Episode 699 - September Midrats Free For All

change that link. So we look like we have lots of guests, but it's just Mark and I today in the audience link. Thank goodness, I hope went out to tens of thousands of people on X.

find the most interesting today. If there's a topic you would like for us to address to, whether it's on our list or not, we'd like to be invite you to go in there and just pop it down there. Mark and I will both be watching the chat room as it scrolls along for those that wish to play, and if you're just here to listen, that's great. So hey, Mark, good afternoon. Let's see whether there's surprises.

how do you deal with with going live? You must do a lot of preparation and scripting. And I literally just laughed, Well, we've been doing this is twenty ten and we we actually just literally make it up.

at people. But it was an interesting to see that in some sidebar conversations with some of the points that Sal actually brought up, because here we are coming on on eleven months since the attack on Israel on October seventh of twenty twenty three, and then the extra little effort gave by the Iranian proxies and the hoo Thies that we've talked about quite a few times here in the course of the last eleven months here on Metraps and the great naval power that is the US and

her allies and friends. And you can look at the open source information on where our fleet is deployed right now. It's in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Golf, whatever you want to call it, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Trying to keep Iran actual back inside her box a little bit because of what's going on still in Israel and Gaza and with Hesbla and the Red Sea is still it's worse than the wild Wild West because there's not even a

good cavalry patrol. There's just the occasional element here and there that is going up and down and at will. The houthis are able to attack international shipping and one of the most critical junctures in the world when it comes to trade, and it's just amazing that more people are not and a lot of It may or may not have to do with the fact that this is an election year, and I always try to keep that in my back pocket when I wonder why things are

or are not being talked about. That might have something to do with it, maybe not, I don't know, but there is a in the national security arena. Mark there's a large arena of people who love to come into the conversation about international law, the rule of law. They want us to be signed on to the Law of the Sea treaty that we haven't signed on to. They've been,

especially in the last nine months, very quiet. You also have those that above all, and there's a non zero percentage of people in the leadership at d D who think that climate change is the most important thing, and people in the arena like Salamar Cogliana who worked that segment, they've been very open about the additional hydrocarbons that are being injected into the atmosphere from having to go around South Africa as opposed to going through the Red Sea

for those ships that decided they don't want to have the insurance premium. And you also have from a strictly American point of view, is we have not had a good record the last fifteen to twenty five years of burnishing and reinforcing hour which is our greatest deterrence, which is our reputation and our credibility on the world. Saint

and the fact that here we are. I would not have thought back in February or so that you and I would be talking in September where we still have these ability to go into onto tankers who were carrying four times what was leaked, and by the Exxon Valdez attack the ship, stop the ship, forced the evacuation of the ship, and then with a multimedia presentation blow it up right in the Red Sea. But here we are,

I don't see. And there's a real interesting and we did mention a couple of weeks ago, but there's been some echoes of it. Ward Curl's interview with the former commander of the Eisenhower Strike Group and what he had to say about the decisions. There are some secondary and

tertiary effects of the lawlessness in the Red Sea. I don't know who's going to resolve it or when it's going to be resolved, but it's going to take a lot law back to center line, because I think the international order for lack of a better phrase, has been damaged more than of people appreciate by US, the imperial US not.

on with the Huthis and the Red Sea. And you know, I mean even the Chinese are apparently sending some of their ships around the Northern Route instead of through the Red Sea area, even though for a while apparently they were under some kind of immunity from attack by the Houthis.

take on Iran right now? And this administration in particular has been pretty soft on them, and a lot of the money that has been turned over the last few years to the Iranians has helped pay for all this weaponry. And and we're also seeing I think reports of Iranian influence campaigns that to a lot of the anti Semitic activities have been going on the various parts of the country,

included college campuses and stuff. You know that they're funding a lot of this stuff, so that you know, we we have pretty good reasons as we as usual to go after a RAM. But I don't know if anybody has the stomach to to go into another big This would be a big war in the in that region of the world, And whether we need to. I mean, you know, we will pay additional cost for the the shipment of oil and goods around Africa. But you know, we've we've done that before. And I don't I don't.

I just don't know if anybody really wants to get involved the way we'd need to get that said. We've already put I think one of our guests as he has a son who deployed with VFA.

who's who's going to enforce it? Who's enforcing the international law against the Chinese intruding on the Filipino uh Exclusive Economic Zone and rent ramming their their coast guard ships into the end of the Philippine Coast Guard ships?

by the events in Ukraine and also in Israel. But kind of the last gasp of some of the illusions by well meaning people who are being taken advantage of by not well many people about international organizations quote international law unquote. You know, what the UN was doing in Gaza that's been uncovered kind of speaks for itself in that regard, and it's it has to do with national

will and things that you could do. And you know, you mentioned going after Iran, and I don't think that though it's on the spectrum of things you can do, there's a lot of non kinetic things that we could do against Iran. And you know, you also alluded to something I've been real proud of us in the fourteen years plus that we've been doing mid Rats that we talk about policy, not politics, and we do our best

to keep politics out of it, as we should. But people are policy and people are appointed by politicians that are elected. So it's it's tangentially arranged that. And the people that we have making our national security decisions right now are the same people that were with during the Obama administration, and they do have, if not a pro Iranian lean review, a non confrontational and excessive optimism about

what could be had with the Iranian regime. I think if the if we didn't have the present regime we had in Iran, as we happened before the Mola's got charge of Iran, we all get along great here. I grew up with the kids of Iranian refugees, and one of the largest Iranian cities in the country is Los Angeles. They're they're finding, they're great people. It's just the government the policy they're pursuing. And you also have to face the fact there's people who've heard me here and and

have read my stuff over the years. Knows I'm not an interventionist, piny stretch of the imagination, but there are some things that if not us, who And when you talk about the free flow of market goods across the sea, lions of communications, the open seas, the free seas, the safe sees. If not the US Navy, people will look towards the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy and the

United Kingdom have been for well over eighty years the give or taken incident or two have been our best and most reliable allies. We work best with them. But there is a graphic that made the rounds this week that, as I pulled the thread on. Its pretty accurate and I'll post it in the show notes afterwards. It's how

most of our naval fleet is out of action. It's for the Royal Navy's major warships, of its attack submarines, and it does active or inactive, which I think from rib operational or non operational.

they're lpds, they're ones in refit and ones inactive. Of their Type forty five guided missile destroyers, which are their most capable, you only have four of their six that are four of their six are inactive. And of their Type twenty three multipurpose frigates, you have ten of them, nine correction and only five of those nine are deployable. And it'd be interesting to see the US Navy's outlay

of that, but we're better than that. So if something does come up, our most capable ally, the Royal Navy, is simply not there, and our other allies, their navies

are really really thin. Some news did come out this week the new Dutch government announced, in addition to bringing back their heavy armor they're bringing back they're going to order I think twenty or so new main battle tanks from Germany Leopard A two six is where it is, and they're also going to be building two additional of their multipurpose they call their ASW frigates, which would be good,

but again it's not that large. So if it's not going to be us, who is it going to be, And it's not going to be them either, then we're going back to a situation where locally, the international community is just going to have to accept that we're going to lose free access to certain bodies of water, which we can do if Egypt, the local powers Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran decide that's what they want in the local waters.

I guess that's their decision, but that's moving away from I don't know, Mark, when do you think it's a shame we don't have claud in the chat room he could answer this force. When did the Royal Navy really draw a line on the calendar and said we've got it? Was it right after the Napoleonic Wars, after the US Civil War? But whatever that line is in the eighteen hundreds, until very recently, somebody was guaranteed free access to the seas.

And if the Red Sea is allowed to be uh a little ink blot across an important flock, when when is the next lock up gonna come?

I think that one of the battleships was targeted. You know this this these these Chinese missiles the sea eight oh two's, eight O one's whatever they are.

You know, it was different from the days when the range of of a gun determined the three mile limit or the twelve mile limit that we we had for for our coastal waters. Because you know, the guns now

and the and the missiles now are much more rain have much more range than those than those old canon did. And it's just one of those things to be aware of. Now, we keep spending a lot of money and effort trying to shoot these things out of the sky and at great cost to the taxpayers and at high risk to a lot of our people. Or we can do, as I have urged on some occasions, we could engage in a opptunity expedition to try and take out these hoothy things.

But I don't know what the population is that's involved in Yemen, in the in the hoothy movement. But that would mean, you know, if we were to take the eighty second and the one oh one airborne and drop them in there and then have them fight, We're gonna have to sustain them. We're gonna have to provide the food, the AMMO, all the other stuff. And you know, we can do it because we're a great power. But it is a challenge to to mount that kind of attack.

And you know, it's not one of those things where you're going to land the the Marine Corps landing force and the and the airborne guys and uh and get them in there and then sustain their operations. I just you know, we modern warfare is a lot more complicated than than when we drop the Marines off Tripoli and add them run to it in run around and help solve the the piracy crisis in the in that part of the Mediterranean. So you know, we can bomb them,

we can we can shoot down their planes. But I go back to if you're going to really control the land, you have to put troops on the on the beach. If you're going to do that, then you really have to think of the consequences of putting them in that environment again, and and how long what's it going to take to support them, and what are the risks involved

in that? So you know, somebody, somebody much higher up in the world than I will ever be, and and who's thinking about this stuff, is really trying to figure this out. And you know, and I think what I'm saying comports with what the former UH Task Force commander for that area talked about that you know that you can't just do it from the air, and we knew that from from Korea. You know that that you just can't go on this way and you can't, So what

do you do? I mean my suggestion is that we just we if they want to, if they're content to do this, and people UH just get sick of it.

wanted to. But you know, this country of Yemen is not exactly the fold to gap it is. You know, there's a lot of bad terrain, a lot of bad conditions for troops to operate in, and you know, the sustatement is going to be an issue because then you're gonna have to bring goods around Africa and or in through the Indo Pacific region to resupply them wherever the troops start out from. So I think that's the challenge.

I think that's the risk. And somebody's weighing these and at least right now saying and I think somebody said it in the in the in the chat room that I don't think anything's going to happen in the next next sixty days. Now. You know, if we had capable lateral literal combat ships instead of the ones we have, you know, those, that's about the right things to bring in there. I would bring Mark five boats and to you know, challenge these unmanned armed you know, you us

vs and and work on that. But you know, otherwise, you know, you just get in a place where the situations have changed over the years and this is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

say what about you know, UAE and Egypt. Well, they were fighting the Hoho Thies until a few years ago when people in the US decided to h tut them to death. And I think we've talked about it before. Fou was the Saudis and the Emiratis, I would be yeah, yeah, it's kind of tough. It's a shame that y'all made us stop fighting them because they were trying to get them on the ground. It's a tough answer. I think you know, you touched on it, and the Israelis gave

a little hint. You just got to you've got to bomb them. And there's also the fact that in the hoothy controlled areas, there's a lot of international aid that's going in there that's paid for the America by the American taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. And you know, we didn't let grain shipments into Imperial Japan during the Second World War, but we haven't declared war on Yemen either.

So it's a tough nut. But I think the longer term implications of everybody doing nothing, it's probably not too good. And a lot of that in action may just be the assumption, well, America will do something. Well, I don't know if that's an accurate assumption anymore, for a whole host of reasons. And not only is there nothing is going to be done in the next sixty days, I think regardless of what happens in the next election, I've seen no indications that there's any desire to do something else.

So it may just be a situation that's gonna have to work itself out, just like Sue has canal was closed for years, and maybe this would just be a situation where until you have the right set of circumstances and things are right that that it will just have to be something everybody will have to deal with and we can still have goods flow around. It's just gonna cost more money. And that's just just the nature of the decisions.

the USS, john S McCain. Only thing I'll say about that is I've seen spotty reporting the last thirty six hours or so because some people thought because he was a few months ago, it made it on dvids and everything a picture of him firing an M four I believe it was, and whoever his armor was, had installed the scope on backwards and he was still firing it as if it was a functional gun. People were saying, oh,

he must have been relieved for that. No. I think what I've heard in the last thirty six hours is there was a condition with steering. It almost led to a collision during unrepped. I'll wait for more information on that because it's either an equipment issue. I've seen some reporting that it was a known equipment issue for those that recall the John McCain was involved in the incidents in the summer of twenty seven, part of which was

related to steering and the interface thereof. I don't know if we're gonna have to wait for more information to come out.

getting these the navy. One of their reports talks about the Navy buying some more light oilers Navy light replenishment overs and uh, I don't know anybody's seen this, but it's a it's a report and it and it talks about what these things are going to do, and it is a a an important asset that we we should invest in. These are I think twelve new lighter ones. Are talking about two different kinds of of of oilers, ones a slower, more typical one and the other one

some kind of fast servicing. Anyway, it's just it's just it's time and and and there's another report I think is which I saw. I was talking about the Chinese little a minute ago about there going north. It's embarrassing

to say that the Chinese have put three ice breakers into the Arctic, and uh, we don't have. I think we're just getting one back on line after after the Polar Star, after some some service life extension program has finally been completed. But absolute it is a disgrace, and we've got to remember that once the Chinese start something, they view themselves what is the quote here, they view themselves as a near Arctic power. I don't know what

a near Arctic power is. So they don't have any common border with the Arctic Ocean as far as I know, but it is a it is a challenge once they get once they get their nose under the tent, then uh, you know, we're going to see a lot of them up there. And we have some pretty u vital concerns

in that area are easy as pretty large. We've got a huge oil resource up there in the prude On Bay and and uh, you know, things that countries that need that, the fisheries that are up there, there's all kinds of stuff that I would prefer them not to not to be messing around with. But if they can, if they can find a pinnacle to build an island on and suddenly to cleare themselves, you know, in a

neutral area out there that is played by the Danes. Well, even I don't think they care, given their treatment of South China. See, you know, we'll see one of their islands out there and then they'll they'll be claiming that they are are they now have protection of the of the This is just China being China. But it's a it's annoying, and.

And if you want to severely impact US production, look at what the Ukrainians are trying to do to the Russians. Impact their oil sector, impact their oil sector, impact their oil sector.

need to have a grand strategy. When you have a grand strategy, then that drives your force planning center, which means the number of ships you it need to have, the size of your military, and a lot of other things. You know, we we went from being able to have handle two major con contingencies and and have a little bit left over for some uh regional areas are we called back in the day, and now we're I don't think I don't know what we would have to do

to even get one regional contingency under control. And uh it I think that that is it's really important American people understand how how important it is to have a strategy that says, this is what we stand for, this is what we're going to do, and we're not going to be bullied by either the Chinese or the or the Russians, and we're going to match them as we did back in the eighties. We're going to match them and exceed them so that they can't And we have

trouble this with China, a pretty wealthy country all things considered. Uh, you know, they can't match our expansion and and our growth of our military. And it means that you know, we're we're if we're going to do the guns and butter routine again, sometimes you have to be guns and not just all butter and.

But if you have three or four smaller ships and one of them gets dropped out of commission, you're working harder, but you can still make mission. You don't have to pull back from the front because you can no longer supply. Plus that gives us the ability to maybe utilize reserve assets and in a more effective way. And if you're looking west at the International date Line in the Pacific, not only are the distance is huge, but the difference

between the different distances you have to go. If you've got to go northeast of Taiwan to do something that's equally important to something that is due east of Papua New Guinea, that's a huge bit of distance that you're going to need multiple ships to be able to cover.

And you also had a system that we did during World War Two where you had your most capable replenishment ships forward, but as opposed to them having to return to a major port to top off, they would have lack of a better phrase, you might know that the technical term shuttle tankers that could bring up top off those tankers that are serving the four deployed ships, and they would go off and it just made more efficient

having those numbers. You have the ability to do that, but that requires somebody to be able to counter the accountants brief because if you the accountant gets up there with a spreadsheet, he's going to tell you that's not very efficient, and you have to have the Like in many things, you have to have the effectiveness argument, and nowadays yours have to argue with them. Okay, you're seven hundred short siv mars right now, where are you going to get the other five hundred? You need to have

your your cute little toy tankers running around. That's a hard question.

to turn themselves off in a certain period of time according to international law. So you know, it's it's designed to swarm you at the navy right now, is you know, looking at funding this stuff and it is it's an issue about how many actual ships man ships do you need, how many of these smaller unmanned units do you need? How do you control them? I mean, you know it is,

but that's the magic. We're gonna We're going to deal with the size of the Chinese Navy apparently by having lots and lots of these swarming replicator uncrewed systems out there, and they're going to do all kinds of wonderful things from intelligence collection too, uh you know, I guess taking

out the opposing forces. It's going to be really interesting to see how this works, because uh, you know, we're seeing some of it work in the in the Black Sea, we're seeing some of it work in the Red Sea, which are pretty much contained bodies of waters and not all that uh uh you know, not like the Pacific where

you get some pretty rough conditions. So it'd be interesting to see how they would work in the Strait of Taiwan and and some of those other areas where things are not quite as smooth as they were in the in those in those Black Sea areas.

is electronic warfare. It's gotten to the point in Ukraine that they're developing they no longer have the reliable access to electric magnetic spectrum many areas, so they're they're bringing back as opposed to copper wire, they're using fiber optics, so they're basically pulling a pulling a fiber optic cable behind their drones, which takes out the electronic warfare, but it makes it much more difficult to counter these these systems because you can't jam them, which means you can't

do a soft kill. You can't do a soft kill, you gotta do a hard kill. Uh. There are other technologies out there that if the app the spirits allow, you also can get around jamming. Though I maybe maybe it has and it just hasn't broken out of the the skiff yet, but it's not really practical. But wire guidance is making a comeback. And know something off of Taiwan.

You know, if you're expecting to to counter hundreds of ships coming from west to east cost Taiwan's traits by a bunch of drones circa twenty twenty three.

spectrum to fiber optic guidance. That just brings out all sorts of interesting questions, most of which in a lot of the static lines, it's like a spider web after a while with all the fiber octic cable laying all over the place.

up in some of the stuff. And it sounds really fantastic if it if it works, but you're you're running a fairly high risk if if a third of your force becomes unmanned, fairly large unmanned vessels, unless they're being used in connection with things like you know, we talked about this before, where you have.

technology to do that. But I I you know again, I'm it's not that I'm against a lot of small little things out there containing carrying something which can do damage to somebody, But I question if you want to rely a whole lot on that, because you know, there

are ways to feed them. And we've seen picture images at least from the Red Sea of people on board that the some of the ships have been attacked, you know, taking a machine gun and shooting away with those things until the unman surface things, until they blow up, and that you know that that does work. It's not elegant, but it is. It is a solution.

Be nice, keep reading, and that had to be The US Army has asked Japan for the next six months to deploy, and it's great to see they're actually deployed, and I find out a few details I didn't know. Mid range capability missile launchers that they're calling the Typhoon, which is great to see somebody actually calling a weapon system a name and not an acronym. So Bravozulu to the army. That is what you and I think we've

talked about maybe once or twice in passing here. That is the basically quad packed Mark forty one VLS cell on the back of a tractor trailer, the trize tractor trailer, you know what those things look like.

four VLS cells. Just for comparison purposes, a flight two at two Alpha or a flight three hourly Burt has ninety six VLS cells and a spruance has sixty one VLS cells. So that's Claude's dog.

thought by fault for sitting in the wrong link out everybody, and that's okay. We're all one big happy family here at mid Rats. So basically the Army has bought if a spru if the old spruances it had the vlsls, they had sixty one vlsls which were fun to play with during Desert Fox. They've bought three cells, more than

a spruance. But you can take those batteries and you can spread them around where you can't spread around the VLS cells in a spruance or Harley Burke, well, we don't have any spruance anymore, you know what I mean.

And you know, those are not complicated weapons in the in the sense that you don't have to worry about terminal terminal guidance at all, but you better be pretty accurate as where you think you're shooting them. And you know, we we we talked to Wayne Hughes about this a

long time ago. You know, the Navy keeps insisting on building bigger, better, more heavily armed ships rather than UH and which you know, as he pointed out, just mean you've got more worries that if you lose one of those ships, because they're supposed to do a lot of things anti submarined, anti aircraft, anti surface warfare and UH and now land attack. So uh you know, having more many more mobile platforms that can launch systems and and eased on on the larger ships.

it takes a lot of power. Then then it's time to bring back the nuclear powered cruisers and destroyers and looks really gen these things up to be the protective systems they're meant to be and allow smaller, heavily armed VLS type ships out there to go out and really do some damage on land based stuff while they have the protection of a larger ship nearby.

to look you look at Sevastopol. Sebastopol from Odessa is just one hundred and sixty two nautical mile and you know the for a few centuries, it's always been said, don't put your bases under the reach of your enemy's artillery. And if your cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are a branch of artillery, then they've seen that in spades, uh and s. Best of all, even and my, my Slavic friends will just have to tolerate my inability to pronounce

any Russian word with more than two syllables. But their backup base on the other side of Crimea, across the curse straight on Novurshka Novo Rushka. However, however, you house that it's a little bit further away, two hundred and ninety two nautical miles from Odessa, but especially if you have any any ability to get a weapon in the air or from the sea, that's way too close. So the Russians have had to learn they've got to back

their bases off more and more Ukraine. Obviously they can't they can't back up anywhere from where they are, so that the importance of range in both defense and offense has really come up to the four And it's nice to see the Army and at least the Navy has appreciated the problem more of needing to have those additional VLS cells to carry weapons available, but.

to the drawing board. So who knows if when we'll ever see that next airborne platform On the Navy side of the house, I haven't seen an update recently that the guys in Navira keeping a pretty good.

capabilities of the systems we can we can use. If we went to mine warfare, and we've talked about mind warfare, it is you know, it's another one of those unsexy but really really important to parts of the of the Naval service that gets ignored until you you have to clear a field of them, and then you then you have to think real.

rig those up to lay minds. Now you have my attention. How you're going to transport them from point A to point b.

ship and you deter the entire strike group. Mine sit there and they wait, and the minute their presence is known, even if they don't wind up damaging a ship, everything comes to a full stop because next to a submarine in the middle of your of your group, knowing that you're in a mine field, that's that's terrorized sailors for a couple of couple of centuries.

We even if we knew about it, we could talk about it.

Republic of China had a very big presence there. They were showing off their Y twenty transport, which is roughly two thirds of the C seventeen. Maybe it's close to the European A four hundred and its airlift capability and their J ten fighter that they put out as being an F teen equivalent. Who knows, they had a pretty big presence there.

sadly every year fades further into shadow, announcing that they wanted to lead a great Muslim opposition to Israel, with not shockingly involving most of the former Ottoman Empire. So you have the Eastern Mediterranean at the top and the bottom, and of course Syria is what it is and Lebanon

is what it is. That whole area east of Crete has never been the most secure place in the world, but you can almost you could almost draw a scenario out circa twenty thirty four or so that the Eastern Mediterranean becomes is less of a friendly place that we've seen since you know, you were off the coast of Vietnam many moons. That would be an unfortunate development, especially for our European friends, even if we fixed the problem in the Red Sea.

from Egypt. The hope that a lot of people had. I saw one person say that if the Chinese, if the Chinese succeed in becoming the primary supplier to Egypt,

that is pretty much the end of the Camp David era. That would be It's a pretty bold statement, but we've seen stranger things. But I think that whole Eastern Mediterranean area already gets a lot of attention. But I think it's going to be a very interesting decade between the trends that we're seeing in Egypt and Turkey.

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