manning con ops was And I bring this up all the time because it makes a point that I don't think it has been addressed. It was all designed around burning your people out. Literally

you could see up on the PowerPoint slide. Lcs can deploy for four months because basically people are losing their mind because they have been working so hard for so long, and you're not going to be retaining people like that. It's an objectification of your your sailors and your mariners that it's like a piece of machinery. Well, I know we're supposed to, you know, change the oil at two thousand hours, but we're going to go to twenty five

hundred today and we'll accept the risk. You know, that's not machinery. That's people. And I want to talk to you a little bit about the human capital. These people that have left and won't come back. These are people, you know, reals of what their sources are or what their position that have invested years to decades of their life and the training involved invested in putting somebody in charge, because you don't want anybody on the bridge during underway

replenishment next to a nuclear eca carrier. It's extensive. When you invest in these people and they leave and they don't come back.

one off, one month on, one month off. It's a little different depending on the ship, but basically it's that schedule that you have and that allows you to have at least the semblance of you know, normal routine. But the problem is you can get anybody cycling in on that. You know, one of the things that you wanted at MSc is people who are familiar with underwear punishment, with rig operations, with the operations that's unique to Military Sealift Command.

And let me be clear. You know, you talk to the crews out of Military Sealift Command, they love the job. I'm I loved it when I did it. It was the best job in the world. It was great. It's just if you were like me getting ready to get married, you cannot tell your wife when you'd ever be home, you know, because you just couldn't make a schedule because at the time I was six months on, two months off, but there was no way they were meeting that, and

it was just impossible. You know, at least Navy schedules you have, you know, shore duty at some point MSc, it's completely at sea the entire time. I had to quit MSc and come back to work at MSc headquarters and get rehired to do that. And this has been the issue. And this has been, you know, again a long issue. I've had debates and talked to MSc about this since I left MSc in the nineties, and they

have been making this push. And let's be clear again, there were a lot of efforts to do this, to fix the lead policy, to get more personnel in there. You know, this has been the bane. And I also go back to another issue, which I think is really really crucial here is that the MSc mariners are not in the chain of command when it comes to MSc. They operate the ships, but they're really not in the chain of command. They don't have a say in how policy is set in Norfolk or even at the area commands,

and I think that is a tragic mistake. I really do. They will bring port captains ashore to help in the manning and operations, but not really the policy. You know, Admiral Sobek should have a senior master chief engineer at his side as a deputy vice commander of some kind to you tell them that. And if you look at the five sees's that MSc has none of them sail for a military sealift command. So you know, I think there's a big issue with that, and the crews feel that.

I mean, you had some tragic accidents that happened here recently. I mean you had a suicide on board one of the akes out in Bahrain. You know, that ship had the third night on board kill himself on the bridge of the vessel, and then that vessel had to get out the sea the next day or two because they

had to meet a schedule. There was no stand down, there was no you know event for you know, let's switch this ship out and crew, you know, the schedule had to be met, and that was jarring to I know members of the crew who left as a direct result of that. And this has caused problems in the fleet, and again I don't think many in the Navy appreciate it. We just saw the Royal Fleet Auxiliary crews go on strike because they haven't gotten a pay raise for fourteen years.

But they are treated immensely different than the MSc crews are. They get four months on, two months off, I think is their schedule, and it's a pretty rigid schedule they operate by. So I think that the Navy really needs to take attention to this, and I think that they were trying to get this passed very quietly. I think they were going to release it on Friday before Labor

Day and hopefully make it wouldn't make the news. But it's reached a point of criticality here where they're doing this on the eve of a presidential election, which I don't think anybody wanted to do.

aircraft can get their their fuel. And they've got all those destroyers and other escorts they've got to go fuel. They're out there in the in the in the danger zone as they used to say, they're in the Gulf War, and uh, and they're not getting a whole lot out of that, is it. And they also don't get a lot of the benefits of if they're If you park an oiler next to a destroyer inport, the destroyer guys can go to the exchange and go to the the various dogs and stuff. But I think those those civilian

mirrors don't get to do that. They're they're not allowed to do a lot of that stuff.

Merchant Marine expeditionary mets. Where was Marit? Where was MSc with the awards for the cruise of Patus and Supply and Kanawa and Shepherd and Amelia Earhart and the console tankers that were out there providing them. You know, we were talking about this before the show. Supply pumped twenty times twenty times its capacity during its nine months deployment, which you know, a normal you would see maybe three

to four times on a normal deployment. That gives you an idea of scope and scale that these ships were performing, and they're absolutely crucial to it. You know, Merchant mariners on board those vessels, the masters of those ships are in the Unified Command. I mean, I mean they are you know, part of the carrier battlegroups. They're integrated. And let's not talk about the fact, by the way, that

the ships are completely unarmed. I have no weapon systems at all on board for defense beyond a Nixy system that they need to be told to deploy it when something happens. There's no sea, no sea rams, there's no defense systems except for some small arms on board. This is you know, a critical gap in them. And now

you're seeing seventeen vessels being pulled out. And when you start looking at those seventeen vessels, twelve Spearhead class fast transports, those have been a ship that's been trying to find a mission for the you know, fifteen years they've been out there. Some will just say they're just a you know, works program for hostile but you know they've been being used more and more as time goes on. But the ESBs,

the Poller and the Williams, those are platforms that sinks want more and more. I mean, the combatant commanders want more of these ESBs. You cannot read, you know, a monthly episode of a monthly magazine of proceedings without seeing an article in there about ESBs, the akes, I mean, yeah, they're coming out of the prepositioning fleet, but they would love to have them out in the replenishment fleet and losing an oiler. That's crazy right now when you look

at how strung out our oilers are. We're running the Kaiser classes into the ground. The Lewis classes have got issues. We've seen three of them come out, but none of them have deployed yet because of issues with them and other issues we have percolating behind the scenes. You know, the Navajo class salvage vessels are coming out late. We're already plenishing. We're getting rid of salvage vessels. There's no salvage vessel out in the Red Sea right now to

help with the issue out there. We're seeing issues in the sealift fleet, where the selift fleet's over forty four years old. The recapitalization is not going fast enough. We're losing ships faster than we bring ships in. And then we're drawing down the Army and the Marine Corps pre positioning program. So I mean the amount of things that are hitting the fan right now. Just to use the court I use on my ship My show all the time, there's a lot of ship happening.

this is why I think it actually soaked in. Which is why this this news is getting the attention because enough people are being told this, but I don't think we can say it enough. Is if you do not have these the mariners and these u U s and S auxiliaries out there, your oiler, your your supply ships, you can't fight, you can't always pull into port. Or if there isn't an oiler available and somebody thinks a brilliant idea for you to pull into port, you open

yourselves up to things like the USS coal. As things get hotter and the world gets crazier, you want to be able to supply your warships at sea, at sea because you can control that, where you can't control things even end quote friendly unquote ports. So I don't see any indications from the South China Sea to the Black Sea to the Red Sea. And boy, I think we can do a whole show just on salvage ships and icebreakers and what a self owned this is from a

strategic point of view. But I don't want to go to that rabbit holecase. I'll get all excited. But where are we six months, eight months down the road if we keep doing these like we talked about last episodes on the USS side of the house, is we're back to the eight nine eleven month deployments. Those don't happen without the auxiliaries. And now we've put seventeen to the side, so we have an even narrower pool at which to pull from. So is this a reset or is this

a gamble that could really have repercussions here in twelve or eighteen months from now.

star as the command under of Military Sale Command. Remember MSc used to be a three star billet back in the day. Now it's been degraded down to one star billet. Should be a two star billet. But we're waiting for Sobek's promotion, but it's been kind of hung up with the bon Armbashard. But I think he's at a moment here where he is showing the leadership that's needed, you know,

pulling those crews off. He's doing what he needs to do, very similar to what we see going on with Admiral Fagan over in the Coastguard laying up ships because she wasn't going to run ships and run him with minimum cruise and throw money into into maintenance. She wanted to prioritize so Sobek through fleet forces. He's doing this through fleet forces. Remember he's under he's kind of dual hat in Sobek. He's got Transcom over him on one side,

he's got us fleet forces on the other side. He's working with fleet forces and saying, listen, I need to pull these seventeen ships out. We need to maximize the ships, because even having all the oilers manned was a problem because they weren't all manned. There were cases in the spring of this year. I know for a fact that there were no option rational oilers on the East coast

of the United States. You actually had Arley Burke destroyers having to come back into port to refuel a Craney Island in Norfolk, something that does not typically happen because there are no oilers available and the kaisers are in such poor material condition that many of them. You've got two on the East Coast, one on the Gulf Coast, two out in Singapore laid up in yards right now

because it's just the maintenance is so hard. And then you have crewing issues where you have ships coming back in and you're pulling crews off to get crews onto deploying ships so you have enough people to fly five rigs at a time on an underway replenishment ship. I think SOBEC really is working a plan here. He's going to take that pool of seven hundred mariners. He's going to put them into the pot This will allow him and his office to start rotating mariners and improve morale.

That's the key thing he's got. He's got to improve morale. I get I get danged by MBSC all the time

because I talk about this and they're saying, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're highlighting the problem. It's like, I'm not highlighting the problem. Everyone knows what the problem is. They got to address it, and now they're addressing it. And if you can do that, that's great, But there's other steps that have got to follow. He's got to get a recruitment process out there to

bring in unlicensed from the SIU schools. He's got to get licensed personnel coming out of the state maritime academies. I mean, if you're not pulling a certain percentage from the state maritime and federal academy, that's a problem. You need to address that. And then you've got to work on the retention problem. And then finally you have to work on increasing the policy for manpower. MSc for many years sat there and said we will get by II sir, this is will do what we have to do, and

they can't do that anymore. They have got to sit there and say we need the personnel to do this. If you have forty five hundred billets at Military Seal of Command, you should have at a minimum six seven hundred and seventy five people working for you. You should have, you know, at least one and a half people. Ideally you should have two. You should have you know, up to nine thousand. But there's no way you're going to

do that. And I think if they start improving the work style, and they start improving the leave policy, you know, they're put in starlink on the ships, they're they're making things better. I think that they can start seeing it, but it's going to take a concentrated effort. The problem is a lot of damage has been done.

and Acquisition. I can't imagine how complicated that makes life for the for the poor admiral in charge of MSc. But one of the things I'm looking at is, you know, we have all these requirements, we have we have a need for people to be an MSc, and yet we mandate the same requirements that the Coast Guard puts on

any civilian merchants sailor. And I'm wondering if they cannot get into that system and make it a little easy for people to transition and say out of the active duty for US, if that's what they want to do to become a you know, a part of the of

the Selifts Command. I know that the I'm sure the the detailers and the people who are running the Navy personnel aren't really happy with that concept, but it seems to me we could make it a lot easier than all the hoops that they make these guys jump through to be able to sail with MSc.

is when you're in the pool, you have to do training. Well, well, you're doing that training, you're not earning leave. You know, you're not earning shore leave. And so there's there's crazy things that you're working but you're not working that needs to be ironed out. They're they're still doing the old school where you were based on the east or west coast, and so they will only pay for you to fly from either the east or west coast, depending on where

you're hired from. So if you're living in the middle of the country, you have to pay for your own way to get to the east coast to fly out. There's crazy things that just need to be ironed out and fixed. But you know, working, you know, we've talked

about military the mariner, but you know, the crew, the graduates out of the US Marcharny Academy should be one of the key pools that we're pulling out of, but we're pulling less. You know, we're in single digit percentages of what we're pulling out of the mariners from all the state schools to go sailing. And you know, the irony is MSc is throwing so much money at the problem that I know of third mates coming out of

the state maritime schools. They go sail for MSc, they have a bad experience, they can't get off for eight months because they're stuck on the ship. But they've earned so much money, they've paid off their student loans, and they don't want to go back out the sea. They're fine just kind of hanging out, and they know that MSc is looking for mariners, so they'll just hang out, lay low, and then come back in a few months and get hired again. That doesn't create a really great

service pool. And we haven't even talked about the fact that what happens when the balloon goes up and there's actually a crisis where there may be shooting, you know, on the high seas, do these mariners stay? What happens

if the crew on an MSc oiler in San Diego says, you know what, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to go work at a power plant. I'm going to go work at Starbucks. I'm not going to do this. And we don't have the critical oilers and underway replenishment vessels that we need. This is you know, back in twenty nineteen, I wrote a piece for the CNO's Histories Essay contest. I got second prize because it was about logistics.

You never get first prize we write about logistics. But I talked about the fact is, you know what if the you know what, if there was a war in the Merchant Marine didn't come. I think that is a serious issue. We need to be talking to. What is Plan B if all of a sudden we don't have enough crew members, if we didn't have enough oilers on the East coast to handle Arley Burke destroyers on routine basis, what happens when this stuff really hits the fan?

step and it's I'm not sure, Well, I have my suspicions as anybody's talked to budget people have, but somebody has managed to sell as the environment we have to live in that this can be done on the cheap, paying bargain basement prices you get which you pay for for people, and to build it off of a view of dealing with your employees that dates back to the nineteen fifties, the nineteen sixties, and show me what your priorities are and I could probably find out how that

goes with your budget. And I just did a little bit of googling while while you're answering the last question, and the president's twenty twenty five budget request for MARAD the Maritime Administration was eight hundred and fifty nine point seven million, and on top of that was nine hundred and seventy four million from DoD to acquire, upgrade, maintain vessels and the Ready Reserve Fleet and the National Defense

Reserve Fleet. So if you add those two together, we have what is at one point seven to one point eight billion. Now, in the same budget, we spent four hundred million dollars to the Jovini consultants out of Northern Virginia to analyze to analyze again problem appreciation, DoD spending and supply chain issues is a beautiful report with wonderful graphics. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, splendid for four hundred million. Everybody should watch it. You paid

for it. And we also have budgeted two point four billion to Deloitte and Letouche. However, you pronounce that consultancy to quote identify, build and deliver holistic solutions facing the submarine workforce and industrial base unquote, which we know has issues. And again going back to kind of what I mentioned in the universion, we have these huge bureaucracies and mare AD DoD don You know you mentioned the what was it five sees? None of the OCS sees are expensive.

If you never had one on your manning document, what are what are they doing? Such that in my little basic math, two point four billion plus four hundred million is two point eight billion. We'll round it up to three billion dollars, which is not quite twice, but we're getting up there. More than the budget we have between MARD and DoD's forces to support the ready reserve fleet.

The money is there to Part of the people problem is we're trying to do too much with too few people, so we abuse the people and the people go elsewhere and we have a still smaller pool. But again going back to the things I mentioned before, if money is the first thing, there's money out there, it just needs to be properly allocated.

And but you know he's not treated that way, and none of the MSc commanders have been treated that way in many ways, especially after and I know it's a big point for you to Goldworder Nicholas changed everything. When you know, the Navy controlled a lot more of what they did than now they do, and that was a big issue. And you know, if you look at the way MSc was created back in nineteen forty nine, we're

coming up on the seventy fifth anniversary of it. On October first is the big anniversary for MSc. They want to celebrate this. So the great resets coming right at this period of time. Their original you know trifecta. What they did was sealift. They did you know, troop ships, they did cargo, and they did fuel. That's what they did.

Those are the three things they did. And over time it's morphed into this and so that now MSC's primary mission, what they focus their entire time on, almost exclusively, is on naval support, whereas MARAD is now looking at sealift. When if you look at what Marad's mission is, it's supposed to be in promoting and enhancing the US merchant Marine, a job I will tell you that the MERID does not do very well at this time. And this comes again to this whole point of sea blindness I think

that we have. And one of the reasons at the very beginning I kind of took you through that long kind of history issue is because it's all intertwined, it's all kind of wrapped in together, and the fact that we have been sea blind so much has really impacted now so much so that when you look at the shipbuilding programs of the twenty tens and where we are today in you know, just building a frigate or trying to get any platform up and running without it, you know,

going into massive cost overrun. CBO just came out with five point one billion dollars for three coast Guard icebreakers. You know, this, this is all related. This is this is the issue we have. It's one of the reasons why in the most recent NDA you had this issue for a national maritime strategy, because I think we've been looking at navy strategies exclusively along with military without looking at the commercial side. And you know, give me that money you gave for that study, and I mean I

can make I can fix things right now. I mean a lot of things can be fixed, you know. And I think one of the big ones is leadership. Is showing the leadership that number one, that MSc cares about its mariners. That's what they want. You know, when that ship comes back from the Red Sea, that the MSc commanders on the pier, that the marid you know, administrator is there, you're giving them, you know, acknowledgment, you're thanking them. You're making it as big as the Secretary of the

Navy going on the Eisenhower and recognizing that. But more importantly, you're ensuring that there's reliefs for those crews so they can get off, go home and be with people, and more importantly, have a life. I mean, there's quotes in that story by Sam Lagron talking about the fact that mariners just see you know that they all they're going to get out of working for MSc is a big paycheck,

but they're not going to have a family life. They're going to go through multiple marriages, and by the time they retire, they are dead within a year or two because they have nothing left to live for. It's a really sad story. And you can't not help but think that, man, I would quit too if I was a mariner at that point. And that's going to have a detrimental effect on the Navy because now twenty percent of the ships in the Navy are banking on those crews.

after the Eastern Offensive back in seventy two. They were bringing aes from the from the East coast because you know, they knew we needed more of the logistics force there then than was present when the when the North Vietnames came across the border. So you know, the demand cycle is what should be driving. Is that we talk about it. For the carriers, we've got a problem with keeping them going, and we're running. We're running the carriers into the ground.

We're running a lot of the destroyers into the ground, and we certainly are running the combat logistics force into the ground. Now. As a guy who's done a few on reps myself, it is it is great work. It is the best ship driving you could do. And I've driven destroyers to I love destroyers. You've got so much power. You can't do much wrong because you can always make

up for it. If you've got a single screw ship and you're trying to go alongside somebody, you know, then there are some some white local moments, But it is great fun once you're doing it. And the crews when we were busy, they were really they enjoyed the UNREPP stations. But you've got to sell that story, and you've got to make it so that people don't think this is all they're going to be. All they're going to be doing for the next fifteen years is stand at the

same unrep station watching palettes of something go across. It's got to be it's got to be something better than that. And I don't you know, as we all know, money is a motivator, but it's not the key motivator in your life. There are so many other things that matter more than money.

them were howsepipers. They came up from the enlisted and they were masters. I mean they were ship drivers, par excellent. I mean, you could not believe what they would do at a ship, and you know, that is the story that MSc has to do. But again it all comes to this issue where I think the Navy and MSc fails in promoting their mission. You know, the job that they did in the Red Sea should have been number one. That should have been something that was just in your face.

How that doesn't get people recruiting. Hey, you can sit at home and play on your video game and shoot down stuff where you can come on board the Carnie and actually do it. You know, that to me is you know, the way you get people on and same thing at MSc. It's a great opportunity. But MSc also has to understand that the workforce is changing, and the Navy does too. You know, I see it on a

college level. People are not going to stay in the same job for twenty thirty years, and so you've got to create jobs that you understand there's going to be a short time enrollment. People are going to come in, earn a lot of money and want to leave. So you've got to be prepared for that, which means your

recruiting has got to be geared for that. Your training's got to be geared for that, and we need to really set that up because again, one of the things that is happening right now is that MSc is finding itself on the short side. They're in the press, and they don't like being in the press. They don't like this at all. They like being behind the scenes. Nobody in the Merchant Marine likes to talk about anything this.

I've learned this from three years running my program. They don't like it when you talk about them because because they would much rather just be behind the scenes. But you know, since the global supply chain crisis, everyone's attention is drawn to the sea more than ever before. People are interested in this, and now all of a sudden,

this story has hit the buttons. It's been on Fox News, It's made all the rounds that you surprisingly you would not expect, and that means you have to take the moment. I'm a firm believer that when you make the news, you have to run with it. And this should be the moment that we start talking about what this reset's going to do because people are paying attention.

plain old sailor in such a great positive light. Was done on a Twitter account by the skipper of the Eisenhower of childa hill over there, where a lot of his content was just you know, here's m M three Schmucatelli, who's we will allowed escape from the reactor compartment to come up to the bridge to have a cookie. Here's her background and it you know. Then there's a picture that's worthy of a pulitzer that one of his people put up about one of his aviation Bosn's mate covered

with chains. You know, that type of stuff that if you're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old person who perhaps doesn't want to go to university for whatever reason and is looking for something else, and there is Unfortunately, we've created things and you've brought up COVID that the minute you put something out like that, there are people who have other stories that they'll jump right on and share. But you can't counter the narrative unless you engage in

the conversation before. And there's got to be somebody, some mariner out there who could be the merchant marine version of Childer Hill, because there are great stories out there, and you talk about the changing workforce, people don't people also want to be part of something. They want to be involved in something that's a little greater than themselves, something that's different than the normal experience of those people that they grew up with. And here you can go,

how many years has it been since the Easter offensive? There, Mark of we look at that forty two years. It's been more than a week. But you could hear in Mark's voice and in your head you could almost see the face of his sailors and the job they were doing. Because it is a great story. Sal But I just why we cannot tell that story except almost by accident or by individual initiative by a very small number of people. I don't know. There, that's again part of the CNO's reset.

It's got to be within her ears and on her staff but there are other things that need to be reset besides just seven hundred sailors coming ashore.

station ships and shuttle ships. You had the station ships which were usually those were the ones Mark sailed on. Those are the ones with Navy crews on board. They were providing the direct underway replenishment to the combatants out there at Yankee Station or up in the Persian Gulf. You know, that's that's what they did. And then MSc

would do the shuttle ships. They would run the ships from the depots, from the from the ports and up there, and you know, they would still do undwaar replenishment with other vessels, but they weren't the primary well, you know, in the nineties and you know, post Cold War the two thousands, we got rid of that. We just morphed it all into one big thing, so that now shuttle

and station ships are all the same thing. We got rid of the underway, you know, consolidation tankers, where we used to have a big, huge tanker fleet in MSc for commercial tankers. We got rid of that. And you know now we're waking back up today again, especially with the loss of Redhill. You know, we see MSc relearning the idea of console tankers. We see the start of a tanker security program, getting ten tankers commercial tankers out there.

They can do it. There are fundamental flaws. I could talk to you about the TSP, but I don't want to eat up the time talking about that. But you know this means that, you know, we're used to fighting wars close to supply heads. You know, Korea, we had Japan, Vietnam, we had the Philippines, Persian Golf, we had Bahrain and Oman. If you've got to go across the Pacific, and I know you love to put that out there, so that the great graphic of the Google Earth showing the Pacific,

you know, it's seven thousand miles. It's the tyranny of distance. This is going to be a big problem, and we are going to need the merchant Marine, We're going to need military Sealift Command. There is no way we do

this with just what we have out there. If everybody thinks we're going to fight, you know, the Chinese off Taiwan with the seven fleet that's out there in westpac then and you know, you need to read about the Asiatic Fleet nineteen forty two and see how that went, you know, when there was nothing coming to back them up, because that's what they're kind of setting themselves up for here in this scenario.

of MSc from it like to the Korean War. I think that was maybe that was the first or second anyway Korean Vietnam you put together, but the difference in the amount of shipping between World War Two and the Korean War you put you put this this this graphic of it. I'm looking at that going that is insane people? Did people not know that? It was a huge jump from what was required across the Pacific and World War two to what was word for the Korean War.

the mountains of supplies, fuel is just increase. And again, you know, this is something and I'm always amazed myself, John Conrad and a few others who who follow this are always amazed. When someone chimes says like, oh, we'll just fly the stuff in, It's like, are you nuts? It's like, do you not understand the tonnage we're talking about here? The amount of cargo is just mind boddeling you're going to need in a conflict, and we should be seeing that from what's happening in Ukraine and Russia

right now in terms of the expenditure of weapons. Everything is just demonstrates that to us. And I think the Red Sea is another good one. Or that I mean it took a full fledged effort. It took the US and a supply, the patuxentt the Kanawa, the Airhard, the Amelia air Hard, and a console tanker to keep one carrier battlegroup operational in what I would argue is probably not as intensive an air combat situation as you would get off the West with Western Pacific, off the coast

of China. And so if it took that much to keep a carrier battle group supply, what's our battle plan going forward? Because I gotta tell you right now, you know, you look at some of those images of the ships coming in. You know, they're they're warned that they are not getting the preventive maintenance they need, The crews are getting battered. And again you're relying on those to provide a key lynchpin for not just the Navy, but for the entire defense strategy of the United States.

come online. But if you look at the Davidson window and you're exactly right about and you don't have to be a genius to put in your red hat and to find how the People's Republic of China have laid some splendid little tiger traps in the Pacific, that'll make our logistics an even greater challenge it's already going to be. But if we got the right people, if we got the right money, and we got the right messaging to start to slowly turn the bow in the direction we

wanted to go in to move that up. Is it time to look again at something that we just briefly mentioned at the start of the show. Is a lot of the USNN used to be uss? Is there anything to be gained to move the curve in an attractive direction by looking at reverting back at least some of the ships to USS instead of USNS. I.

He went on a staff. He had that knowledge. And if you look at a lot of the past commanders, they had that knowledge. They did their time and tour on an underway replenishment vessel, so they came to appreciate logistics and what it took. That's not out there right now. Everyone's on the receiving end, they're not on the delivery end of it. And I think that is really playing a factor in a lot of command decisions out there. And again, aoees you can put the full defense suite

back on board. You can put all the sea rams and sea whizzes on them and get them out there. You know, we can build a new generation of AoE s out there. You can mark some of the aos for that. I think we can go back to where we were kind of in the nineties and two thousands with a mix between them. You don't need, you know, a US Navy crew probably on an AoE operating off the east and west coast, because again, you can do

that with a civilian crew. They can provide the refresher training that's needed, they can surge up, they can provide the back fuel that shuttle ship that is really required. But most importantly, you know, it'd be great to have a senior officer, you know, a captain commanding an AoE and then becomes a battlegroup commander, goes on to be

a fleet commander, goes on to staff. They understand them that logistics and I think, you know, this is the only area in the Navy where we don't put the people who are doing the job in charge of it. You know, seals are in charge of seals, some mariners in charge of some mariners, aviators in charge of aviors. Why why is Chowda Hill the captain of Eisenhower's cluss. He was a backseater. He was an he two guy. You know, you know he's not a swell, he's an aviator.

Why do you put an aviator on there? Because aviators understand how to run carriers? Well, you know who understands logistics. No one's putting supply officers in charge of fleets and commands out there. They should, in my opinion, because they understand logistics. And so I think it's really we start rethinking the way we're doing things out there. And again,

this is going to take a big discussion. I think it's time for us to have one of those big discussions about not just the size of the navy we have, but what do we want that navy to look like? Do we want one fifth of the US fleet to be crewed by civilians out there? I'm not trying to short, you know, cut MSS jobs. I think there's a lot of things that MSc mariners can do and should do,

But you know is that the main job. Probably one that I think we can talk about sharing is something like that recruing the aoees.

keep an eye out for you? And what can they look forward to on your next few episodes over at what's going on with shippings on YouTube?

out either in the Proceedings or Naval History here. Also doing an article on the role of the Red Sea and the impact that has. In between all that, I'm working on trying to work on my book on Military Sealift during the First World War and the role the Navy and the Merchant Marine played, and that my plan is to cover that do World War Two and also finish up a book on the history of the Military Sealift Command, because I think it's an amazing organization. You know,

I want everyone to be clear. I love that organization. It's one of my favorites. I met my wife on board the hospital ship Comfort. I think it is far none one of the most unheralded organizations that's out there. I think it's just so unique and the job it does is fantastic, and it really pains me when there's issues with it, and I think that's one of the reasons I get so high up on my soapbox. Plus I'm a little short, so it always helps me. It'll be a little bit.