Sea Control - Sea Control 225 - IUU Fishing and the Evolution of Sea Shepherd with Dr. Claude Berube

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

Links1. “Sea Control 153 – USS Constitution with Angry Staff Officer and Dr. Claude Berube,” Claude Berube, Angry Staff Officer with Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC (2020).2. “Sea Control 156 – Sink the Montana!,” Claude Berube with Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC (2020).3. The Preble Hall Podcast by the USNA Museum.4. Maritime Private Security: Market Responses to Piracy, Terrorism and Waterborne Security Risks in the 21st Century, edited by Claude Berube and Patrick Cullen, Routledge (2012).5. “Blackwaters for the Blue Waters: The Promise of Private Naval Companies,” by Claude Berube, Orbis (2007).6. “Standup a Joint Interagency Task Force to Fight Illegal Fishing,” by Claude Berube, CIMSEC (2020).7. Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, by Lizzie Collingham, Penguin Books, (2013).8. “Sea Shepherd: The Evolution of an Eco-Vigilante to Legitimized Maritime Capacity Builder,” by Claude Berube, U.S. Naval War College (2020).9. “Leveraging NGOs and Volunteerism for Maritime Surveillance Against IUU Fishing,” by Walker Mills, Dylan Philips-Levine and Trevor Philips-Levine, CIMSEC (2020).10. “Advantage At Sea,” U.S. Tri-Service Maritime Strategy (2020).11. “Competition Continuum,” U.S. Department of Defense (2020).12. “Thunder Road: Outsourcing the Fight Against Illegal Fishing,” by Claude Berube, War on the Rocks, (2015).13. “Trump’s Gunboats: Achieving the Goal of 350 or 355 Ships will be Challenging,” by Claude Berube, The National Interest (2016).14. “Online Event: Strategic Perspectives on Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing,” panel discussion with Craig Faller and Karl Schultz, Center for Strategic & International Studies (2020).  15. “The Maritime Story Missing in “Civilian Warriors,” Claude Berube interview with Erik Prince, CIMSEC (2013).16. The Aden Effect: A Connor Stark Novel, Claude Berube, Naval Institute Press (2012).17. Syren’s Song: A Connor Stark Novel, Claude Berube, Naval Institute Press (2015). 

Hey folks, Jared here. This week we have Walker Mills in the hosting chair and he's joined by our old friend Dr. Claude Baraby to discuss IUU fishing and the evolution of Sea Shepherd. Aside from that, I want to include a note on the website. You may have been having some difficulty accessing SIMSEC. We're working with our hosts to upgrade our services and what that means for you is that there will likely be a two to three day period where the site is down. So we'll try to announce that ahead of time on Twitter as best we can so you understand what's going on. The reason we're able to make this change and upgrade our support agreement right now, though, is you. So our Right Fight Win holiday campaign was successful enough to allow us to make a few infrastructural improvements. Thanks to those who donated, and if you haven't yet, you can still donate on the website or add us as your preferred nonprofit on Amazon Smile so you can support us while you shop.

Finally, 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. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast with the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host today, Walker Mills. This week, we're talking to Claude Berube about his report on the evolution of the Sea Shepherd Organization for the Naval War College's Center on Irregular warfare and armed groups. We're excited to have him back on the podcast. This is not his first appearance with us. Claude talked to Jared last time about the USS Constitution and colonial

history. Claude, welcome. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Thanks for having me on, Walker. I appreciate it. This is actually the third time I think I've been on because we did a joint podcast between the Preble Hall Naval History Podcast and CIMSEC on a fictional USS Montana battleship in an episode of G.I. Joe. So I am an assistant professor at the Naval Academy. I currently teach history, and I am the director of the Naval Academy Museum. In my previous life, I've worked for a couple of senators from both sides of the aisle for Naval Sea Systems Command, Office of Naval Research, Office of Naval Intelligence, and I'm a commander in the Navy Reserve.

Awesome. Thank you for that. So you've been doing work related to IUU fishing and maritime policing for quite a while now. I know you had an earlier book about private security approaches to policing in the maritime space, correct? Right. That was on private maritime security companies. Back around 2005, I started getting interested in theorizing about the subject,

wrote an article for Orbis after an essay for one of my Naval War College classes. At that time, Blackwater was on land, and I started theorizing that if piracy continues to increase, that we'll start to see private naval companies emerge. That's exactly what happened. I ended up interviewing Prince and others in the industry. And it wasn't until about 10 years ago that I started putting a tie in with IUU Fishing. And I think it was based on my interview with Prince that first set me on that path. And I interviewed him on the day that President Obama was first inaugurated.

Do you think that this IUU Fishing issue is kind of growing in importance? I know this year the Coast Guard released an IUU Fishing strategic outlook. And you wrote about IUU Fishing for us in SimSec. So it seems like it's having a little bit of a moment. I think so, and I'm certainly not the first or the only voice, and I need to be up front with that. I am one of many people who have started to look at this issue, but there are also a lot of people who have been looking at it for literally decades. I've been studying a lot of the reports from the UN, from the World Wildlife Fund, and other organizations on the depletion of fish stock globally. I've been looking at Chinese fishing fleet patterns throughout the past five decades, where they've been going, where they've been leaving because of overfishing, and so I think this issue is truly proliferating.

I just spoke to, at the request of the State Department, the G7++ Friends of the Gulf of Guinea conference, and this is getting bigger because fish is, for all intents and purposes, a strategic resource for the 21st century. What I've argued is that as we've been doing this with Chris Raleigh, Captain Chris Raleigh, for many years now at presentations or in articles, that this is like spice in the 16th or 17th centuries. This is like oil in the 20th century. And it's far more fundamental because if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, food, air, water, et cetera, you can survive without spice. your economy won't do well without oil but you can survive you cannot survive without basic needs so that is why i think this is actually a far more important resource strategically for this century i'm super uh sympathetic to that argument i i just recently finished a book i think it was called the war for food scholar she was making an argument that food was really important in both

the first and second world war in a way in terms of motivation for going to war and in a way that I think the United States does not necessarily understand because we don't have periods of starvation nationally or even in the military in recent or living memory. So before we get onto the report, I do want to ask a little bit more about the piece you wrote for us in CIMSEC for the Ocean Governance Week, because I thought it was really good. You proposed a continuation of the standard 90, 80, 70 percentages that are often quoted around IUU fishing. And you say that 50% of global fish stocks are depleted. 40% of the world's population relies on fish for protein. 30% of the world's fishing fleet is Chinese and 20% of the global fish catch is illegal. And you

proposed an interagency task force. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that? When we're looking at an issue like IU fishing, I think the default is to simply go to the Coast Guard. But I think, as I stated in the previous answer, that because this is going to be strategic development for the United States in the coming decades. It's not just going to be something that the Coast Guard is going to have to deal with, because here's what I think is going to happen. As the Chinese fishing fleet continues to go in waters it shouldn't, we've been seeing this globally. We see it off Argentina, for example. We see it off the west coast of South America. At some point, their white hulls are going to follow to protect the fleet. You know,

as the old adage goes, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Raleigh or Drake who said basically the fleet follows merchant ships wherever they go. And so they'll be the white hulls. But as we've seen the growth, it's really the incredible growth of the Chinese Navy in the past couple of decades, they will have the force to protect their fishing fleet globally. And that is when it becomes a U.S. Navy interest. What I suggest is that it's an interest now and we can get ahead of the curve, or we can simply be responsive to it. I think standing up a joint interagency task force helps to address that and brings a lot more platforms, ideas, and processes to bear in a way that just having the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard is an incredible organization.

They have so many missions and they are constantly underfunded and they can't be with regard to this particular challenge. I think this is a good segue into kind of the report that you wrote on the Sea Shepherd and using that as potentially another organization to help combat IAU fishing. So let's talk a little more specifically about your report. Who is the organization? What is the organization Sea Shepherd? And can you just give our listeners a little bit of background on that? Sea Shepherd was founded in 1977 by Paul Watson, a Canadian who was environmental vigilante activist you know take take your pick of words he joined greenpeace he left greenpeace or was kicked out depending on whose version you listen to largely because he wanted to take far more

direct action than greenpeace did so he founded sea shepherd it was a called something else in first year earth force and initially they were kind of a one-man shop he and a few other people simply bringing awareness. It started, we know, with baby seals in Canada. It went on to whaling. Its first few decades, it was an ecovigilante. It was a small organization taking more extreme kinetic measures. There was nobody who died in any fight or any incident, but it has changed over the years. I did this report for Naval War College after studying it for about a decade and presenting several times at Naval War College at CWAG, the Center for Regular Warfare and Armed Groups, and having written a bunch of articles with my often co-author and co-presenter, Captain

Chris Raleigh. Initially, the first time I became aware of the organization was a show called Whale Wars on Animal Planet. I think it was November of 2008 or so. I can't remember. And I just thought, who are these clowns who are operating at sea, who are ramming ships? And it was a very, you know, as a naval officer, it was a very guttural, emotional reaction to them. And I think I may have even used the term, like many people, the sea hippies. And so what I did is studied them as an intel officer. You know, I've done that here and there throughout my career. And I wanted to study them objectively.

So I came up with a set of factors that I wanted to explore. I wanted to look at their order of battle over the years. I wanted to explore their organization, their people. I wanted to see how they were funded. I wanted to look at operations and their support and their capabilities. And as a result, my findings show that the organization has changed dramatically between what it was in 1977 or 1980, what it became under the whale wars era and what has become in the past five years and i i explain this in three different phases of evolution the first phase is the vigilantism on a shoestring

the second was the whale wars era and this new phase which i think really sets it apart is this era of public private maritime partnerships and they've changed their direction their strategy their operations, to a large degree, their platforms. And so that's what I did. I looked at it quantitatively, and I also conducted a number of interviews. It took me a long time to get in touch with the right people at Sea Shepherd, but I've learned a lot over the past several years about them. And that's what I wanted to convey for the Naval War College. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to interview these guys and how you did that methodologically? I mean, when I was reading the report, I started noticing there's some really

good quotes. And then I'm looking down in your footnotes and it's like, well, you must have interviewed these guys. Was that difficult to do? Again, it took me a while to get inside the organization. It took a lot of phone calls and emails to convince them to talk to me. And it wasn't unlike my experience in interviewing a lot of people in the private maritime security industry especially with blackwater that one was a little quicker i i knew a few people on the inside and they had reached out to me after i wrote an article about them that was you know half half decent half not decent so they said hey look we'd like actually like to talk with you because you know everybody does hits on us you at least looked at it from both perspectives so

we're willing to talk with you and so it took a while to develop trust with sea shepherd i think as it did with Blackwater. And that I was very clear. I said, this is my purpose for understanding the issue. I will corroborate any information I have. I will provide an independent analysis. And I won't betray your trust. If we go off the record for anything, you're never going to see that written down anywhere, discussed anywhere. I won't do that. So the first person I interviewed was actually one of their, somebody who had left Sea Shepherd. She was on for one campaign, jane taylor i interviewed her at the academy reached out to her because she's a naval academy grad she was a swole o2 grad she left after five years and she was a vegan even at the academy and

so i spoke with jane i just said i want to understand the organization and even though she had left the organization she wouldn't there were things that she wouldn't talk about which was understandable there was loyalty there but i also learned that these people are term c hippies that i used earlier you know jane taylor was a naval officer and from what i understand she was a pretty good SWO and I think you saw that in the episodes she was featured that she was very responsible so she spoke to my maritime security course back then which is the reason why I brought her to the academy another person I spoke with was Omar Todd who's one of the top Sea Shepherd folks and I've gotten to know Omar over the years now and again it was uh years of

trust of saying I'm this is what I intend to do but I got a better understanding of how they think or what they do, what they don't do. I spoke with Paul Watson. I interviewed him at his home. I drove up to Vermont on his mountaintop home. And it was a really very surreal experience. I've interviewed both him and Eric Prince now, heads of organizations at sea.

And it was very enlightening. And the same was true with Peter Hammerstadt, who's one of the captains, head of their global ops. This is somebody who I was first introduced to Peter only because i was watching south park and he was caricatured on south park and then when i met peter and we started chatting you know it becomes a completely different story i want to say that i think in each of these cases food ironically takes a role in it and in popular culture and literature and state affairs food is this is a bit of a tangent but you know you sit down for

over a meal with somebody and things become a little different you listen to each other you talk to each other, and I've found that that's been pretty effective. I mean, think about in terms of literature or popular culture, the first scene in I, Claudius, the old BBC series, the Emperor Augustus is having a feast night in Downton Abbey. How many scenes take place at the dinner table? You know, the Bible, New Testament, how many scenes, fundamental scenes take place over food? State Department dinners, why are they so important? So, strangely enough, I think there's an important aspect for sitting down with somebody at a meal and talking with them because it means you're taking the time you're sharing something some sort of common ground and then

you can move from there and i think you know just having lunch with peter and then our eventual interviews really helped me understand the organization and the people how much do you think that the sea shepherd organization is is personality based i mean based on paul watson based on Peter Hammerstad, because certainly they feature pretty heavily as personalities in your report. I think any organization has one of two options in the long term. If it is strictly personality driven, then it is bound to fail. If you look at American political parties, or I should say political movements, if you look at Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 or Ross Perot 1992 their movements did not continue after them and that is one critique i have of sea shepherd

and i i asked in one of the questions you know what happens to sea shepherd you know paul watson has been the leading figure for 43 years and you know tempest fugit we are all mortal at some point paul watson will either retire or pass on from this world what happens to the organization peter is very charismatic articulate intelligent reasonable what you see on television is off you know it's reality through television and it's not often what you see in reality behind the scenes the same is true i understand for say howard stern the you know he'll even say the character he has portrayed on on air is some is often different from from real life so i think that plays a role in it in order for an organization to survive it has to have more ideas ideas that

are more broadly acceptable they have to be organizationally and financially sound and i think at this point at least my assessment is that they are that they would survive a difference in leadership so i think that's where i stand right now with sea shepherd but i think the next few years are going to be very illustrative of my being correct or not. And I think that's part of it. I think when you're an analyst, you have to recognize that your analysis may be faulty at first, or it may be right. You don't know. You have to provide some sort of objectivity in there, but you also have to be open-minded. And you have to recognize that somebody may come along with different research that completely refutes that. And I'm hoping that this report gets a little bit

more momentum after it's used in the classroom up at Naval War College, because if there are things that I'm incorrect about, all the more power, because it helps us learn. We can't learn without some sort of disagreement. Did you find that your perspective on the group was changing as you went through the report? I mean, one of the things that kind of struck me is it seems like a very positive report about the group, and I think you make a strong case for why it is that way. But that stood, I guess, at least for me personally, in contrast to some of my preconceptions about this group that's been called terrorists, they've been called pirates, they've sunk ships, they've cut nets, they've thrown acid. How did your understanding of the group change as you did

your research? No, I did not expect it. It's sort of like my doctoral dissertation. I did not expect what I would eventually find. And I think that's important in research. I should note that there There were other figures I didn't interview, going back to your previous question. There is a gentleman, Giorgio, sorry, DiGiorgio, who was a retired Italian admiral. He was the naval chief of staff of the Italian Navy who joined Sea Shepherd. So I think that the people that you see behind, that are behind the scenes, are not what you would normally expect for an environmental activist group. getting back to your this question i don't think i was i don't think it's right to characterize it as my being sympathetic to the group i don't particularly support the ramings at sea i don't

agree with the boardings that they that some of them did i don't believe in those methods that they did in the initial decades or to some degree uh in the in the south seas southern oceans excuse me with the japanese whaler i do however see the value in these partnerships that they've been doing over the past five years and there's where i would say that i was surprised when this started happening in 2015 that i think was one of the game changers as i was developing this this whole theory and the early things that i either said or wrote about sea shepherd i think still still bear some truth in terms of how they conducted their operations but again i also understand in the grand scheme of things looking at if you're a historian 100 years from now and you look at the

development of an organization, would they be today providing that maritime partnership capability in the capacity building they are in West Africa and elsewhere? If Paul Watson, number one, did not found the organization, number two, did not use the tactics he used, and then eventually the media acceptance, and then there were a number of other legitimizing factors. So I think that's why my views on how they operated changed. But again, I wanted to provide this framework for the organization to really understand it over time i think that's really valuable and i definitely i think what you're describing i had kind of a similar experience um with a couple of friends also navy officers we wrote a short piece really shallow and compared to what you've uh the work

that you've done um for sim second we kind of proposed that these uh ngo and and public sector partnerships is a potential way forward for iu fishing and i i guess originally had to be convinced by some by these other guys that that was a worthy thing to pursue and i was saying these guys are terrorists and i think your report it says exactly that and and we were able to quote some of your work um but unfortunately this report was not out let me go back to that then yeah in defining an organization and i think this this is the central part of this is the legitimacy factor for the organization here is why i understand the organization had piratical acts in some cases as circuit court determined. It was not a pirate

organization. And I think it's important to distinguish between the two because pirates and terrorists are not legitimate. Why? Because they don't have state sponsorship. There's a lot that they can't do that businesses, et cetera, can do. In the case of Sea Shepherd, here are some of the factors that I suggest lend credibility to this theory of legitimacy. Number one, they pay taxes. In fact, I got a lot of financial information about them through, you know, the US, the Internal Revenue Service and their annual reports. Number two, they have, they don't, they have, they may have flags of convenience in some cases, but by and large, they have flags. They are not operating without some sort of legitimacy from states. Three, Animal

planet had their show i mean that is a case where the japanese whalers could have sued the heck out of animal planet why did animal planet then i mean would animal planet have had a show on somali pirates or al-qaeda terrorist ships no another factor is that they have sold sorry they purchased their more modern boats ships from the united states coast guard with the coast guards sell their ships to pirates or terrorists. They have received a lot of money, especially about four or five years ago, to build a ship from the keel up from the Dutch postcode lottery, and again, that is given to non-governmental organizations. There is the issue with marketing with companies. They have a deal with Adidas and many other companies for marketing particular products. There are

so many other things. I mean, heck, the government of Liberia had Peter Hammerstadt there to receive a medal, one of their highest military medals for work he was doing off their post. In none of those cases would you say that was offered to a pirate organization or a terrorist organization. That is why I say they have legitimacy in a way that those non-state actors don't. Do you think that they always had this legitimacy or did they as an organization kind of grow into, and obviously there's there's more i think we can easily say there's more legitimacy now than there was do you think they always had legitimacy or they had to grow into it i think they had to grow into it i think and that's what and that's why i say that the first phase was vigilantism and they

they did have some of those aspects but not all of it and they were more inclined as a small upstart organization to cut corners to try things in a kinetic way that they don't now I spoke to Peter, and I did have Peter at the Academy to speak, by the way. That was part of the interview. And he spoke to about 40 people at the museum. And that's on YouTube. You can search Peter Hammerstadt, United States Naval Academy Museum. We did not include the Q&A by agreement.

And it was a fantastic Q&A, just under Chatham House rules. But Peter really suggested that there's a new generation that doesn't see that kinetic option as the best option for the growth of the organization, that the new generation is a little more conservative in its approach, and that's why it's working with these countries because these partnerships offer them something in terms of doing what they want to do,

and that's this current strategy, current goal of deterring illegal, unregulated, unreported phishing. So the goals and the strategy have changed just as have the operations, the platforms over the past 40 years, 43 years. Those all factors have changed. I think today they are dramatically different. And it's not only that. They have far more support than they did 30, 40 years ago. They have one of the factors was media.

The media exposure they got from whale wars was off the roof. I looked at LexisNexis hits. Excuse me, LexisNexis allows you, for those of you who don't use it, to check newspaper, radio, television references, you know, whenever. And for the first 30 years of the organization, you had maybe 100, 200 hits per year. Well, with Whale Wars, you had between 1,500 and 4,000 hits per year. That provided the exposure to a global audience. As a result, Sea Shepherd chapters started emerging globally. So I also tracked those. So all the data that you see in my report, what that demonstrated was global interest. And this is not just environment, strictly in the traditional environmental activists. These are a broader public that understand the issue. I mean, think about, you know, thinking about sci-fi and navies. Think about Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home. What's it centered on?

Whales. Well, in a way, there's a tie into Sea Shepherd because Paul Watson actually gave to Bill Shatner, who plays Captain Kirk, the D.H. Lawrence poem, Whale's Weak Nut, which was used in it. And Star Trek IV is one of the most popular movies. People sympathized with the whales, and there was a lot of reaction to it. So I think Sea Shepherd has been able to transition in a way in appealing to a broader public that might not agree with their initial operations, but they agree they might not say your average person on the street may not say hey i don't want to stop fishing entirely but these guys who do it illegally or the chinese fish chinese ships that

do it illegally yeah we got to stop that so what you're seeing now is this intersection of interest between state governments ngos businesses because some businesses were supporting sea shepherd because they don't like illegal fishing competition so so what you're seeing here is a venn diagram of interests and state governments may see economics and the fishing industry to their particular country as one circle you may see the united states having an interest in china you may see ngos like sea shepherd having this circle of hey we want to end fishing and you have fishing legitimate fishing companies and say we want to you know reduce illegal IUU fishing so now you put those circles together and what do you have right in the center you have a common

interest to reduce IUU fishing I think this is an incredible time and an opportunity where those interests align in a way that hadn't been possible before and that's why I think more people are talking about IUU fishing now I credit Pew the folks Dan Schaefer and Gina Fiore who have been doing some phenomenal work over there, and so many other organizations, NGOs, that are really shining a light on this issue, but I think the United States needs to be serious right now. I think the Commandant of the Coast Guard, his report was spot on in highlighting this as a strategic issue, but I think more people need to come on board. No, I totally agree. I actually talked to Commandant Schultz a couple of weeks ago. His podcast is not up yet, but we talked

pretty extensively about the IOU strategic fishing outlet and why that's a big and emergent issue. Mentioning these other organizations, I do want to ask, were you able to talk to or interview anyone who was affected by the Sea Shepherd? And I guess we'll put it out either positively other governments that are working with them or negatively people who were the targets of their activism? Yes, both. I wish it had been to more of a degree, but that would have required a lot more travel and time than I could invest. There was one minister from an unnamed government who told me very specifically about Sea Shepherd. He said, look, you, you're in the Navy, right? I said, yeah, you've, you've gone to ports around the world. I said, yeah, I've been

to a few ports and he said when the navy comes here they stop by for a visit for a couple of days and at the end of the visit we get a coffee mug and a coin but the navy doesn't stay around for three to six months like sea shepherd does and by the way the navy doesn't come here when the fish are here because again fish are fish migrate there are they're fishing patterns and so sea shepherd understands that and what sea shepherd was able to do especially uh just got I mentioned the captain in the Navy, Gabon, mentioned just a couple of weeks ago that when Sea Shepherd goes there, they have a ship on site that not only helps with maritime security, and they have a law enforcement detachment aboard, and they have the flag of the local nation. They also provide some scientific data, so they have environmental professionals who are studying the issue as well. I have also heard from people who have had pretty bad experiences with Sea Shepherd.

There was one guy who reached out to me on social media, and I'm still kind of trying to assess that one, who was talking about issues in Costa Rica. But again, I'm still trying to pull a string on that to understand it a little bit more. You look with sort of a jaundiced eye at any issue you approach as a historian or as an intel officer. And I think that's important as well. One of the things that I learned growing up, my mother was a politician for 30 years, and I think I started working on her campaigns when I was four years old. started running her campaigns in 19 sorry when i was 18 and one thing you learn with so many politicians coming to your home in state politicians local politicians national politicians were coming to the home you have to assess people pretty quickly and you have to also assess what

you don't know so whenever i spoke speak with somebody i'm interviewing i always think about what information are they trying to convey to me what is their interest is what they're telling me correct? How can I corroborate what they're telling me? But at the heart of it, you really have to size somebody up and who they are, what they represent, their character. And it's not always easy to do. It's not always right to do. I've certainly been wrong in my life a bunch of times, but it's a skill set you learn and you learn very early. And I want to go back to what you said, the unnamed minister said about the visit of port calls, because I think that's really important. And I think it ties, you know, not to be that guy that ties everything back to like the

competition continuum and the new tri-service maritime strategy that we just saw. But I think that fits right in there. And this realization that the Navy has to, the U.S. Navy maybe has to be a little bit better and more competitive in that space. And I wonder how you would tie your report on the Sea Shepherd to current events and kind of more current issues that the U.S. navy in the obviously it ties to the u.s coast guard but more specifically that the u.s navy is working on i think you can tell them what the problem is but they're not going to change here's again i say this as somebody who's worked for nfc nfc systems command on acquisition programs i worked for both part political parties for senators from a shipbuilding state i know how

this works and i had an article that came out about using in in a way like private maritime security companies or Sea Shepherd, hey, why doesn't the Navy want, this is four years ago, the Navy could build up numbers very quickly for partnerships and capacity building by looking at commercial variants like the Domin ships that were built for not only maritime security, but Sea Shepherd built one. So these are low cost for low intensity operations, perfect for maritime security. And that article came out and there was an individual friend of who mentioned it to a flag officer at the Pentagon that morning when it came out, and the flag officer, or unnamed flag officer, said, yeah, we saw that, but you know what?

That would take money away from our budget for submarines and carriers and destroyers, and we're not going to consider that. And I think that's played out over the past couple decades. The Navy Rail Warfare Office has certainly been diminished, and they used to have a flag officer in command of an IWALT. That doesn't exist anymore. And there is a navalist I spoke with earlier this year about IAU fishing, and he just told me point blank, said, yeah, this isn't a Navy mission, so we really don't care.

Now, those are anecdotal. I think that's changing. When Peter Hammerstadt came to speak to the Naval Academy, there were a number of junior officers, some more senior officers, but a lot of midshipmen who attended this, and what I can tell you is that after the talk and after the Q&A, those midshipmen stayed around, and there were two of them, I'm being perfectly honest, two of them, Point blank, who told Peter Hammerstadt, we love your mission. After I'm done with five years, I want to join Sea Shepherd. I was floored. Wow.

Why? Part of it was he explained the mission. He also, this whole theory of direct action. If you ask any Sea Shepherd person, anyone from Paul Watson on down to the newest volunteer, what Sea Shepherd does, they will distill it as direct action, direct action, direct action and i've actually tabulated how many times the term direct action has appeared in a lot of interviews they get it walker i ask you you go to any flag officer captain junior officer sailor in the fleet say what's the navy do we have a lot of answers but we can't distill it in that

and there is a sympathetic mission that they have in this whole fishing thing and you know what there's an innovative and if you want to talk innovation and adaptive and all these key words these buzzwords people throw around you can't do that in a large organization you can do that with sea shepherd and that's what the midshipmen saw because i can tell you working on contracts in fact i'm working on one right now how cumbersome government contracts can be it's necessarily that that way for legal reasons but by the same token how quickly can we adapt when we have processes and budgets from the 1950s and 60s and 70s this is a small organization very very lean i mean they operate at about 10 to 14 million a year with about two or three dozen paid staffers and sorry

hundreds if not thousands of volunteers that they can pull globally for any particular mission now we do something different in the navy than they do obviously no question however i think there are some things we could learn from them just as they learned from jane taylor in providing processes for small boat operations or the italian admiral i think we could learn from each other i think that's an important thing to note as well if you don't listen to you know it's one thing to be very critical of of anybody it's another thing to it's i think it's another step to listen to them to say okay i'm going to put aside my preconceptions and i think that's part of the story is that whether you're a historian or an intelligence officer or anyone else, you may go

into an issue with preconceived notions, as you and I did with the organization. But you also have to understand this broader constellation of issues and people and processes to better understand them as well as the larger constellation. And so as a result, I think that's why I framed the assessment of Sea Shepherd as I did, as a changing organization. I don't know what the future holds for it, by the way. I don't know if they're going to have the status quo. I don't know if they're going to grow. I don't know if China will somehow say, well, we want these people out of the way because they're preventing us from sending ships to certain regions. And I just don't know. But that's part of the reason for the case study. If you look at the end of every chapter in this,

This is designed for students at the Naval War College primarily. It is to be used in the classroom, and the questions are designed to elicit more consideration, maybe get more answers from the diversity of officers domestically and internationally who are in these courses. And we may be able to find better answers as a result of the questions that I raise. Wow. So there's a lot of little things I want to pick up there and we're kind of running short on time here. You mentioned China. Do you think that there's going to be increased tension there? Because I know in a lot of the IUU fishing commentary, China features heavily, right? And Cousard Common on Schultz, when we talked, told me it's not a China strategy, but China features heavily in the strategy. So I was just wondering how you saw Sea Shepherd kind of deal with that when a significant proportion, if not the majority of these predatory overseas fishing fleets are Chinese. I wouldn't say they target Chinese fishing vessels. I think they look at targets of opportunity. They look at any illegal fishing vessel that's out there, whether it's Chinese, Spanish, or whomever. So I don't think that's a factor.

I think that China has an opportunity, just as Japan did. In fact, one of the early memorandums of agreement that Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd did was with the island nation of Palau to provide some patrol services. And about a month or so after that was signed, And the Japanese apparently came in and made Palau a similar offer on the condition that they would not allow Sea Shepherd. Now, I think obviously that was driven by and large from the activities through the Whale Wars program. But China could do the same, use soft power. Look what they've done in the Caribbean.

I remember going out of the Caribbean about 12, 13 years ago and seeing all these Chinese construction projects and all these Chinese arches and asking the locals, what are they doing here? And they said, oh, they're building cricket stadiums for the international conference coming up in a couple of years, and all the investment down there. And then when I came back, I asked one of our professors, who's an expert on Asian affairs, said, hey, take a look at the names of these Caribbean island nations. Is there anything that's been different in the past few years? And I didn't give him any background whatsoever. And he just said, huh, yeah, two of these just recently changed their recognition from Taiwan to People's Republic of China at the United Nations. So there are methods of deterring organizations that may not agree with your particular view. So I think that's going to be interesting to see how China plays a role with Sea Shepherd in the future as well. I think that's interesting that you mentioned the Caribbean because I was going to say kind of on a note that I appreciated. CSIS recently did a panel discussion with Admiral Fowler, who's the commander of U.S. Southern Command and the Coast Guard colonel, Admiral Schultz, and they both highlighted IAU fishing. and i think it was admiral faller one of the things he said is you know he's been traveling around the southern kamehameha which includes the caribbean and he was struck by how many of his counterparts and ministers of defense and ministers of the interior and things like that have said that to these latin american nations and caribbean nations iu fishing is a national

security issue it is a national defense issue so i think same way that we were talking about how our perspectives on this, specifically the Sea Shepherd organization, have changed, I'm optimistic that the larger Navy and larger defense establishment in the United States is kind of, I don't know if you could say waking up to IUU fishing as, I think you put it as a strategic issue. Well, that's a good point because wouldn't this be a great opportunity to stand up a giada for IUU fishing and have, if Sea Shepherd can operate at 10 to 14 million a year and have former Coast Guard assets, the island, I think it's the island class cutters that they have, and another buoy tender that they have. Wouldn't it be interesting to just set aside 10 mil

somewhere, stand up this Giatis, have reservists from all these different services do it, work on some old commercial boats that they can use as patrol vessels. You don't need multi-billion dollar warships to do iuu fishing patrols just as you didn't need a carrier a cruiser and two destroyers to surround the sb quest during a somali piracy crisis there are low level operations that can be tested and i guarantee you you would get more applicants from reservists willing to come on active duty for a mission like that than you would expect you would have the personnel to do it. You have the platforms available. I mean, I think it's been pointed out that there are plenty of OSVs that could be used for this purpose, and plenty of people have written about this.

So I think that's a great opportunity to test the theory. Can we do maritime security capacity building on a long-term basis with this sort of concept? I think this is a case with a Maritime Peace Corps or GIATF, where you can use low intensity platforms, reservists to work with these partners and allies who don't have large navies for a lot of reasons, a lot of legitimate reasons because of the cost. And I think this would be a great testbed for it, especially in South Com. Let's try it there. Let's try it in the Gulf of Guinea. Let's try it in these regions first to see if it works. You're not talking about a lot of money. Again, if Sea Shepherd could operate globally for that amount of money, there are ways we could do it as well.

I think that's a really, really interesting proposal. And again, like it immediately makes me think of the piece you wrote for SimSec and I'm going to go back and make sure that we have all the links to everything that we've mentioned between us below the podcast. I would suggest that maybe counter-narcotics is the model for how you combat other illicit maritime activity. Because obviously we know that the United States has a really robust and mature interagency counter-narcotics enforcement apparatus in south com joint uh joint task forces in the caribbean and really well integrated with partner partner nations and allies in the region as well and it's not just states there are a lot of ngos i'm not just talking about sea shepherd there are ngos

that are doing iuu fishing work that are really important that have capabilities that we haven't studied or that we haven't invested in so it doesn't mean we have to reinvest in that it just means we establish partnerships and expand them not only to the governments but to the ngos themselves and i should point out that when you when you do the the links to the show in the giada proposal there's also a link from my interview with with eric prince from 2009 that i post on simsec a few years ago so that you might want to add that because there is a section in there about about fishing specifically no we we absolutely will well unfortunately that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank our guest, Claude Barabee, for a really interesting

conversation. It kind of ranged around a little bit there. You can find his report online as well as any of the other documents or webinars that we've referenced, and we'll make sure to put the links below the show. Before we go, I want to ask him what he's working on now and where we can find him online, where our listeners can find him online. On Twitter, I can be found at C.G. Barabee, and I'm currently I'm just waiting for my sixth book to come out it's on the navy during the 1830s that'll be published by University of Alabama Press this summer and I'm also working on my third novel with my new publisher and I've just revised my first two novels the aid and effect and siren song and they'll I've got the rights to them so I've worked with this new publisher

and they are going to re-release aid and effect and siren song when my next novel is published So it'll be a package of three that'll be available. Awesome. Well, we will definitely put links to those below the show. Did you mention earlier in the podcast that you're still working or you're still doing some research related to Sea Shepherd and IAU fishing that we might be able to see coming out? Right now, I'm not.

I'm just kind of tracking a few trends, but I'm pretty much just responding to organizations. I'll be doing a Naval War College lecture as well, either in the post-COVID environment or something online for them. I'll still be involved with it, but I'm trying to work on some other projects as well. Okay, awesome. Thank you again for your time. Thanks again for joining me and to our listeners. Thanks for tuning in.

We'll see you next week. Sea Control is produced and edited by Ed Saylor, William McQuiston, and Jonathan Selling. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon