Sea Control - Sea Control 247 - 2034 with Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Links1. War in 2034: A Novel of the Next War, by James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, Penguin Press, 2021.2. Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command, by James Stavridis, National Defense University Press, 2010.3. The Bedford Incident, by Mark Raskovich, Thunderchild Publishing (reprint, 2016).4. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? by Graham Allison, Mariner Books (reprint, 2017).5. Winds of War, by Herman Wouk, Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.6. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, Tor Books (reprint, 2017).7. Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux, Vintage, 1990.8. Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, Berkeley (reprint, 2009).9. Admiral James Stavridis Official Website10. Elliot Ackerman Official Website

Hey folks, Jared here. I have talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Seacontrol feeds out there. Some of you may have just realized it this last weekend when the old feed sprang to life and we suddenly had 3,000 more downloads than we were expecting. The current feed, which is the one you want to be listening to, is labeled simply Seacontrol and it includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. So it's Seacontrol Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed as well.

in this episode we have walker mills hosting the co-authors of the new york times bestseller 2034 elliot ackerman and the second guest he's sort of an up-and-comer in the national security business so keep an eye on him we expect big things and walker is going to try to mentor him along the way it's admiral james stevridis so they'll be talking writing process the assumptions behind their work and a lot more this episode was edited and produced by jonathan selling please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've just released our next call for submissions for Project Trident. If you're interested in contributing to the discussion on the law of naval warfare, submissions are due May 17th. For more information, check out our website,

simsec.org. You can also see a lot of articles on naval strategy up right now. And 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. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. This week, we're talking with Admiral James Stavridis, who is the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine officer and award-winning author. Both of our guests have written several books, and we'll make sure that we link to those in the comments. Today, we're going to be talking about their new book, War in 2034, a novel of the next war, which they co-authored.

Admiral Stavridis, welcome aboard. I'm sure you're familiar to most of our listeners, if not all of them. If not for your prolific writing, then your long and distinguished Navy career. For those who might not be quite as familiar with who you are, do you mind giving us a brief introduction to your service history and what you've been up to since you left the Navy? Sure. I'm an Annapolis graduate, had a long career in cruisers and destroyers, culminating in command of a destroyer, a squadron of destroyers, and a carrier strike group all in combat. Along the way, I got a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. A lot of shore duty in the Pentagon because of that PhD. And then my last three assignments in uniform were senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense as a vice admiral, then a combatant commander, U.S. Southern Command, headquarters Miami.

Best job I'll ever have. I'm from South Florida. And then four years as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Elliot, welcome aboard as well. I think some of our listeners are probably familiar with your books. And if not that, then you're writing in the New York Times and elsewhere. But could you go ahead and introduce yourself as well? I'm Elliot Ackerman, and I'm an author. Before that, I had a military career. I served in the Marine Corps and the infantry, as well as in our Raider battalions, and then also later served as an intelligence officer.

We're really excited to have you gentlemen on here and thrilled to be talking about the book. Before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we're associated with. Kind of the first question I have is, how did you two, how did this project start, and how did you two come together and start working on it? As I mentioned, I'm a Fletcher graduate, and Elliot is a Fletcher graduate, and we kind of knew each other through that connection, and a couple of years ago, I had the idea of doing a book as cautionary fiction, if you will. This

book is not predictive. It's not science fiction. It's not techno thriller. It's cautionary fiction, much like books of the Cold War, hopefully, were part of keeping us out of going to the big dance with the Soviet Union. So think Dr. Strangelove, Fail, Save, The Bedford Incident, those sorts of books. And I went to my publisher and said, hey, I have this idea for a book, 2034, a novel of the next world war which is the title and uh he said you know admiral stab you're a you know you've written nine books of non-fiction but you probably need to work with a novelist if this is going to really work and he passed me over to elliot ackerman so i'll let elliot pick up the story yeah that's about right i uh you know uh we we share an editor at penguin press and so our

shared editor came up to me one day and said that uh jim had the idea for a work of speculative fiction that would imagine what it would look like if the u.s and china went to war and he said you know i think it'd be an interesting project for the two of you to collaborate on you know if you're in if you're interested uh and so we came together and said you know let's see if we can like write first chapter let's see what it would be like to collaborate so we kind of outlined the first chapter which in the book is the winery incident which is sort of like the the gulf of Tonkin-type incident in the South China Sea that really sets this war in motion. And we had a great time writing that and proceeded apace to go forward with the book. When it kicks off with

the Wenri incident, what's going on in the world? The novel, of course, is set in 2034, hence the title, 2034, a novel in the next world war. And there's tension between the United States and China. I think that's quite a realistic assumption, frankly. The South China Sea is highly in dispute. The Arctic is melting. There are political changes in the United States. There's not a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. An independent has been elected. And I think the United States is still, broadly speaking, globally engaged. But China has become a very, very formidable competitor to the United States. So that's the set piece. And then the Wenri incident, which kicks the book off, again, based on real life experiences I've had over the years in

command of destroyers, wherein an American destroyer goes to aid, rescue a burning Chinese platform and discovers quite a surprise on board. And that kicks off a chain of events that leads to escalation on both sides and has dramatic consequences, shall we say, for both nations. And Elliot, do you have anything to add? And how much did Admiral Stavridis kind of bring you his ideas and his plot? And how much did you get to add? Because obviously you have, you know, your own military experience and your own writing accomplishments. I think the nature of our collaboration was that we would sort of go to the two of us and outline, you know what a lot of the major muscle movements were going to be so the major muscle movements

being the plot points of the book and then you know we we very quickly drilled down on the structure of the novel you know we wanted something that would feel and needed to feel very broad in scope i mean this is this escalates into truly a world war but we weren't trying to write a techno thriller we wanted to write a book that was character driven you know which is the types of books i like to write and i like to read uh and so then there was this really active collaboration and imagining who those characters would be so you know in the winry incident you meet you meet sarah hunt uh who is a common you know commodore in the u.s navy um you then go on to meet you know wedge who is a uh that's what's called somebody's a marine captain he's a marine

major fighter pilot uh and so as you meet each of these characters in the opening scenes in this opening crisis they become the characters that really carry the story forward out into the world but uh you know also through through just the duration of the book um so that was sort of our the nature of our collaboration you kind of talk about how it's it was more character driven and i definitely felt that um as a reader and i appreciate it because i think often in i don't know if we wanted to say kind of world war three genre books the characters can be kind of a weak point um and and it's more focused on technology and and combat and stuff like that elliot did you find yourself writing yourself into any of the characters um and and then i'll ask admiral

as well yeah i i want to speak for both of us but i do think we feel the same way that they you know the characters contain bits and pieces of both of us and those bits and pieces of you know real experience things we've dealt with then become really the the launch points to imagine the character in a you know in a in a deeper way and so i think that you know with with any type of character driven book you know you're trying to give the reader things that they can hold on to you know whether it's you know sarah hunt's broken leg you know when you meet her she's being medically retired out of the navy and she doesn't want to and she has a an old injury that's from a parachute accident because she was one of the first women members of Naval Special Warfare.

Again, we're projecting out into the future. Or someone like, you know, like Wedge, who's a fourth generation Marine fighter pilot, you know, who still smokes Marlboro Reds. You know, these little things that you're giving the reader to hold on to so that the character really takes root in their imagination. I would only add to that, each of the characters, as Elliot says, have bits and pieces of each of us. Three, in my case, I'll just make an example of one is Sarah Hunt, destroyer officer, commanding a flotilla, small flotilla, destroyer squadron, we call it. She's got three of her ships out there as the Winry incident unfolds, goes on to be a strike group commander. That's obviously kind of in my personal wheelhouse. Secondly, Sandeep Chowdhury,

the Deputy National Security Advisor. I've worked at the NSC staff. Elliot has worked at the NSC staff. I think there's bits of both of us having, you know, run through the White House trying to get a paper to the president. And then thirdly, this one may or may not surprise you, but Lin Bao, I find to me very compelling and, you know, an immigrant story and also a naval officer, or someone's pining away to get back to sea, there's a fair amount of me and Lin Bao as well, just some examples. And just a note for the listeners,

Lin Bao is, I don't want to say he's the bad guy, but he's the Chinese admiral. You know, he's the character on the other side of the story from the Americans. Yeah, let me make, I think, an important point about the book. There are no good guys and bad guys in this book other than war.

War is the bad guy. everyone else is a human being locked in a situation of escalation and in many ways trying desperately to avoid further damage to their own country they all share that and now there's no good guys or bad guys in this one and I don't think there will be if we stumble into a war with China and I was going to say one of the things that I really appreciated that I felt like some of the characters on several different sides had in common is is a is a long lineage of of military history i mean there was there's the iranian brigadier general who then goes on to be not a brigadier general but um his you know long military history and then you have the marine uh pilot

wedge do either of you have was that one of the things that you were drawing kind of from your own uh background because it was i felt like a strong way to tie these characters together from different militaries? That's a good question that I know the answer for me, obviously, but I don't know the answer for Elliot. I am from a military family. My father was a Marine colonel. My wife is the daughter of a Navy P-3 pilot. My daughter, Julia, who's a commissioned officer, Navy nurse, is the fourth, maybe the fifth generation U.S. military officer. So yeah, it's the family business here. Elliot? Yeah, I mean, I have a history of military service in my family, that i would in no way say that we are a military family but not being from a military family and

hailing from a service that has as strong a culture as the marine corps um i always saw with my peers who were second and third generation marines how they were having a very different experience in the corps in many ways than i was because i was someone who really came to it you know tabla raza this was totally my thing, totally my experience. And, you know, not that you were treated differently, but I just knew like there was sort of a subtext to what they were experiencing that didn't exist for me. Like, you know, I had a, I had a friend of mine who was a Naval Academy graduate. His father was a Silver Star recipient who'd served in India Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines in Vietnam. And when he got his orders, he went to, he went to 3rd Battalion,

5th Marines India Company. So I could empathize and acknowledge how heavy that felt for him to follow in his father's footsteps so directly. Yeah, and just to close on this, but my father, as I mentioned, was a very proud colonel of Marines and commanded the 1st Marine MP Battalion, which was a 1,200-person battalion protecting Da Nang in 66, 67. But I kind of didn't want to go into the Marine Corps because my father had done that, and I wanted something just different, and so in that sense, I broke away from the Corps. I recognize that my co-author is a proud Marine, and the interviewer today is a proud Marine, and there's a lot to love about the U.S. Marine Corps, but it, I think, is by far the most tight-knit, culturally oriented of all the services, and I

I think Elliot's spot on that, uh, as, as that deepens generationally, uh, you see, you really see the, I don't want to say the burden you carry, but that sense of responsibility, I think that you carry. And for me, that was, it was kind of liberating to go be a Navy destroyer officer. I wanted to ask, um, Elliot about the Marines, um, because, you know, we know that you are a Silver Star recipient, a Bronze Star with Valor recipient, Purple Heart recipient, um, and some of your combat experiences or at least when i was at the basic school at tbs um are still taught and so i as i was reading i kept kind of waiting for a a grunt um or a recon marine or a or a raider character and it never quite materialized so why did you decide to kind of

stay away from uh those experiences i wouldn't say that i decided to stay away from those experiences Does that make sense? I think those experiences are more universal than the specificity of, you know, the units that I necessarily serve with. So, you know, one of the opening sequences in the book, and this is something very much kind of taken from me, I mean, my experience, is there's a moment where Wedge, the Marine fighter pilot, who's his fourth generation Marine fighter pilot, and his family goes all the way back to the Second World War. his great grandfather flew with Pappy Boyington is talking about, you know, he's up there and he's flying in an F-35 and he just feels like a computer operator. And he's sort of bemoaning his lot in life and in history saying, you know, I just want to be like close, you know, close to it, you know, flying by the seat of my pants. Like my great grandfather was like my grandfather was in Vietnam and my father was in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that idea of it and being close to it and what

is that it is something i've actually written about before i wrote about it uh in a memoir uh of mine so so when you say you know where's the grunt where's the raider you know he you know that person is is all through the narrative because so much of this book is a character driven book means it's also a meditation on war and everything i learned about war uh almost everything i learned is i learned as a marine so um you know so that's threaded through there as well, as well as Admiral Stavridis' experience with war. So, you know, the book is a character driven book, you know, we hope will be experienced as, you know, as really a layered book, like, you know, it was written as a palpate set. I mean, there's, I like to think there's a lot,

a lot there. That's not just a, you know, a projection of the future of war, but it's also a statement about the very nature of war. Elliot, would you say it's from a military perspective. I mean, I know we have Sandri Chowdhury, the NSC staffer, but I think all the other characters were in the military. And something that I felt, you know, as a kind of empathizing with these characters and reading it is, it's, they're the ones fighting the war, but they're not necessarily the ones making the decision to continue and to escalate. And it seemed like, you know, the kind of key decision makers, the political leadership was oftentimes a little bit behind the kind of behind the curtain making those decisions yeah i think to a degree

but i also think um there is a portion of you know going to going to war and perpetuating a war is always an emotional decision in some some respects i mean listen if you look to history it is just riddled with decisions that were not necessarily fully rational decisions but were turbocharged with the emotions of that moment and this work it quickly becomes extremely costly and so you see the emotional calculus at play so it's not necessarily just individuals sitting in a room making every single decision but it's also the the force of events the zeitgeist of a moment that cause people to make collective decisions and there's a collective nature to how this war spirals out of control um on all sides um and we also see the way you know certain actors uh nation

nation act nation state actors behave in ways like namely the russians to sort of elicit certain responses from countries to to take the war and and cause it to escalate further so the characters themselves are not necessarily oftentimes you know the the the one decision maker but i would argue that when you look at who those decision makers are, they themselves are not independent decision makers because they are trapped up in this cycle of escalation that is sort of almost like a collective madness. Right. It's both a decision and then in other ways, it has a certain inevitability. Even though I'd hope that that would be one takeaway maybe a reader would get Was it that there also isn't an inevitability in it? You know, the escalation decisions and when you're talking about nuclear war is kind of a chain of decisions that that can be reversed.

Right. And I think one of the you know, one of the one of the things that the book does is it it shows how nations can quickly sleepwalk their way to wars where the outcome is absolutely horrible. And we've seen that, you know, we've seen that all throughout history. I mean, listen, by definition, baked into every war is a miscalculation, right? Because both sides, when they begin the war, think they're going to win. So by definition, somebody's miscalculated. So miscalculation and war go hand in hand. Admiral, so one of the things that I wanted to ask you is, we know that you were commander of U.S. Southern Command. We were talking a little bit in Spanish before the interview. Latin America is another component that doesn't really show itself in the book. And obviously, you know, it's one book, there's a discrete set of characters, and so it doesn't cover everything. That's a special place for me because I work here. So I wanted to know how that decision was made and then also what you thought kind of beyond what's in the book, how that plot and competition would kind of play out in Latin America. The simple answer is, yeah, there's no Latin America. There's really no Africa in the book. There's really not much Europe in the book, if you think about it. NATO is sort of just offstage throughout the book. Is that how it's going to turn out? I don't know. I'll give you in a minute my thoughts on Latin American, where it's headed.

But we tried to narrow the focus down to make it not a sprawling war and peace-like book, but one that is war perceived through the filter of this handful of prominent characters. And so you have an American, you have a Chinese, you have an Iranian, you have a Russian, et cetera. Indian American. And I think that's about the right frame at the level of what we wanted to achieve in 2034. Now for our next novel, it'll be set in the South Atlantic about a war between Africa and Latin America. No, I'm totally kidding. What will happen in Latin America? I always say Latin America is in many ways my favorite region of the world. There really is almost

zero chance of a major war occurring. The potential, the natural resources, the human warmth of the people is, I think, unmatched in many ways. We're very lucky, we the United States, to share this hemisphere with Latin America and the Caribbean, because the chances of armed conflict are essentially zero, and I don't see that changing. So my hope for the region, Walker, is that it will find its way toward its economic and human potential. And to make that happen, I'm hopeful the United States will spend a fair amount of time thinking about how it can do exactly that in this hemisphere that we share together. I wrote another book about all that called Partnership for the Americas. And I think that is a profound muscle movement that probably

actually occurs later in this century. And any of the listeners who've listened to the previous podcast that I've done, I'm always trying to find the Latin America link and bring it into conversation. I'll close on that one by saying the United States is well on its way to being a bilingual, bicultural country. The three of us are three white guys, and we were chattering away in Spanish a minute ago. Today, 15 to 20 percent of the population of the United States speaks Spanish as a first or a strong second language. By mid-century, that'll be 30 to 35 percent. You know, I'm Greek-American, but my two daughters speak excellent Spanish. Why? Because it's functional, because we are, again, in my view, headed toward bilingual, bicultural, and that'll

strengthen those north-south bonds, I think, to the benefit both of the U.S. and that gorgeous world to the south. I absolutely agree, sir. And that's going to have to be your next book. Elliot, I want to turn back to you and ask, there are several points in the book that reference ongoing events. I think especially the COVID-19 pandemic, did you find yourselves kind of updating it or working in um things that were happening i don't i don't have a great sense of of how long the project has gone or or when when you uh two started writing yeah there were really kind of two actually distinct uh things in the book or distinct moments in the book where external events overwhelmed the narrative of the book a little bit or meaning just we had to deal

with it um first was the the death of uh Cosmo Soleimani so there is a plot point earlier in the book with one of the central characters is Qasem Farshad, who is the sort of ostensible, his backstory is that his father was killed diverting an assassination attempt on Soleimani's life. So in the early drafts of the book, I mean, we really finished the book. And there were just a few scenes with Soleimani in the book, talking to Farshad, and Soleimani was killed. So we had to go in and just tinker with those scenes to show that they happened before Soleimani's death and then reference the fact that he had been killed that was one and then and then COVID which wasn't something where we had to do anything big but we just sort of put our heads together

said you know as you're meeting these characters in the years 2034 and you were learning about their backstories for there to be absolutely no mention of this seismic event in the book like just doesn't feel right at the same time it doesn't feel right to try to like really write it into the book in a way that seems like it's pandering to the COVID crisis so you know we just went through and they were there's one character who actually made would make made a lot of sense for them actually I think really improved and brought that character into better relief by mentioning a way that COVID had featured in their life that they'd lost a loved one and one of the themes that super recently and probably in post it was during post-production

of the book or some of the kind of civil military themes over the last year or six months. And so I thought it was really exciting that Sandy Chowdhury, the NSC staffer, was there and has kind of a secondary character who's a uniformed member of the NSC and kind of comparing or getting that kind of inside look. And so I wonder if that was at all adjusted. Not substantially, to my recollection elliot may have done some tinkering i didn't quite catch but um there that character the uniformed uh admiral bunt is his uh call sign i think is another compelling character in the book in many ways and trying to do the right thing and kind of having to work with a very difficult boss who's probably the darkest character in the book and by the way he's a west point graduate i don't

know if you noticed that but no no other yeah Elliot's doing that the universal hand motion for ring knocker but I think you're right Walker to point out the civil military tension that exists in the book and it pops at a number of different places I think that's quite real and then I think it's worth mentioning that it seemed like it popped a little bit not just with the characters from the United States but you know the way that that you gentleman had written it, there are really important, as important characters from other countries that are also kind of dealing with their own internal civil military relations. Indeed, there are. And if you stop and think about it, so often the pivot points in history

aren't because of some sudden majestic technology or some radical moment. They really are small human failures and successes, the memo that gets in the hands of somebody, a link that's made by a retired officer. That's how it really works, folks. And, you know, everybody likes to think of the Pentagon as, you know, this perfect death star orbiting the planet capable of listening and reaching and finding anything. Look, I had seven tours in the Pentagon. It is a it's a puzzle palace in so many ways. And the big moments do tend to turn on small human frailties and small human successes. Yeah, I'm thinking back now about some of the pivotal plot events. And I think almost almost all of them were were driven by personalities and specific interactions rather

than a kind of blooming inevitability right or a great plan or a perfect new technology in my experience we say in the surface navy uh celebrate the small victories because the big ones never come and that's another way of sort of recognizing that it's these tiny little pivot points big doors swinging on small hinges and those small hinges are what we tried to illuminate in the book ellie i'll turn and ask you was there a part of were there parts of the book that you enjoyed writing more than others um i mean how did was it was it fun to write um because obviously there's some kind of pretty dark dark parts as well in describing the book uh you know it comes out very shortly um i see you know we've written a work of speculative fiction about a war with china

and it's a lot of fun. So actually the book is fun. I had a good time, you know, I think we both had a good time writing it. I certainly did. You know, for me, the parts of the book and, you know, just in the writing process that I enjoy the most is when you, when you see all the pieces of the book fitting together. And I don't necessarily mean with, even with plot points, I still remember, you know, one of the kind of the last phone calls the two of us had as we were writing sort of the coda to the book and it was a pretty quick call as we were saying okay this is how everybody ends up um and you know this is what happens to chowdhury this is what happens to sarah hump bump bump bump down the line um and to me that's very satisfying because you see you know i feel

like in the books i read and when i feel like i've done you know we've done a book that works the characters are real and there is just a logic to all of them and when you see how they end up and you see that that logic is held throughout the book, it's very, very satisfying. And I think that, you know, when you get to the coda of this book and you see what happens to each of these five principal characters,

you know, there's a logic to it. And I like to think there's an elegance to it. And it's something that I'm like, you know, that I'm proud of. I'll only add, you will, as a reader, you will have a very emotional response to the endings of these characters. which vary greatly and i think that's the most real way you can end a great novel is where you

you as the reader have come to care about the characters and you have in my case anyway uh even as part of the drafting team i still felt very emotional in the last set of outcomes for these characters some of which are happier than others let's put it that way as a reader i would i would definitely second that uh gentlemen i mean if that was the intent it it certainly was successful i mentioned before uh we started recording that i i think i was only two setting two sittings uh that i read it in you know i think probably the last i think back the last time i read a book that quickly was probably like one of the harry potter books when i was uh in grade school not not that they're you know in the same genre but they can kind of captivate you the same way that's good

company to be in. Yeah, from your mouth to Gotti. Hey, I'll tell you one that may surprise you or not, but getting ready for the book tour that we're now undergoing, I went back and reread the whole book, word by word, the whole book. And I came to the end of it, and this grizzled old admiral got quite choked up on a couple of points in that final set of outcomes. And I knew what was coming and had participated in writing it, and it still moved me greatly. We come to care about these people. And I think in the kind of, I mentioned this before, World War III techno thriller genre, I mean, I would hesitate to call it a techno thriller, because as you mentioned, sir, it's the technology is kind of alluded to, but it is not central to the story. You know,

I think you often walk away from those books, not interested and kind of excited, but not particularly moved on an, on an emotional level. And I can see before I had the opportunity to write it, that was something I was looking forward to being familiar with, with Elliot's work and some of his columns and being really kind of tugged emotionally and seeing that collide with the kind of bigger world war three ish themes i would i would just echo the point we made in the earlier which is that the you know sort of the real enemy of this book is war itself and so if the enemy is war itself the book is also sort of a psychological profile of not only these characters we talked about but also a psychological profile of a war you know how do you how do you

wind up getting to the point uh where the entire world is once again at war and how in some ways do many of the conceptions we have about what that war would look like and particularly america's you know military dominance in that conflict you know how are those perceptions perhaps wrong um so you know that is very much kind of you know what the book is also about is you know it's not just it's not just the individual characters of the book that we hope we that that keeps the reader going but there are also some really uh much much larger themes uh about war itself um that are that are baked in there so you know anyone who comes to the story i hope they'll you know enjoy it enjoy it as a story and also enjoy engaging with some of those themes so something i'll ask you

first admiral is are there books that you looked to as inspiration um when you were writing this both kind of discreetly within the kind of World War III type genre, but also beyond maybe something else that inspired you? I'll give you three. One is a book called The Bedford Incident by Mark Reskovich. And it's a classic Cold War story of a Navy destroyer leader in kind of a cat and mouse in the North Atlantic against a Soviet submarine, and the two of them are constantly maneuvering. It's allegorical to Moby Dick, and the captain of the Bedford, the name of the destroyer, becomes obsessed with finding this submarine and pinning it down using his sonar, and it's very dangerous, and an incident occurs, the Bedford incident, that potentially could plunge the world into war.

that small frame the characters you come to really care about the people involved that was very much my mind second is a work of non-fiction that i think many of your listeners will be familiar with and it's by graham allison the title is destined for war can the united states and china avoid the thucydides trap put a link in for those who perhaps aren't familiar with the term that Thucydides trapped simply the idea that rising powers, read China, established powers, read the United States, in 2,500 years of history, many more times than not end up in a global war. So that book was very much rattling around in my mind. And then lastly, one of the great naval writers of all time, although he's written a number of different

genres, of course, is Herman Woke, King Mutiny court-martial, but really the book that this has echoes of for me is Winds of War, and what Woke does in two enormous volumes, much more ambitious sweep, but really that idea of using characters to tell the story of a world war, that was kind of in my mind as well and then elliot over to you did you was there something you kind of were inspired by or were interested in emulating or were looking to as as you were working on this you know i always hate the books question because i'm kind of always reading something like what was i reading when i was writing this book um listen i can say like these are books that that that the the feel of the book was something i hope to emulate um you know there's a book ender's game

which is a science fiction book uh and the way that ender's game um very much engages in the genre but then quickly sort of transcends the genre was a type of transcendence that you know i think i was definitely aspiring to in the writing process then that we you know i knew i was writing something that was sort of in a genre but i wanted to write something that could get out of the genre and be larger than that um there's a book uh by andre malraux called man's fate um which is all about an early uh communist uprising in china in the early 20th century you know and then i'd say sort of um anything by you know graham green always uh he classified a certain subset of his books into what he called his entertainments which is sort of his books

that were page turners and fun and interesting. And I wanted, you know, there's a part of the book where I felt this, like the subject matter was so heavy. I wanted parts of it to sort of have that sense of like a little bit of one of Graham Greene's entertainments where, you know, you, you know, it's, it's tough to say nuclear weapons too many times, if you're not going to also sort of keep, you know, you'll, you'll lose the reader if you keep, if you go too dark and you have to kind of show a little bit of the light, it's sort of like a, you know, how, how, you know you're a grunt how you employ gallows humor in the darkest moments because you know if you don't laugh you'll cry for sure no that that makes a lot of sense and i i'm kind of

surprised that we got out of that question without anybody mentioning uh you know tom clancy's red storm rising or or something something like that i would say the opposite as as follows that the thing i anyway distinctly didn't want to do was tell a story that put technology at the center of it and was predictive about technology. And there are great books that do that well, but this is not that concept. This is about human beings encountering war and how great events swing on these small hinges. Yeah, this is definitely not Tom Clancy. Sorry, if you're looking for Tom Clancy, go read the latest Tom Clancy knockoff. As far as I can tell there's like a stable of Tom Clancy's writing books under his name, despite the fact that he

died 20 years ago. Uh, so no, this is not Tom Clancy. Elliot was saying that it's kind of a book that, that definitely transcends that genre. Um, but I would, I would disagree and say, if you are interested in Tom Clancy, you should also seek out this book. Um, because I think you will also um you'll also enjoy it and don't get me wrong i'm not criticizing red storm rising i have a copy of it over here i have three signed first editions of the hunt for red october i was chairman of the board of the naval institute when we uh or i was a board member of the naval institute when the naval institute published it i like tom clancy i'm just making sure people understand this book is not Red Storm Rising. That's a very readable book and worth a read.

No, that's absolutely true. And our listeners should definitely be aware of that. So Admiral, being sensitive to the time that you have with us, I just want to give you an opportunity to kind of conclude with some thoughts. I mean, if there's something that you would want a reader to take away from the book, besides just the kind of emotional weight of what conflict can do and the dangers of escalation, what a reader should take away. And then if you could give us a hint if you're working on anything currently and tell us where our listeners can find you online. Sure. The book, as we've said several times in the course of this excellent interview, is cautionary. It's a cautionary tale. The idea is to read the book and imagine what a war with

China would look like in all of its horrific characteristics. And as Elliot and I have gone back and forth on many times, our failures so often are not failures of our intelligence, they're failures of our imagination. So come with us into this book. Imagine how terrible it would be if these two nations, these two great civilizations, were to sleepwalk into a war and be part of the solution, which is to, say, engage in positive ways and help guide this national conversation with tools of diplomacy and economics and culture and understanding and empathy and communication that's how we avoid making 2034 a novel of the next world war 2034 inaccurate prediction of the next world war let's hope it's not um secondly what am i working

on now i have two more non-fiction books um that are approaching completion one uh very much to the theme of this interview is called The Sailor's Bookshelf, 50 Books to Know the Sea. And so it's a compendium of 50 very short essays, each one about a thousand words, so think newspaper column length, picking 50 books that I think really help an individual understand the oceans. About half are non-fiction. Think Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World, and half of them are fiction. Herman Wolfe, The Cane Mutiny Court Martial, Nicholas Montserrat, The Cruel Sea, The Bedford Incident is one of the 50. And so that's been a really wonderful, fun project. That'll be published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in December-ish, late this year. And then

And my next big book, Nonfiction, with my team at Penguin Press, we have a wonderful editor there, Scott Moyers, has a working title of Nine Hard Choices. Nine Hard Choices. It's a book about how we make decisions, and it uses nine tough decisions that were made under very stressful situations and tries to draw lessons from how we can be better decision makers. So those are my two projects. And follow me online. Easy to find anywhere just because the name is unique. But I'm at Stavridis J. James Stavridis on Facebook. James Stavridis on LinkedIn. And my website is Admiral Stav, S-T-A-V, Admiral Stav, all one word, dot com. Thanks for having me on, Walker. It's been a pleasure catching up. And thank you, as the saying goes, for your service in the Corps, but particularly your

service in Latin America. Well, thank you, sir. And we'll be keeping an eye out for those books coming out. Thank you for joining us. Elliot, I would ask you, do you have any kind of final thoughts besides what we've talked about that you want to go over before we wrap this up? i'd say no no no broader final thoughts but you know i hope listeners who choose to pick up the book i hope they enjoy it i hope it i hope it leaves them thinking is there anything that

you're working on uh right now that we're going to see coming out soon and where can our listeners find you online um my next project uh tita for publication is i have a novel that will come out 2022 um that is all takes place around the the london bridge terror attacks in 2016 um so that's slated for publication 2022 um you know as well as the the columns i write for various publications like uh the new york times and time magazine and you can find me on twitter at elliot ackerman or online, ElliotAckerman.com. I'd like to thank my guests, Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, for joining me on the podcast today.

And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Thank you. I'm putting it out, it's putting out, it's in my mouth.