Sea Control - Sea Control 220 - On Contested Shores with B.A. Friedman & Timothy Heck

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

Links:1. On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare, edited by Tim Heck and B.A. Friedman, Marine Corps University Press, 2020.2. 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, by B.A. Friedman, Naval Institute Press, 2015.3. Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle, by B.A. Friedman, Naval Institute Press, 2017.4. From the Cold War to ISIL: One Marine’s Journey, by Jason Q. Bohm, Naval Institute Press, 2019.

Hey folks, Jared here. We have Walker Mills back in the hosting chair this week, and he's joined by Tim Heck and Brett Friedman to discuss their new book, On Contested Shores, The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare. Should be a two-episode week for us, so stick around because we got another big one coming on Thursday with two high-profile guests. Not going to say any more than that, but the episode has been recorded and we're just editing now. As always, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast network the bilge pumps you can find alex jamie drack and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts finally from sea control to bilge pumps to project trident 2020

has been a banner year for simsic we need your help to carry that momentum into 2021 please continue supporting our right fight win holiday donation campaign via direct donations on our website make simsec your preferred non-profit on amazon smile so you can support us while you shop with that i'll turn it over to kimber's men Welcome back to Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host this week, Walker Mills. This week, we're talking to Tim Heck and Brett Friedman, who are the editors of the recently released On Contested Shores, The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare,

which is what we're going to talk about today. Tim, welcome. Can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners? Yeah, thanks for having us, Walker. I'm a freelance editor and a historian. I'm a major in the Marine Corps Reserve. Most of my work as a historian has been on the Red Army, but as a career Marine, I dig on amphibiosity. I think out of that came this book. Okay, welcome. And Brett, same question to you. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Yeah, my name is B.A. Friedman. I work as a military analyst with a company that does operations research and other military analysis. I mostly work for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, and I'm also a career Marine Corps officer currently in the reserves. Awesome. And would you let me call you Brett or B.A., or what do you go by?

Oh, yeah, just Brett's fine. Okay, fantastic. So Brett, first question to you. So what prompted this book? I know that for you personally, this isn't the first book that you've written. Yeah, so it's not my first book, but it was definitely Tim's idea. He approached me and pretty much noticed that it had been a long time since someone had put together a book like this on this subject. One, we kind of took inspiration from Assault from the Beach, which was a collection of Naval Institute Press proceedings articles. That's a classic and still is. And I wouldn't say we replicated that. We weren't trying to replicate it, but we were trying to update the conversation on amphibious operations a little bit because it had been so long since that one was released. So that was mostly Tim's idea. And I said, yeah, right away. Absolutely. And we started putting it together, planning on how we could do it and talking to different publishers. The rest was just the hard work to bring it to fruition. Awesome. And just so our listeners know, your first book is On Tactics. That's correct?

Yeah. So first book, no, my first book was 21st Century Ellis, which was about Pete Ellis and his ideas. I dug up some work he had done in the 19-teens and 1920s and kind of reframed that for today. And I talked about how they applied today. And then my second book was on tactics, which is more of my own work of theory on trying to define a way to, as military officers and practitioners, We look at strategic theory a lot, but no one kind of digs down deeper into the tactical theory. So that was my attempt to do that. Awesome. And we'll make sure that we put links to those books in the show notes so that our listeners can get a hold of that.

So, Tim, I want to ask you, does that sound about right? I mean, it seems like Brett's saying this is really more of your idea. And I know I was going to ask that it seems pretty similar to, I think it's Merrill Bartlett's Assault from the Sea, Essays on the History of Amphibious Operations. that was published in 1993. So is this kind of an update or a similar project or how would you, would you put them side by side? I mean, I'll gladly take the credit. The conversation about the book started as a text message, literally me texting Breitbart, hey, do you want to do a book on amphibious operations? And his response was, oh, hell yes. And then here we are about two years later with an actual product. And he mentioned Bartlett's book, you mentioned it. And I think

it is, I think it is an update. I think it's, you know, Bartlett's book was in many ways the genesis of this project. I was researching a Soviet landing operation, and his was one of the few sources in English I could readily find on Soviet operations during what they call the Great Patriotic War. And so looking around, I didn't find much else out there that was fitting my need. And when I went to Brett with it, he found the same thing. Nothing was out there fitting our needs. And necessity being the mother of all inventions, we figured out that creating a modern day version was due. We're grateful to Marine Corps University Press for investing in the project and making it freely available as part of our effort to create a new book on amphibious

operations. And certainly, you know, this is a Marine under the current commandant, the Marine Corps is looking back to see in a significant way as we disentangle from the long war. So I think there's a direct applicability of what we did by coming up with this book. Brett and I are dirt Marines. We came up in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan. And frankly, we've never been to see. You know, even our basic school classes didn't even do an amphibious tour or go look at a ship or any of that stuff. But now we're at a level where we can start having significant influence on the organization if we're in the right rooms. And we want to make sure that we've done the right thing and that influence is the right one and not going to cause a lot of folks

to call our recommendations misguided or bad, right? When your generation comes up and is field grade officers and looks at what we did as we retire and goes, oh, you Muppets. I certainly don't want to be called a Muppet, not by you or by anybody else. But we use this book as a chance to explore those theories and explore those ideas. And so it's both a practical and an intellectual exercise for us to understand amphibious operations beyond the traditional studies of assaults, right? Bartlett's book is titled Assault from the Sea. So people think of Normandy and Taro and Iwo and Gallipoli. And we said, there's so much more out there. And that's what we wanted to cover. No, I totally sympathize with that. And I just did a podcast, a meet the team podcast with

Jared, which is probably out now. And he asked me about some of the stuff that I've written. And one of the things that I said was, you know, I feel like there's a lot of change going on. And it's kind of like, speak now or forever hold your peace, you know, get your get your two cents in. So leaning into the in the next question I've got for y'all. So your forward, which was written by Brigadier General Jason Boehm, who recently just published his own book from Cold War to ISIL, One Marine's Journey. He talks about some of the investments that Russia and China are making in Marine and Naval Infantry Forces. And then obviously, as Marines, we know some of the recent guidance that the Commandant's put out. Do you all think, and I'll toss this one to Brett

first, do you all think that there's kind of an amphibious renaissance going on or reinvestment, not just in the United States, but kind of globally or more interest in amphibious operations than we've seen over the last couple of decades? Yeah, I definitely think so. And that was one of One of the points I tried to get across in the essay I wrote for this book, it's not just China and Russia, it's Australia, it's Japan, it's a couple others. We seem to be the only country with a major Marine Corps that's getting ready to contract and for good reasons to try to reformat ourselves a little bit and reinvest in other areas. but there's definitely a renaissance going on and even as the U.S. Army looks at how it's going to operate in the Pacific it's going to have to operate in an amphibious manner it may not be an amphibious assault but they will have to do amphibious operations I think they've quite

figured figured that out yet and gotten there yet but that's that's the way you are relevant in Indo-Pacific as a ground force if you're not an aviation force or a naval force that was one point of my essay to try to say hey this is this is a growth business and even if you look at climate change the change is going around with sea levels ports that may have been viable for decades or even centuries may not be viable anymore maybe new ports that are not have not been viable but are going to be the very geography of the Indo-Pacific is changing in many ways due to climate change due to artificial islands Russia's building artificial islands as well but they don't get as much press as the Chinese. If you look at amphibious operations as maritime force

projection, that's one way to do it. Building islands is another way to do it. I don't know if it's the best way to do it. When we look at these changes and the way that major militaries are investing in their amphibious forces, that there's definitely a renaissance goal. Following up on something you said earlier, Tim, you said that you thought that Merrill Bartlett's Assault from the Sea was really focused on amphibious assault, obviously, the title would suggest? I mean, do you think that there's kind of a gap in the literature that you all were trying to fill here? Or maybe just an update? No, I think you nailed it with the phrase gap. You know, one of the things Brett and I did when we were looking at our chapters

and how we chose them was to look at things that were beyond high diddle diddle straight up the middle. How we selected the chapters and how we targeted who we went after was certainly an attempt to vary the narratives and to vary the case studies, right? The practical exercises you do at a place like EWS or Command and Staff College are very different than the ones that you do at a place like Joint Forces Staff College, which is more focused on an amphibious operation. When we were looking at chapter proposals, when we were looking at how we wanted to organize and frame the book, there was the decision to try to get as much non-assault as we could in there. And it sounds weird to think that the Marine Corps is talking about doing something other than kicking a door in, but we wanted this to be more than just, it's really awesome to go over the beach and to seize a beachhead and to keep fighting.

There's a lot more that can be done and there's a lot better ways to demonstrate national power and kind of influence the strategic level what's going on. And I think that that was one of the big things we worked on. Then Tim, kind of following up on that, how did you pick your chapters? I mean, you've got practitioners, you have academics, obviously you're both Marines, and there is some Marine Corps stuff in there, but it's not heavily Marine focused. How did you pick? Well, I mean, we cast our net wide, and I think that shows in the chapters, most of which you can read individually as case studies. The book started with some targeted emails to folks with whom we'd worked before, yourself included, Jay Overton, Ruth Gudmundson being two other notable examples. And then with using some of those chapters as the framework for our book, we put out the call for chapter, calls for chapters? Anyway, some variation of that phrase on Twitter, with the Society for Military History, and on the HNET websites. And word of mouth did the rest.

We went to the McMullen Conference, the Naval Academy back in the fall, and we were pretty much done. But we met Randy Papadopoulos and some of these other big name naval historians. And they said, Oh, that's your book. Hang on, I've got a guy or you should talk to so and so or yes, I'll do this. And as a result, we're still receiving inquiries about chapter submissions from folks who are just now getting the word of mouth. So that's how we did it. We live in a world of abundance and certainly reaped that, that abundancy. Well, I don't want to jump the gun here then, but are you guys going to do a volume two if you've still got submissions coming in? We have started discussing it with Marine Corps University Press. We think the second volume might be a little bit different than this one. Obviously, you'd have different chapters, but maybe a little bit more. The short answer to your question is yes, without getting lost in my answer. Okay, yeah, no, and don't mean to put you on the spot there, you know, and okay, moving along. Brett, you probably know the Delhart quote, a landing on a foreign coast in the face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war. Do you think that this is still true? Is it possible? Do you think amphibious operations are more difficult or less difficult than they have been in the past? So that's a big question. So you can kind of come at that however you feel like it.

Yeah, I definitely think they're still the most difficult. I'll throw another quote at you. It was Winston Churchill who called them tri-phibious operations because you can't do the sea or the land without the air. And he was a guy who knew what he was talking about when it came to amphibious operations, even if they didn't work out too well.

Yeah, I think they're definitely the most difficult. And that's kind of why we see this gap in literature where historians are focused on the assault because we all know writing is hard it's easier if you're writing about something interesting and dramatic and maybe it's assault it's interesting dramatic some of the other types the raids are too but a lot of them aren't and a lot of the smaller scale operations aren't as interesting so they get less attention another reason why we felt we had a there was a gap in scholarship that we could address and second part of your question i think they're they're definitely

more difficult. I mean, just based on the precision guided weaponry that any amphibious operation is going to have to take into account, the old ways aren't necessarily going to continue to work in the face of new technology. We've all come up in a Marine Corps that was organized for the amphibious assault and specifically one way of doing the amphibious assault, concentrating as much power as you can in one spot and kicking in the door. And now General Berger's Commandant's planning guidance, it's clear that that's not going to be the only way we can do things. We may still have to do that, but we've got to expand our horizons a little bit to the other forms of amphibious operation, the demonstrations, the raids, and that kind of stuff. So I think part

of recognizing how difficult they are throughout history and how difficult they are now in the face of modern technology, kind of forcing the Marine Corps to look beyond the assault. And that's a good thing. Brett, I'm totally sympathetic with that point. I've noticed it definitely in some of my teaching here in Columbia that the students, they want to talk about D-Day, they want to talk about Inchon, they want to talk about Iwo Jima. And I like to think it's a little eye-opening sometimes when you show, okay, there's actually all these other types of amphibious operations, and a lot of them are happening not necessarily on a day-to-day basis, but the Colombian Navy is often using amphibious landing ships like lcu type ships to deliver aid and supplies sometimes

in routine operations and sometimes super recently in disaster relief operations it's like guys that's a that counts too uh you know it's not you're not always storming the beach but these are just as valid and and oftentimes a lot more important yeah and i think a lot of people look at how difficult an assault like an iwo jima style assault would be against a modern defense think well that's got to be obsolete they can't do that anymore kind of iwo jima is not what you want you want to go on a canal where you land where the enemy is not instead of landing where the enemy is now sometimes you're going to have to land where the enemy is but you'd rather come around the other way like they did in guadalcanal i think that's a super good point right like and

they didn't start uh landing on iwo jima you know in 1942 you know they that was several years of building up you know i don't have the numbers off the top of my head but there was probably I want to say there was like 500 ships there, you know, so there was more combat power to take Iwo Jima than the U.S. Navy has now, you know, depending on how you measure it. Obviously, ships are a lot more capable. Guala Canal was done on almost a shoestring. But then, you know, look at Okinawa. It's a totally different situation that we may have to replicate that process in the future. But we're probably not going to start with the Okinawans.

We're going to start with the Guala Canals, the Wake Island raids. No, that totally makes sense. So Tim, I'm going to toss the next question over to you. You've got 23 chapters in the book. Do you have a favorite? You can't say my chapter, even if it is your favorite. Crud. Let's see. All right. Favorite chapter. I don't know. Brett and I are both parents and you're not supposed to pick a favorite. And this is kind of our baby. Actually, when the manuscript went in, Brett did text me and he was like, we just had a baby. I'll say this, though. I learned something from every chapter that was in the book, right? As an example, I do the Red Army, right? That's what I studied.

That's what I read about. And I had no real grasp of the Soviet landings at Mirakula, which Andrew DelGaudio wrote about, even though I'm supposed to know about this sort of thing. Others, like Andrew Young's chapter on Molyneux, helped open up the intellectual background of this stuff for me. And so I walked away with a greater appreciation from a period of time that I kind of wasn't that interested in. And like you said earlier, you know, you talked about a little bit about a practitioner academic split. I walk away with something different from each chapter each time I read it, depending on what hat I had on. Was I the editor? Was I an academic engaged with it? Was I thinking about it as a staff officer? Something different every time. So, ha, I refuse to answer your question.

Okay. And now, Brett, over to you. Favorite chapter, or I guess you can give us a dodge. Don't pick your own and don't pick mine. I'll say my favorite chapters were ones like B.J. Armstrong's, Eric Sybil's, Bruce Goodmanson, because they wrote about things I wasn't really familiar with, even with B.J. Armstrong's article about late 19th century landings the Marine Corps did and the Navy did in Korea. I knew that it happened, but I didn't know much about it. So it was really great that we set out to, you know, expand the horizons of the conversation. And then our kind of reward up front was we learned all this new stuff that we didn't know about. That was my favorite part. No, I totally agree. And I think having read most of the chapters, that's probably my favorite part, too,

is that you guys did a really good job of picking stuff that's not necessarily the Inchon and the Iwo Jima and stuff that's a little, the readers are probably less familiar with, you know, because there's a whole wide variety of case studies that you can choose. And they don't always have to be that, what you were saying before, traditional, a diddle diddle right up the middle. Moving on, Brett, I think, Brett, you mentioned in your conclusion that since you began this project, we've seen some big redesign efforts, at least in the United States Marine Corps and the Royal Marines as well, is undergoing a kind of a forced redesign. do you think you can say with any clarity what the future of of amphibious operations is and i

know you were talking about this in your chapter yeah it was really serendipitous that uh because we've been working on this book before the the commandant's planning got even before general berger became common uh we started when general meller was still coming down and back then the marine corps operating concept was still like the cutting edge um and that was before the Commandant's planning guidance that really dramatically changed the conversation about the United States Marine Corps. And I know the Royal Marines are doing kind of the same thing, not necessarily doing the same thing, but re-looking at everything from the bottom up.

Yeah, as for where I think they're going, that was kind of the point of the thesis of mine, that I think the amphibious raid is going to become more important than the assault and probably anything else. With that, you know, we kind of have special operations forces that focus on raids, but I think that's going to have to expand a little bit beyond just them. I think the Marine Corps is going to have to take on more of that, and perhaps even Army forces, some of their lighter stuff. But because the amphibious raid is going to be more important, especially on the front end of major naval operations, the force is going to have to get lighter. The force is going to have to get faster and work on range. So rather than parking the big amphibs right offshore and pushing everything across the beach, I talked in the chapter about diverse platforms and smaller, swifter, stealthier ship-to-shore connectors. So that's where I think it's going.

And I think it's going to more than Evans, Carlson, Second Raider Battalion of World War II mentality, you know, updated with our technology than the First Raider Battalion, which is organized more for conventional. That's where I think the future is going. It looks like that's what the Marine Corps is looking at doing, at least from my seat. But we'll see how it goes. Yeah, and we'll just remind the listeners that Brett does do a lot of work at McWill's, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. So when he says from his seat, that's like a front row seat in some of the force design efforts that are going on in the Marine Corps. And I'll also add, totally sympathize with what Brett was saying about kind of the flash to bang lag in publishing. As any author or writer knows, by the time that something makes it to print, it could be a year or two after the author actually wrote it. You know, I imagine and I'll ask you, Tim, did you have authors that were kind of updating some of the stuff as they as they went along in the editing process? We had a few. I mean, a lot of the historic case studies, we didn't.

Something that happened in the 15th century without the access to a new archive. Not a lot else going on or the I feel weird talking about COVID on this. But, you know, we had other authors that were like, oh, I know there's this source that I'm trying to get here. But the archives were closed. And there's the potential that if there is a volume two or one of the Marine Corps University Press journals, there's a chance to publish some revisions or some updates to some of the work that's been in here. But I focused a lot on the historical or on the military history related essays and not a lot of changes. But I know that the work that Brett was looking at, there were a lot more. And that's a really interesting way to put it. Yeah, that COVID has kind of restricted some of the scholarship and there's perhaps updates and revisions that we're waiting for. Brett, I'll ask the next question to you. In your conclusion, you talk about the famous amphibious assaults like Normandy and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as I quote here, benchmarking the genre. And I really like that phrase. And this is kind of a theme that we've been pulling on throughout the podcast. But is there a specific danger in focusing on those?

And then to take it further, if you were going to pick one or two amphibious operations that are lesser known that you think we, the Marine Corps, should be focused on, or even specifically like a young lieutenant that's looking to study something that's not one of the major well-known amphibious assaults in history, and what would that be? Yeah, well, I think there's danger in focusing on those because the amphibious assault is just such, it's like the pro-level amphibious operations. It takes a lot of investment, a lot of focused force design to be able to even do that kind of an operation. There are even Marine Corps that cannot do anything like a real amphibious assault on a contested shore. But there's a lot of other things that amphibious forces and the Marine Corps can do besides the assault. And I think especially it seems like we're going into a period of flat or lower budgets. If all we can offer is the amphibious assault, then we're not relevant for a huge amount of other things. So we need to make sure we focus on the other things and maintain relevancy across the range of things that amphibious forces can do.

And the other danger is you're just missing stuff. If all you can think about is amphibious assault, then you may be, as a higher level commander, presented with a problem and say, oh, we should do an amphibious assault because we need to get on land. But there could be other options. Raids could contribute to creating a gap somewhere else that you exploit in another way. A demonstration like in the Persian Gulf could be used to support land operations. And if you only focus on the amphibious assault, you're not preparing yourself to think about the other ways things could do things. And, you know, I hate to go back to Guadalcanal, but I've really been looking at Guadalcanal. I've heard a lot of senior Marine generals saying we need to be looking at Guadalcanal.

I think they're absolutely right. And the point is that at least the initial operations, probably most of the operations in any conflict in Indo-Pacom, they're probably going to look more like Guadalcanal than they will Iwo Jima. And it's just a function of the beginning of a conflict, which we assume we would be responding to aggression somewhere. And the other thing that I should specifically say Operation Watchtower, which is the official title of the operation. The other thing, it was about sea control. It was not about seizing Guadalcanal to have and hold Guadalcanal. It was about seizing Guadalcanal to use Henderson Field for sea control. As a Marine Corps that's trying to participate more in sea control and sea denial, it's almost a perfect case study in how we as an amphibious force can contribute to that with the Navy,

especially because the Navy was obliged to pull away after the Marines got ashore. We still, the Marine Corps, 1st Marine Division, exercised sea control by itself, the Navy somewhere else, at Guadalcanal. And looking at how they did that can help generate insights for how we can do that if we need to today. I think you're on to something there. Obviously, I, too, have seen the, I said, like a flood of stuff about Guadalcanal. And it's I think it's an easy case study to get into if you're looking for one, because it's so accessible. I got it. Obviously, our listeners can't see it, but I got a stack of books behind me about Guadalcanal. And it's super interesting reading. And I think you can read about it from the perspective of the Marines. And you can also read about it and draw some interesting lessons from the perspective of the Japanese.

Yeah. And it's it's a good a lot of people say, oh, it was an unopposed landing. They just showed up on the beach. So it doesn't count. Yeah, it counts. And really, that's what you want to do. You don't want to have to fight your way. Exactly. That should be that should be the plan. So, Tim, over to you. Same question. If you had to recommend one or two case studies or a category of case studies to, let's say, a young second lieutenant who wants to get into reading about amphibious operations, what would you where would you tell him to start? for her before i answer that i want to say i think one of the cool things that mcu press did for us was the the graphic design on the book and if you look in the intro it's photos of the landing on ewo or on uh on guadalcanal rather like that's how they chose to frame the the title pages of our

book they might have been onto something that we weren't quite aware of but it's a certainly one of those serendipitous things that again i think that that helps helps reframe the the focus on the major operation. And I think reframing the focus on the major operations is going to be helpful for that young lieutenant, that young captain. There are a few chapters in the book that stand out to me about that. If you want to study an offensive operation, I think John Salt's work on 47 Commando at D-Day is a prime example. Leadership, decision-making, all at the lowest levels, without communications. And so if you're a platoon commander or a company commander, you can do a decent amount of what would I do work out of that chapter. By extension,

you can use it to build scenarios or tactical decision games, or, you know, you can have your teams, your subordinate, you know, your squads, your platoons do their own version of it. You know, it's got civilian factors, it's got prisoners of war, it's got naval gunfire, loss of comms, linkups, it's got a lot in it. And I think it's so it's a really great multifaceted case study to use at that young, you know, at that junior company grade level. And plus, and hats off to John, but there are a lot of maps in there too. So with his maps that MCU press turned around, I think you've got some good opportunities there. Thinking again back to that sea control and defensive operations piece, James McIntyre's chapter on the Delaware River campaign

is another great one. He does focus a lot on the attack of the fort, but there's a lot in there about the defensive operations against an amphibious assault. How do you react to a raid or a feint or a proper assault on a fortified position? And there's a human element that he puts in that story too, by pulling from the diaries and the letters. And so I think at that company grade level, those are two great case studies to use. By the time you're a major or lieutenant colonel, I think it's something else. A staff officer is looking at something else. You know, Greg Liebke's chapter, for example, on the German evacuations, like that's MEF staff planning level. You know, here's an ability to preserve combat power by doing the exact

opposite of an amphibious assault, right? Putting folks on ships, including your allies that you're not really sure are going to be good allies and pulling them out and preserving your combat power. That's something that a MEF staff officer should be looking at. It's probably not the right thing necessarily that a second lieutenant is going to gain a lot out of, but a major, a lieutenant colonel sitting there going, how do I move using Indo-PACOM? How do I take an Aussie battalion off of a beach so that I can put them somewhere else or Kiwis or Japanese or whomever? And so I think there's a lot in there, just depending on what hat you're going to wear when you want to read it. I think that's exactly the impression that I got reading the chapters as well, is that it's very much there's something for everyone, for the practitioner, for the academic, for the junior officer, and for NCO, for the staff officer, even just for the armchair enthusiast. And again, for the listeners, the book we're talking about is On Contested Shores. It's been published by Marine Corps University Press, and it's available for free online. And we'll make sure that there's a link to it below the podcast. So unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank our guests, Brett Friedman and Tim Heck, for a really interesting conversation about amphibious operations and where they're headed in the Marine Corps and also globally. Before we go, I'm going to ask our guests to tell us what they're working on and where, if anywhere, our listeners can find them online so we can watch for their future projects. Brett, over to you.

So I spend way too much time on Twitter. So you can always find me there at BA underscore Friedman on Twitter and also at the Strategy Bridge where I'm an editor. So please check out our stuff there, whatever we publish. And next up for me is sometime in 2021, there'll be a paperback version of OnTactics to hold everyone over until the follow up on operations comes out in fall 2021. more. Okay, awesome. We will look for those and we may bring you back on the podcast when On Operations comes out. Thanks for talking with us. Tim, over to you. Same question. What are you working on and where can our listeners find you online? All right. Well, first and foremost, I'm putting, I keep saying it's the finishing touches and it never is. You always find one more source. On a course from Marine Corps University's Continuing Education Program, that course is going to look at the U.S. Army as it moved from Vietnam to Desert Storm. And that grew out of my dissertation from King's College London.

Should be going live in March. I just got to make some final decisions about which readings are going to do. Again, like I said, I keep finding more. I'm taking editing contracts. So that's something that's filling some time. And then you and I have two projects, Walker. We're putting the finishing touches on a chapter for the Army in their large-scale combat series. And then we're working through chapters on our book together, Armies in Retreat.

Busy. My Twitter game isn't nearly as good as Brett's, but I can be found there also at TGHeck, the number one. That's where you can find me online. All right. Looking forward to it. Yeah, I was hoping to get through this without mentioning that we also have a couple of projects in the works, but you outed me there. Okay. Thank you guys again for joining me, and thanks for our listeners for tuning in.

We'll see you next week on Sea Control. Sea Control is produced and edited by Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuinston. Take care. Thank you. ¶¶