Sea Control - Sea Control 202 - Regional Strategy Week with Dr. Sebastian Bruns & John Bradford

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Links:1. CIMSEC's Regional Strategy Week2. The Kiel Seapower Series3. Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Affairs

Hey folks, Jared here. We are closing out Regional Strategies Week here at SimSec, so we brought in a pair of guests, Dr. Sebastian Bruins from the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security, John Bradford from the Okuska Council on Asia-Pacific Affairs, to discuss lessons learned from SimSec's recently concluded Regional Strategy Week. I want to preface the episode with our usual disclaimer that all opinions are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. I also encourage you to keep tuning in because we're going to have some exciting news about some changes for Sea Control coming very soon. As always, we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast feed, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Drach, Jamie, and a pile of empty iron brew bottles on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain and naval history. Check them out wherever you download your podcasts. They've got a friend of the Sea Control podcast, Dr. Selmer Cagliano, on this week,

talking about what navies can learn from merchant fleets. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. We are dropping this episode midweek to discuss CIMSEC's Regional Strategy Week, which was so successful it expended to fill two full weeks. It remains unclear if this is part of CIMSEC's salami slicing strategy to grab more of the maritime security calendar. So I'm joined today by an old friend of Sea Control's, Dr. Sebastian Bruins from the Institute for Security

Policy at Keele University. It is eight o'clock in the morning. Good morning, Sebastian. Good morning, Jared. And John Bradford from the Okuska Council on Asia-Pacific Studies. John, I believe it's 3 p.m. by you. Good morning, or good afternoon, I'd say. That's correct. Hello from Japan. It's 11 p.m. here in San Diego, so this is the most globe-spanning edition of Sea Control that we've done to date here. So, Sebastian, welcome back, and thank you for agreeing to come on today. Can you refresh the listeners on your background? Well, absolutely. I am the head of the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy, Key University

in northern Germany. I'm a specialist on naval strategy, US Navy, German Navy, and my team and I, we are Continental Europe's only think tank that's specifically focused on the role of naval forces, sea power, and international relations. Good to be back. Thank you. And John, would you mind sharing your background with the listeners as well, please? Yeah, sure. I'm the Executive Director of the Episcopal Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, WICAPS. We're a non-profit organization that started in Yokosuka but has grown to some of the other bases around Japan, and we expect to expand beyond Japan soon. We're focused on helping people learn more about the region and enhance their professional development. Also, since the beginning of August, I've been a

senior fellow at the Roger Atnam School of International Studies in Singapore. I'm still in Japan right now, but I should be transferring down to no longer work remotely and be in Singapore later this year. Excellent. So to begin then, gentlemen, ISPK, YCAPS, and the Dominican Command and Naval Staff School partnered with CIMSEC for this topic. Sebastian, we'll start with you. Why did you want ISPK to be involved? Sure. So first of all, we are very interested in bringing up new voices in the maritime security analysis and in the maritime world. Things like these, topical weeks like these, really allow us to look beyond, in our case, the Baltic and European waters and really identify individuals who are up and coming researchers, experts on very diverse maritime security topics. And I guess that's the other part that's important to us is, as I was hinting, we are, as much as anyone else, bound by geography and, of course, the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

And, you know, these kind of things, they really factor very high on my daily agenda, on our institutional agenda. So it's very good and very helpful to look at other diverse regions of the world, be it South America, be it Southeast Asia, other parts of Europe. So that was very helpful. And then, John, same question. Then how about YCAPS? Yeah, as I said before, YCAPS is a nonprofit organization. We're dedicated towards building interpersonal networks, promoting dialogue, and enabling professional development. Our desire at NSTATE for our organization is to create a group of people that are more aware of security issues in our region

and to enable communities that are more capable of rising to these emerging challenges. So we have a great deal of SIMSEC. I see SimSec as an organization that's kind of similar to YCAPS in that we were both built from the ground's roots up. We're about real people, but we've been enabled and eased by the new technologies that are available and opportunities for online collaboration. So it seemed natural for us to team up and foster some collaborative thinking. I think it also was an opportunity to bring some new voices to the conversation, but it's also an opportunity to connect people, to read from each other and learn from each other. So I was going to ask you, too, if you got what you were looking for out of this. But based on the descriptions that you gave for why you signed up with CINSEC here, I would say that the answer is yes.

So I'm going to move along to our next question is really wound up with topics that address three distinct regions as you broke them all down. South America, Europe, primarily focused on the Mediterranean, though we did get a really nice submission on the Swedish Navy. and then the Indo-Pacific that, well, I think it was China-centric. It was China-centric as viewed through various national lenses. So, for example, you might have a Japanese author writing about Japan's approach here, but very focused on China, which I found to be an interesting twist. John, I'm going to start with you. Did you find any broad, overarching themes to connect these regions?

Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. There was a lot of China talk. in these papers. And that makes sense. You know, the PRC is by far and away the biggest and most powerful state in East Asia, and its Navy is growing. Its Navy, as was noted by a couple of the authors, will surpass the United States Navy as that with the most ships of any force in the world. And it's using that Navy as well as its Coast Guard and its maritime militias to be very aggressive and act in clear violation of international law. However, I think it's also

easy to think that the region's concerns about China are the only or the overarching maritime challenge. Perhaps it's the strongest, but people in the region are concerned about other things. They're concerned about maritime crimes. They're concerned about IU fishing. In many cases, they're as much concerned about the instability that they see as being associated with U.S. PRC competition as they are with the salami-slicing ambitions of the PRC itself. So, I mean, in that case, I thought Abdal Izzal from Malaysia did a really good job of showing a case where, you know, Malaysia is very concerned about the PRC, very concerned about PRC actions, but that those concerns are mitigated by their views of other challenges and other opportunities

and risks. I also want to point out that, you know, I think that these other challenges like crime and IU fishing are a really big deal. And I think they'd probably be slightly more prevalent in the region than was reflected in the papers that were submitted to CIMSEC. That makes sense given CIMSEC's background in nature. But in that case, I was really refreshed by Michael Van Ginkle's article on the South Pacific. I don't think it ever mention China. That might have been an oversight because when I traveled to the South Pacific and I talked to South Pacific speakers, Chinese involvement and Chinese growing influence, there is a concern. At the same time, it really focused on concerns that impact them today,

such as managing fishing and crime and their bass waters and their resources to provide enforcement. Thanks. I think another contributing factor on the lack of articles about maritime crime and IUU fishing in particular was we just wrapped a topic week a few weeks ago on ocean governance where we had a lot of articles on those topics so is maybe people expended some of their best material on ocean governance early and then came at the regional security or the regional strategy piece from a slightly different angle of attack if you will. Sebastian yeah I mean yeah sorry go Go ahead, John. Oh, so yeah, that makes perfect sense, especially the title.

It's kind of what I mentioned about what I meant when I was mentioning the background of SimSec is when you speak of a regional strategy, people automatically presume that that is about international relations as opposed to about domestic concerns. And while a lot of these maritime crimes do require international collaboration, they are primarily domestic challenges. And if you take a look at the region and define the region as a group of states, the behavior of China is the most concerning regional and international challenge. Absolutely.

Then, Sebastian, I'll come to you. Same question. Broad, overarching themes that you thought tied some of these regions together? Sure. Well, yeah, in addition to what John just explored, I have about two or three, maybe four takeaways. The first one is that maritime dynamics are similar or appear to be rather similar in diverse regions of this world.

And that implies to me that pairing the generic, if you will, the generic foreign policy toolkit with regional specifics, that can go a long way to combat maritime security challenges in very diverse regions of the world. The second overarching aspect that really, really resonated with me was the quest for naval resources, resources to fund the navies, the Coast Guards, the maritime forces, if you will, the regional strategies, the regional maritime strategies in question. I think that's something that also is a bit familiar to anyone, everyone who listens to this podcast. The strategy, the Navy that's fully funded and fully resourced to the best of ability, I think still has to be built. And the third takeaway that I had was Navy's still have a very vital diplomatic and constabulary role in the 21st century. I believe my personal impression is that a lot of time, a lot of effort is spent on writing, thinking, articulating about the Navy's, the Naval role in great power conflict, in war. And a lot of individuals tend to forget that Navy's have a very broad, there's a very broad spectrum that Navy's and maritime forces operate on and the diplomatic function and the constabulary function. We need not forget about these. These were very dominant in the 1990s and in the 2000s, up until perhaps 2014, for a lot of European and Asian navies. And we need not forget about these in times of great power conflict, where a lot of talk is about the high end, the hard end of naval conflict.

And if I may, there's one more takeaway that I had sort of inspired by a short note by you, Jared. The wealth of national strategic documents really, really struck me. I personally follow the big navies, the big states, the big countries, and see what their strategic documents lay out and do they have one in the first place. And I was surprised and perhaps a bit angered that Germany, which by no means is a small country, still doesn't have a naval strategy to speak of. So something that we can take a page out of the playbook, just looking at a lot of other countries that managed to draw up documents, strategic documents that are really meaningful. So that's something that I take away for my next conversation with policy leaders and naval leaders. Yeah, I was really pleased with going through the different reference lists for each article and getting to see all the different national strategic documents. I think as an American, you're kind of used to these gold-plated problems where we can throw an awful lot of money at issues, and it's not the same for a country the size of, say, Colombia.

They view things very differently because of their budgetary limitations. So budgetary pressures that were prevalent in almost every single article that discussed the Navy, a lot of the problems are resource driven. Every country is concerned about its resources. The two most prevalent I found being fossil fuels and fish. John, I thought your article actually was tremendous in this respect as you laid out the case for sort of the expanded role for the Japanese Navy over time, all centered around sea lines of communications to the resources that the island consumes. That was really illustrative of that problem and the way that a country will shape its national strategy to ensure that its populace can get those resources. And then, Sebastian, you mentioned the navies as a tool of diplomacy. Even the smaller countries, Colombia, I already mentioned, but that article, a lot of the way they view their navies is a diplomatic tool and a way for them to have a place on the international stage. So with that, I'd like to go to South America first then. And we received two articles which examined the Colombian and the Chilean navies, respectively. And, Sebastian, what did you learn from those? Thanks. So both countries, both articles struck as having a similar challenge of the naval ambition versus the resources.

So we already talked about that. And both countries are obviously, well, they are South America, but that's that's where a lot of the commonalities really end. And look at the just look at the map and at the coastlines and at the at the maritime security environment. And reading it, I learned a lot about how both navies, how both countries try to navigate the spectrum of conflict and sort of adjust the naval roles, not just the maritime security role, but the naval role that they want to play in their environment, in their national defense, looking ahead, sort of, obviously not a global role for either of these navies or either of these countries' naval forces. But I think it's no surprise, no secret that there's been

a vast, vast Chinese fishing fleet operating of the west coast of South America recently, and countries are very, very concerned about their EZs, about the fishing, and about the geopolitical implications that this may have. So that's something that I took away there. And in particular for Colombia, I filed it on the two items. The first one was the narco subs, very pertinent maritime security threat that countries like the US and others are operating against, obviously, but also Colombia. And they are an emerging strategic partner for Germany, buying decommissioned submarines.

And all in all, I guess, I believe that South America is an emerging naval market, but that's just a side note. I think both countries, Colombia and Chile, and both articles underline the need for the appreciation of maritime security and prosperity nexus. Jared, you mentioned that just a moment ago. I think that a broader perspective beyond these sort of sea lines of communication approach might be useful, not just for South America, but in general. Well, my feeling here in Europe is that, you know, when you talk about communication, a lot of people still think, you know, they've got this black and white image in their head of the Halifax convoys in World War II. And that's obviously not how the modern day nexus of prosperity and maritime security really works. And it's really, I mean, you know, amidst the COVID, the global pandemic that we're experiencing, who knows whether the sea lines of communication issue will ever emerge. Final thought that if I may, both articles really show that innovation is key.

And I think navies and governments really need to find a place where they can let innovation, naval innovation roam rather freely, not within the boundaries, obviously, of national ambitions and national objectives. But innovation really was something that I thought was useful. and both in terms of technological as well as doctrinal and tactical issues. I'll say I was struck by both those. They're dealing with two different resource tensions there. The Chilean Navy sort of double-tasked to perform both Coast Guard functions and its Navy functions, and then I didn't realize that the Colombian Navy

splits a lot of its personnel with its Marine Corps, which is a function of sort of the internal politics of that company in that country and their internal security situation. It also reminded me, I was fortunate enough to do a couple of podcasts earlier, one with Christian Ehrlich on the Mexican Navy and Andrea Rosende on the Brazilian Navy, how underdeveloped the shipbuilding industry is in South America. Sebastian, I think that answers your point of is there a right market if you're trying to sell frigates?

There are countries there that are interested in that. I just don't know that the budgets are going to support that, particularly moving forward from COVID. Transition to Europe next then, and then we'll finish with the Indo-Pacific. Sebastian, I know you're Northern European. I think Sweden is near and dear to both of us. Most of the European articles centered on the Mediterranean and everything that's going on down there. So I just did a podcast with your colleague Jan Esmussen and Janis Gregoriatis on the Eastern Mediterranean, but our submissions gave us some new perspectives, namely Italy's Israels. Did the level of Israeli ambition surprise you?

You know, not really. This is my time where I can brag. My office is right across, right on the Kiel Bay, on the Kiel Firth. And when I just look out of my window, my office window, hard enough, I can see the submarine shipyards, Tosin Trop Marine Systems. I've been living in Kiel for over a decade now. And almost every time there's an Israeli dolphin class submarine being built there. So to me, given this longstanding defense technology transfers from Germany, particularly from Kiel to Israel, now also not just submarines, but also five or six new corvettes that Israel ordered, it's no surprise to me. It was no surprise to me. The only surprise that I'd be able to perhaps articulate is that this defense transfer really

doesn't play a big role in the, or the Eastern Mediterranean rather, doesn't play a big role in the German maritime foreign policy mindset, which is surprising given the conflict dynamics in the region, given the fact that there's a lot of things happening, to put it mildly. And I think the podcast that you did with Jan and Janis really went a long way there. I mean, it's no surprise. You just look at the map, you realize the sea offers a strategic depth for Israel that the country doesn't have in any other way. It's also obviously an arena for resources, resource extraction and access. And if you want to talk geopolitics in the region and why northern European countries should be worried about that or not just worried,

but should spend some time thinking and analyzing this area. The Sixth Fleet presence is nowhere near that it was in the Cold War days. There's Russia, there's China in the region. I had started about the land conflicts that are ravaging the region. No, it didn't surprise me. The only issue that I had was we need to spend more policy attention, if you will, in Europe, in Northern Europe on the fact. That's a little surprising given that I think there are German units down there

almost constantly, either off the coast of Lebanon, operating as part of UNIFIL, or Operation Irenia, which is not that distant from their Aegean German forces the last few years. So, okay, interesting. What did you think of the Italian submission's identification of Turkey as a primary destabilizing force in the region? Yeah, so, yeah, you're right. You know, I hadn't even mentioned Turkey, and I want to clarify, because you mentioned Irini and UNIFIL and the Aegean mission. In German Navy circles, that's probably eating up one third, if not half, of the operating hours that the German Navy has.

But in the policy world, it's surprisingly absent. UNIFIL is the longest standing naval mission that the German Navy is involved in since 2006. And the German Navy is about to take over the command of the Maritime Task Force. So there's no exit plan for that yet, and all the other missions as well. So it's really big on the German Navy's agenda. But I just wish that it would be also, you know, there would be more appreciation for what these three missions, or the Eastern Mediterranean at large, really mean for Germany and Northern Europe. Now, in terms of Turkey, which is a player or a factor in at least two of these various

missions just mentioned, that's something I really enjoyed reading. The Turkish-Italian rivalry, I think, is often overlooked as well. And Libya, obviously, as the key battleground state, so to speak, this is obviously a question of regional hegemony, but it's also, it goes back into the colonial history. Libya has always been, Italy has perceived Libya as a sphere of influence for many, many decades, if not centuries. And now this destabilized country is becoming the new, and yet again, another battleground for regional hegemony.

This is as bad as this in the first place, but then EU and NATO get drawn into this because There's the Irini that's operating off the Libyan coast, Turkey and Italy, obviously NATO allies who should be not at each other's necks during the process. So a lot of things happening in the region that Turkey plays a key role in. Now, it takes two to tango, and I don't want to blame Turkey for that kind of aggression as it was framed. I thought that was a very strong wording, but it goes to show that just because you're in the same alliance or in the same general region of the world, you don't need to be friends necessarily. Yeah, and I guess we should clarify as well that when we refer to the quote-unquote Italian submission, your implication there is the author is Italian. The author does not necessarily speak for Italy. That just happens to be their nationality.

So, point of clarification there that I should have mentioned earlier. John, did you have anything in particular on the European pieces? Otherwise, I've got one more question about the submission from our Italian author. No, I just thought that the fact that many of the articles talk about the Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean reflects the same trends that we're seeing with authors in the United States of big thinkers who've been showing their concerns about that as probably the most significant near-term maritime hotspot or flashpoint. And so I thought it was really interesting that we can see a sort of lighting contest

that spans out over a month or more, matches up that closely with the headline news a week or so. Yeah, I think anytime you have allies ramming each other's ships, it's going to get some attention. I was actually a little surprised that we did not get an article either from a Turkish perspective or from a Greek perspective to lay out sort of their – how they viewed the situation, but it's okay. Maybe they're too busy ramming and getting rammed. That's entirely possible. There was another concern expressed in the submission from the Italian author that surprised me.

That was Algeria's unilateral maritime claims extended into the Spanish and Italian EZs. So it seems like this is less contentious than the other, as the other concerned countries, their large protests and all sides immediately started negotiating. But it was a surprise to me to learn that. Sebastian, do you see any real threat to stability posed by those competing maritime claims, given what we're seeing over in the eastern Mediterranean? I don't think it's as much of a stability threat as the eastern Mediterranean. In particular, I believe it was one article that noted that there's a conflict dynamic in the eastern Mediterranean that stretches all the way to Ethiopia, including water resources. And obviously, Ethiopia is no more a naval power. It's landlocked.

But I thought the broader, the most significant stability issues were in the eastern Mediterranean. In terms of Algeria and that claim, honest men can disagree, and I suppose honest statesmen can disagree and should disagree often, and that's okay. It becomes a problem when the quest for resources gets nasty. I don't see that kind of challenge in the Western Mediterranean. It gets problematic once a populist or outright autocratic government decides that this is an issue that they want to take up to unify their population against a perceived or actual foreign threat that's extracting resources from them. I believe in the Western Mediterranean, there's more opportunity for governance structures, which I think is something that we need to address in the maritime domain as well. And in the Western Mediterranean, in that particular case, Algeria, Spain, and Italy, in the EEZs, there's good potential for an idea, a word that's come out of fashion, really, and that's compromise. A lot of these issues, they can be solved.

It doesn't mean that there needs to be a naval armada deployed from one country or another. And frankly, these disagreements, especially on the EEZs, they happen everywhere. I know that Germany and the Netherlands still have a couple of things unresolved about their maritime borders. But, you know, we're not necessarily necessarily going to war. I hope we just play soccer or football against each other and Germany wins. That's that's that. So. So. So, yeah, I wouldn't worry about about the Western Mediterranean in that particular issue as much. Thanks. OK, John, we've reached the Indo-Pacific. Now you submit a piece here. I mentioned it earlier, it's been very well received, far and away the greatest number

of submissions for this region. And you talked earlier about some of the overarching themes here, but we got a lot of really good articles from authors writing about Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and then, of course, China. Were there any pieces here that really stuck out to you? Yeah, I mentioned both of them earlier. There's two that really stood out. The first was Abdelaziz's article about soft balancing Malaysia, ASEAN, and the South China Sea.

I thought it did an exceptional job of describing both how national and regional concerns about China are a driving factor, but not the only factor. and trying to explain how the, well, China may be the biggest concern. There are concerns about United States activities and, in many cases, a preference to find some sort of balance. I also personally really enjoyed Michael Van Ginkle's article. The South Pacific is an area I don't know much about, but I made a trip to Fiji last year and fell in love. And as international influence grows there, it's becoming more and more important.

So I'm trying to learn more about it. And I thought he was really eye-opening to me to show how much regional cooperation there is already. I would say it sounded like there was a lot more information sharing and collaboration than there is in an area I know better, which would be Southeast Asia. But at the same time, while I knew it, it was very eye-opening to read it to see just how little capacity they have. And again, I kind of noticed that when I was in the shipment training with the Malaysian Navy, there were three cadets there from the Tongo Navy. And they explained to me how they, the three cadets of the Tongo Navy, were half of the wardroom from the one ship, which comprised the entirety of the Tongo Navy. So when you read an issue about Palau and having one mid-sized vessel to cover one of the world's largest EEZs, that's illuminating. It's interesting the way that that problem has driven those countries more closely together, and it's driven them closely to the United States with things like the boarding arrangements.

But even with those arrangements, it's clear that capacity is far short of the problem. Yeah, and another part of the submissions from that region that I found interesting was these countries don't just have an issue with China. They all have their own issues with one another as well as far as whose EEZ overlaps with who else's claimed EEZ. There's a lot of conflict there with Vietnamese fishermen being pushed down into, I think it's the Indonesian and Malaysian EZs to do some of their fishing, that the Malaysians are trying to keep them out of their EZ and how those countries are trying to work together, too. Is that something that you spend a lot of time on, I'm guessing? Absolutely. I mean, I think there's at least three mentions in the collection of papers of a three-way standoff. Both north of Natuno, as I know was mentioned, and as was the standoff of earlier this year involving Vietnam, Malaysia, and China in sort of the central south side of the South Tennessee.

You know, I did want to say something about the response to the PRC, because as you noted earlier, that was the bulk of the articles. And I think that the variety of thoughts presented on what either the current strategy or an appropriate strategy to manage a more aggressive PRC would be, the diversity there reflected the wide diversity in the region. So you have a couple articles which are very much about hard power, naval combat, who fights who and who wins. So my colleague at RSIS, Sun Tzu Wu's article, kind of patching a Chinese carrier bottle group against various different coastal state defenses is a very hard warfare question asking, who wins against China? David Scott's article in India, it's being written from a perspective of a state which has an ongoing active conflict with the PRC. But then a lot of the other articles were more focused on either managing or preventing a conflict. And some of those relied heavily on sort of traditional hard deterrence. You know, Selling's article on Taiwan describes how Taiwan is building a new strategy to be able to fight and win against China while at the same time using larger ships for peacetime roles.

I think as an aside, not only was that a question of a hard-to-turn strategy, but it was also very interesting of a juxtaposition where a country plans to use its smaller vessels in the war, but maintains a fleet of frigates and destroyers for peacetime operations, which is not normally how you think of a state constructing its navy. but it does reflect the realities that are right there around Taiwan. Captain Selling, also kind of a hard-to-turn piece. He talks a lot about law enforcement, but he clearly says this is a backdoor to build a relationship to deter Chinese aggression. The title of the paper uses containment, so very much a hard-power paper. Whereas the Asian authors tended to focus more on opportunities to create balance, to create off-ramps, or to build stability.

So I think that diversity right there reflects the diversity of thinking in the region and the diversity of the challenges and questions about just what is the best way to manage this increasingly dynamic problem. Yeah, thank you. The range of submission and the variety of solutions presented make a very strong argument for getting diverse groups together to tackle these problems. Because, again, as an American, we often show up with our bags of money prepared to address the problem. And I think if you don't have the bags of money, then you're going to be a little bit more creative when you approach it. Sebastian, any final thoughts here before we close out?

Yeah, I thought this discussion was extremely useful. Something that John hinted at, I think I want to underline again, is the issue of – or two issues, rather. The first one is we need not forget about capacity building. I know a lot of the conversation in naval strategy and naval circles is about readiness, about war fighting first, about all these kind of things. And we need not forget a sentence that's coming from the 2007 US Maritime Strategy. You cannot search trust. And I wonder when navies, in particular those in industrial countries, a.k.a. First World, we're focused very much on the high end. And we need to. We need to. Don't get me wrong. But who's doing the capacity? Who's in it for the long haul?

Who's in it to build the capacities so that Tonga and the Indo-Pacific nations can grow and really help each other out better? I think that's something that we need to keep in mind as we move forward. And I really appreciate the breadth and wealth of perspectives that I gathered from, in particular, from this region, because it challenged my perception of how the next war might start. It might actually be a muddy maritime security issue that escalates rather than the Battle of Midway 2.0 that gets a lot of airtime in certain, well, in certain pundits' circles, I suppose. So this was very useful in laying out a broad perspective. Thanks, Sebastian. Yeah, the capacity building was another aspect of the article that you submitted, John, that I really enjoyed. I mean, you talked about what the Japanese have done over a long period of time, both with the Philippines and with Vietnam.

Do you have any more thoughts on capacity building? Otherwise, I'll close it out here. Yeah, I would mention that if you want to take a look at an advanced economy with a powerful Navy that is really focused on capacity building for exactly the reasons Sebastian just outlined, Japan, great case study. I would argue that the JMSDF is one of the top three, and I don't think anybody could argue not one of the top five most significant navies in the world in terms of number of hulls, advanced technology, training, maintenance abilities. Yet, they focus a lot of their energy as a nation on building the capacity of their neighbors. So, they do exactly what Sebastian was suggesting, is that they're very ready for that high-end fight, that major war at sea, while at the same time, they're building relationships through their capacity-building efforts. In Southeast Asia today, a lot of the polls say that the preferred maritime partner is not the United States, not China, but Japan. And that's partially because they've quietly, for 50 years now, been there, been at the side of their Southeast Asian partners, building up capacity, and not doing it in a way that requires a lot of showboating or publicity.

Now, sometimes you can criticize the Japanese and say, hey, why aren't you getting credit for what you're doing, or why are you so bad at public affairs? And that certainly has near-term costs that they're not sort of in the limelight enough. But at the same time, that slow, steady, quiet approach is giving them a great deal of mileage over the longer-term experience. Thank you, John. That's a tremendous note to finish on. So unfortunately, that is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Sebastian Bruins and John Bradford, both for partnering with us and why I think we can agree it was a very successful collaboration, and for joining me on the podcast today. Sebastian, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me online at naval underscore gazing on Twitter, and I invite you to visit www.seapowerseries.com, which is the website for the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security at ISBK in Kiel. So my focus, my projects are where my team and I are working on a book on Allied Maritime Strategy in the 21st century. So that's going to be published next summer together with preparations for the Kiel International Seapower Symposium 2021, which we hope COVID will let us have, at least in a hybrid version. And quite personally, I'm focusing on doing a deep dive on naval aviation. But don't worry, Germany is not buying an aircraft carrier yet.

soon sebastian soon uh john same question to you where can we find you online and what else are you working on yeah if you're uh looking for me i am on twitter but not as active as many of our contemporaries that's marsec underscore bradford but i'd prefer to steer you towards the ycaps web page and social media uh that's www yankee charlie alpha papa sierra dot org when i write something, it gets put there, but all of our other members get highlighted there as well. YCAPS is also active on Facebook and Twitter, and you can find us just by searching YCAPS. As for my current projects, there's quite a few of them. I'm continuing on this

line of investigation about Japan's role in Southeast Asia. I'm trying to expand that more into questions of how the U.S. and Japan together should be involved in Southeast Asia. An alliance which is thought of as being very military, but may be able to become itself more involved in sort of holistic maritime solutions. When you mentioned the aircraft carriers, as a joke about Germany, I'm very interested in the fact that the F-35 lightning carrier is going to become the capital ship of Asia here in the next three years, being operated by at least three navies in the region, with a few more talking about it. So I'm trying to think through what the implications of that might be on the region.

Well, thank you both again for joining us. We'll include links to both Seat Power Series and Y-Caps in the show notes, so you'll be able to find that on the SimSec website as well as wherever you download the podcast. I do want to pause here and thank all of our authors who contributed to this topic as well. A lot of new potential Twitter follows if you're interested in maritime security. And finally, to the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Seat Control is produced and edited by Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuiston.

We'll be right back. Water, wine, both white and red Oh, put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley Why are they pulling the alley? Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley Put it on the shimbo now