Sea Control - Sea Control 183 - The Bilgepumps

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Links:1. Dr. Alex Clarke's Youtube Channel2. Drachinifel's Youtube Channel3. Jamie Seibert's Youtube Channel

Welcome to the Bilge Pumps, where a bunch of naval geeks spout off. Hello, and welcome to another Bilge Pumps. Well, Bilge Pumps number three. I'm Alex Clark. You all know me from my YouTube channel probably by now. If not, then avoid it. Avoid it. It's terrible. It's terrible. um and i and it's just basically three pals getting together discussing naval and maritime affairs uh hopefully we'll be continuing this because i think every the reaction so far we've got has been very positive but actually episode two is after we've recorded episode three and well we've got a whole lot to discuss today and we'll be getting into it but first of all

I'm going to hand over to my other two compatriots who are here, Jamie and Drac, to introduce themselves. We'll go with the other half of the matrix first. Okay. Hi, I'm Drac, curator of the YouTube channel Dracinofel, as you may have guessed. And yeah, I am the other Alex. And I'm the guy who's taking the red pill. uh yeah jamie and i um yeah sort of fell into this um through doing my armored carriers website

where i sort of indulged in a bit of my uh history passion uh while at the same time experimenting and learning um uh web publishing and uh found myself in a whole new world as a result yeah it's a it's a fun world to be in random but fun all right then oh where should we start off this week how about drone noughts shall we well yeah i was just thinking that uh you know there's a couple of vectors into this a it's an ongoing discussion from our previous podcasts you know how much of a how much of an impact on you know the whole naval sphere is technology having at the moment um so we've got we've just seen uh this past week the testing of the lasers on um was it portland

um you know which is uh anti-drone anti-laser anti-missile anti-hypersonic missile potentially weapon but is it um you know and we've seen you know drones feature prominently recently with attacks in um saudi arabia and getting shot down over the straits of hormuz so you know i'm just wondering where they stand at the moment so given that in the in this grand scheme of things given that a lot of, well, in particular, the United States is pulling back from at least drone 1.0, which is the bigger, not necessarily cheaper and not necessarily survivable kind of drone.

So the concept of drone nought, which was raised on an Australian think tank forum, I think, was building ships that carry drones, deploy drones and shoot down drones, whether that's still got a place in the future. So, you know, that to me seemed like a good way to dovetail into current affairs and history at the same time. I think when I'm looking at drones, I'm seeing a sort of divergence and it's a case of I think you're going to have the ones

which are the cheap expendable drones off to one side and possibly some drones which sort of border on being missiles also sort of in that category and then there's going to be if they're going to make the drones what they want to make them reusable they're going to have to make them survival

which means they're going to go through the exact same process as aircraft have they're going to grow bigger and it's like ships and Drax's idea on ships you know they grow bigger and bigger until someone goes

this is just stupid we'll make smaller ones and just make them you know expendable and then they grow bigger and bigger and i have a feeling they're going to grow bigger and bigger and this is why i think also again aircraft carriers are going to still be around because if you've got bigger if you've got air power which you need to rearm and refuel and maintain as close to the battlefield as possible as close to where you're fighting as possible you're going to need an aircraft carrier because the drones are going to be the size of f-35s very shortly if they already are yeah and and i think the other thing

is that when you talk about naval weapons as a whole are generally quite big a lot of people have this idea that a surface-to-air missile is something like a stinger or an sa6 something that you can either man carry or tow around with the on the back of a truck but if you look at something the size of c viper or sm2 or the navalized s300 s400s the russians use etc these are some seriously big weapons and that's that's basically your point defense i mean a hundred and the same thing even with artillery it's a 76 or 105 millimeter land-based artillery is considered decent but four and a half five inches you're talking 120 127 millimeter or or more or one even even a 152 if you're getting a six inch gun those are considered some pretty hefty

pieces on land but they're just considered the deck gun on a modern destroyer or frigate so if you're going to keep up with the the man ships in terms of how the your vessel is armed your drone is going to end up being fairly large i mean obviously there's a a certain amount of savings to be made in the fact you don't need crew quarters you don't need stores and supplies etc but your drone's still going to have to be maintained by somebody which means it's still going to have to have human accessible port uh gangways and everything and you're probably still going to need someone aboard the flight of things because

you know, it's you know, it's there. You know, they're going to need to be able to take off and land it definitely on the carrier. They're probably going to need to coordinate it from the carrier because if you have everyone doing the commander control from one place in the world and you have

your admiral or command staff aboard the carrier trying to run the battlefield and they're going right, so what we need to do to tell our pilots what we need to do we need to satellite call them back in safe home country and tell them it becomes a bit

of a problem it's already been a bit of a problem with the forces on the ground now again though I think the thing is to recognise that like the battle cruiser there is the full spectrum of drones

so you can see these It's a concept of deployable drone swarms at the moment where they roll them out the back of a Hercules apparently or deploy them some otherwise. And, you know, these can be small drones that are tailored to do a particular task like go and ruin your comms array

or go and interfere with your, you know, visually identify the components of a ship to go and explode alongside of. It's more of a mission kill kind of harassment device all the way up through to, as you say, the drone equivalent of an F-35. The trouble with those small smalls is I see those being far easier prey for the laser kill weapons than the bigger ones. You see, that's where I don't know because a laser, to me, and you don't really see much out of that carefully presented video,

for example, we saw of the Portland, but how much heat does each shot generate? How much of a drain on the capacitor does each shot pull? So when you're up against 20 drones or 40 or 60, how many times can you fire the thing? um i i'm seriously thinking that no that's not actually a anti-drone or at least anti-small to medium drone device and probably won't be for quite some time um you're going to need some other means of um accurately keeping them away i think part of it is going to come down to what

the sense what sense platforms the drones are using because it's i mean obviously the the way to hard kill a small drone is just to burn a wing off or something but a drone relies on various sensors some of which are quite delicate in a in order to fly but also in order to record information because yeah theoretically a drone can probably fly just using gyroscopes and other forms of onboard sensor that don't need an external visual reference like human pilots do but if that drone is going to be relaying information back to you whether that be infrared profile visual profile radar whatever it's going to have to have some form of external sensor that's delicate and a laser could destroy or disrupt to those or possibly some of the flight-based sensors

without having to have quite the same power output you would need to physically destroy the drone because at the end of the day if you're if i don't know let's say you're using it as uh an infrared scanning recon swarm or something or a laser designator swarm if that laser can just burn out those sensors you've got a bunch of flying bricks that aren't really have any use to you and you didn't have to put the power in to blow them out of the sky fair enough yeah i suppose admittedly you wouldn't want to waste you know your precious uh ciws against these little things either would you so it depends how reusable the laser is um i think and i think this is the thing it's where where are they taking lasers because with the funny thing is it's almost it's the

inverse of guns because with guns it was easier to make smaller guns and scale them up because big guns tended to do horrible things if they went wrong um whereas with lasers it's actually easier to make a big laser that would theoretically take the place of your deck gun and then try and scale them down towards more ciws type units as the technology becomes better and the peak dissipation etc systems become easier to to manufacture on a small scale i'm now imagining the super firing type 31 that they're bringing back as well for the 40 millimeter mounted behind and above with the deck gun, which is a 57mm replacing the

40mm with a 57mm equivalent laser just to sort of do that and it becomes an interesting idea that as an option, instead of going for the smaller close-in weapons system, go for the bigger laser and just see what happens

but that is going to be you see one of the problems I think when you're doing that is A, you can build a system where is probably quite far easier to keep clean and protect because you can use a sort of barrel and other systems to protect it.

But when you've got a bigger system like that, when you've got the sheer amount of capacitor and energy you're going to be using for that, you're talking about creating quite a hefty power storage system and forward. And those batteries, well, somewhere on the ship, you're going to have to have a lot of batteries. And as SSK drivers will tell you,

Batteries create a whole different effect on your hull performance and on your trim because they are dead weight wherever you put them in the hull. So you've got to be very careful where you're putting them and you don't want them too far away from those guns because, well, how's the power going to degrade as you're taking it to them? It's going to be an interesting thing for a naval architect to deal with, is what I'm thinking. Wouldn't it surely just be easier to revisit the old shotgun blast effect

that they tried with Yamato and Renown and Rodney? If you've got a swarm of drones over there on your port bow to sort of just blast a cheap buckshot at them? Yeah. Well, kinetic rounds are always going to be cheaper than high technology like lasers, but there's there's strengths and weaknesses to both both parts and to be perfectly honest against the kind of threats we're seeing these days i think the with the best will in the world the

20 millimeter phalanx and stuff like that has probably had its day um i was watching a rather interesting video actually i mean it goes back way back but one of the early tests of the phalanx they sent in one of the old firebee subsonic drones to to test it and yeah the phalanx knocked the fire bee out the sky the fire bee just kept tumbling and smashed straight into the test ship which didn't really help matters but it's like yes okay so if that was a cruise missile it's not necessarily punched into your engine room however it just did take out your bow which and and that's that's against something that's big slow and relatively easy to hit compared to the the kind of things we're talking about these days so

yeah it's it's all going to be threat dependent for something like a high speed supersonic hypersonic cruise missile that you're you're trying to knock down as far away as humanly possible and as quick as possible uh and that's probably got quite a fast rate of bearing change you want something like a high powered laser because that's probably about the only thing you can guarantee to put on the target soon enough but yeah if you're talking about swarms of very cheap, very expendable drones, you probably might as well just get away with something like a SeaAdder 20mm phalanx.

I guess part of my point is that we're now starting to see a huge spectrum of threat that your average frigate or destroyer has to contend with. So I can imagine the drone swarm scenario being something you might experience along with the odd modified sea slug off Yemen, for example. I think when it comes to

other theatres, that's when you can start to expect your supersonic cruise missile or even ballistic I think to be honest weirdly enough we might be seeing a bit of a bounce back in terms of the kinetic

strike closing weapon systems I think you might see a bit of a bounce back because remember at the beginning of World War II you had the .50 cals and the .20 mils and then you added the 40mm Bofors, and then after the Second World War, it was all about the 3-inch rapid fire

and the 4- and 4.5-inch rapid fire. And then that's kind of dropped back to the 20mm Phalanx, 30mm Goldkeeper or Kashtans. Interestingly enough, from your own example, it's the same experience path, isn't it? The .50 cal, 20mm was simply not enough to stop that kamikaze from striking the ship. so he went for the 40mm

and went for multiple barrel 40mm to try and fragment them before they arrived I guess again that all comes down to mass and weight and speed doesn't it and what are we now sitting on to the Type 31 cloth

oh 40mm and a 57mm it's your old it's the 40mm and the 3 inch are back let's be honest okay yes it's technically a two two and a bit incher but it is heading up towards what you would you know the three inch sort of system you've got the optimal era 75 i think which is a fairly good air defense system as well and you're sitting there going okay so we're basically

retracing the 1950s and the late 1940s early 1950s again because we're back at that threat paradigm of where you need something that's small enough that you can quickly track, but large enough you can get a decent fragmentation round, because we're the best one in the world. A 20mm frag round is going to have a lethal cone of effect about that.

But is that not enough, say, to strap a few 20mm on the railings, as we saw in the Falklands War, in order to take down those drones? If you're desperate.

But it's better to, I'd say, it's better to have a 57 or a 75 or 76 with proper radar guidance that can just sort of sit there and go, oh, drone, bang, drone dead, bang, drone dead. Basically clay pigeon shooting, just with a lot more expense involved. Yes, but again, it's always, everything just seems to come back to asking particular weapon systems to be all things to all people under all circumstances. and i'm yet to see an example of that actually work i sometimes wonder if this is the sort of the peacetime treasury accountancy effect where you're trying to get the maximum funds for your buck in every single weapon system and then when you get into wartime everyone suddenly realizes what you've got is very good at one area and you've been marketing as general purpose so you can get it paid for i i'm thinking about the skewer fighter dive bomber the british had at

the beginning of world war ii uh the ron maybe wanted a dive bomber they couldn't get a dive bomber through the air ministry and various other various political issues so they developed a fighter dive bomber it was absolutely terrible as a fighter although it did actually get a few kills disturbing and love including one of an me 109 which must have been so shocked but leaving that to one side it was actually a very good dive bomber and if it was left to do the dive bombing task which they did quite often long-range dive missions it was absolutely excellent it just wasn't a general purpose aircraft and sometimes i think you're sort of you're securing these systems going they are general purpose they're not you know it's like

If you're looking in 1944-45, 40mm is a medium AA weapon for destroyers. Basically, it's considered a medium AA weapon for destroyers and a light AA weapon for other ships. And then you suddenly get out of World War II and the 40mm is the multi-purpose light deck mount. Has the gun suddenly changed? No, it's still the 40mm bow pulls and the stag mounting. Then, why is it same-trained? Because to justify

it, you need to say it's general purpose. And they go, well, we did use some of them on motor torpedo boats during the war. They're quite good at light craft. One of them took out a landing craft. Well, we think it took out a landing craft. We're not quite sure. There were three tribals and they were all firing their

40mm at the same Japanese landing craft. So, it was kind of being deluged under heavyweight fire. That may be a case of killed by erosion. It was killed by something. But, you know, because of that, they claimed it was a general-purpose weapon

and a general-purpose mount, not an AA mount. And you sit there and you go, but it's still the AA mount. It is still. It's got even the 262 radar on it. It's still an AA mount. But, you know, and I sit there, I'm looking

at the current phalanx and the filthy millimeters and i'm wondering how long before a 40 millimeter version of the phalanx appears i someone goes you know what the way i can make my phalanx work better is if i make it slightly bigger still have all these gray offices on but instead of a 20 millimeter cannon it's a whole set of 40 millimeter cannons spinning around firing admittedly that would be quite interesting to see what would happen and jamie's face i i know the view of the listeners can't see jamie's face but his uh his face at the idea of a 40 millimeter phalanx he's still he's sort of going yeah oh that's cool that could do so much

fun i mean the the russian cash cash tan system they've stuck a couple of uh gatling style 30 mils and a bunch of short-range missile launchers all on one thing which is a similar concept with just slightly lower calibre, but it's... Yeah. Oh, you just know, if there's a 40mm phalanx produced, there'll be a 57mm cashtan produced. Yeah. You know, it's what the Russians always do.

I think this idea, yeah, but I think the idea of multiple larger barrels than what we've got with the phalanx is definitely the way to go because, for the best will in the world, yeah, the Russians might only deploy one or two cashtan per surface combatant.

Don't put that many more phalanx on it. on frigates and destroyers so if you're gonna if you're gonna only have one or two point defense weapon systems you might as well have them configured in such a way that you can guarantee they're gonna rip apart anything they hit as opposed to we poked some small holes in it so now we're going to be hit by a cruise missile that's coming in sideways and on fire instead of headlong well you see that's why i'd be worried if i was um i've forgotten now the company which makes the phalanx it shifted around a couple times over the years um is it lockheed martin no it isn't might be general dynamics might i think it's still general

dynamics but lockheed martin take over so many things you never really want to bet against them making anything um but i think it is general dynamics still and you know i'd be looking at if i was them i'd be looking at our sales profile and going hang on there are quite a lot of new ships being designed and coming through which aren't being fitted with this. We did become the standard de rigueur. Pretty much everyone

in the Western world, when they were going out and quite a lot of our allies around the world were fitting phalanx onto their new ships. And now I'm seeing quite a few new ships coming through and they aren't having phalanx fitted. They're having 40mm or 57mm or

I'm trying to remember what the auto malaria this sort of little gun is it's a 76 millimeter and there are some ships which manage to fit about two or two of them on and you sit there and go i'm not quite sure as the self-defense weapon whether we've quite reached that point yet but good for you but if i was the makers of the phalanx i'd be worried i'd be sitting there going right then we've been doing this great churning out this great tool for about let's be honest the phalanx has been in design development and production for roughly about 60 years because i think it starts it starts in the 1960s doesn't it or is it doesn't even start early in 1950 they're testing it with a fire bee so yeah it's

going to be quite a while back it's late 50s early 60s i think so we're talking 60 70 years of a system in service of a system being sort of either being developed or tested or being around they haven't really changed much in that time yes you can say it's got lethal yet more lethal yes they've talked about adding on lasers and adding on missiles and they've talked about adding on a whole lot of things they haven't done anything and yes you can say well you know in the last 30 years the cold war ended and there hasn't really been much reason to but hasn't there In the last 30 years, you've got escort numbers have dropped down. Threats have multiplied.

There's been more and more terrorist organizations and other non-governmental organizations or non-recognized organizations which have weapons have increased. And the level of weaponry they've got is more sophisticated. I just said, if there's one thing an area does need to be invested in, it is the point defenses. And they have stagnated. or is that just me sounding off no i'm to be honest i think that with the best will in the world although the threat profile changed for a while it looks like it's going to be changing back towards a more conventional surface based engagement but even so um if you're repurposing a 20 millimeter or a general purpose machine gun or something the threat at least the

active threat at the moment is things like suicide boats like the one they used on the uss coal and it's not good it's not going to take them too long to figure out the italian maz boat style of maybe we should go a fraction faster in confined waters rather than pretend to be a sailing vessel or something and don't don't don't forget that you know there's been plenty of instances of cruise missiles admittedly old ones being used off yemen and yeah we've seen ships be hit by them We've also seen ships avoid being hit by deploying things like Nolka. So it's there, it's happening. And for me, the obvious next step up is, okay, well,

if you're not hitting with the old style modified scud or whatever, then why not repurpose one of those nice little drones that we used against the saudi oil tanks and uh uh fly some of them into a few precious targets so yeah it wasn't all that long ago that boxer took down a drone with it with a an army um vehicle strapped on its deck yeah well i think this is the thing it's that the threat paradigm has shifted when phalanx was designed if you were going to engage a small surface target if you shot it enough times it would stop moving and surrender and the missiles the early cruise missiles of that period the anti-shipping missiles were effectively small unmanned aircraft they had

big control surfaces and wings and everything um so similar to shooting an aircraft you could shoot it enough times to disrupt the the airflow over the the lifting surfaces and it would spiral out of control and crash this is fine but these days the small sort of the small boat threat is more like the kamikaze threat and bigger missiles that are coming in now obviously they still have lifting surfaces and directional fins but they're moving at such high velocities then they don't have the big swept wings of some of the early cruise missiles so it's poking holes in those things isn't going to stop them in time you have to physically take them apart and for that you need a bit of a heftier punch and how long before things like pif-paf move from just surface

to air missiles and for those who don't know pif-paf is when you use a little sort of little puffs of air to sort of direct your air missile which is used on some of the surface air missiles like the sea vipers and i think also the sea set system i'm not sure though um is um you know how long before that becomes the standard in the missiles especially as they're going faster and then you have even less control surfaces available for you to hit yeah and the whole thing applies

to drones because let's face it the anti-shipping missile is a drone it's just a drone with a single purpose mission that doesn't come back hopefully so we always hope it doesn't come back

yes yeah a lot of a lot of the um a lot of the decisions that are going to be made about dealing with various drones uh so various cruise missiles in terms of how you're defending against them are going to probably translate across to drones if you've got something that can if a weapon that can stop somebody volley firing two dozen or several hundreds or small small hellfire or maverick sized missiles compared is going to stop a bunch of drones small drones very well and the kind of weapons can potentially stop a granite is going to stop your f-35 drones pretty well as well sorry my tv's about to turn off yeah again it comes back to that spectrum it doesn't you know alex is talking about um

the spectrum of battle slash cruisers so now you've got drones going from your um football sized uh quadcopter with a grenade strapped to it um through to i guess a guided hypersonic glide vehicle i i have a feeling what we might see in the future with when it comes to drones might be a combination because the it's called star streak the old star streak surface to air missile i don't know if you know much about that jamie i i know a bit about it yes yeah so yeah so for the for the viewers or listeners who might be unaware star streak surface to air missile that basically is a big rocket motor that has three smaller sub munition missiles attached to it and then it drops apart to create a wider cone of effect so and then it's in some ways a

similar technology to a multiple independent re-entry vehicle on a nuclear missile uh more targets easier to hit the target harder to counter we may see drones that are able to do something like that especially now obviously with if a drone it's not got a pilot on board we've talked about an aerial drone if it's not got a pilot on board its aerodynamics can be very different because you don't have to put a cockpit in which means that potentially you could have a larger drone which is almost your mothership drone which is the expensive bit that's got in sort of lots of independent weapon systems and sensors and such like but you could actually design into that effectively slots like almost like the formal fuel tanks that they use on f15s

such like where you could then equip this larger drone with a number of smaller drones which form an integral part of the airframe while it's in transit but once you get into the threat environment and you detect you're under attack it starts detaching all these smaller drones who then go off and do things whether that be offensive defensive guard distraction whatever but that that would be a way of um of certainly confounding some people's defenses and forcing everybody else to invest in a lot of a lot of different defenses at once because as we're discussing what's good for one may not be so good for the other it's making me think that's just uh we'll go submarine yeah right up until someone straps mini torpedoes on a torpedo yeah and let's be honest submarines

that's the trouble, the unmanned the sort of unmanned underwater surface underwater vessels, the UVs are in many ways advancing far quicker than the USVs, the undermanned surface vessels and even the

UAVs because the Royal Navy hasn't really got the USFV in service they've been looking at them and they've looked at them with the Americans quite a lot, but they haven't really got one uh we are investing the royal navy is investing in unmanned undersea vehicles and is start is ordering them is building them i think the australian navy is looking at some the u.s

navy is looking them the russians and chinese were already fairly sure have them keep finding the fishing nets yes we keep finding all sorts of narcotic uh organizations which may or may not have them they certainly have manned ones which look a lot like them but they might be going for unmanned as well um you know it it's uh it it's a world which is already going to because in many ways underwater is a very very dangerous world to operate in and if you can give the submarines some safety or if you can pull them back and use these submarines because what most of the nations who are western nations are missing especially once you've gone for nuclear-powered submarines is it's very difficult they don't have any cheap defense and cheap

defensive submarines i.e the ones you used to use for the coastal patrol duties for protecting your own ports etc because using a nuclear submarine to sit off your own coast and act as goalkeeper to protect against other submarines is a very expensive use of that that resource when it's got all the capabilities it's got so if you can get an unmanned undersea vehicle which can deploy other unmanned undersea vehicles

and all of them carrying torpedoes sitting off your port that is a quite interesting prospect but I'm not sure if you want to be the submariner first of it yes I wish I could

remember where I saw it I saw a mention today of someone developing small torpedoes for the first time since World War II. We're obviously going to use those. Seems fairly obvious, doesn't it? You don't really want

small, short-range torpedoes on a surface ship or on a manned submarine. Yeah. To be honest, as you say, I think the underwater aspect is probably going to be, although it'll probably be a lot more classified because it's a lot easier to hide um it's probably

going to be informing the the aerial part of drones and the surface part of drones a lot more than the other way around because apart from anything else a lot of the problems that we have at the moment jamie's come there is um yeah a lot of the problems that we have trying to at the moment trying to get aerial drones and such to work is that command decision loop computers are fast but they have an annoying tendency to crash when you ask them to do a lot of different things at once and that's not a good thing when they're in control of the of the drone whereas by its very nature subsurface warfare is just a fraction slower so you can not not overly tax your your poor old processor as it chugs through the various permutations of what it can and can't do and what

might be better or not and this at least until we get quantum computers is always going to be the limitation whereas a human mind given a split second situation can make a decision very quickly it may not necessarily be the best decision but they can make a decision whereas a computer will just be going well line one this decision no line two this decision no and it will still be sitting there permutating its way through its its decision tree when something comes and obliterates it yeah but you know the whole nature of algorithms is to train them repeatedly simulated environments and that algorithm just gets more and more whittled down smooth down shaped to provide that fast specific answer yeah which works fine until you come along

with the question that doesn't suit the algorithms yeah this is the thing is you you you can make it again it's kind of the specialization thing isn't it you can make a program that's very good at doing something and right up until someone presents it with a problem you haven't taught taught it about and and this i think this is a thing with at least with underwater warfare if you have that situation it's a case of well you've probably got several minutes to make the decision so if the algorithm has to start relearning what's going on it's got the time to do that whereas in an air-to-air situation you've probably got about a second or two before that's it you know it is one of those sort of i'm sitting there and i'm looking at the thing

about the embassy is slightly slower slightly slower face but also there is difficulty of communicating with the embassy so i think you're going to also have to start placing a lot more faith in what your unmanned vessels can do to really let them go off let them operate which is going to be the scary thing is how much faith are you going to put in them or how are you going to try and maintain? Do they launch a sonar boy to

get permission to start firing? That's going to reveal their position. How are they going to do this? How are you going to warn them so that you can have that human in the loop which people insist on or do you just completely not have this human?

oh i'm feeling quite bad because you two both have these beautiful naval backgrounds going on today and i am wearing my tank museum t-shirt all right so i guess that sort of brings the drones to pass yeah next subject was the lasers well no that sort of part that was the lasers I suppose was part of the drawings yeah we did the lasers and drones together I guess it's

it's a trouble I can't see Jamie speaking because I'm not sure basically my theory is that eyes on Taiwan, Hong Kong, India it's becoming our recurring theme every week we've ended up discussing China

if they stop doing stuff at sea it's going to be such as that week's going to have to be a banner week China this week actually hasn't done anything which scares the living out of us well they did drop one rather important word

when it came to talking about Taiwan yes they're no longer talking about peaceful your reunification yes oh i i'm i'm just i'm just i'm just putting putting uh bets aside as to when it when it goes it's now gone from peaceful reunification to reunification i'm just waiting for when they just insert the word inevitable yep oh that's gonna be fun no it i have a feeling the trouble is they've done the peaceful reunification thing they've got rid of the peaceful and now they're doing what they're doing in hong kong and that was really the figly for

peaceful reunification so it's going to be interesting to see how the politics in taiwan is affected by this because there have been several pro china pro reunification well not really not so much pro but people who sort of said well yes this is probably likely the safest route to go down have been holding out the hong kong one nation two systems thing as something that you know is the route they could have gone down and now they've seen what's happened with hong kong so they've lost that so now they know it's going to be either continue the democracy the norms they've established or they go the chart i have to go to full communist chinese system uh well yes it's been a very dramatic change isn't it in the in the past couple of months

it's it's constantly been bubbling away for a couple of years i suppose the whole taiwan thing we've seen um yeah every every two or three months someone comes up somewhere in chinese media or in the central bureau i suppose and make some noise about taiwan but now that we've seen the election take place and quite comprehensively install a democratic president as opposed to the pro-unification option in conjunction with the terror campaign in Hong Kong I guess it's a situation where you've got

a Chinese chairman suddenly finding himself backed into a corner I don't think you can forget the domestic scenario going on as well in China I think they possibly lost a lot

more in COVID-19 than they are prepared to necessarily admit. Wow, we can... Hey, Jamie's back! We can see him again! That suddenly makes this whole thing so much easier, because honestly,

Grack is amazing to chat to, but he never gives anything away in his face. So, there's just a sort of wry grin appears. So I know roughly when he's going to speak by when the wry grin appears. Jamie telegraphs a lot of when

he's going to speak by his facial expressions, which is what caused the earlier fun, because when I couldn't see his face, I didn't know whether he was starting to talk or not. It's like being in a pub and being several drinks through. Although, in mine and Alex's case, that would be, well, in my case, it would definitely be, in mine and Alex's case,

it would be non-alcoholic drinks, so it would be high on sugar. Mine's just a fermented variety, that's all. Yeah, look, it's so hard to tell what's going on there, obviously, and it's something one doesn't want to speculate on, I suppose. But, you know, you've got a president for life or a chairman for life. He, like Putin, needs to maintain his popularity or at least his authority.

And now a couple of the big ticket items that he's been pinning his flag to, i.e. Taiwan reunification, is starting to go a bit astray. And I think that's why we might have seen that dropping of the word peaceful. And now we're hearing of proposals to potentially carry a task force through the Taiwan Strait, past a few Taiwan-held islands on the way down to a major, oddly enough, beach landing exercise in Hainan Island. So if there's a gunboat diplomacy flag waving, I guess that's it. I suppose it comes down to what particular game does China want to play this year?

Because, as we've discussed in the previous episodes, we're pretty sure they want to be the ones in charge at the end of the day. and they're building they're trying to build towards that goal but if internal or external political pressures demand they change up a game there are other methods to go for to achieve your aims that don't require you to completely challenge and overwhelm the existing top dog you can go for the risk fleet theory admittedly didn't work out too well for the germans in world one but there are cases where it does seem to work at least in the short term because the navy that you need to stand off against the u.s and allies in the pacific generally is a much larger

and more complex beast than the navy you need to be able to take taiwan by force which to be fair they probably could do now and probably have had the capability of being able to do for a long time um but then whether or not they can hold it now the force you need to deter the u.s and allies from taking back something that's fait accompli because you hold it now that's much smaller and in actual fact the uh with the best will of the world the crimea is a perfect example of that because no no one's really going to challenge that yeah nato nato fleet versus russian fleet nato armies air forces versus russian armies air forces nato has the clear superiority did nato want to go to war to demonstrate that superiority once russia had acquired the

crimea no because you could win but it would cost you an awful lot more and the ultimate political calculation was we don't care about the crimea enough to throw ourselves into a massive conventional war with russia so if if although i say although china would like to be in charge if it gets to a point where we need something almost argentina falkland style we need something to to push our ratings up back at home take that they probably they probably got the force to be able to take taiwan now and then it's a case of well does the rest of the world actually care enough to get involved in a in the fight that would be necessary to take it back this is going to sound terrible to ukraine but the difference between crimea and taiwan

is crimea is still in the black sea and the russian navy still can't get anywhere in the world if china takes taiwan then they have direct access in the pacific and they are through the first island chain and now you've got a big problem for japan and korea south korea up north because they've got taiwan sitting in the middle between them and the rest of the american forces down south in southeast asia you suddenly got the chinese have managed to drive a wedge between what could be a unified theater and divide it into two theaters so strategically taiwan is very useful for both sides. Furthermore,

the thing is, so much comes from Taiwan. Taiwan has so many connections to places. Even though it's unofficial, they do have a lot more connections than the Crimea did, to be fair. And, if we go further or beyond that, yes, I think China could take it.

But, the Taiwanese have been preparing for China for a long time there are you know it's always pointed out there are people on both sides who are quite sort of tongue and quite sort of quite sort of

focused on this mission I do not think it would be I think China can do it I don't think it's going to be easy and I don't think it's going to be quick and I think that's the trouble for them anytime they are delayed if they can take it in a day they have a chance of holding it.

But if it goes on for two days, for three days, for four days, for a week, and they still haven't secured the whole island, and they are still fighting on the beaches or fighting in the near enclaves in the lower areas, in the coastal areas, they are going to be in trouble because at a certain point,

the rest of the world turns up and it's not retaking the islands, it's reinforcing the defenders of the islands, and that's when China has a trouble. And also you have the fact that China's already Yes, they might go down that route And I agree

It's disturbing, especially with Some of the things they're doing like Possibility, but They're already experiencing with COVID-19 what the effects on their economy Are of a downturn Of people not being interested in buying Chinese goods

They haven't got the domestic market yet That can sustain their economy Yet, they can do in a few years But yet they haven't so well you have to think that if there is an invasion of Taiwan if we've already

covered 19 is that being going to be something that's not going to be forgotten soon and that's I don't like to jump into the whole heavily politicized it was China's fault thing you know and that's just like that is sort of

I don't want it's not blame on China COVID-19 happening what is the tough clear blame on china is the way they reacted when it happened that's the more the problem for me rather than i don't consider coven 19 chinese i'm not i people keep trying to suggest it's a lab i don't know i don't that's not my area of expertise so i'm not jumping into that one but the fact the way they covered it up and the way they hid it from the world and the way they reacted with the doctors internally, whilst all very much part of the

cause for their regime has definitely caused it to be far worse globally than it could have been if they had been more open and managed it properly, which is going to cause them trouble. I think invading Taiwan, if they're drawing any lessons from COVID-19, is

going to cause them also more trouble. And the longer it goes on, the longer it fights, the more trouble it's going to be for them economically, because the more countries and it's not just going to be the European countries and the western countries there are quite a lot of nations in the world who have who would worry about the precedence china would set with taiwan i think this is why they haven't done it yet because they they probably as they they probably physically can take it

they probably can't hold it assuming that everybody cares enough to to try to push them back um but that this is the thing is that there's this there's this sort of this ascending scale of naval might that they're going for and the point where they can reach yeah we can probably take taiwan quickly enough fast enough and have enough forces for everyone else to back off and not not really challenge us over it is a lot closer than somewhere up here where it's like well and now we can just sit there in the south china sea and dare the u.s to come at us and they want to be there but if the continued existence of the the ccp requires some big publicity thing outside that can unite the country against the foreigner they only need to be down

there and that capability they could get to in five ten years or so but but again though it's it's We're talking about one person, really, aren't we? It's not CCP. It's Chairman Xi. It's about him maintaining his position. And that's where, as we've seen historically, rationality starts to fly out the window. When you need to maintain your authority,

you need to maintain your credibility, uh you need to maintain your life and yet alone your lifestyle um all of a sudden the temptation appears that hmm maybe we don't need to wait until 1945 to act uh and plan z to be completed kind of um scenario well in in in the in the best words of uh star wars episode three i am the senate it's like yeah when when you get into governments like the ccp i mean obviously there's a there is internal politics and jockeying for position and stuff but to a certain degree what's good for the party leader is what's good for everybody else or or else kind of thing so and that's and that's what you know you know it's it's a scenario that um i can potentially see unfolding here

is is um economics china's economy wasn't in a great position before covet 19 it was struggling with housing prices cost of living uh wages um household debt was enormous the country's household debt was enormous and so it's it was a bit of a juggling game even then to um keep everyone happy now it's it's harder so um and so this is where you suddenly have that scenario where you've got to keep your brown shirts happy so that your brown shirts keep your the rest of your population under control and if your brown shirts are thumping the table saying leban's wrong then you give them leban's wrong yeah and i think the other thing is it's it's not just necessarily purely about what china wants or what they think they

can get away with it's also about what the overall global political situation is like because the i care well you know i think we're seeing with their wolf warrior diplomats at the moment seem quite um uh determined to um upset more so than um apply diplomacy but i think if this if they're smart and to be fair you don't get to run in a country like china without having a few brain cells to rub together it is also about exploiting when and where you do something something like the balance of military force might be the same or roughly the same but whether you do something one year or the other can make all the difference i mean again reach back to a historic example look at the suez crisis if if the suez crisis had kicked off a year earlier or a year

later i.e not a u.s election year it probably would have gone very different because it probably wouldn't have been worth the u.s's time to antagonize its two biggest allies in western europe but the u.s decided to put its foot down in a large part because it was an election year and the president wants to be re-elected and you can look at the timing of things like crimea um and various other incidents in like all the way through from above the whole of the 20th century to be honest how a large a large given nation reacts to something can very often depend or what its internal political processes are doing and so if an opportunity presents itself if the stars align um let's say i mean at the moment the the the japanese government is

relatively conservative and relatively expansionist not expansionistic in greater eastern co-prosperity sphere terms but they are wanting to push for a bigger role of the japanese military in things but if japan has an election cycle and for whatever reason they get swapped out with their opposite numbers who obviously believe in the opposite of that and if the u.s has a election cycle around about the same time and the new u.s um president wants to de-escalate confrontations well then suddenly two out of the three big players in that area uh the other ones would be the south koreans in terms of geographic proximity two out of the three of them now have politics that are mitigating more towards a china back off and de-escalate and not react

immediately and heavy-handed if they if china launched an invasion of taiwan tomorrow you can guarantee between abe and trump they'd be on on them like a hot in a hot minute with boris johnson as well you probably have the bridge turning up quite quickly as well yeah but that'd be great a great chance for britain to show we are global britain here's our navy coming to help you know the taiwanese and our american and our japanese allies you probably have in that way probably the Australian government as well getting involved because that would show how strong they are. There isn't.

I don't think there's actually been a fight since World War II that we haven't jumped on within the first 24 hours. There is. In the nicest way, you guys jump into... The Australians are basically... Speaking of someone who, despite the accent, has a lot of Scottish blood in him.

The Australians are basically the Scottish nation, given their own armed forces. There's a fight. We're here. but it's like but this is the thing you move the move the political scene on two or three years in the west and the political will to do something might not be there or the chinese might not think it's there because this is the other thing is look at the falklands war that was based on exactly the

same kind of calculation they thought the british wouldn't fight turns out the british would actually fight but they didn't know that at the time and that's prompted that whole thing i mean even even things like the uh the russians getting stuck into syria they could have got stuck into syria at any time but they waited until the u.s was in the middle of a we're bringing our troops home from the middle east this is all this has all been a uh a big mess at which point russia jumps in because then what what again it's it's politics do you suddenly reverse your decision and send all your troops back in again which is going to be unpopular or do you let the russians take the lead in dictating how the syrian conflict goes which is also unpopular um and it may and

yeah and and as dr clark says taiwan has huge strategic implications um so realistically speaking at least for the next few years any kind of attack on taiwan is going to have to is going to prompt a response from the western and southeast asian allies the question is whether or not the political will will make that a rapid response which might have a chance of unseating china from taiwan and sorting the whole thing out before the the atomic start to fly or if if that decision making is paralyzed for even a few days maybe a week whilst everyone tries to sort out how they can reverse their internal domestic politics that could give them enough time to build up reinforce and set in this fait accompli mindset that makes it a lot harder to

then displace them which then raises the questions of whether or not it's worth trying so i guess the next step down from that i mean which is to say obviously a worst case scenario taiwan but i'm thinking okay um another option to stamp um your authority on the world uh in the eyes of your own populace would be to say, no, we are declaring this Bradley's sovereign territory, and we are going to enforce our economic exclusion zone right up to the coastal waters of Malaysia, Philippines, and the like. That's not a physical invasion per se. It's a political international declaration.

and I guess they've been talking about no-fly zones which were imposed over East China Sea a few years back being imposed over the South China Sea would that be something that would help a Chinese

chairman who needs a bit of a boost on the home front or again is that too much of a step too far it probably depends on how the how the various other people react really i think that this also this in a way this ties back into the conversation we're having in the previous podcast about gunboat diplomacy um because let's say they say right the spratleys are ours stay up like and we're

enforcing this now if they choose to stick a bunch of ships there to provide a kind of a degree of physical legitimacy to it all you've you've then got some very interesting decisions because at that point they're probably belligerent and willing enough to turn back a small ship or one or two ships so that the softly softly approach to gunboat diplomacy doesn't work at that point but then you have the you have the decision do you send in do you try and have a standoff with them which actually works in their favor because the longer the standoff goes on the weaker you as the theoretically superior power look or do you do you sort of break glass in case of emergency and send in overwhelming force which they probably will back down from but you run the

risk of maybe they don't and i'll be and again are we then willing to get into a short notice conflict over it i think it depends what level of overwhelming force you're talking about and how quickly you can organize that overwhelming force because i think when you're talking about the overwhelming force in that scenario i think you need it to be an allied overwhelming force i you know like we talked about previous podcast the whole big exercise here are all our pals well this would have to be a here are all our pals uh approach and it would have to be tremendously overwhelming it couldn't just be an american task group they would have to have an american japanese south korean australian british french everyone who you could drag along

everyone who has a rowboat who you could bring along pretty much approach to it um yeah yeah and with the best of the world you don't want you don't want to involve the un at that point that would have to be a strategic it would have to be a strategic military decision because let's face it china has a veto seat on the un security council so anything you try and pass is automatically going to fail you you would have to cut to the chase and just go it's effectively like like again in the terms of government diplomacy it's like you're dealing with a small child you put your foot down and you just draw a line and say no end of discussion with a lot of ships yeah but can we actually put them there the interesting thing of course about

the south china sea is it's surrounded by choke points and those choke points would be obviously the spot that you know china would slam the door shut on any approaching you know uh force so we're talking everything from the strait of malacca sunda strait you know the um the waterway there around Rabaul then you've got the choke points of north and south of Philippines Taiwan you've got literally

a handful of narrow channels through which you can project that power that all sounds nice in theory but the trouble is at sea and especially if you're in one of those choke points is anything less than short of war if it's international water the ship just keeps going so what are you going to do you're going to

order your ships to bash into the other ships well that's pretty much starting a war because the moment you do it once then the other ships when they're going through the other choke points so this is why i say you have to bring all the friends because you'd have to have forces entering through from every single one of those choke points to meet up in the middle and it would be coordinated and they'd all have to be coming in so the china would have people controlling all of those choke points a the local forces probably wouldn't like that and b then what do the chinese do to stop you do they just go shout aloud hailer or do they well there's a freaking carrier battle group coming through uh anything short of war is not going to stop it moving because if you as i said if you do

start trying to bash your ships into each into them at a certain point that is considered war so you start getting a warning shot fired at you you're bashing into my shitty carrier i'm going to shoot you first and this is and this is why you you have the this is why you need the overwhelming force because if if you make the mistake of sending in a force a force for a standoff or a force that's matching or a force that's only slightly superior then the temp although you can't obviously there's no guarantees in this but the temptation for somebody to think maybe we can win this is there the bigger and scarier the force is yeah okay if it escalates into a shooting war it's a heck of a lot bigger shooting war than otherwise but the chance of someone actually

taking the chance of someone actually pulling the trigger in the first place is much much less because well that's why it's called an overwhelming show of force i mean if you if you really want to put your couple your cards on the table get a get a ballistic missile submarine to lead the formation It's interesting because Australia's most recent exiled prime minister recently published a book in which he said that he refused to order Australian vessels into the 12 nautical mile exclusion zone that China was claiming around its South China Sea islands because he felt that the United States would not come to Australia's assistance if China decided to hold the line and that that would give China that diplomatic victory that you're talking about. So when you're talking about a very upscaled, overwhelming display of,

no, we disagree with this, where's it going to come from? Yeah. you know it's without the un um we don't have a nato here in um uh the south in the south pacific the southeast asia it's um where do you get that kind of political will would it exist does it exist yeah i think it's going to come down to the the whole strategic concern aspect because As we say, it's like, what does that affect in terms of international shipping and various international strategic concerns? Because at sea, at least, if a major shipping lane is a major shipping lane, that's going to be supplying all sorts of people. If you're threatening it, then either everyone's concerned or nobody is.

so you're either you're either going to get everyone to react or not the question i think the question from from the chinese perspective would probably be a case of how much can we push this how much can we um how much can we claim and exploit without making it impossible for anyone with any kind of reasonable strategic uh concerns to react um and again if you want to draw a historical parallel you'd almost look at the almost look at the run-up to world war ii uh with with with nazi germany because you've got germany and it's like yeah but now we're going to take over austria does anyone care enough to fight about it they say the austrians seem on the surface to be willing to do so okay well we ignore it then czech republic or czech

or whatever it was called back then they changed their name every five minutes it's checkier now isn't it um and and the uh sudetenland as well um and alsace lorraine and all that so you can see exactly the same kind of thing there's this calculation of we can take this thing we don't think everyone else is going to be too bothered by it but it's demonstrating our military might it's pushing up our rate our internal ratings at home it's pushing our international standing up because effectively we as the smaller power are bullying uh seem to be bullying around the larger powers because they're not stopping us of course then it all comes crashing down when it when eventually they go for poland and

everyone decides actually for whatever reason we're drawing the line at poland but the these whole things whether it's hong kong china the spratly islands or whatever um or taiwan or whatever it's it's the same kind of thing it's like how far does china think it can push push itself without stepping over some kind of invisible arbitrary line that's going to force everyone else to to react because what if you force everyone else to react then then then it's on because china's not going to back down and the trouble is does it not think it has a line does it think if it's thinking as we talk about the principle that is now already reached that point where it is the global power already it is the superpower it is the person in charge because

of whatever its view on the weaknesses of democracy and all the various systems going around the world does it think it doesn't have a line does it think that whatever it does it can get away with because no one else is going to push back against it well it's certainly pushing uh just about every line at the moment isn't it it's pushing in against india it's pushing against hong kong pushing against taiwan pushing against japan um and previously it was always a poke here and a poke there but now it's a poke everywhere and you know that to me just seems to be the the change in thinking or the change in behavior that's making me wonder why um and you know um where to next is And now I guess it's the why that depends that.

If the why is a strong man who needs to stay strong, then historical precedents don't bode all that well. Whereas if it's a strong man who's got a clear sort of vision of how to erode the United States and other international relationships and get what they want from it, then it's a different matter. That's someone who can recognize there is a line.

I think it's what I call, and looking over at good old Kentucky, the gerbil, I'd call the gerbil theorem. Because, yeah, if you're, well, if you're trying to, in that particular case, tame a gerbil, initially they won't come anywhere near you. then you put some food out they'll come for the food and then they might come for food that's on in in your tip of your fingers and then they might come for food that's on your on your hand

because every time they get bolder they do something additional they don't have a negative consequence so they feel safe doing that and they feel safe trying something else and i think this is the thing is again it kind of all swings back to the gunboat diplomacy part of china's done a little poke it's not had what they consider to be a negative reaction and this is the thing it's about what they think is a negative reaction not what we think we can sit there thinking oh yeah well we showed them if china doesn't take that message on board that has absolutely no relevance to what they're going to do next they do anything as anything short of fighting to be not a negative non-negative reaction they're going to worry about

yeah because they they want everyone to be annoyed about with them they want everyone to be reacting to them because if you're reacting to them then they're on the front foot but at the end of the day if they have a clear physical aim like i want this island if at the end of the day i have this island do i care if everybody else is standing outside going oh well that's really unfair you shouldn't have taken that island so the end of the day it's like well i still have the island and your words mean nothing so yay um and this and yes it escalates and escalates and escalates and they say eventually it's like well what happens if we poke them in multiple places at once do they react now no good okay well now we'll try even more and eventually yeah with the

constantly shifting spectrum of international politics who knows that that the line that they might or might not cross is probably changes on an almost daily basis but at some i think what what china's probably hoping is that there are there are two lines there's there's the line of this forces everybody to take action and there's the line of this threatens everybody nearby and they should take action if they know what's good for them long term but will their allies back them up and china's hoping it gets to that line first because if it can push something big well like you said with the with the australian navy not believing that or the politicians not believing america would back them up if china can find something like that where it can go right i'm

fairly sure that i can do this it's going to force everyone to react but i don't think the big players on the board are going to react that breaks all the various alliances and agreements and all of a sudden their jobs just become a lot easier because if it's

probably a little bit too escalating I guess but let's say there's an Australian flagged merchant ship if they haul it over actually no you need to something a bit more realistic than that we don't actually have any fair enough okay uh

a british flagged merchant ship there are still a couple of them i hear in the world i know the iranians have been trying to hunt them but they are there are still some yeah the iranians found one or two yeah or maybe a ship maybe it's not even australian flagship but a ship that has a lot of australian nationals on board whether they're crew or passengers if they then right this we're stopping this for arbitrary invented reason three now what happens if australia doesn't react well it's just proven it can't defend its citizens if australia does react china's bigger than they are so australia needs help will america back it up well if america does back it up china loses that that calculation and they get a lot of egg on their face and that is something they don't

want if they've got their calculation right and america decides america first we don't care about a bunch of australians even even if they are our allies well then what's the australian government going to do about it they can't get those people free by being aggressive and counter countering the chinese so they either have to abandon their own citizens which is never going to play well internally or they have to shift from we are allies with america to we're actually really good friends with you china and since we're friends would you mind letting our people go and then china will go oh yes well as a friend vassal you can have your people back at which point china wins um because everyone else is going to all the chinese the japanese the south

koreans the philippines the indians etc etc etc we're going to go ah so that's what happens when when you all the cards are on the table i guess we should go and once again and once again we're back to gunboat diplomacy it just seems to be the constant um you know point of return in our discussions i don't know whether that's whether or not we're biased towards the whole subject or whether it's actually got a um a stronger than you um usual role being played out in the world at the moment in one way or another gunboat diplomacy kept not necessarily kept the world at peace but it it was the the international language of diplomacy for the better part of 500 years the only reason it really went away after world war ii was because the big antagonists were

pointing nuclear weapons at each other and in a scenario where you're not immediately threatening the instant sunshine it's pretty much back to that that point because you can you planes can only stay in the air so long and no one really wants to escalate to the point of landing large contingents of troops everywhere, apart from anything else troops make a rather nice static target in the realm of modern weaponry

so you're back to well, what can we bring in that can stay around for a long period of time, is mobile and can defend itself? Oh, that's the Navy You can also put media contingents on board You can do all sorts of things with the ship

I think what's interesting is And I think there is another scenario here that possibly you can forget when you're looking at China from just the Asia, the Pacific realm, when we're talking about America, because I'm, you know, Xi Jinping is a strong man, of course. but there's also there's the fact that trump perceives himself as a strong man but there's another strong man in the mix there's modi who might not be possibly a conventional strong man or is very much a very conventional strong man depending on your perspective on him just depends on how far down the path he's gone that's all and in the nicest way if you're looking at the scenario you've got in and i did laugh okay so they very carefully in the press when i was reading the article said there are multiple brigades looking at each other from both sides on

this incident now last time i checked when you have multiple grades put together in a command structure those are called divisions and when you have enough brigades and enough that is formed into enough divisions you have what's called a corp a corp okay a corp and then if you have enough of those you have an army well i'm fairly sure on both sides the formations i'm looking at are looking definitely heading towards corpse level so it's not brigades looking at each other it's a very hefty armed force and you have a sort of you're sitting there going okay yes let's be honest there is one country on all this sort of mixture which isn't going to look to america to back it up and that is india on the ground at sea they probably would need it but

on the ground india's got a fairly effective fairly well trained fairly efficient army which has a quite a large amount of equipment and what do you know that area that that china is causing trouble in he's actually right next to the area which is next to pakistan where india keeps quite a large amount of its army for some reason. I don't think. Why? So, it's a scenario which helps India going, you know, this is one of the few countries, you are

betting on them wanting to drop down and call for America help. India won't call for American help. India will act. And that is your big problem, because if India acts, there are a lot of nations who are allied with India by history, by culture,

by all things, who might well get drawn in to back them up. Because in a nicer way If you consider Britain We have a huge Indian population In this country We have all sorts of connections To them over the years

They were a large part of our empire But we'll gloss over that one quickly You know They have provided us with Troops in two world wars All sorts of things If they end up in a fighting and a war versus China, even a conventional one

you have to expect the British are going to at least send some support in some respects, maybe not military support but probably something will be sent along the lines to help them or intelligence or something if not actually the British turning up and actually backing them up, in which case you could have a very interesting British-Indian

combined carrier task group entering the South China Sea that would be something quite worrying to see well, possibly well, again though India is certainly feeling aggrieved with its relationship with China, and it has already, I understand, been making appearances in the South China Sea and certainly been making noises of increasing its exercise and interoperability with Japan and with the United States. It hasn't gone so far yet I think while it does have the occasional

Exercise with Australia It hasn't turned the I don't believe the exercises with Japan And the United States have integrated With Australia yet But it's certainly starting To feel the need To make its presence felt

On more than just A few mountain passes Gunboat Diplomacy again Yeah and it's going to be interesting you know so India

is this sort of extra wild card because everyone thinks of India versus Pakistan but there's also the fact that India versus China is an issue and the interesting thing with Pakistan is I'm not sure if China can rely on them to come in on

their side I don't think they'd come in on the side of the Indians but I think they might well sit there sit back and go we're not getting involved in this because it's not in our it's not in our it's not in our benefit to do so yes we have a Chinese port

yes we have a lot of Chinese money but we have a lot of Chinese money and a Chinese port that doesn't mean we want to go and fight a next door neighbour again in a big war it doesn't mean we want to piss off America at the precise moment because we're a long way from China

you know it's like which is like Argentina they are neighbouring aren't they Well, they're neighbouring but in the nicest way if you consider the nicest way where everyone would come from the coast and all these things

China's around the inner Pacific area and they're all well into the Indian Ocean past South East Asia past India that's a long way to go for support that's a long way and in the nicest way

and there's usually an American carrier battlegroups sitting in the indian ocean yeah and and and to be to be perfectly fair the um that china facing off against india is something that yeah people might people might back them up world popcorn supply sales might go up quite considerably um a lot of people will sit back and watch how that develops but in terms of strategic resources and global resources a face-off or even a minor war between china and india over the himalayas doesn't really threaten anyone apart from them a conflict with pakistan pakistan is worryingly close to the middle east it does have a land border with iran and it's a lot closer to

those various choke points near the persian gulf and the red sea and the suez canal so a conflict i think and i think china knows i can't weirdly enough although india is the much bigger power a conflict with india is probably actually safer for them on an international stage than a conflict with pakistan your microphone has gone really cool you are you know we were doing the channeling the matrix when we got here yes freak jamie out because we found out there are me and track aka Alex um you know we we found some scariously freaky connections over the years that were sort of looking at each other going how have we got all these similarities this is quite worrying so we are joking it's a sort of matrix scenario and so we were wearing matrix coats uh although

I couldn't find my shades when Jamie arrived and now Drac's voice is going I don't know full-blown Darth Vader what do you say is that slightly better no it's uh not uh all that different to me so I just I just changed the audio settings on my microphone sounds okay to me yeah yeah I don't know what it is but for some some reason the if I'm using Skype or Zoom or something somehow the computer keeps making edits to the settings on the microphone, whereas if I'm just recording using

Vegas or something. You are in the matrix. You want more evidence of this? Do you need more evidence of this? Let's just put China aside and explain why I feel that Alex

and Alex are corrupted copies of the same file out of the matrix. okay carry on i'm i'm i'm uh mr smith okay so now i understand that there are certain parallels with your age yeah we're both the same age yeah okay not quite perfect but um you know that could be accounted for by a glitch in the stream yeah um now what was it about the school we went to

uh it's a primary school oh that's right you mentioned something about how you were in the same years until um one of you went up a year yes the english educational system works by the cohorts are september through august age-wise so um but back in the 90s back when we were both in early primary school the government moved class sizes from we'd like you to remain below a certain class size to you must remain below a certain class size unless you've got a very good reason otherwise and uh so i was in year two at the time and they said they just went right uh we have a class size of 33 we're only allowed a class size of 30 so you you and you are sort of the top scoring pupils in in this class at the end of the year you're going straight up to year four skip a

year don't pass go don't collect 200 um so they bumped they bumped bumped me and two other others up at one academic year so that's another corruption in the matrix but no that means you jumped into my year because i was in would have been in the year ahead yeah because i was born in september and i'm march and and yeah and then to keep to keep the alignment going although they considered bumping you up a year, they ended up not doing so. Yes. So that meant by the time you got to high school, university,

all the important academic milestones were actually in exactly the same cohort. And the same university. I went to Kingston. Dr. Clark now works for Kingston. I did Kingston for my Masters, and my sister was at Kingston

teaching Drac. Yep. it's why whenever alex calls me dr clark i sort of look behind me because my sister's also dr clark and i'm used to working with her and because she's the engineering engineering lecturer she's more often called dr clark than i am at kingston so whenever i hear i still go well but it's my sister and you know it's it's fun times but it is quite interesting because of course alex was taught by my sister who he can comment on how good how good a lecturer she was now you live around you live around the corner from each other yeah and now you're both running naval podcasts okay yeah all right oh if you if you want if you want to put some extra extra fun parts i mean

obviously we're both called alex um we both like iron brew we both like lilt we both like treacle tart and custard um and when it comes to the academic side of things the the extra fun part is that the three university offers i had when i started university when i was going into university were kingston kings and imperial and the only reason i didn't go for kings was because kingston was a heck of a lot closer and i didn't want to get on the train i could cycle to kingston i I couldn't cycle in central London. Whereas I did St Mary's for my bachelor's because it's a beautiful university

and you've got cheap tickets for the rugby. Very important at the time. And then Kingston for my master's and Kingston for my PhD. All right, so how many million people are in the UK? 70-odd? Yeah. Yeah, okay.

So either coincidence has happened or this is the matrix. oh and of course we're both big fans of uh professor lambert yeah yeah you know it is we have a fun we have fun times and you know it's sort of i of course work with track's brother as well because he works at the same university that i and my sister do and um he has said in the past i think he'd get on with my brother he's never introduced us no he's too lazy so instead you sort of just you know found each other via this matrix thing called

twitter i suspect yeah yeah yeah i think i i saw what was it i can't know it wasn't a twitter a recommendation it was someone else i followed on i was following on twitter that's i was i was following the king's college lawton twitter account and you were having an exchange with somebody on there and i was like oh i wonder who this person is this and then look through the twitter feed oh this looks interesting i shall click follow and then it was like oh we're doing a live stream i shall watch this live stream and i was like this all sounds very interesting subscribe and the rest as they say is history

the only difference being is that the Dr Alex Clark doesn't have the suit of armour yet so what style do we get him just to make the matrix complete well I have five

so he can borrow one and they're all in different styles as well you could have full plate part plate A male Hungarian lamella. Fancy. All perfect.

I don't know. I'm thinking you're looking a bit more Roman there. Yeah, I am in red. As I said, I'm wearing a... And this will probably be seen later when I'm doing it live. I'm wearing my Tank Museum t-shirt because I got on...

Basically, I've kept watching the Tank Museum doing all their stuff on Twitter and they keep getting ignored by people and they're doing this great stuff they're putting out this great sort of interactive museum stuff on twitter they're doing all sorts of introductions thanks because of course they're closed at the moment and i think they should get more attention so i thought i'd wear my t-shirt today for the live and have a chat about them oh yeah i'll have to keep an i'll have to keep an eye out for some more of your retweets of them and tweet them myself yeah they're a very

very nice set of people actually um i've been to tank fest just just misguided they just should have preserved a few more warships that's all well as as i said to the chieftain when he interviewed me at last year's tank fest um like a tank is a metal box with a gun in it the difference is the navy's ones are bigger and they float yes originally tanks were called land ships ships yes it was the land ships committee yeah and then there's then the army took it over Yeah, and they've ruined it ever since. It's just like the Air Force. Mm-hmm.

All right. So, is this bringing us to our natural end of the session with the red pill or blue pill as the choice? Oh, probably. But let's see, have we covered all our lists? Because we did have quite an impressive list. As you all know, what happens is we have a chat during the week.

Let me explain it. and basically we pass backwards and forwards ideas and things and jamie is the very nice person who collates them basically goes this is what's practical for us to cover in a rough time so that we don't end up talking for the entire day and i think we have hit everything i will yeah so stuff i will say is that um please remember that we are still running the uh competition as to our new artwork so please do tweet those at us um we'll be announcing those when we do the fourth recording because hopefully people will start them coming out at some point so usually probably when we've done the fourth recording they'll be able to come i

will be able to sort of announce a short list and um thank you very much for listening and by the way yeah why don't you let us know what you would like us to uh dribble on about oh you know yeah um you know we're we're talking about things that we find uh intriguing and inspiring and um uh that we might have some sort of perspective on from our um historical and current affairs perspectives but uh you know we're only three drips i'm sure there's a hell have a lot more of you out there so um let us know oh yeah that'd be good yeah i mean it's yeah it works to be honest it's uh when on on the channel as people probably know the the five minute guides are literally there there is no there is no real order or or anything to them

they are literally just a case of how quickly did people get their requests in so this is why there's no kind of yes and this for these months we're covering American battleships and in the next few months it'll be Japanese cruisers it's just like well today we're covering the Perth and tomorrow it's the Mogami and the week after that it's

some obscure Romanian ship you've never heard of but somebody had but and asked for it so it keeps things fresh I have to say the questions I get sort of being asked I've now got enough put up that i could probably keep it going twice a week till this till the end of

december beginning of january from the questions i already have in without any without me thinking of any more questions myself and i do have a habit of adding about two questions in a month which are things i just fancy doing because frankly i fancy doing them well this is why i keep a very very narrow focus this is why it's armored carriers or nothing because otherwise i would never get any work done or see my family whatsoever. And, yeah, you just have to put boundaries on things at some point. You do. All right.

Thank you very much. Although getting work done is terribly overrated. I have to pay for it all somehow. Okay. Well, thank you for listening. And. Welcome to the Bilge Pumps, where a bunch of naval geeks spout off.