Episode 702: Mid October Maritime Melee

say the birthday edition. Happy two hundred and forty ninth Birthday to.

the had are humanitarian assistance. Disaster response is not just something that we need to prepare to happen overseas, because I think from the time that it first started to grumble there off the Yucatan Peninsula to win, it just devastated everything from the Big Bend part of Florida, which when you live there you kind of expect that all the way up through Georgia Mountains of western South Carolina.

But then the really big damage that we saw in western North Carolina where they just got rainfall that you just don't expect to see in your lifetime. Just incredibly devastating storm that there there are a lot of lessons for for everybody to think about. Yeah, it's uh, it's

important that if you think you're in a safe area, you still have a disaster preparedness kit because you have no idea what's going to happen. I mean, it could be anything from from the sweet meteorite of death, or it could be a tornado, anything, but you know your house could disappear. You have to make sure you have some kind of of emergency system in place, where you have some food, some water set aside, some way to

provide yourself, some emergency shelter. But you know that we were talking about earlier, we were talking about how well how we how do we tie maritime stuff into this. I think with sal mccarglean, it might have been John Conrad, but they're talking about the these ships that the the Maritime Administration is built their their national camera national security

ships or something. One of them is being used at least for one of the Maritime Academies is one of their ships and they were pointing out those ships really

are designed to health for situations like these disasters. And and I remember years ago there was somebody down on the Gulf Coast talking about taking an old refrigerated storeship and a FS and converting it into a a recovery ship for disasters like Katrina, like the recent both recent hurricanes that smashed into Florida, and allow these supplies to flow into a disaster area, especially the ones on the coast where we get to we get the hurricanes, UH

and flooding, and allow these ships to come in and they can carry a heck of a lot more that you can carry on trucks and and UH and airplanes, bring in water, bring in food, bring in shelter. You know that that ought to be something that the the Federal Emergency Management Administration ought to be looking at to have a couple of these ships on standby in the in the Gulf Coast area or on the East coast

where the hurricanes mostly happened. And also something on the West coast because of the hurricanes, I mean the earthquake situation, because seriously, bad earthquake can do a horrendous amount of damage and it's a it's a question of what kind of supplies you can get to the people who are going to be in need, and I think this is

a job that the maritime services can provide. Historically, many years ago, I did a couple of blog posts on on how electricity was brought to some of these areas by Navy ships when prior conditions, when earthquakes had caused harm on the on the West Coast. There's no reason it can't be done on any of these other areas. If you can find a place to hook up and start providing power so emergency services can be can be feeled.

I think that's an important thing to consider now. One of those things that you know people keep proposing, but always the budgetary restraints where people think, well, well, you just have the ship sitting around for long periods of time. If you look at the history of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and on the East coast of Florida and North Carolina and Georgia South Carolina, the need is going

to be there every single year at some point.

interesting things that I saw. And for those that have been to the really anywhere in the mountains, but especially the mountains of North Carolina, there are some very winding, very narrow roads with some beautiful houses. You've got lots of people who we they retired to Florida. They spend one summer in Florida and they go, let's go up

to North Carolina instead. There are a lot of people that retire up to the mountains because the weather is great, the people are great, the crime is low, it's relatively affordable, can't beat the views. But with that comes to people that have needs that use some people who don't have good help, people who are insulin dependent, people who have oxygen and a lot of those roads are barely passable

now on foot. And there were people who will do the backcountry camping trips with their mule trains and they just repurpose them.

and I'm sure it's availableise I've looked it up. The Marine Corps experiment with two of the Kmax helicopters are the ones that have the intermeshing rotors, and I actually deployed to Afghanistan with them as uncrewed systems to resupply where the most simple of all things take off from X, go to Y, drop load go from Y to X, and they carry up to six thousand pounds. Now that's small. Helicopters with the Kmax is a little bit smaller than a sea sprite. Most in the Navy. You know about

the SH two about how small that is. But you also have what we've all seen in Afghanistan. Not in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and for those that have been around agriculture, knew they were around before they became in use in Ukraine.

again that's something that humanitarian assistance disaster response. Maybe your only open field is somebody's backyard or a local counties parking lot. Maybe you don't want to risk a big helicopter to come in, But if you can get the right corridors by planning ahead of time, there are some ways these systems that have a variety of uses, but especially in humanitarian systems disaster response, a lot of the problem is getting important things in isolated locations, and maybe

a mule might not be the best way to do it. A little small drone maybe can bring a couple of day supply of insulin, but when you're dealing with lots of people, are you dealing with things like oxygen. You need something that can carry significant weight to isolated, remote locations that prior aren't very well prepared, and the right answer can't be is we'll have a solution in three weeks.

little more time. And first thing is that if I was talking about this earlier, that you have to be ready to live on your own. I mean, this is what FEMA, this is what the Red Cross will tell you, three or four days on your own, have food, have water, or have a way of getting water, and and some way to shelter yourself. And fortunately an Edmund that cold

up in the mountains. But uh, you know, if the hurricane season goes on through November or into early November, so it's conceivable that you could have some really cold nights up there, and some of these people would be uh seriously in jeopardy of hypothermia, you know, but they also have to learn to look around to their their situation. You can get pretty cheaply. These life straws allow you to drink water right out of streams and not and not worry about some of those things you were talking

about earlier. You can use these sawyer filters and there are other catered in filters that hikers use. You know. You can do a few quartz at a at a time with those things. Fill up a bag and they call them a sea knock bag conoc bag that you can fill with dirty water, run it through a filter into a water bottle, and you've got water, you know.

And that means if you have a stream nearby, or you know where a stream is, or you have a lake nearby that didn't that didn't disappear down the side of a hill, you know, you can go get water. You can purify it yourself. You can just use clorox. You can you can let it settle. You can use these other pills, the iodine kind of pills to get

the water ready, you know. But that's really important that you know how to do that, and a lot of people, you know, we always assume that civilization is going to be civilized all the time, that people have not read enough Prepper books or or Apocalypse Now books. Who you know, what happens when the power goes off? Where are you going to? Where are you going to store your lensen is insulin? Is there a Is there a way to dip it in a stream to keep it cool? I

mean it's got to be. You know that you can keep the insulin apparently fifty nine eighty eighty six degrees for up to twenty eight days and will continue to work. But you've got to make sure that you have what happens, you know, the keeping it drop, just like we used to cool beer. I hate this, yeah, Beer and sodas and watermelons used to dip them in streams to keep them cold until you're ready to eat them. So, you know,

people have to be thinking about this stuff. And you know, it's not that it takes a rocket scientist to do this, but it is important that if wherever you go, you have to be thinking about, well, what if? What if the tree falls in front of my car? Tree falls in back of my car? Here I am stuck in the middle of the road and it's the beginning to get cold, it's rainy, and I don't have any food, you know. It's it's not you need to carry a as you say, you don't need to carry a month

supply of food in the car with you. But it's a good idea to have some kind of way of capturing water, some way of purifying that water, cleaning that water up so you can drink it. And if you have some food stuff, it's always a good idea to measure, you know, to ration it out so you don't eat it all in the in the first ten minutes of panic.

was in the Navy, but for most of the Navy, I think pretty much I was in the zone. But I live in a hurricane zone. Hurricanes are just part of life, and you know, folks around here are expecting them. But it don't have to be a hurricane as anything that can happen. What happens if you lose power for a week or two weeks, there can be circumstances that it's not a storm that causes power. You don't again, you don't have to read funky books to know that

that's a definite occurrence. You look at some of the stories that have come out of Ukraine and they're just parallel of stories you've always seen in civil conflict, where people who have never in their life really had to deal, even very poor people with a lack of running water, a lack of a regular supply of food, lack of heat and cooling our shoes. Even it does not take long with there's a whole list of things that can

happen that everybody should have. You don't have to be a like whatever that character was from the last of us, who was who had been in his whole life of preparing for the world to end. You don't have to be one of those guys. You just have to be able to take care of yourself and the people in your family, and maybe a couple of other people too, until the rest of civil society comes around. And I think, you know, I liked how you brought up early on. Now not just the private pilots, but a lot of

private individuals. They went up and volunteered whether it was helping clear their street or helping their neighbor who might be mobility impaired. Are a bunch of college kids grabbing, uh, grabbing a couple of friends and loading up a car and going up to where Samaritan's purse it was in

western North Carolina, going how can I help? And it's amazing when you have what two hands can do in the course of seventy two to ninety six hours in a good organization, multiply that by a couple of thousand, and government can handle the big pixel stuff, but the little pixel stuff sometimes get overlooked. But if you have good volunteers and good organizations that you can link up with,

it's solid. And I think there are lessons from this domestically that I think does play into the national security. Are in a humanitarran assistant disaster response we talk about we have a lot of those capabilities a resident in the National Guarded Reserves. Yeah, they're great for wartime situations or in responding like we did in Haiti fifteen years ago or so after that earthquake, but they're also pretty good when you have a hurricane, a bad forest fire,

your North American natural disaster that we have it. It makes a difference.

You don't have to have one for every person, but you have to have one that can reach a number of people so that they're you know that because if they're battery powered and there and there are people on the ground who can transmit information is absolutely essential. You know, we're here, we're here to help you, will be as with you as soon as we can stay near your house, protect yourself, you know all that stuff that that's the

information that's important. Then and if you know, if somebody up there has a has a CB radio or HAM radio or somebody that they can broadcast say and I've got thirty five people around me, that's great. But the other side of it is the people that are being affected need to know that there is help on the way and what the what the current information is. And I think that's I think that's a vital thing, and that ought to be the case in every single disaster.

I mean, wherever you lose our normal TV and radio, there ought to be a system to have. And I know the HAM operators do this because they they they are pretty mobile about this, but they can't reach everybody. But there ought to be a system where we can get to the public radios where they can listen in

to what's going on. I think it's very important for national security because that stops a lot of the running around in circles that you see where people are panicking and they don't know, you know, I don't know what's going to happen next. We've all got to get on the road immediately. You know, you jam the roads up, you you cost all kinds of other issues. I think

that that is a that's a vital it can be able to communicate and have people understand what's going on.

on the Internet. I'll just use cell data. When everybody who usually uses Wi Fi all of a sudden hops on their service provider to do sell data, your throughput's not too great. And I was thinking about a lot of these isolated counties that we saw in western North Carolina, and you know, even down in southwest Florida, we still have people that don't even have power yet, simply because that store was so impressive in so much of we

that we do. Now, from a communications point of view, you need Internet connectivity and you've got a starlink MANI that you can pick up and that's this is the kind that's about the size of a laptop and gives you satellite communication. They cost about six hundred bucks and fifty dollars a month for roaming, charges up to one hundred and sixty five if you need unlimited. But that that is something that you can't give one to everybody.

But if you have various locations that you can drop a Starlink Starlink Mini, you can set up command post to back up for the radio. You get a lot more bandwidth that way, other people can come in. That's something else that I think is in our modern age. It's something to ponder for your disaster kit, especially if you're really out in the boonies and isolated. How do you communicate if you don't have a cell tower or you need to be able to get internet connectivity for

whatever reason? It used to be you know, Antenta the size of a Volkswagen. Now it's the size of a fifteen inch laptop, and it's really approaching affordability for a lot of people, but definitely for governments. And if you look at I want to say Murphy's law, but it's not Murphy's law. What's the law where everything doubles at eighteen months? You know what I mean?

satellite communications devices too. So if you're a hiker and you're off in the boildies, you fall down or break your leg, you can get on this little tiny garment thing and book right up to a satellite and send out your emergency message and tell people you can. They'll know where you are because it sends out a signal and they can come rescue you. And you know, so those of us who do a lot of hiking have

those things. And again I know starlink has. One of the things about that or six hundred buck one is that you can also use it for short term operator. You know, so if you don't want to run whatever it is for fifty dollars a month forever, you can say, okay, and I'm going to be up in the mountains for in my hunting cabin for a couple of months or a couple of weeks. I just you can. You can buy a short term and use it for that. But

the disadvantage is you have to have electricity. I think it has to plug in somewhere, right, I guess you could use if you have a car, and you could probably cut up into your car somehow, but.

And we had a an incident recently off Florida where these people, as happens there, their boat went down and they I seen a reporter of refrigerator was probably their cooler. They use their cooler for flotation. Their boat had any fib but they also had a personal one that they that they strapped on and that's that's how the coast Guard was able to find them. For those that haven't done search and rescue at sea, you can be on a twenty two foot twenty five foot thirty foot boat

that's above ground and you're hard to see. You disappear real fast. Ocean is big. People are small. But if your two guys hanging on to sixty four court cooler as your flotation, yeah, you know that it just might

be your time. But those personal emergency devices is also something that if you are really, really really isolated in a situation, you pop one of those off, they're going to see there's somebody at this lat long who hasn't having an emergency, that that's something else that might be worth consideration, especially you're somebody who's insulin dependent.

of the topics we have is the self help. I mean, the self help goes a long way. People need to be able to take care of themselves and tell until

you can get in. At some places, as we now see in the mountains of North Carolina, some places are a lot harder to get to in three or four days than you'd think because when your road washes out and the bridge washes out and the only access is you know, non existent, then that and you know, it's nice for a mountain house up in the middle of no place, but it does create problems trying to get to you if something bad happens. So you've got to be prepared to hang in there by yourself.

luckily none of the bridges were lost. And then you look over at the inner coastal Waterway, or you look at a thoroughfare like the Saint John's River, or if you go up north, you know the various canals, the Great Lakes, all the tributaries of the Mississippi. When you're looking at heavy things like fuel and lots of food for lots of people, you know, you've got to wonder if there's more ways that we could be able to use those waterways and situations like this or at least

have this scenario. But in order to have that stuff that either has to be subsidized by the government. Are we do other things to make it economically feasible. I know that one reason why we have so many semis on our roads is there are some externalities human made beyond what the Good Lord gave us that makes water transport in our inland waterways not quite as effective as just loading things on a truck and movement.

You know, that's probably New Orleans when when the levee when either blew up the levee or whatever they did to to flood the lower lying areas. But you know, that's a that's an issue. You've got water everywhere, not necessarily can you take barges and get and towboats and get stuff up and down? But uh again, if you if you you know, it's a it's a question of, uh, we have a stuff pre stagum because we don't have enough stuff free stage. And the answer is, well, we

sure we do. We have a lot of stuff pre stage. It's in grocery stores, water, you know, wal marts, costcos, all the stuff places that have mass things. It's just a matter of being able to tie it all together and get get people working on we have to talk about something else. Are you still there?

should know. If not, well, it is a link on the show page after the show. But you know, back to the Future episode seven, we on board one of our quickly disappearing Taekwondo class cruisers. We demonstrated that we could reload a VLS cell Comma again at c very. You know, my my comment was excellent, more faster, I should have added, and you know, can we do it

with Arley Burks too. It is a hard thing to do, but most things in war are hard to do, and one thing that keeps hitting my head over and over again recently. There's a lot of the arguments I have, well, this is too hard, this is too difficult, this is

too dangerous. Yes, and if you're looking at peacetime operations and what we do every day in peace, but we need to be thinking more and more, which we haven't thankfully had to do in a few decades, about the fact that we're going to be asked to do significant combat operations at sea in the Western Pacific if China is actually not bluffing about the challenge that she's going to do in order to get her place back in

the world. And if so, we need to be prepared, and we need to be capitalized at peace to do things that are difficult and a bit dangerous because it's a long long distance from Hawaii or the West Coast to the western Pacific if your vlsls are empty and you've got to leave. So I guess it's a nice but limited capability. But we can't make it faster and more safe if we don't experiment and test.

aircraft loyal wingmen. We need these loyal missile barges that can accompany the force and they can go sit somewhere out of out of any range of the Chinese threat and power themselves forward and then have a place where we can they can meet the ships and the ships can can either you use those barges to fire whatever weapons we're going to be shooting and to and expend the barge capacity first before they get into their own magazines.

And you know that that could be if you had money via I think a Ticonderuga class cruiser had two sixty one cell launchers. I think that the various birks have odd numbers of one sixty four thirty two launch anyway, so you've got a bunch of these launchers on the other destroyers. But yeah, need more than that, and you're gonna need several barges, and it could be anything from

converted merchant ships. So with enough deck space to carry these things that can hold the launchers, which weigh I don't know, thirty three thousand pounds or something, they're pretty heavy, and you know, some system for being able to transmit the information to shoot information to the to the the things in the in the launchers so they can they can be fired accurately where they're supposed to go.

okay if it's too hard, if you want out of the box ideas. If you need a stable ship to reload forward, okay, here's Sal's good idea ferry throw a spot against the wall Chapter eight and thirty two. Whether it's the US Fitzgerald on the motor vessel Troms Shelf. A lot of people remember the Samuel B. Roberts was taken back off a mighty servant too. These are these ships that you drive another ship one and then they pump out the water and they lift your entire ship

out of the water. Okay, that seems pretty stable. What if you had one of those ships that could bring on board your Urley Burke lock it up. You don't have to go all the way out of the water, but enough that there's no movement between the two, and then you can load them from there. That's another option to look at if you want to modify one of those ships that has been put in ordinary somewhere. But the excuse is that it's too hard, we can't do it.

These are people that I don't think are really thinking about why we have a navy and what we're going to ask our sailors to do here in the next five years or fifteen years or maybe never. We need to have that capability to reload thevlsls west of the International Date Line, and saying Yakuska in Japan and Subic Bay is another place we can do it, or even Darwin, that's not an answer, because those are all under the guns are the missiles of the enemy's artillery. They can

strike all those facilities that they want to. We need a place that we can, with relative safety and security and minimal risks, be able to do these operations without having going all the way back to the West Coast or Japan. And I know that we're on the cutting edge that eventually the entire planet will be under the gun of conventional prompt strike. It's okay, we'll deal with it, but I don't see any viable option besides finding a

way to make it happen. Then to make it happen, and I think the Navy knows that that's why they're trying to bring back that capability. It just doesn't seem to have the right hand doesn't have the sense of urgency that the left hand keeps signaling to everybody. And I find that disconcerting.

you with the cranes they had on those things. I mean, it's not like we haven't had these problems. For we had We've had to reload and rearm battleships, cruisers, uh, destroyers, do you name it, for years and years and years. I mean I was on an ammunition ship we used to transfer to, you know, going on lunishment at sea. We'd go alongside, we'd give them bombs and bullets and

sometimes oil and uh missiles. And by the way, working with the nuke missile guys with a large missiles was a huge paint of the rear because the nukes checklists are so anyway we would we've done it. It's not. It doesn't have to. We don't have to invent reinvent every wheel. We just need the ships, but the capabilities

to do what we need them to do. And when you get rid of your tenders, and I whoever came up the idea of doing away with was destroyer tenders ought to be how to find him fe's down, dig them up and and hang him because that's a huge asset to a fleet that's going to be far flong because.

take a solid block of copper. You'll go have a smoke, come back and there's your part because they have a million machine that can create it, have a whole cloth. You even have to wait for DHL to send something to BA Rain so you can have a CV twenty two fly out there and bring it back and hopefully not crash on the return. Yeah, and there's a lot of it. I think is analysis to paralysis. And plus we just it's like you and I like to talk

about it sexy, but boy is it important? You know, which would you rather have five Arley Burks and no tenders? Are four Arly Burks and a tender? I would I would take Option B every day of the week.

floating maintenance ship go along with the fleet. Uh, it's just something that went out of fashion and we need to get that back.

and out of theater to do reloads. Not only is there the tyranny of distance, you're also you're burning up a lot of fuel, especially in the Pacific, being that we don't have enough replenishmentships and we've thrown away red hills, you know, burning up a bunch much if fuel might not be the best utilization when we can have something else forward, And it goes into that and I can't stand the word battlemindedness. I hope somebody can come up with a better one, but we need more, kind of

like the utility of destroyer tenders is. Because we've had two generations without them, people are forgotten, at least most people have forgotten what that utility is. But you also have to keep asking the question that if you are

exquisitely designed to be able to meet peacetime exercise and deployment requirements, Okay, what are you going to do for war? If you can just bear to not meet, as we saw recently, the peace time and the surge deployment requirements, then what are we going to do for war? The reason is we're going to have trouble winning the war, and that's the most expensive thing for a nation to do.

And we recently saw in the recent attacks on Israel by Iran a little better than their attack that happened a few months ago.

defend Israel against the Iranian missiles? And then I saw this weekend that Israel has requested the US Army and we're going to do it. We're deploying a THAD battery THAA D that's their ballistic missile defense. It's able to reach out and touch it much higher and further than

that the Patriot Packed three can do. It's somewhere between Patriot PAC three and SM three, and that means that we now have US Army soldiers on the ground in Israel, and I'm kind of thinking there might be a connection between the two where the US Navy has said we don't have any more SM three to give unless we're going to take out of ships in the Pacific that

we already don't have enough SM three's to do. So another only other option is the Army THAD batteries haven't been doing any shooting, but the US Navy has been at it for the better part of the year in the Red Sea and off Israel, So I think that's an interesting And then yet about the utility of seapower where it's it's not on land, so you don't have to worry about everything from car bombers to one hundred and seven millimeters rockets to mortar teams to snipers. You

don't have to worry about host nation legal issues. I don't have to worry about having an airhead to getting in and out of you've got a DDG bloating off the coast. It can show up when it wants to, It can leave when it wants to. If people did what you and I said, it have the ability to replenish whenever it wanted to. But that's only as good as the weapons it's able to carry and then sustain in the fight. And when they can't sustain the fight,

they gotta leave. But if you still have an outstanding requirement. Because I think again I'm just reading through the through the lines through an open source, I'm pretty confident that Israel probably does not have very many of their arrows, which is their version of I mean, it's not the same thing, but accomplishes the same mission as bad which is blistic missile defense. They're probably pretty thin there, and we're the only people are going to help Israel anyway.

I just thought that was a real interesting development that we're now going to have US Army soldiers preparing for combat in Israel. So hey, welcome to October twenty twenty four.

we would call coastguard cutters. Just impressive industrial capability that we, believe it or not, we don't have.

these jobs. We've created a nightmare for ourselves. And you know, I keep going back to the peace devidend that that you know, it was just a matter of self deception. We you know, we we were convinced that peace had

broken out and everybody who's gonna sit around seeing kumbay ah and uh, Meanwhile other people were thinking about how well, you know, here's what the US is good at. How

can we how can we beat them at that? And if you look at the way the Chinese have their layered defenses and their active defense concept and what they want to accomplish out there, we really need to work on getting that first island chain with its own active defense and and then I know the Marines are looking at this, but you know, we need to have disperse

small forces there. They need to be armed well equipped enough to to to make things uncomfortable for the Chinese should they move, and that requires the equipment that we don't seem to have right now. So I'm a little baffled how we're going to do this all in a couple of years. But I hope the CNO is right.

years ago. Though you probably couldn't have sold it, you should have been able to sell it ten years ago, because we're ten years past when President Mama announced the Pacific Sorry it's worth laughing about Europe and the Middle

East just they can't quit us for some reason. But there's stuff that we could do now that if the pessimist are right and the balloon goes up in twenty twenty seven at the earliest, you know, what you do right now will start to tickle in the fleet unless you're just going to do you know things that will show up in twenty thirty five. So more, if more

can be done now, that'd be nice. It will also be interesting to see, regardless of which party wins here in a few weeks in the national election, I think if Vice President Harris wins, she's going to want her own team. I think the Biden team has given enough time. She'll probably replace those with those new people. There might become new motivations. Trump obviously will bring in a whole new team with a vote in their teeth to disrupt, as we've talked about before. But see who again, Harris

or Trump doesn't make a difference. But look at who they get as their sect deaf, who they get as their Secretary of the Navy, and why, And that might give you some vision if we're going to see something one way or the other what happens in Congress. Of course, that's where the money comes from. But you as it stands right now, it's it's been kind of a non issue in the election. I have an idea of what direction the truck Trump team might go, but people are policy.

You won't know until you see what team he picks out. But as far as Harris goes, I would assume that there would be a lot of inertia even if she does replace all the top people, because all the second, third, and fourth layer people will probably move from Cherry to Cheribe, but it'll be the same people in the same worldview. So very very very similar to the priorities of the last three and a half years.

the lynchpin of the Pacific. As long as is they put boots on the ground with the right equipment to do the job. They better start moving those people out there, because if the balloon goes up, there's no way we're going to get them mirror in time to stop a lot of things that could could be really bad.

I was like, that's my argument, but hey, it's just nic see the other people coming to the same solution. They were talking about the the fact that if we're really interested in the Army, I'm in the in the Pacific, that the Army is a support team and a third tier operator in the Pacific, and in a budgetary environment, if you need to get more money to shift to

the Navy and the Air Force. It's got to come from the army, and you know, part of that has to be that, And like them, I would like to see a breakout on which bases they are and how they're counting them. But their research had one hundred thousand army personnel stationed in Europe in one way or another,

and that's unsat that. That's that's not what is needed when our European NATO allies have both a greater population than we do and a higher GDP And if we needed to get it, it's going to have to come from Europe. And then how will NATO react and things like that we have I think is that this year, our next year that we're paying an interest off the debt as much as we spend on national defense one of those two. So I don't see a massive increase

in the budget. So like former mid Rats guest Hertzinger said that, you know, hey, it's got to come from the army.

marines going in there. We got the air base, We've got navy facility, we probably you know, where where does the army go and where and how do they spread themselves out so that they provide, uh, the the stuff that we need. And that is something needs to be discussed at levels three high up. I don't see. But and I'm also curious as to how they get all this stuff there because, as we've talked about so many times, our c transportation system is a little bit screwed up right now.

a position. I think that that chairman she has told his military, I want you to be ready to I don't know what day he's told and he just wants to have the option of being able to take Taiwan by force. And I got a feeling that a few years ago his military didn't have a chance to And they said, well, in order to do that, we need to do X and Y, And he said, okay, then we're going to do that, and you keep me updated

on when you think we'll be ready. I may I ask you to go, but I don't want that option. They have not decided that they want to play around in Europe or the Middle East in a military way.

long game in the future. But we seem to just be the global fire brigade, going from issue to issue to issue without really being able to back up a bit and asking ourselves, you know, what, what are we what are we actually doing here? What is what do we need to do? What do we need to focus on? What do we need to ask more of our friends to do? Because we simply can't do it all? Because we do seem to be trying to do it all.

no no, yeah, pain yeah, yeah, said he said. Yeah, I mean that's why the Italian Navy just sailed its aircraft carrier to the to the Pacific. You know, they the Italians have a pretty good fleet and and they just they've been escorting uh Italian and European ships through the through the Red Sea. Great, Now, where's the shipping in the Red Sea going? Most of it's going to Europe, not going to you know, if we're getting our oil.

But oil has always kind of gone around and those big super attackers has always gone around the tip of Africa or the other direction. But you know, this is this is a concern for everybody who's interested in freedom in the sea, and not just the United States of America. And so we've had we've had a lot of free riders, We've had a lot of these flag of convenience ships which may or may not be US owned. Why are we providing protection for the for the people who have

registered their ships in Ecuador or Mongolia? I mean talking about countries that shouldn't have ship flags. I mean this is Switzerland. Yeah, we've reached new levels of absurdity. I mean, it's the idea was we would protect, certainly protect US shipping, and we do believe in the in the global freedom of the seas, but we can't. You know, we're out this doing doing this about eighty five percent on our own.

Europe's got money that the EU. Maybe I don't know if they matches dollar for dollar in terms of gross domestic but I think it's pretty close considering they have the number of people in these countries. They have there, so let them carry some of the load.

But I know I know that they're wearing the ships out, you know from the from the carrier operations and all that stuff, that we're just we're just beating our ships. I mean, we're like horses there or saddles have been roaded hard and hung up wet and added that it's not a good thing.