Sea Control - Sea Control 159: All Things Merchant Marine With Dr. Sal Mercogliano

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

The Collected Works of Dr. Sal Mercogliano:https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/august/be-modern-maritime-power https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/january/suppose-there-was-war-and-merchant-marine-didnt-come https://seahistory.org/wp-content/uploads/SH169_Feature_Jones_Act.pdf https://seahistory.org/we-built-her-to-bring-them-over-there-the-cruiser-and-transport-force-in-the-great-war/ https://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol26/tnm_26_407-424.pdf https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/publications/publication-508-pdf/NHHC4thArmDefense_final_508.pdf https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/05/14/op-ed-the-merchant-marine-americas-fourth-arm-of-defense/ https://gcaptain.com/turbo-activation-19-plus-a-sealift-surge-or-just-a-trickle/ https://gcaptain.com/why-the-united-states-needs-a-merchant-marine-a-historical-basis/ https://gcaptain.com/space-force-how-about-a-maritime-force/ 

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're discussing the U.S. Merchant Marine, pre-World War I, and some parallels to today. Our guest is Dr. Sal Mercogliano. Dr. Mercogliano is an associate professor of history at Campbell University in North Carolina. Our normal caveats apply, so all opinions expressed here are personal opinions and do not reflect the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense, or Campbell University. So we're going to discuss several different articles today, Doctor, and they'll all be linked in the show notes. Before we get into those articles, could you tell us a little bit about your professional background as a historian, as well as what made you decide to focus on the U.S. Merchant Marine in particular?

Sure. First, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's great to see CineSax having the Sea Control podcast back up. My background is I did my master's in maritime history and nautical archaeology at East Carolina University. I did my doctoral dissertation at the University of Alabama, and that was on the role of the merchant marine in national defense. Before my academic career, I was a merchant mariner. Attended the State University of New York Maritime College, graduated with a B.S. in Marine Transportation, sailed for three years with the Military Seal of Command, and then worked four years ashore with them, and decided to leave government work and embark on an academic career. And the thing that really piqued my interest was I was in the first Persian Gulf War. I was stationed on board the hospital ship Comfort of a third officer on board. Oh, wow.

And I distinctly remember being in the Port of Daman, watching the offload of the Army Corps out of Europe for the 1st and the 3rd Armored Divisions. I was just amazed by it. The amount of goods, the amount of cargo, and just the logistics feet behind it was so impressive to me. I just wanted to know more about it. How did we get to that point where we could do that? And that's what really perked my interest in it. I just didn't find a lot about the modern merchant marine out there. And that's been kind of my goal ever since getting out of Alabama.

Thank you for all that background. And, you know, I'm going to have some more questions on that later, particularly your experience there in the first Gulf War. You mentioned, you know, you don't see a lot about the Merchant Marine. I do feel like we're kind of living through a Merchant Marine moment right now, where I've read more about the Merchant Marine, the state of the Merchant Marine in the last six months than I've seen in the previous 16 years of my career. Would you agree with that assessment?

And if so, what do you think is driving it? I think we're seeing a lot more of it, mainly because of the situation the merchant marine finds itself in. You know, post-World War II, we always lived in a very comfortable world where we had a pretty robust merchant marine that we could count on in time of war. Now we're in a much different position. I always use the analogy, you know, we're the number one navy in the world, yet we have the number 22 merchant marine in the world. And I think that decline of the merchant marine, even within the span of our careers, you know, go from the first Persian Gulf War where we had about 450 vessels in the merchant marine, and then you get to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and you're down to 250. Now, if you look at the deep draft merchant marine, you're down to about 185. And I think it's the critical nature of the Merchant Marine and certain aspects of it.

If you look at how military sealift is done, it's kind of a four-sided pyramid. You have the element that supports directly the U.S. Navy. Those are the supply ships like the Oilers and the fast supply ships. They provide direct fleet support. You have the prepositioning fleet, which are those ships that are loaded and forward deployed out in places like Diego Garcia in the Western Pacific. Then you have the Surge Sealift Fleet, which are these 61 ships that are maintained in a reduced operating status around the United States.

They're getting a large kind of attention right now because of their situation. And then you have the Commercial Merchant Marine, which is the sustainment, which provides you the beans, the bullets, and the bombs to keep everything going. And I think we're realizing now to be a true maritime power, You just don't need the warships and, you know, the shooters. You know, it's great to have carriers and submarines, but you also need the logistics behind it. And logistics is always that thing that until you don't have it, you don't appreciate it. And I think we're getting close to that point.

I think that's why we're seeing so much in the literature right now about the merchant marine. And you mentioned the numbers of ships, 185. You know, I'm always surprised as I visit some of these ports to see great hauled ships just stashed over in the corner. like where are those 185 ships is they're not obvious to the naked eye of somebody who's not looking for them no and that you know that's the nature of of shipping today i think one of the things and one of the things i advocate quite a bit is educating just the normal you know lay people on the maritime history of the united states the issue that's happened is you know much like navy bases commercial shipping is kind of not in the public eye anymore unless it's

something bad unless it's an accident a tanker spill or tom hanks gets grabbed by somali pirates we just don't see it happen too much and even then it's very focused and it's fleeting there's not a lot of attention to it because we shut it off into corners of the of harbors you know most people can't get onto a port these days because of security restrictions and again we just take it for granted that our goods are going to arrive in the port and be offloaded and it will always be there so your most recent article was suppose there was a war and the merchant marine didn't come i believe you're also working on a piece for the u.s naval institute that's going to advance the position that the merchant marine finds itself in roughly the same situation it was in

just prior to the first world war what exactly was that situation well the essay you referenced the one i wrote for last year's essay contest really took a look at where we're at today and It germinated from an op-ed written by John Conrad, the editor and CEO of GCAP. And I built on his comment about the situation of the merchant marine. And to me, it seems like we are in a historical parallel. Up until our entry into World War I, our merchant marine was largely a coastal merchant marine. We basically operated in moving goods along the coast-wise of the United States. We didn't have a large international merchant marine.

But when we enter World War I, and remember, we enter World War I late. It's 1917. The war has been going on for three years. When we enter World War I, we're not directly involved in the outbreak of it, but then all of a sudden, because of our trade, specifically the sinking of 10 American ships, the loss of 64 merchant mariners, that triggers U.S. entry into World War I. And now, all of a sudden, the Allies find themselves on the ropes. Russia is falling out of the war. Italy is on the precipice of falling out. The French are in mutiny in the trenches.

And we need to make a very quick statement over to the Allies that we're in this war with them. And we had to cobble together a seal of effort to get over a kind of token force, what eventually becomes the 1st Infantry Division. And what we had to do was pull together 14 commercial ships, 11 from the coast-wise trade, two from the Caribbean trade, and one from international trade. load them up get them across we had an ad hoc together an escort force we had a forward deploy half of the navy's destroyers over to ireland to start these escort operations and we really found ourselves in a very difficult position to really be expeditionary and one of the things

that we had realized in just before entry in the world war one is like wow we really need to get ourselves building more ships so we started building ships under the shipping act of 1916 but the war ends before that full effect came in and so when the war ends in november of 1918 our shipping bill our shipbuilding is just getting up to speed it's just coming up and fortunately for us it turned out well everything worked out right we were able to depend on the british to help us but if you look at the number of troops shipped over and the cargo the vast majority of them were shipped on foreign ships, not our ships. We had to be dependent on the British to haul our troops and our cargo over. And at the end of the war, we found ourselves

at the negotiating table with the Allies at Versailles in a very poor position because the Allies knew they had kind of had us in a very precarious position. Matter of fact, the British threatened not to help us bring back the AEF in Europe unless we agreed with them in certain aspects of the peace. And so I think that the analysis of World War I or the analogy of World War I is very applicable to our situation today. We find ourselves with a very small merchant marine and really not as capable as we like to think it is to allow us to exercise our foreign policy. So is what we have today for a merchant marine, you'd mentioned coastal trade pre-World War I, is what we have today analogous to it as far as it's mostly coastal? If you look

With 185 ships that make up the, again, the Deep Draft Marine, these are ships over 1,000 gross tons operate, what we would refer to as Deep Draft ships, able to go interocean. It doesn't include offshore supply vessels and tugs and barges. We have about 100 in what we call the Jones Act, the coastal trade, and about 85 in the international trade. And that decline is due to a lot of factors that go in. In post-World War II, we build the interstate highway system. We build an interstate pipeline system. So now all of a sudden you can move goods on highways and through pipelines faster than ever before. We start flying passengers across the country in jet airliners in the 1950s.

That frees up space on railways, and now more cargo can move internally into the United States. You don't need shipping to do that anymore. And so you see the coast-wise shipping, something we could always count on. In World War I and World War II, we tapped into that coast-wise shipping as a great reservoir of personnel and ships. Now that coast-wise trade is still important because there are some areas not accessed by those railways and those pipelines. But it's much smaller than it has been in the past. Thank you. Could you briefly explain the Jones Act for our listeners, as well as what effect you believe it has on the merchant marine? Sure. So World War I taught us a lot of lessons.

One of the realizations after World War I was, OK, we got into the shipbuilding process way too late. It was really critical that we not just have a coastal merchant marine, but we wanted to make sure we had merchant ships operating on international routes. And one of the things we do is identify actually international routes around the world that we want to see U.S. ships on. And so Wesley Jones, a senator from Washington, along with a congressman from Massachusetts, Congressman Green, work on putting together a Merchant Marine Act. I recently wrote about this in Sea History magazine. And they are able to cobble together several bills and put together what is known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. It's really a nominative bill with a variety of sections that deal with everything from protection of mariners, which was a big issue about whether or not merchant mariners have protection under the law, to what to do with the government-built fleet left from World War I. But the most famous element that most people are associated with the Jones Act today is Section 27, which basically requires that ships in the coast-wise trade, what is referred to as cabotage, that all ships moving cargo between U.S. ports have to be U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned, and at least 75% of the crew have to be U.S. citizens.

And that's what's referred to as protected trade. And that is an extremely controversial subject among some people, whether or not we should maintain this, again, what they refer to as cabotage. Can I ask your opinion, then, of the Jones Act's supporter or anti? Sure. One of the things that the opponents of the Jones Act will tell you is that building ships in the United States, sailing ships in the United States, employing Americans is more costly than foreign ships. Today, if you look around the world, 90% of the world's merchant ships are built in three places, China, Korea, Japan. They're very low cost. They're subsidized heavily. And most importantly, the ships are not built to last.

They're designed to last for about 15 years. And there's no denying that a foreign flag, foreign-owned, foreign-operated ship is cheaper to move goods from point A to point B, especially when you compare it to an American. I never deny that issue. The issue I come back to as we read the Jones Act and the preamble to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 and all subsequent Merchant Marine Acts is it states that the U.S. policy is to have a merchant marine for purposes of national defense. If we are any other country but the United States, then is it important for us to have a domestically flagged merchant marine? And you can make the argument, no, it's not. But no other country in the world has our forward presence, our military posture, our role in the world, our GDP in the world. And so I will always argue that it's very important that we have a domestic merchant marine for moving goods in the United States in case of war, as it happened in World War I.

One of the things that happened as a result of the declaration of war in August of 1914 is we were dependent on British, German, Italian, French ships to move our goods. And then all of a sudden our goods sat at the dock while those merchant fleets sought refuge or were diverted, and our economy crashed in 1914. So I think it's very important that we do that. Second, I think it's important, too, that we have that reservoir of ships, but more importantly, the personnel to man those reserve ships, those 61 ships in the surge fleet. We draw upon the active merchant marine, the unlimited tonnage mariners to crew those vessels. If we don't have that reservoir, if we don't have jobs for those mariners, we are not able to deploy elements of the U.S. military from the United States on board those 61 surge ships. And so, to me, the Jones Act is a national defense issue. And now you can make the argument, the argument is made repeatedly to me, well, we didn't pull any Jones Act ships out of the trade to go, for example, to the 1990 Persian Gulf War or to Iraq in 2003.

And that's true. We didn't. But we did pull the mariners off those ships to crew them. And should we ever find ourselves in a peer-to-peer conflict, which many people, including myself, hope never happens, but if we do, we will pull those ships out of the Jones Act trade to participate in a potential conflict global. And I think that's an important element of why we need the Jones Act. That was more comprehensive than I had ever hoped for. I was wondering, too, as we discuss, is this a merchant marine moment now? How much of this is just a natural consequence of feeling that we're again in an era of great power competition where our organic resources we don't believe will be enough and we're going to have to reach outside of what we traditionally use as we deal with powers that are our peers in many ways?

Well, I think if you look at China, for example, one of the big attentions that is directed toward the Chinese is the building of the plant, of the People's Liberation Army's Navy, and it gets a lot of attention. I mean, last year they produced 24 warships. It's quite a massive construction, but one of the things that's very important to understand is if you look at where they're building those ships and how they're building those ships, they're building them on top of a commercial infrastructure where China is the largest ship constructor in the world today. Forty percent of all commercial ships are built in China, and one of the things we're seeing is China is rapidly moving into a position of dominance in the world. If you take the Chinese merchant fleet, add it to the Hong Kong merchant fleet, they're under two different registries, but together they make the second largest merchant fleet in the world. We've seen them using their merchant fleet in a variety of different ways. We've seen them use them for harassment against sonar surveillance vessels in the South China Sea. We've seen them being used as auxiliaries, you know, outfitting merchant ships to provide auxiliaries, you know, underway replenishment to elements of the People's Liberation Army's Navy. And so the Chinese commercial entity, along with their military entity, is a powerful force.

Ask yourself the question, you know, would you rather have the number one Navy in the world and the number 22 merchant marine in the world? or would you rather have the number two navy and the number two merchant marine in the world and that's where china is today and so i think that's the other reason we're seeing this this kind of renaissance of attention toward the merchant marine and one of the other events that you had mentioned in uh i want to say was the cno's essay piece uh was at the beginning of u.s involvement in world war one one of the first thing that happens was federal marshals moved out and seized i think it was 91 german vessels so does that i don't know does the merchant marine of these other powers represent a vulnerability for those powers, as the U.S. would look to

seize some of that shipping? Well, you know, in a future conference, one of the things we did in World War I was, I wrote a piece, an earlier piece, where I talk about how the U.S. built, constructed, and requisitioned a merchant fleet. And one of the things we did on the Declaration of War against Germany was seize all the German merchant ships that had been interned in the United States. Particularly, there were 19 passenger liners that are instrumental in our ability to deploy the AEF over to Europe. One quarter of all the troops sent over to Europe, over 557,000 of them, go on board these repurposed German troop ships. As a matter of fact, the situation was so desperate that in March of 1918, we actually seized Dutch vessels, which were

neutral in World War I, in U.S. ports. We seized every Dutch vessel we could get our hands on because we knew the dutch really couldn't do anything to protest that we were so desperate and uh it was done under an ancient medieval right of what's called angari which is the right to seize vessels in your domestic port we can do that tomorrow if we find ourselves in a peer-to-peer conflict and u.s ports are brimming with ships of flags from all over the world panama marshall islands liberia we can grab them tomorrow and all of a sudden okay now we have a merchant fleet the issue we come to is well who's going to man them who's going to crew them in world war one one of the biggest problems the navy had was was personnel it had to crew up vessels it had to take

over military auxiliaries for example one of the things that's not commonly known is that military auxiliaries prior to world war one were civilian man so the navy's colliers and support ships had civilian merchant crews on much like military sealist command today and what we see happening today is hey we're going to turn the esbs the uh the polar class expeditionary support bases we're going to commission them because they may be going in harm's way so and we may be projecting power from them we need to put a navy 06 on board along with a navy crew and if the navy has to do that in a full-on peer-on-peer conflict where do those personnel come from you know today the navy is shorter personnel right now. Are they going to be able to man, you know, if we take 100 ships out of

U.S. ports to plus up the merchant marine or to provide auxiliaries for the Navy? Well, maybe we'll get the merchant marine to do it. Well, we're having a hard time now. Admiral Busby, the head of the Maritime Administration, and General Lyons, the commander of Transcom, testified back in March of 2019 that in any contingency going more than six months, we would find ourselves about 1,800 100 licensed mariners short of where we need to be just to crew what we have right now, let alone add above that. So, you know, personnel is a big critical issue. And having not just bodies, but bodies who can run and operate vessels is important, particularly the senior licensed, senior unlicensed personnel in the merchant marine. Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally,

I spent some time off the coast of Tunisia doing NATO's Operation Active Endeavor back in 2008. We would query every ship that passed in front of us, ask them about who was on board, nationalities, all this information. We queried hundreds of ships. I cannot recall ever seeing an American merchant sailor on board one of those ships. That's anecdotal evidence, I understand, but you're probably talking about thousands of individual merchant mariners with not a single American in the group. So it's almost anomalous to find one outside of U.S. coastal waters. No, you're exactly right. And, again, it becomes an issue where, in case of a conflict, in case of a contingency, where are you going to go?

You know, some alternatives have been floated by some people as well. Americans can find jobs on foreign flagships. If they can't get jobs on U.S. ships, they can go on foreign flagships. The problem is the pay, the time on board is so far below what Americans or at least American mariners are willing to work for. They don't take those jobs. If you look at who's manning the vessels today, the merchant vessels today, unlicensed are coming from Southeast Asia, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indians. The licenses, even the big cruise liners, which used to have Northern European licensed officers from Germany and Denmark and Great Britain, now are almost exclusively using Eastern Europeans. And again, in terms of security purposes, it is great to – there's no contingency that we can have where we're not going to have to use foreign shipping of some kind.

There's a misconception that one of the pushes is we need to make sure that we can haul everything on American-only ships. That's not going to happen. We didn't do it in World War I. We didn't do it in World War II. We didn't do it in Desert Storm. We didn't do it in OIF. But the issue becomes is do you want to be overly reliant on those foreign ships where you don't have a lot of background on who owns the ships? International shipping companies operate through shells.

You're not exactly sure ownership. You're not exactly sure where that crew is from. And you put very valuable technology on them. You understand that technology may now be out there for everybody to see because you're not guarding it as it's sailing across the Atlantic or the Pacific toward a port. And you are also at the mercies of the shipping companies. Back in 2000, the Canadian Army was bringing its equipment back from a deployment in Kosovo. and the ship, the ship was the ship called the Katie, the company went bankrupt.

And so the ship was placed under arrest and it could not be offloaded. The bulk of the Canadian Armed Forces land equipment was stuck on that vessel and they couldn't get it off. And the Canadian Navy actually had to rappel on board the vessel and seize the vessel and tow it to Halifax to basically get their gear off the ship. So wait, there was a cutting out expedition by the Canadian Navy in the year 2000? Yep, and it was off their own shore. It was literally off their own shore because the ship, the Katy, was sailing off the coast, not coming in for fear of being arrested. Sorry, I'm just making notes here because that sounds like a future podcast for me.

Thank you. We talked about the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. What was the situation as the U.S. entered World War II then? So it seems like there were some efforts post-World War I to remedy the situation. Had that improved by the time we got to World War II? Yeah, one of the things that you see is, number one, you have a series of Merchant Marine Acts that are passed. You have a Merchant Marine Act of 1928, which really isn't a very successful one for a variety of reasons. They were trying to figure out how best to support the Merchant Marines.

So in 1928, they used what they called mail subsidies, which really did not work very well. matter of fact there was issues of corruption so in 1936 they passed a new merchant marine act and this gets the support of franklin delano roosevelt the president who had been assistant secretary of the navy during world war one and he saw exactly what had happened in terms of merchant shipping and so in in 1936 he has a merchant marine act passed and this is also part of a new deal legislation he's trying to get america back to work and so there were two parts of that act the first part created what they called differentials, which allowed shipping companies to basically get money from the government to help offset both construction and operation. Because it was

expensive to operate American ships, it was expensive to build them, what you wanted to do was get these differentials to kind of make it economical to build the vessels in the United States and keep them U.S. flagged. Well, it's the heart of the Great Depression. No one has money to build ships. They also include a provision called Title VII, which says if no one's building ships in the United States, the government will build them. This is a program I think would have a lot of utility today. The U.S. government builds ships under Title VII, and then what it will do is lease them to private concerns to operate the ships. Then should the companies want to buy the ships, they can go out and buy the ships from the government, or they have to keep paying the rental

the lease on them uh and what that did what the act of 36 did it started shipbuilding in 1937 yards started employing personnel uh so that for example when you see the ss america which was the number one ship in the in the merchant uh maritime commission's building program when she slides down the way on september 1st 1939 at newport news literally as soon as she's down the way the next day they start building the battleship indiana on her shipyard and then when indiana slides down a ship where they start building USS Yorktown, the Essex-class carrier that replaces the one sunk at

Midway. And so the commercial shipbuilding really gets the shipyards back in the work, starts employing, starts, you know, because again, if you're building a warship or a merchant ship, I understand the differences between them. But in some areas they're the same. I mean, you've got to build a hull,

you've got to build machinery. There's a lot that's commonality. And what the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 did is it allowed the Two Ocean Act of 1940 to come in and produce an entirely new Navy for the United States that hits the waters by 1943. I'm going to fast forward now, too. You've also done a lot of writing recently around the Military Sealift Command's turbo activation exercise.

I know you trod this ground a little bit already on the Midrats podcast, so I don't want to go into detail about that. We'll get into the IG report that just came out as well. But can you tell us what the goal of the exercise was, as well as the initial results? Sure. So one of the things that has become apparent is back in March, in that congressional testimony of Admiral Busby and General Lyons, they really out and out sat there and said, listen, we have a critical issue here.

Our surge seal of force, that vital component that's going to lift U.S. military forces out of the continental United States and project them overseas, is in a degraded state. They're overwhelmingly outdated vessels. The average age is almost 45 years old. The operating plants on some of them are now steam propulsion, and steam is going out of phase. And it's going to be harder and harder to find mariners to crew them. And what Admiral Lyons and then the commander of military seal of command, excuse me, General Lyons and the commander of military seal of command and Admiral Busby really wanted to do was stress test the surge fleet.

They really wanted to put it under a microscope. They testified in a very brutal testimony. If you ever have an opportunity, you really want to watch a testimony where the defendants really come up there and tell you what they think. They ran this exercise in September of 2019, and the results are just amazing. You know, suffice it to say, the surge seal of fleet, those 60 ships, are supposed to have an 85% availability rate. In other words, 85% of the 61 ships are supposed to be available within five days of activation. Their test concluded that only 40% is available. And that has huge ramifications for the combatant commanders out in the field.

If I'm a combatant commander and I'm planning on 10 million square feet of cargo, and I have to sit there and say, okay, I can only count on 85 because of the availability of the surge. Now, all of a sudden, I can't even count my 85. I've got to count on 40%. That changes the equation up there if you're planning. And so if you're Admiral Davidson in DOPECOM, you've got to be sitting there thinking, what are you doing? I need the availability and the deployment of these forces to follow a certain schedule. If you can't follow that schedule, I've got to change my posture.

And more importantly, it changes our ability to respond to contingencies, let alone the fact that the previous year, in 2018, the Navy announced to the Maritime Administration and the Military Seal Command, oh, by the way, we don't have any available escorts to escort your ships through a contested sea lane. So you're on your own. Go fast, is basically what the Navy said. You've given us the reported results of that, but you also just had a piece on G-Captain that went into the Inspector General's report on the turbo activation. So what was in that report, and why did you find that significant? So last year you had an IG report on the prepositioning fleet where they went in and they identified issues about reporting. This report was an IG investigation on the search fleet, and on top of the poor availability rate, one of the things that they were finding was that the commands, whether it's Military Seal of Command or the Maritime Administration, wasn't getting the accurate detail on the availability of the ships. And therefore, even if you're reporting a 40% availability rate, in truth, it may be lower than that. And this has to do with a lot of issues.

It has to do with how contract operation of these vessels do. MSC and MARAG contract with commercial firms. But the biggest issue isn't that the commercial firms are hiding problems. The biggest problem is a lack of funding for maintenance. These are fairly old ships. They require a lot of maintenance. And worse, they sit there in saltwater and then they sit for a year And then you expect them to get up and run. And, you know, I had a kind of an anecdotal report from one of the chief engineers on an LMSR. LMSRs are these 10 vessels in the surge fleet. These are kind of the Cadillacs, the biggest ships, 350,000 square feet of cargo space.

They can go at 24 knots. During the turbo activation, six of them couldn't activate, and the four that did activate all had issues in terms of speed. They couldn't make speed. But this chief engineer reported to me that he had a visit on board his ship from General Lyons, the commander of Transcom, and he assured him the number one priority we have for you is to ensure that your ships are ready and maintenance is done. And literally the following week, word came down that maintenance funds were cut. And that was from April until October. And, you know, again, I don't think General Lyons was being deceitful. I just think it was issues beyond him reducing funding and cutting money. And now all of a sudden, you know, what am I going to cut?

And it's maintenance that gets cut with the perceived idea that should the balloon go up tomorrow, we'll dump money into them and we can fix everything. And for a 45-year-old ship, that's not good. And the LMSRs are the newest vessels. They're only 20 years old, most of those. And they're having issues of reliability. So as we look towards Defender 2020, which is, how should we describe it? It's kind of the rebirth of the reforger exercises that we saw during the Cold War. How does this availability play into Defender 2020?

Is there a merchant fleet role in that exercise? Sure. So, you know, where turbo activation was kind of a stress test, you know, almost like a quick little spotlight on it. You know, the ships went out. They only went out for a few days. Didn't really test the long-term availability of the vessels. Defender 2020 in Europe coming up this spring and then Defender 2020 in Asia in the summer is going to witness, you know, division-sized deployment. So we're going to see ships rolling into Savannah and Wilmington and down in Texas, loading gear and then deploying overseas to Europe.

And so this is going to see vessels operating in the long term. And what's going to be interesting is we're going to see ships drawn from the commercial fleet. So you'll see roll-on, roll-off ships from Liberty, for example, and probably ARC, American roll-on, roll-off carriers being used. And then we'll see ships broken out from the search fleet. And I will imagine that based on what they did in turbo activation, they'll do a random selection of vessels. And because I really think they want to see what happens with a ship that they just would pull in case of an emergency and deploy it. And the sad thing really is we have this case study. We already know this case study.

In August of 1990, back during the first Persian Gulf War, when we had to deploy the 24th ID out of Savannah from Fort Stewart in Georgia, we used the eight FASILA ships. These were the eight largest at the time cargo carriers we had. The operator for those ships, they ship, warned MSC, they warned Transcom, hey, seven of them are good to go, but one of them don't use. Don't use the Antares. She's due to go in for required maintenance. Her boilers are in bad shape. If you use her, she's going to break. They disregarded the operator.

They disregarded the port engineers from MSC, loaded her with every helicopter in the 24th ID, and about midway across the Atlantic she melted her boilers and went dead stop had to be towed into Rota, Spain by the USNS Apache a fleet tug and then they had to divert one of the fast sea loop ships coming back

from the Persian Gulf, the Altair to take all the gear off the Antares and send her over and that's the danger that is the danger fortunately it didn't impact operations in August and September of 1990 because it was hidden

basically but in a potential war scenario or a potential emergency situation if you know your ship is loaded down and it loses a plant that can have catastrophic impact and again one of the things i think that needs to be raised all the time is we're not going to see world war three you know a battle of the atlantic like we did in world war two or world war one but what you may see is asymmetric style attacks. You may see, much like the cyber attack that Maersk Line suffered a few years ago, where all of a sudden they couldn't load cargo because all their loading computers went down. Container ships are nothing more than big jigsaw puzzles. If you don't have a computer, you're not loading 15,000 boxes on a container ship. You may have the Chinese or the

russians use pressure against an operating company to prevent them from hey don't use your ships to support the americans or else we're going to shut you out of trade or worse we're going to sink one of your larger ship and you know the asymmetric side of maritime conflict that's coming on the future hasn't been really analyzed to the level i think it does and particularly foreign flag shipping is going to be more more susceptible to that than the united states is there additional capacity with some of our allies that presumably their vessels would be crossing the atlantic going the other direction and then taking our cargo over to over to europe well let me first say you know even in our you know even with the issues that have come up on our lift capacity for

example we still have the best lift capacity of anybody in terms of military sea lift i mean by far our ability to load equipment and send overseas is still better our surge sea lift even though it's aging and has its issues. We still have a better ability than anybody else. But you're right. I mean, we can sit there and say, well, we can always rely on NATO, for example, in case of a conflict. But, you know, Vietnam, I did a study on Vietnam. I wrote a book for the Navy History and Heritage Command on sea lift in the Vietnam War. And one of the things that came very clear in that conflict was, well, we couldn't rely on allies. I mean, Except for the Australians who supported us in New Zealand, that was it.

And so a lot of shipping firms refused to load our cargo because they would not go to Vietnam because the Viet Cong instigated an asymmetric attack on American merchant ships. You know, 168 ships are attacked going up the Rungset River to Saigon. And, you know, they're not going to sink American ships using RPGs and rocket fire, but they're going to deter a lot of other people from supporting the United States and we would like to think well the Danes who operate

Maersk would be at our side but I don't know is the Swiss with the Mediterranean shipping company going to be at our side is the Taiwanese with Evergreen if they're being pressured by the Chinese, is the Chinese with Costco

one of the largest shipping firms in the world right now, China's on the precipice and becoming one of the largest container liners and tanker firms in the world. I'm not sure they're going to be willing to support us. And again, it comes to the issue, one of the things we see is economy of scale. Ships are getting bigger and larger. And, you know, you don't have to sink a lot of ships to cause impact. If you have a 20,000-box container ship, you know,

the threat of losing one of those ships may be enough to cause a shipping firm to back off and sit there and say you know what i'm gonna pull my ships in the port and set this out until you all resolve it and again it may not even be us involved in it what if it's a world war one scenario where instead of it's the balkans and the europeans it's the south china sea and the east asians and then three years into it we get into it what if it's that scenario and now all of a sudden we have to come to their aid and we don't have the merchant shipping that's available to support them and so i think really the u.s finds itself in a position of really asking itself does it want to be a maritime power we love using the term sea power i can't you know can't go to a

navy conference i'm sea power being used but you know if you get through the first chapter of my hand and most people never get through my hand is if you get read that first chapter of my hand one of the things he says in the very beginning of this is is true sea power is defined by commercial and military application. I'm a Navy captain. I'm going to talk about the military. Somebody else can talk about the commercial, but they're both important to it. And I think that's one of the issues that we see played out time and time again. Thanks, Sal. We're running a little bit low on time here. So I'm going to ask you, if you were appointed SEPTEF tomorrow, what are the three things that you'd be asking for as far as changes or recommendations, new legislation? What are you

asking for to improve the current situation well i would say you know again looking at it from the merchant marine side what i would kind of want to do i think i think there's a couple of things that we could look at right from the very beginning so one of them is initiation of you know we right now we have a a ready reserve force ships that are laid up and along the coast of united states in a ready reserve force and they sit there and wait for the call and they're activated. I'd like to see an active reserve force. I'd like to see us rekindle a program that we did after World War II called the Mariner Program, where the U.S. built 35 large cargo ships and kind of did what I mentioned to you before. We leased them out to commercial firms

with the caveat that, hey, in case of war, you operate these ships, but you haul American military cargo if needed, with an option to buy. And if you buy these ships, then that'll give us money and the coffers to build new ships. So, you know, I think we need to rethink the way we look at SEALIFT in some ways. The Reserve Force came out as let's keep these ships from leaving after they're done with their service. Today we're overly dependent on them, and I don't think we can really fly a program where we're going to build new ships

and just lay them off like we did with the LMSRs after the Persian Gulf War. I think the second thing we need to do is really look at an education program where we talk about the role of not just the Navy, but also the commercial aspect. And I think that's an important aspect. You know, the Navy is very good at getting their word out. The Army is good at it. The Marines are the best at it. They just love getting their ability out. And I think we really need an education.

And when I say an education, I'm not talking about going down to grade school and teaching them. That's great. That's important to do. But I think state, local, government officials, federal level really need to be told why it's important to have this kind of maritime trade. It's very easy to throw darts at this issue. I think that's an important element, and I understand that it has reasons to be criticized. But I think that element is really an important one. The education element is so vital about it.

I guess the last one, I'm trying to think of a good last one to end up on here. But I think it's technology. I think one of the things that I've studied this for a long time, I actually teach a course on maritime industry policy for the Merchant Marine Academy. And where you see the United States excel is innovation and the introduction of new technologies. You know, hey, let's introduce the Clipper ship. It was an American, for example, who introduced containerization. It was an American who came up with a supertanker. It was a naturalized American who came up with a mega cruise ship. You know, we're right on the precipice of this with new fuels and new powers, LNG-fueled ships. There's going to be a change in technology of how to move cargo because containers, you know, reach the max size of container ships almost.

So if we really invest in technology in both interocean and coastal trade, you know, short sea shipping, hey, you want to relieve the backlog in the roads in New York City, get some of the cargo off the highways and put them on boats. But it's very hard to do that because of the costs associated with it. You almost need a shark tank type program where it actually deals with the ocean and not with goods ashore. So I think investment in technologies, and again, I think that has a downward trickle of impact so that if we are better at building ships commercially, it will be better for building Navy vessels, and we'll see some cost savings across the board. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Sal Mercogliano. Again, the articles referenced today will be found in the show notes. Sal, where can we find you online, and what's next for you? Sure. I am on Twitter, a very active person on Twitter. You'll find me at MercoglianoS, M-E-R-C-O-G-L-I-A-N-O-S. I teach at Campbell University, so I always be reached by my email, which is the same, MercoglianoS at Campbell.edu. And I maintain a little history of Facebook page for MSC. Find it at M-S-T-S-M-S-C. Thank you very much. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. I walked up to the barroom counter

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