Episode 706: The Midrats Horn of Plenty

want to share. And also if you don't already, maybe you got to leave halfway through the show, or this is just one of the few times you've had a chance to join us live. If you go over to iTunes or speaker or any of your other aggregators of podcast, go ahead and find mid Rats and subscribe. That way, we will be there with you at a time to your convenience. And this is no guest, is just Mark and I. Today we're going to cover the waterfront here

as everybody gets ready for Thanksgiving. And I'll probably repeat it at the end of the show. But I know everybody's going to have a week full of feasting and family and friends.

the riverside transaction and joining the chat room. So that's always good to have. Kind Of to kick things off, we kind of coordinated in the pre show some of the thoughts that we had bounced through our mind, and as the kickoff was going, Mark, I was thinking, you know the topic that you brought up because at the end of the day, national defense it is a people business. You have all these great and exciting technologies and machines, but behind all of it and the theory, how do

you execute it. It's the people and an all volunteer force.

You have a pretty complicated set of variables that being able to maintain the excellence of that all volunteer force, and that has to do with not just recruiting, but retention. And there are a few rumbles in the retention front that people should be asking hard questions about.

can with those. What we've seen is that has the size of the Navy is as shrunk, then the demands placed on the assets we have has increased because we're trying to meet the same commitments that we've historically met with a larger force. And so that means that the people of the Davy and the Marine Corps and probably all the other services are getting used They're getting used up. We're burning them out at a younger age. They We

have trouble retaining mid career officers in aviation. We have trouble retaining skilled personnel who can find work that doesn't involve them leaving home for eight to ten months on an inconsistent but regular basis. It is not taking care of your people, but that it is the part of the snowball effect of allowing your fleet to shrink to the size where it can't do all the missions that

are demanded of it. But we sit won't say we can't do that, and so we're trying to do everything with people that are already on the ragged edge of burning out. And it's a problem if you have a shortage of aviation squadron department heads where some in some cases people are doing they're double hatted, as in the department at World, if you can't keep people motivated to when especially when they're facing and it's not about money.

Somewhere along the way I've read I was going to my various degrees that you read about money is not a great motivator.

a zero sum game out there. You have a fixed number of ships, fixed number of squadrons, fixed numbers submarines, shore commands that need to be manned. With your senior leadership, you're going to have a COO and XO and your various department heads. And you want to have in a meritocracy, which is the military with a blemish here or there. It is a bit of meritocracy. We can't mess around with evening but the best. Ultimately, you want to have

a pool of people to choose from. So if you have you have ten important jobs you have to fill, and you have twenty people to choose from. When you get those twenty people in front of you, you can say, you know, here's these four absolutely we want they're up there.

selected the best. You have mitigated performance risk due to low quality, our poor personality mixes, and things go well, which is important when you have multi billion dollar equipment, nuclear reactors. Things that go boom are very important. Now, if you have those ten billets to fill and you only have twelve people to choose from. Then you are going to bring in some people that probably shouldn't be given that opportunity to excel, and that degrades the performance

of your military. And you have all sorts of problems developed from that. So you have to create an environment that you retain enough people to pick from. And you know the department head problems that people have. When people get their commission, whether they go to the academy, rotcci, they're usually in their early twenties unless they're prior enlisted. So let's just pick a round date twenty two, and let's say that the people who have the most obligation

I believe is still pilots. You're thirteen tens. So let's say you get through a flight school at age twenty four. Let's say just use round numbers here. I don't know what it is right now, whether it's six, seven, eight, let's just say eight because that's easy math to do. Twenty four plus eight is thirty two, so at thirty

two you can punch out. That also happens to be to years after you have gotten your commission, which means it's about time to go up for a department at the Green board. So you have all these people that are given the ability to get out because they've got through with your obligations and surface warfare. You can leave a little bit earlier. But let's back up, so you have thirty two. Let's back up for the surface guys

who can get out earlier they want to. When you know you get your go to your ship at age twenty two, do a year fiddle fiddling around that gets you to twenty three. You do a three year tour that gets you to twenty six, twenty seven and whatever. Between the ages of twenty seven and thirty two is one of the most important leverage parts for young men and women for a variety of things. That's that's when you do mostly your family formation. If you are recently married,

you're starting to have kids. If you're not married, especially around age age thirty, you're getting itchy whether you're a male or female, and if you are female, when you reach age thirty, biology starts being really mean to you if you want to have a family, so you've got to be really motivated, and when you do the plus and minuses of whether you want to stay in or not, that's a real critical juncture to get there, and I think one of the things we hurt ourselves is, and

this is a senior leadership problem, that we haven't had an admiral no or really a second NEV and a sect death no. That when you tell everybody that an eight month to eleven month deployment is going to be the new normal, that doesn't just have an effect on ship's maintenance. That has effect on retention is six months forever. A lot of the listeners here who have done deployments, you know six months is tough because you do twelve

months work up ahead of time. I remember the calendar I kept when I was on the enterprise, backing up three hundred and sixty days from when we got back from deployment.

for command because you don't have as much competition. And I think the argument could be made that we probably are losing some of our best people too, because I know one of the best officers I served with when they came up to their obligation, they loved the Navy, they loved what they did. But he was offered a chance to go to Harvard to get his NBA, and

he actually thought real hard about it. But this is the nineteen nineties and there wasn't much love going on, and so he took off and did great things in other places. That retention is multifaceted. I think you're right. It's not just money. If it was money would be easy to solve.

You look at the people who can get the job done, and the people who get the job done get all the jobs, because you don't want to give an ihortant job to somebody who's not as competent and won't do as good a job as somebody who is competent. And we'll do a good job. And that's the way it works. But if you're if people are leaving, putting more burden on your on your superior performers, now you're grinding those folks down a lot faster than than they need to

be to be ground down. And as you say, it's not the the sixth or seven or eight month deployment, it is the work up to get there. So even on a ship, you're going through refresher training, you're going through all kinds of stuff to get ready to go. And you know, all of that involves all hands, and

it involves everybody spending more time at sea. And and you know, when I was on a destroyer out of San Diego, we were the we'd come back from a deployment and then we were the duty destroyer for a while. That meant that every time a carrier needed somebody to go out for a four day carrier wall or something, you know, we would we would be out there following along as a as a you know, the destroyer falls

carriers along. The playing guard is not fun. And it's especially if you're if you're in port for you know, we're gonna go in port for three days or four days and you're gonna one in four one and three duty section, which means that you could have the duty when you leave the night before you go, and have the duty when you get back, and that means you

have like two days with your family. It is it is a It is a not a career enhancing position to be in where you feel like that it's you're you're giving all and nobody else is really taken care of or even contemplating what it means to be in that position.

You know, what type of prophylactic deployment are we going to do to make this present mission? Or do we bring people home and start to rebuild our maintenance, rebuild our quality of life. And these long employments are also quality of work because you start running out of parts, that you start breaking things because people machines get tired

on long deployments. You have additional problems if people come home because their family life is not not everybody married the person who's best suited to be a Navy wife.

don't have enough smaller units. We need to get We need to find the other folks in the Department of Defense to you know, come pick up some of the slack. We certainly send enough Navy people to assist the army in its land wars and in various places. Well, I think I read the other day someplace and you maybe arn more about this than I do, but ninety percent of one of the cgtfs was a we're Navy people instead of instead of the you know, they're not doing

Navy things, they're doing Army things. So that you know, we we need to call on the Army and say you need to if you're going to be coastal artillery like it used to be, then it's time to get

going with this. And you know we need to figure out how to work that. And we also need to make sure we don't get involved in these endless wars where we try and and we know we talked about this after Somali. We were not we were not going to go in the nation building business, and then we went into the nation building business. Everything we've been in since then. Really need to if we're going to go do something, we need to make it quick. And if

you're looking at doing something about the hoofies. I put up a post on X the other day about have anybody looked at a terrain of western Yemmen. I mean there are thirteen thousand foot peaks in there. It is a rugged place. I'm sure after Afghanistan, we really don't I want to go operating in places where the locals have all the knowledge in the high ground.

Is this idea of the best and the brightest have a great idea on how to use this little lever of power, whether it's managed escalation, whether it's nation building, whether it's Samantha powers in her group, responsibility to protect it made a what Libya's is today today we continue

from the Pentagon to foggy Bottom. We keep using the same set of criteria for the people that we are going to write our plans, write our strategy, lead our security and national security infrastructure to come from the same schools that have the same CV have come from the same think tanks, like I saw twice last week, one of which was an interview at Brookings with Admiral Paparo that maybe we'll come back to where one of the guys from Brookings was singing all the prages praises of Petraeus,

which the time fifteen twenty years ago I said some nice things about him as well, But in hindsight, I don't care if you got his PhD from Princeton. He does a hot mess and did not create a net positive for our nation where it stands now in twenty twenty four. But they keep looking to him as if he is some sage, and we need to stop and think about why we keep repeating these same errors, these forever were, or these unresolved conflicts. Another example is is

the operation going on in Gaza. All those people who

were asking for a ceasefire in Gaza. Would that have made the experience in Gaza any better, any more likely to be peaceful and more likely to be resolved, or to just create another festering wound. You look at what the attacks on Israel in the north by Hesbolah. That all derives from the fact that when the Israelis got punched in the face hard and withdrew from southern Lebanon, UNIFIL and UN was supposed to come in and protect it. Well, we've all seen the fact that between UN posts A

and B you've got rockets from hesbela shooting off. That just does not work the template that we think produces the best mind and theories for our national security. It's doing just the opposite. And we have it our incentives and this incentives have been wrong for the last thirty years. How you reset that, I don't know, but probably a start is to be very direct with these people, and maybe talking to different people would be a plus. That

would be a start. Is except the fact that we are not we are not training our best in our brightest might be going to the certain institutions and might be trained by some great places, but the end product is not fit for purpose. And I think the scoreboard kind of outlines that fact. Whether you agree or not, and that's fine, but look at the scoreboard and tell me where I'm wrong.

sit down and talk about it. And but the problem is that somebody will come along and they let's take say you work for a grocery store. You know, they slip and fall on a loose grape allegedly, and their theory is that they if they sue you, that you'll reach some kind of settlement accommodation with them. Well, the other side of that is if you've got a case like that where somebody is suing you for reasons you know, we're totally invalid, but it's going to cost you to

go to court. Sometimes you still take it. Should take it to court, because otherwise you'll get the reputation of being a pushover, which is what I think. Exactly what you're talking about is that you know that the people all rush in after there's a company. We shouldn't be fighting, We should be that we should not let these this happen. This is this is bad for humanity. You may have been fighting worse for a zillion years, and the winners used to make the rules. Now we have the losers

making and saying, oh, yeah, well you know, yes, we're gonna We're going to continue to escalate this unless we get whatever the reward is they're looking for. And that is the problem sometimes. I mean, you know, it's probably made me sound like a till of the hunt, but until I had the right idea. Sometimes you just have to go in and and for what he was going for his goals.

externalize their internal problems. That there are no pretty solutions. There are no nice solutions, just like for the Gosa operation, there's nothing pretty. There's nothing nice. Our solution to defeating imperial.

hoothies are picking the fight with us. Again, there is no pretty er good solution, but there are solutions out there.

the Houthis die on their behalf with no little or no risks for themselves, that you know, that's part of the prop So when the when the Israelis attack, when the Iranians directly attack, is really is Israeli's respond in kind. You know, that's that's a different, much different kind of worst scenario than than fighting proxies who are getting money and and uh weapons from their from their proxy masters.

And you know that includes the Russians, it includes the Iranians and undoubtedly includes the Chinese because the Chinese are are providing stuff to both Russia and to to uh Irans.

we shouldn't fight. Everybody wants us to fight because we're the ones who's supporting the the trade corridors of the world. So you know, what do you what do you do?

Then we invite our allies to commit, and that's great because it's the European navies have been stepping up in the in the Red Sea, and we've certainly been playing with the some of the Allied nations up in the northern area of Europe off Norway and Denmark and all those areas, and that's that's great, But we have to be more demanding of our allies too, you know, which you and I have talked about had infinitem and some of the allies are stepping up. So the Poles who

are you know, they're they always looking east. They recognize where their front is and it's it's not it's not to the north or to the south. So that says a lot. But you know, we need to we need to be aware that that doing things like reducing your the size of your forces. And we see this with the bridge. They reduce the size of their forces there. They don't want to spend money on on the escort ships of the carriers they have. They have to moth

ball a couple of of unwrapped ships. You know, this is this is this is the way uh, great nations die. They get caught up and and things that matter internally maybe,

but really aren't doing much to defend their coastlines. And I think the British have a problem even greater than we have, and that's the fact their political class is divorced from security requirements and a lot of it's just the pressure of the welfare state that they've built. And you would like to make it into a party problem like well, it's the Labor Party.

of the support that they need. I think we have a little more of a healthy environment because even more than we are, the United Kingdom is an island nation. They cannot feed themselves. We can feed ourselves if for all, all of a sudden, if we lost access to the Atlantic and the Pacific, we'd have some economic problems, maybe a little bit of industrial problem with not getting some raw material, but we won't starve to death.

the Falkland Islands War. They've got the shell of a navy. They have two great conventional carriers, but they only have two and they have incomplete air wings. And it's sad, and it's also underlines the fact that our allies are not what they could have been or were fifteen twenty thirty years ago. That we kind of need to reset and recalibrate our expectations. The Japanese are going to be spending more, a lot of that will show up at sea.

That'll be nice. Australia and the Pacific is turning two, but they've feely kind of plus or minus a million people from the state of Florida. You know, they got a continent, but they're not a large population. They're not going to be able to contribute much. There needs to be a lot more hard truth which is one of the nice things about Admiral Paparo's like an hour and twenty minute discussion that he had over at Brookings is he threw a lot of hard facts on the two

people classic think tankers. I love you, folks, I really do, but you live in DC and you live in an interesting bubble. Admiral Paparo, he's the guy who's in the seat right now that if a war kicks off west of the International date Line, he's the one that's going to have to fight it. And he put out some really hard truths that were good to see because when people outline what you and I have been talking about, Mark, they okay, well you know we've got depth Secteth Hicks

has got her replicator program. Or I saw earlier today Elon Musk said, uh, you know, look at look at all these these drones. These are going to solve all We don't need a big fleet. We just have a few thousand drones that are all flying together. That that's good in a localized, small environment. But he told everybody that these are not useful in the in the great reaches of the Pacific, from Okinawa to Taiwan to Japan down to Singapore. Those are not useful in any way,

shape or form. He talked about one of one of our hobby horses, the logistical truth of the Pacific. He was very upfront saying that he was never happy with his magazine depth and the fact that the support of Ukraine and Israel has a very real impact on his magazine depth to begin with. And you can read between lines with a few of the other topics he saw, and you have you have to sit through a lot of butt to get a lot of it to get

to it. Of that conversation, which I people can find, I'll put links.

how are we going to sustain everything else? We would completely give up on air and materiy aritime superiority in the Pacific. You know, if that's that's the thing, what if you don't have it, you can't you can't sustain it. If you and if you can't sustain it, you might as well not have it. And that's kind of where we are. And you know, we're talking about all these other programs, and you were right about the Britains or UK's problems with its social welfare programs. We're in the

same boat. One point three trillion dollars. One point three trillion dollars goes to social security eight hundred and sixty nine billion, to Medicare eight five hundred or six hundred and sixteen billion, to medicaidcome security programs four hundred and forty eight billion. Those are those are things you can't touch. Defense is I think eight hundred and five billion in the twenty twenty three budget. Uh, you know that that's

where your defense money goes. And the total revenues are only four point one trillion, and there's a budget of six point one trillion, And so that you know, that is a formula first disaster, and that's that's how you end up like the UK. You can't keep spending money on programs that you don't have the and the has the boomers people like me retire. I certainly I appreciate all the benefits I get, but my goodness, I'm being

supported by in a Ponzi scheme. I'm supported by a lot of fewer people than the boomer supported my parents. That really is something we need to take a heart hard look at. And I'm hoping Musk and his doge plan looks at this stuff with a with a very very hard eye, because we can't keep going the way we're going. We can't we can't make everybody, can't guarantee everybody's income unless you have some major change in the way we do things. You know, and back in the day,

there was the fair tax. The idea was we'd pay everybody some kind of basic minimum income and that that would they wouldn't have to pay Some people wouldn't have to pay taxes on it, but the income, the government income, was all from taxes on goods as they entered the commerce stream. I don't know what the right answer is. I'm not not an economist by any stretch imagination, but we can't go on the way we're going.

immovable object. That immovable object is going to be the blob in Washington, d C, that huge bureaucracy that you're going to go in front of these people, a lot of whom are pulling down one hundred and seventy five to two hundred thousand dollars and more a year where they just can't define what they're doing, and to cut significant numbers of those that are so concentrated in DC. The amount of pushback and resistance is going to be

a site to see. And history is full of examples of how dangerous bureaucracies can be when they're put under a threat. You can look back to the the eunuchs of Imperial China, the janissaries of the Ottomans. Eventually was resolved at the end of a cannon, which I don't think we're going to be able to do here. It'll be lawsuits. But if they really want to follow through and somebody's going to come in and go, you know,

we have one hundred ses here in this room. Look to your left and your right, only one of y'all is going to be here in six months. That will create a high warrible inside of DC from everything from lobbying to real estate where otherwise unemployable people will have to find a job, or you have a bunch of people who will have to move or will take to the streets. I don't know DC is such a company town.

I don't know whether the end of what Musk and Ramaswami do, how much of that is actually executable are maybe a value of that would be here's what we want to do, but we can't do it because of US Code, empty France, this regulation.

likes to talk about the eighty thousand employees over a Navsey. Now, a lot of that are people that actually are holding welding torches and things like that. But I'll guarantee you if you start picking apart and looking at that manning document, just like you if you look at what was employed in your county school system in nineteen seventy five versus what's employed now, when it comes to staff versus faculty, your head will explode. I think you'll see a lot of that too in the bureaucracy.

it's spilled out in the constitution. You know who does what, and then you and then you go from there. But but what they didn't remember, or maybe they didn't remember, we haven't haven't looked at it was that if politicians have access to these ways to spend money to benefit their voters, they're going to use that to buy votes. And we I mean we see it in this last administration. If you're if you're going to promise people you're going to cancel student loans, Well there and you've got a

student loan. Are you going to support the people?

student loans because they hatored in water basket weaving or or whatever the useless degrees are that they got.

making it work? And if you want to talk about educationist Department of Education serve a function, and you know, can we combine some of the without creating a larger bureaucracy. Is it possible to do the same job by combining some of the things that we do? And you know, I love my US mail, but I'm not sure that the that we couldn't farm that out to Amazon and probably get more bang for the.

But I just ask them, you know how many how many admirals there are in the US Navy, And it says it's a statutory cat for flag officers in the Navy across all grades. Grades is typically one hundred and sixty two one hundred and seventy officers, one hundred and twenty rear admirals upper and lower half, thirty vice admirals, and five to ten full admirals. That's what they say, so statutory cap. That means it's a house in the Senate.

If so, the President would sign it and he could get Senate in the House to do it.

It is a question that that again, why do we have any I mean, these are the questions that we keep asking, we keep answering, and I think our our answers are different than a lot of other folks. But our navy is not here to provide jobs. Our navy is not here to provide places for young men and women to live while they while they mature. The Navy has a function. It's it's to protect this country and

to fight its wars. And how are we doing And you know, to get back where we talked about earlier, we're not doing real well when we're not taking care of our people. And that that means not burying them out and giving them the right equipment to do the job and giving them enough equipment to do the job so that if we did have to surge forces. We actually have the forces to surge, and they won't be ships that are not in the best of maintenance. So I think that that's important. We see this with the

us NS stuff. I mean, they're out doing a really important job and we have new ships coming online. We can't find the cruis demand because nobody wants to do the kind of work they're doing, because they're they're they're being used really, really hard. It is a I think that I would. I'm sure somewhere there's someone who was sitting down going, I know, we really need to think

about this, but we can't do. You know, it is the it is the my hands are tied because because we can't cut or ask our senior citizens to take a dollar ninety eight less per month without causing a disruption in the forest and revolution in the street. As the seventy five year olds get out with pitchforks and and signs that.

find as much more. And I feel that emotion, but I think from a realist point of view, it's just it's not going to happen so and the pressures are going to get worse and worse, but not just for us. I saw an interesting graph yesterday about the middle the Chinese middle class, because they're dying because their demographics are

so horrible. And while India's is slowly growing because they don't have quite the same demographic their their demographic bulge is going to hit a couple of day decades later than China's, and that's going to create a lot of pressures on their end and on our end. It's that budgetary pressure. Pray for peace, because I don't think we're going to find a big enough budget to be able to do a you know, the Naval Act of nineteen

thirty six, thirty eight, nineteen forty. That money isn't just isn't going to come unless we find people up in Congress that are willing to tap the army on the shoulder and going, and we've talked about it here and we're going to assume a risk on our active duty army and we're taking you need to find a way to do what needs to be done in the National

Guard and reserves. Yes, we know about the readiness hit, but we're going to assume risk there so we can get the Air Force and the Navy assets we need to be able to effectively fight west to the International date Line unless that takes place. But again I don't see that movement taking place. We have the budget we have and the only way you can optimize that is to look for efficiencies. And that doesn't mean we always talk about, Okay, what programs are you going to cut?

What are you not going to buy? I have not seen where we actually look at how we are going to cut short staff, how are we going to cut people we have that are non deployable. And the Marines did something really interesting at the end of the double Zeros where if you hadn't deployed, and I think it was thirty six months, you were going to deploy and if you couldn't deploy, then you will be.

And you're not gonna be able to optimize your deployable forces when you burn them out, which means you either need to get more ships that if you don't have more money, you can't get more ships. That you need to look at why you are deploying them and where you are deploying them, and that that makes hard decisions.

Let's have that conversation and you will have something like we saw in two thousand and three when General Shinseki he lost the argument behind the closed doors and so Senator Levin brought him in to open session at the Senate and asked him questions, and shin Seki was exactly right.

But that was a moment that always sticks out to me about somebody who decided, I'm going to go ahead and make the statement, and we know why Senator Levin wanted him to say that in open session. But at the end of the day, I think history has shown that the Rack invasion of two thousand and three was not the high water of American state craft.

We send messages by putting two carrier groups, one of the meds, say, one of the Indian Ocean area somewhere, and another one you know, homeported in Japan. So we have you know, these carrier groups, and they are sending a message, but I don't know who's receiving the message. It doesn't seem to be stopping any of the bad

guys from doing whatever they're doing. So, you know it is it is time to rethink this message sending thing and to think about what the next deploy is because it is the While it's important to do the u the message sending inappropriate time, just having them there all the time is not sending. It's not enough of a re turred effect apparently to stop bad guys from doing whatever they're doing.

Red Sea. Zoom Walk class whole one is actually getting retrofitted now to put a bunch of the big conventional prompt strike or whatever we're calling it nowadays hypersonics in there. But since her commissioning, all she has done is I think three or four months going from San Diego to British Columbia to Alaska to Hawaii and back. And I think before she went into the yard she went from San Diego to Hawaii to go on to Japan and back. That all those billions of dollars twenty years ago did

not buy us much of a fleet. So we've got for those units that can make effects forward, we've got a husband them and their sailors a lot better because we just don't have that much of a bench. And we saw that with the rotation of the DDGs through the Red Sea as well. That's kind of petered off a little bit now, but a lot of that has to be I would think, is the fact that we just don't have the units to sustain what we were

doing there, except at certain moments in time. But it's something we simply just cannot do twenty four to seven,

and we shouldn't have to.

They seem to run forever, you know, if we're using B one b's or whatever, let's you know, let's let's do that. Let's send the message that way. Nothing like writing something on a thousand pound bomb and extillering the mess directly.

Who if you haven't listened to us before, we're coming up on our teenth anniversary in January, and we've already made arrangements a gentleman who y'all can blame or thank for mid Rats existing, one of the guys that helped Mark and I get running on mid Rats. We've been going Claude Bearrabey. He's going to be our guest our fifteenth Anniverse show, and we're going to talk about all

sorts of strange and interesting things. So in January at least, I hope everybody can join us there, whether you've been with us since twenty ten, are you just now coming on? And we're going to take a bye week next week for Thanksgiving, and then we'll be back in December before we take some time off for Christmas.