Sea Control - Sea Control 250 - Dr. Joshua Tallis on Arctic Strategy

Episode Date: May 16, 2021

Links1. The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers and Maritime Insecurity, by Joshua Tallis, Naval Institute Press, 2019.2. Sea Control 197: Naval Great Power Competition with Dr. Joshua Tallis and Hunter Stires, by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, August 30, 2020.3. “Focusing the Military Services’ Arctic Strategies,” by Joshua Tallis, War on the Rocks, January 20, 2021.4. Sea Control 219: USCG Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz, by Walker Mills CIMSEC, December 27, 2020.5. Sea Control 230: Coast Guard Unmanned Systems with Scott Craig and Bert Macesker, by Walker Mills, CIMSEC, March 7, 2021.6. “Advantage at Sea,” The U.S. Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, and U.S. Coast Guard, December 2020.7. “How Good Order at Sea is Central to Winning Strategic Competition,” by Joshua Tallis, CIMSEC, August 12, 2020.8. “For a Biden Arctic Agenda, Look to Governance,” by Joshua Tallis, Foreign Policy, February 18, 2021.9. The Strife Blog series on Caribbean Maritime Security will run through June 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The current feed is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast. Go ahead and subscribe to that. That's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed as well. Walker Mills is hosting this episode and he's welcoming back our old friend, Dr. Joshua Tallis, to discuss the various Arctic strategies being published

by disparate parts of the U.S. government. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've released our next call for submissions for Project Trident. So if you're interested in contributing to the discussion on the law of naval warfare, submissions are due May 17th. We have also partnered with Transcom for a call for articles related to strategic sea lift. So if you want to get your idea in front of some flag officers, this is your chance. For more information, check out our website at simsec.org.

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 Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. This week, we're talking with Dr. Joshua Tallis, an analyst from the Center for Naval Analyses, where he works on polar issues. He's also the author of the book, The War for Muddy Waters, Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers,

and Maritime Insecurity. Welcome aboard, Josh. Can you give yourself a little more of a thorough introduction to our listeners? Sure. Thanks a lot for having me, Walker. It's nice to say that I can be back to the SimSec podcast. Yeah, so I'm a maritime and polar analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. I work in our political military shop.

So I've got my background working on sort of smaller scale maritime security and ocean governance issues, have my PhD from the University of St. Andrews in the UK, and then came on to CNA working in our strategy shop. 2018, I deployed with the Truman Strike Group. CNA embeds field representatives into select commands, both on shore and at sea. It just so happened that that deployment was the one where the U.S. sort of returned its carrier presence to the high north in the norwegian sea so from that point on i've also really dug into the uh the polar strategy and policy portfolio so sort of covering both ends

there both geographically as well as functioning on the maritime and the arctic and antarctic fronts we're excited to have you here yeah and and we'll make sure we link to your previous podcast that you did with uh hunter stires on on gray zone competition and recorded with jared and definitely important to note for the listeners that your experience with polar issues is not just abstract, not just academic. You do have some experience up there in the polar regions. Before I start, I need 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. So you've been really prolific, I would say, over the last year

and longer, Josh. So you've got a lot of stuff to talk about. But I want to start with your recent essay from War on the Rocks titled Focusing the Military Services Arctic Strategies that came out at the end of January. So what was kind of the argument there that you're making in that essay? Yeah, well, first I just say, I think if Walker Mills is calling you prolific, then that's a pretty strong endorsement. So in terms of that article for War on the Rocks, really, it starts with an observation, which is that over the last sort of 18 months or so, we are seeing a real proliferation and iteration of service strategies, specifically related to the Arctic from across DOD. And, you know, the Coast Guard has one too, but sort of setting that aside for

a moment. So just to give sort of a brief chronology, you've got a 2019, January 2019 strategy from the Navy. You've got a DOD sort of OSD level Arctic strategy that comes out in June of 2019. The Department of the Air Force, so it's an Air Force and a Space Force Arctic Strategy, comes out in July of 2020. Then you've got another now Department of the Navy, so Navy Marine Corps Arctic Strategy in January 2021. Folks who are listening who pay attention to this will probably be familiar with the fact that the Army has a forthcoming Arctic Strategy as well. So, you know, I'm looking at that landscape and I'm thinking, we don't really see this type of regional strategy proliferation from the service branches for any other regions. And so how did we

get here? And is this where we want to be? You know, and so the article is kind of an extended exploration of those two questions. The how did we get here is relatively straightforward, I think. I mean, we're looking at some extent on some pretty obvious demand signals coming out of Congress. A lot of this is from the Alaska delegation, but not exclusively. I make a point in the piece that the Arctic caucus in Congress is bipartisan. And close readers of the Department of the Navy Arctic Strategy will see quite a number of references to Maine, almost in near equal measure to Alaska because of Senator King's participation on the Arctic caucus. So there's a bipartisan demand signal coming out of Congress generating greater interest and churn

in DOD on the Arctic front. There are some deeper-seated issues, I think, that are being spoken to there that I think we'll get into. The question of is this where we want to be is a little bit more complicated. I think most folks who work in the Paul Mill world would say that service branches that are actively energized about thinking through strategic issues is a good thing on balance. The challenge is that for folks who really get in the weeds for their Paul Mill discussions know the service branches aren't actually responsible for operating forces, right? And so you run the risk of quite a large say-do gap between the entities that are responsible for, you know, man-training and equipping the force versus the combatant

commanders and the components who have the actual responsibility for setting and implementing regional strategy and policy on those fronts. And so, you know, you have a lot of thoughtful dialogue taking place at the services on the Arctic level. On the other hand, it's a lot of words without necessarily a lot of obligation for follow through. And that can create some real issues in terms of strategy implementation. So that's kind of the big picture of what I was trying to get at with that piece. So you talk about kind of the mismatch between who's writing the strategies and who should necessarily be driving the bus. Do you think it's kind of an issue that the Arctic is a little bit at the seam of some of the combatant commanders, right? So it

touches on NORTHCOM, it touches a little bit of INDOPACOM, it touches UCOM, all of northern Russia. Yeah, so I touch a little bit on sort of the command and control element in the piece. You know, I've got a colleague at CNA who runs sort of a whole shop that really just looks at command and control issues. And so that I should be fair that it's in itself, that's its own sub genre of analysis that one could dig into. But from her, one of sort of the bits of wisdom that I have glommed onto is it is often sort of theoretically appealing to redraw the command and control lines, but really what you're doing is you are trying to solve the underlying problem in perhaps a less than efficient way. So, you know, in the Arctic, I think there are some places where

the UCP lines may need to be redrawn. I think that's most likely the case at the component level, and I spend most of my time looking at Navy issues, and I think that's particularly acute with respect to the Navy. I think the division of responsibility from the Arctic that's loosely divided across sixth fleet in Europe, second fleet for the Atlantic portion of the U.S. coast, and then third fleet for the West Coast of the United States, and then even to some extent, some sort of notional interests, if not sort of explicit responsibility for seventh fleet in the Indo-Pacific, it just creates too many gaps. It's not obvious who has the sort of the singular voice at the Navy level for advocating for and stating resources that are necessary for Arctic operations.

At the COCOM level, it's really only divided between two. It's UCOM and NORTHCOM. NORTHCOM is notionally the resource advocate for the Arctic. There, I think you still have some real sort of underlying tensions in terms of what NORTHCOM is interested in and needs to pay attention to is obviously different than UCOM. And so having that terrain split between two voices is complicated. Something I think we'll probably dig into, though, is, you know, the Arctic isn't one space. So it's sort of an imperfect answer to the question of the command lines. To me, it seems more obvious that the Navy has some thinking to do about whether or not it is optimally drawing its lines in the region. Perhaps it can simplify a little bit of C2 and

sort of planning and requirement statement responsibility for the Arctic. At the COCOM level, I'm less convinced that sort of redrawing the lines is really going to solve underlying tensions, about thinking strategically about what needs to happen in the Arctic. And then can you give us an idea, and we kind of set it aside at the beginning, of how the Coast Guard fits in. Some of our listeners may remember we did an interview with Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Carl Schultz back in December, and we talked a lot about Arctic issues. And then more recently, it hasn't been released yet, but we did an interview with two folks that were working on some of the unmanned systems for the Coast Guard, and they were really excited about some

of the potential applications for Coast Guard unmanned systems in the Arctic? So I think there are there are kind of two ways to answer that at the sort of policy level and programmatic level inside the government. My favorite thing to point to, and it's still to the best of my mind, the most current document that sort of speaks to this is the 2016 implementation framework for the Obama era National Arctic Strategy. And it's a long, long document that basically operationalizes the relatively short national Arctic strategy from the Obama era and says, here's who has the task inside the government for executing this portion of the strategy, this portion of the strategy. It's got a hundred and something individual tasks that are

spread out across the U.S. government. The Coast Guard is far and away the single greatest service or U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. agency with tasking in the implementation framework. And after that, it's organizations like the Department of State, NOAA, the EPA, DOD is basically as low as you can get. It's got like three taskings or something, and none of them for the Navy, mind you, right? So to some extent, that is a little bit quaint considering how much things have changed in the intervening five or six years. I think it's safe to say that if you wrote a similar implementation plan now, you'd see a much more prominent role for DOD. But at the same time, it is indicative of the fact that from a U.S. government standpoint, the agency with the single

greatest equity in terms of Arctic planning and programs and strategy implementation is the Coast Guard. Now, it does get a little bit messier than that, which is to say, you know, I said a little while ago, you know, the Arctic isn't one region. And sometimes when we're thinking about strategy and policy implementation in the region and the operations and sort of the four structure decisions that would need to fall from that, it's valuable to think a little bit more about where specifically we're talking about in the Arctic space. And that's where this question of sort of U.S. Coast Guard leadership and service integration can look differently in different places. So the Pacific Arctic for the United States, that's U.S. homeland. That's where

the United States gets its credentials as an Arctic nation by dint of Alaska. And so it makes sense that a force that is largely constabulary and law enforcement in nature, that is doing things like search and rescue, that is doing things like fisheries enforcement, sovereignty patrols, you know, those Coast Guard functions make a lot of sense in the Pacific Arctic for the United States. In the Atlantic Arctic, when we're talking about the sort of more of the classical high north or the European high north, we're talking about that space north of the GIUK gap, the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, which was kind of famed from the Cold War era of concern for Soviet submarines sort of flushing out into the North Atlantic sea lines of

communication. You know, if we're talking about that region, we're talking about the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, that becomes much more sort of a classic Navy Marine Corps security issue. This becomes about preserving sea lines of communication. It becomes about prosecuting ballistic missile submarines in Russian bastions in the high north. So in that arena and in that space, you know, it's not to say the Coast Guard never has a function in that area, but So it's much more of a supporting role than I would say would make sense in the Pacific Arctic. So all that is to say, you know, clearly from a U.S. government standpoint, the Coast Guard is really the leader in terms of the maritime service in the Arctic, broadly constructed. But when we segment the Arctic into sort of more finite portions, then it becomes a little bit different in terms of when we're looking sort of to the Atlantic, the Navy has got a real leadership role. Whereas when we're looking to the Pacific, it's a little bit more obvious the Coast Guard's function there.

So, Josh, if I'm understanding right, and I want to make sure that I am, you're saying that we would say broadly that the Coast Guard could be kind of the nation's lead or primary line of effort in the Arctic. But it really depends on what specific region you're talking about. And then also that we're starting to see that shift. And that's probably less the case now than it was, like you mentioned, in 2016 when the Obama administration had their Arctic implementation guidance. Yeah, I think that's a good summary. You know, when I when I sort of so I think as we talked about sort of the introduction, you know, I've got some some operational knowledge. having deployed with the Truman Strike Group for about four months in 2018 and sort of spent a lot of time thinking about Arctic operations after that. But by and large, I live in sort of the

palm mill and the strategy and policy space. And when I'm doing analysis or leading projects at the strategy level, it's imperative to start with the questions of why and where. And I think that kind of speaks to your question on sort of leadership responsibilities in the Arctic. You know, why are you operating in the Arctic? And where specifically do you plan on operating? And from there, it's a lot easier to understand that, well, you know, if the why is, you know, because the Arctic is growing in terms of shipping routes and fisheries use and resource extraction, and their concerns about sovereignty, you know, and their concerns about sort of demarcating borders, that's a lot, you know, the Navy can play a role in that. But that's really

sort of bread and butter for the Coast Guard. If the sort of why is we're worried about a potential conflict with Russia, and as a consequence of the where is the North Atlantic and the Atlantic Arctic, that to me signals much more of a stronger position for the Navy in terms of its leadership role there. And then, Josh, can you kind of tie this to the tri-service maritime strategy that we just saw and the kind of greater ideas of what we're calling great power competition? Not that everything has to be rooted in in great power competition but i think some of the the push to the arctic um is if i'm not mistaken no i i think you're right i mean i think quite a lot of the push um especially i would say the dod push into the arctic one of the things that that dod land

can sometimes forget is that when when dod and sort of the associated national security sphere identify as an issue. Sometimes there can be a little bit of sort of amnesia that other people may have gotten to that question first in a different way, right? So one of the things I'd like to point out about that fact with the 2016 implementation framework is that the U.S. government at large is not surprised by the existence of the Arctic, right? I mean, the Department of State, the Coast Guard, NOAA, EPA, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, There are large portions of the U.S. government that have been active and thinking about and implementing U.S. policy in the Arctic for decades. So I think that's sort of that's sort of an important thing to note.

The rise of importance for DOD certainly is tied partially to great power competition. That narrative, I think, is rebalancing a little bit in the Biden administration now that it's kind of OK again to talk about climate change, Because obviously, the opening of the Arctic is first and foremost being driven by the fact that it is a more accessible region, particularly at the surface level for vessels transiting the space. And so you're seeing strategic significance from an economic standpoint as things like the Northern Sea Route open up. But obviously, just because of Russia's presence and anything that looks like China might be interested in it, that's going to get connected to great power competition. Last thing I'll say on the sort of competition front, though, is there are certain similarities with the Cold War and certain departures as we look at the Arctic. So folks who have looked at the Arctic for their careers already know this, but during the Cold War, the Arctic was a battlefront, but it was mostly an aerospace battlefront. We were concerned about incoming ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union, and we were concerned about those coming over the ice cap because it's the shortest distance from the Soviet Union to the United States is over the Arctic, right?

So you've got the dew line and the early warning network and the establishment of NORAD, the binational command with Canada and the United States. So there have been moments in American history where we have had to think about the Arctic as a strategic battlefront and something that was relevant to strategic competition. Where that's changing now is really that climate change component and what that will mean for greater forces to operate in the region, perhaps more of a competition over access to resources, which really wasn't a major feature of the Cold War. So, you know, it can be, and there are plenty of posts about this already, about, you know, is the Cold War narrative really appropriate for thinking about great power competition? In many ways, no. And that's likewise true in the Arctic, you know, that it's important to baseline that that the Arctic has always been a space for for competition. That's not a novelty. But the nature of that competition is different as a result of climate change and different as a result of the fact that we see ourselves in competition with with two major competitors now and not not one block. So I definitely wanted to ask kind of more directly about climate and you're definitely kind of teasing it in that in that last response, because we know that the Arctic didn't come out of come out of nowhere. So it's it kind of speaks to the why now portion, I think.

So, I mean, in what ways do you think that we're going to see the Arctic changing because of climate change? And then how is that going to affect, you know, operationally what the Navy and the Coast Guard and even the other services are doing up there? Yeah, I mean, it's a big question, right? I mean, there's, and again, a lot of this, apologies for folks who are more steeped in Arctic issues. Some of this is kind of boilerplate stuff. But, you know, it can be surprising for people that the Arctic cold in most people's minds, right? But it is actually warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet. So it's not just a region that is being affected by climate change. It's actually sort of a leading indicator in terms of the ravages of climate change on local communities. It has some unique implications in the Arctic. So permafrost thaw, you know, ground soil that's typically frozen solid slowly or in some places not so slowly starting to thaw out. That has real implications for thinking from a DOD standpoint, but also just a human and society standpoint. The infrastructure that you've built on top of that permafrost starts to destabilize. That can be an issue for installations and DOD infrastructure.

It can be a problem for runways that may need to be regraded or patched over because of issues with permafrost. Obviously, there are going to be implications for sea level rise in the Arctic. But that kind of gets to a bigger question, which is, you know, as you see greater sea ice melt and glacial melt in the Arctic and to some extent in the Antarctic as well, we're getting to a moment where what happens at the poles and in the Arctic in particular doesn't stay there anymore, right? Kind of the post-Cold War narrative of the Arctic had been, you know, high north, low tension, right? To some extent that this was a space that was kind of insulated from normal politics. And not only are politics being infused in ways that are cross-regional now as we see China, but even other countries like the UK and France and Germany and Japan, South Korea, take greater interest in the Arctic because of growing access to resources, right? This is another feature of climate change, the potential to get at large reserves of natural gas and oil, but also fish stocks that are migrating further north because of changes in ocean temperatures. But also you're seeing sort of implications for coal communities all over the world. Right. I mean, sea ice melt in the Arctic. You know, that's going to ruin somebody's day at some point in Miami also. So we're seeing more of sort of an integrated network of what's happening in the Arctic, both in a material sense, but also at a strategy and a policy and an operational sense, bleeding into sort of global politics and global phenomena in a way that is, if not wholly new, is at least unusual for the region to have to grapple with.

You know, you're talking some about the permafrost thaw and the implications for infrastructure, you know, military and law enforcement infrastructure up there in the high north. But what are some of the other, I guess, material implications of increasing competition or even just increasing engagement by the United States up in the Arctic? I think, again, that question really gets me back to where and why. And this is this is something that I kind of tease in that war on the rocks piece. We're talking about how you've got the services who are responsible for sort of training, equipping, and staffing the services sort of rushing to answer with the what without necessarily thinking a whole lot about sort of what the strategic rationale for operating in the Arctic is. So in my mind, that's a clear question for the Navy with a strategic focus on the European Arctic, right? That's a problem set that at least has a logic chain to it that could make sense. And isn't a really new one. So I'm not really sure augers a whole lot in terms of material changes, right? I mean, the Navy needs to relearn how to operate in the high north. It needs to relearn how to operate off the Norwegian coast. We saw some issues during Trident Juncture 18, which was, you know, a large Arctic amphibious exercise on the Norwegian coast, where an amphib sort of took a little bit of a role and had to turn back to Iceland.

It wasn't able to participate in in the in the exercise. And I think a lot of that just has to do with kind of an unfamiliarity of operating that type of equipment in sometimes heavier seas. We don't have as great granularity in terms of weather patterns in the Arctic as we do in other parts of the world. You know, but at the same time, you know, you hear a lot about, for example, the icebreaker gap or the need for for ice hardened vessels. Right. And maybe this is kind of where where you're heading a little bit. Now, there's it's a double edged sword. Right. On the one hand, people will hear about, you know, ah, we're heading towards, you know, an ice-free Arctic by 2050. And, you know, it's a little bit of a term of art, you know, so it's a little jargony, but ice-free doesn't mean no ice, right?

So on the one hand, you know, it's not like those spaces will be easy to operate in or safe for non-ice-hardened vessels. So there is an element of truth to that. At the same time, you know, if we're really sort of tailor focused on where do we expect the Navy in this case or the Marine Corps operating on Navy platforms to operate and why? If the answer is we are concerned, we being the United States, concerned about the need to flow forces across the North Atlantic to Europe in the event of a contingency with Russia, that water space doesn't have ice, right? There's no problem. You don't need ice-hardened vessels or icebreakers to take a Roro ship or a DDG from Norfolk or the coast of Newfoundland up through, you know, Buda, you know, in Norway. So to some extent, I think there can be a rush to sort of link Arctic to and now we need ice-hardened vessels or now we need icebreakers because of that specific logic train of the strategic rationale for operating Navy platforms in that part of the Arctic. Now, that's not true everywhere, right? I mean, if there is an expectation that the United States wants to be able to operate, for example, in large portions of the Pacific Arctic, where that is more ice-prone, where the infrastructure is sort of less robust from a port standpoint, then yeah, you're going to need some ice-hardened vessels. You're going to need, in particular, icebreakers.

But the strategic rationale looks different there, right? And to some extent, that still remains more of an aerospace challenge. It's why we see the large deployment of the new joint strike fighters to Alaska. You know, it's why we see some discussions about perhaps recapitalizing something like an early warning system for detection for, you know, for inbound air and missile threats over the Arctic cap. The last bit I'll say on that is, I think every now and again, it becomes kind of hot to argue about the icebreaker gap. People have strong feelings on either side of that. What I would say is more than zero seems like an easy answer. And kind of where we are right now as a country, right? The Coast Guard operates two basically effective icebreakers, one of which is not so effective these days. And so we have kind of one working icebreaker, and that probably doesn't seem like enough for a superpower that is a legitimate Arctic nation that also has an obligation to reprovision down at McMurdo in the Antarctic as well.

So more than zero seems like a good place to start. Do we need to pace Russia or Canada in terms of their icebreaker fleet? Seems unnecessary, considering our Arctic coastline does not look like theirs and we're not reliant on on access in quite the same way that they are. But I think, you know, let's let's solve the fundamental problem before we really get so overwhelmed about whether or not we don't have enough nuclear powered icebreakers. And so another infrastructure kind of infrastructure and almost a space infrastructure issue that has kind of come to my attention recently is communications, right? And I think a lot of our listeners may not know that communications are really difficult up in the high north and near the poles for a number of different reasons. And that, to me at least, seemed like a kind of no matter what you want to do, whether it's Coast Guard or Navy operations, you're going to want some more persistent communications up there. And I remember, you might be able to speak to this a little bit. After Trident Juncture 18, there were some reports that the forces were having issues with GPS. And I don't remember if that was, you know, Russian interference, supposedly, or that was just because the GPS constellations are much less effective at those high latitudes. Yeah, no, that's, it's a good question. It's actually, it's come up quite a bit in my conversations on this. You know, generally speaking, absolutely spot on in terms of the need for improved C4ISR, all the things that are sort of space-based for the Navy, to some extent the Marine Corps, certainly, you know, anybody who's operating at sea. There is an element of infrastructure improvement that is space-based that needs to take place. That's an element of the Department of the Air Force Arctic Strategy. Anybody who's read or takes the time to read the new Department of the Navy Arctic Strategy will see the same thing, these references to C4 or C5 ISR.

I think at some point we'll run out of seas. But, you know, satellites. Right. I mean, so that that is certainly an element of high latitude communications, as always, the challenge with anything space based becomes classified pretty quickly. But I think there's just a general agreement that and this is just basic physics. Right. I mean, most of the satellites that the U.S. relies on are mostly, you know, equatorial in orbit to some extent. Right. So you can get a fairly large beam in most parts of where the Navy typically operates, but you need a different type of inclination for a satellite in terms of to get sustained coverage at the polar regions. You need polar constellations in order to accomplish that. The GPS jamming specifically, I sort of I saw the reports about sort of alleged issues with GPS issues during Trident Juncture. Most of the articles that I was reading alleged that that was a deliberate Russian tactic. I don't have any inside knowledge on those allegations. So I think to some extent, there's a risk of conflating sort of the what may have been kind of an info warfare, cyber warfare kind of situation with the Russians testing new toys near Finnmark versus sort of these larger sort of space based infrastructure issues. But both are relevant, right? I mean, Russia playing allegedly with GPS jamming during the largest NATO exercise is dangerous, right? I mean, there were a lot of forces operating in that event. And you want to make sure that people know where they're going and know where they are, right? So that's just at a fundamental level. That shouldn't get excused.

But then there's that larger infrastructure question, which is something that I think the service branches are seized with and is a space where they can make investments, right? That is something that is within the realm of sort of DoD and the Pentagon specifically to address, to reconstitute a more robust space-based polar infrastructure that enables you to gain access to communications and GPS signals and all of that. So you wrote a piece for us at CIMSEC, how good order at sea is key to winning strategic competition. How does you know what's what's the argument you make there and how does that tie to some of the stuff that we're talking about in the Arctic? So that piece actually started, as I think often happens for analysts and academics, as a much smaller question. And I think we'll talk about a little bit more sort of my start in the maritime issues with a focus on smaller scale threats. My thought was, as the pivot to great power competition picked up steam in DOD, I started to get worried that the Navy would, for lack of a better word, throw out the baby with the bathwater. that in the Navy's haste and excitement to start talking about things that big Navy really cared

about, right, strategic competition with a peer or a near peer competitor, that the Navy would hasten to dump all of its capabilities and its lessons from the post 9-11 era without a strategic review of what it might need on the small scale, even in a period that's defined by competition with major powers. What I found is that in order to answer that question, I needed to answer a bigger question, which was, what does an era of great power competition demand with regard to lower-end threats? What is the linkage, the logic train between small-scale threats, non-state actors, but also smaller nations, and this era of great power competition? It's easy for folks to forget, you know, the summary of the national defense strategy certainly reorients

DOD to focus on China and Russia. But it doesn't, it doesn't say that we're done with Iran, North Korea, non-state threats, particularly terrorism, right? Those are, those all still get bundled in there. And if you read basically any strategy, even through now, the little guys stick around, right? The new tri-service maritime strategy does the exact same thing, right? We're focused on China, to a less extent we're focused on Russia. Also, all of these other things still exist, right? So finding ways to strategically and coherently link smaller scale threats to the type of operating style and force structure that the Navy was going to develop to focus predominantly on the big threats seemed like an important intellectual exercise to undertake. In order

to answer that, I felt like I kind of got pushed to the biggest possible question, which is what does it even mean to win great power competition right what is the theory of victory that the navy the marine corps frankly dod as a whole envisions because only by understanding the nature of the competition and what it means to win that competition can you really then sort of link and integrate those smaller pieces into that larger whole my my we'll talk i think a little bit later about this my book is basically an extended riff on the idea that you know the line, if you can win a big war, you can win a small one, is fundamentally wrong. So I believe very strongly that the idea of sort of lesser included cases, there was a wonderful War on the

Rocks piece about this a few days ago, that sort of made a great strategic argument on this front as well. That just preparing for the big fight doesn't mean you are postured either materially or critically, strategically and operationally to win the small fight. So anyway, to get back to your initial question, the thrust behind the argument in the SIMSEC piece, which is derived from a longer monograph that I wrote for CNA, is that my sense is that the victory here is continued influence over and shepherding of by the United States of the rules-based order, right? That the United States continues to be the lead nation in terms of setting priorities and leadership and structures for the international system. That leads you, if it's true, and I think

it is, and I think that if you look at documents like the new tri-service maritime strategy, they echo a lot of that same language about the rules-based order. What that means in practice is it forces us to think about what are the different ways that adversaries can undermine the rules-based order. Obviously, there are some big picture issues, right? There are certain countries, the great powers, in this case, we're concerned about rival great powers. So that narrows the focus a little bit, really, to China, potentially to Russia. They have the capacity to overthrow the system in a moment, and that's called great power war, right? Totally upends the international order. We should be worried about making sure that that doesn't happen,

right? It is devastating, not just to the international system, but also just at a human level. The argument that I make in the piece is that there are, aside from those acute risks to the international system, there are longitudinal, long-term threats to the international order. That's death by a thousand cuts. Some of that can come from great powers, right? When we talk about China's salami slicing tactics in the South China Sea, effort to slowly change the rules by changing facts on the ground over a long period of time, that is a long-term threat to some of the core rules and norms in the international system. But my argument is that there are threats that emanate from smaller scale actors, you know, Iran, North Korea, but even to some extent,

terrorists, maybe even pirates, that if they go unchecked for long enough, you can have allies and partners start to wonder what this system really does for them, right? If the international rules based order is based on the idea fundamentally of the monopoly on violence by state actors, this is the classic sort of I'm getting a little IR nerd on you. But this is a classic sort of Weber definition of, you know, Max Weber definition of what it means to be a sovereign state, you know, the sort of monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. And from an international sort of liberal international order, the free flow of goods and commerce at sea, which is something the United States inherited from Pax Britannica. This has been with the core of the Western

international order for, you know, 200 years at this point. If you have in certain regions, non-state actors that can fundamentally threaten those core tenants you have local partners and ally begin to wonder what does the system do for me and is there perhaps another actor that is capable of providing those those public services to me and in this case really that's china and to some extent russia so to loop back a little bit of a you know to kind of sum this up my argument there is we should be focused on non-state and small-scale threats that pose those long-term long-running risks to the corrosion of the international order. Because fundamentally, the states that stand to gain the most from that corrosion are great power rivals, the one who can

step in and capitalize and provide those services or explain why they can offer something that the United States cannot. I think we shouldn't take that to mean that the United States needs to be the world police, that every situation with a non-state actor is an existential risk to the system, but it provides a way of thinking about how non-state and small-scale threats can ladder up into this larger picture of strategic competition in a way that I think is strategically coherent. Wrapping up our discussion of the Arctic, I think it was just a couple of days ago you had a new piece in foreign policy for a Biden Arctic agenda, look to governance.

What do you think is the way forward for the United States? Yeah, so that piece kind of brings together a lot of the threads we've been talking about just now, which is this idea that, first, again, it comes back to the why. What's the objective here? You know, great power competition is not an objective, right? It's a means to achieve something larger, or at least it should be. And I think a lot of folks have concerns that it's kind of run away with itself as its own strategic rationale. The objective should be interest-based. What is the United States' core interest? It is in maintaining an international system that it built with its allies and partners, and that still

fundamentally serves the U.S.'s security and economic interests, and even where it doesn't do so perfectly, helps mediate disputes in a way that ultimately continues to serve sort of U.S. strategic objectives. So that kind of fell from that larger discussion we were just having, you know, thinking about that small question, what's the role of maritime security and great power competition, sort of leads you to this much bigger question of sort of what does it mean to want to preserve the rules-based order? I think the same is true in the Arctic, right? The Competition is a useful framework in some standpoints, but the main goal in the Arctic should be to preserve the governance structures that keep the region largely peaceful, largely safe, serve generally to moderate disputes in the region, and works to the United States' advantage. That it also works to Russia's advantage, because Russia is a major Arctic nation and a founding stakeholder in organizations like the Arctic Council. That should be fine with us, right? The goal here is not, you don't wipe Russia off the face of the earth, right? And this is one of the ways in which a great power competition strategy has to look different than something like a counterterror strategy, right?

You can't countenance the existence of ISIS, but you're going to have to countenance the existence of Russia, right? So to the extent that you've got countries that are playing by the rules and where we can find ways to hitch those rules to both of our interests simultaneously, that's a positive, right? We should look at that as kind of a mission accomplished. So the argument in that piece really relates to the conversation we've just been having, which is governance is the objective here, because governance reinforces the rules and the frameworks and the institutions that fundamentally, over the long term, work to the United States' interests and the interests of our allies and partners. And we want that. And the Arctic is actually fairly well postured in its existing institutions and rules to do that well for us. And I think that there's a rush, as with many issues in sort of the pivot to great power competition, sort of out with the old and with the new competitions, the new, you know, the new reason for being for DOD. I think that can be quite destructive and ultimately be detrimental to U.S. national security if it's done somewhat recklessly in the Arctic. Now that we've covered most of the Arctic, I do want to shift and talk a little bit more about your book, specifically your sections on the Caribbean. We'll shift for our listeners to a little bit more of a warmer and sunnier discussion points. I think you mentioned that it's kind of where you got your start in terms of naval analyses and looking at these smaller scale threats. So can you tell us a little bit more about what you're talking about in your book and the kind of arguments that you make there? And I should say, again, the title of the book is The War for Muddy Waters, Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Insecurity.

Yeah. So, you know, this is another place where the question really kind of started with an observation, which is there is a fundamental tension in the maritime space when you're looking at small scale threats, which is the organizations that have the greatest capacity for action at a state level in the maritime arena are typically navies, sometimes Coast Guards. But generally, when you look around the world, the institutions that have the greatest capacity for action in the maritime arena are navies. And that's because it is challenging and expensive to operate at sea. And so it's really only sort of the highest end institutions in medium and smaller countries that are resourced effectively to operate in those spaces. At the same time, when we're talking about issues of maritime security, most of those issues really look a lot more like criminal issues than they do military issues, right? When we're talking about drug trafficking, frankly, if we're talking about piracy, we're talking about smuggling in people or weapons or bulk cash or marine resources, whatever you want to insert in there. If you had to pick a sort of land-based corollary for those threats, they'd all be criminal, right? This is all some form of banditry and highway robbery and organized crime.

So the tension that you run into is that the institutions that are materially resourced to address maritime insecurity issues are military ones. They are trained with a military mindset. They are equipped with military equipment. They are legally provided with military justifications and military authorities, and they then take all of that training and those authorities and those capabilities, and they are applying them to a threat that fundamentally does not behave like a military threat. And so my question became, okay, well, it's unlikely that you're really going to solve that resourcing issue, right? I mean, it would be great if sort of a thousand constabularies bloomed, but, you know, I live in the world that we all live in, and, you know, it's hard enough to get the U.S. Congress to fund more for our own Coast Guard, which is, you know, far and away the most capable in the world, you know, let alone should we expect that to be the case in, you know, Nigeria, for example. So my argument in the book is to say, well, then really the solution to solve here is a strategic perspective issue on the part of the maritime forces that are responsible for addressing insecurity at sea. And can we provide them with a strategic and an operational mindset for more effectively addressing these issues with rules that they already have? And my thought was, well, there's a whole body of literature that talks about how to resolve criminal issues.

It's called criminology. And I should say up front, my Ph.D. is in international relations. So I'm looking at this from a security and a sort of a political science standpoint. So I'm not a criminologist. But the idea was to sort of dip into the criminological literature and to see what would happen if we exported one of the more popular theories of criminology and built a scaffolding for that to be applied in the maritime arena. The one I chose was Broken Windows Theory, which was at the time a very popular sort of progenitor of larger concepts of community policing, which are also kind of woven through the book. I think the initiating sort of intellectual idea is interesting enough that I would even be fascinated to see if other folks could do the same thing with other forms of policing theories. Hotspot policing is one that comes to mind. There are any number of really interesting concepts that come up about criminological ideas and how they could be applied in the maritime space. For my book, I really focused on what I thought were the two core tenets that came out of a reading of Broken Windows and of community policing at large, which is the idea that one, crime has a tendency to be context dependent.

right the idea that people are influenced by the subtleties of their environment and to think of people purely as rational actors who can be persuaded to either commit or not commit crimes based on you know your beautiful orory it's fundamentally flawed and the argument that i've often used to describe this is you know if you and i were in a we're in a boardroom together um and you know we both brought in our our coffee cups um you know and the boardroom was spotless and we finished our coffee while we were having our meeting, odds are we would both toss our coffee cups in the trash can on the way out. Not because we thought deeply about it, but because we were internalizing the fact that somebody cares about this space and takes this space seriously. And as

a consequence, I should take this space seriously. And that guides behavior. If we had that same meeting, but the conference table was strewn with empty coffee cups, there's a higher likelihood, obviously not 100%, but a higher likelihood that one or both of us would leave our empty coffee cup there with the rest of them, because we would be internalizing the signal that nobody cares about this space and that our behavior would sort of be shaped accordingly, right? What that means from an operational standpoint is that the target of your enforcement shouldn't necessarily be the person leaving the coffee cup. It should be the environment that is strewn with coffee cups, right? It should be paying attention to the signals that indicate to people in those

spaces that somebody does or does not care about the environment. And that enforcement is a thing that the local community takes seriously. So that's that context component. The second half of the scaffolding that I really build on is this idea of multidimensionality. And I think this is critical in the maritime arena. In the law enforcement context, what it comes down to is, you know, if you focus on some smaller scale types of criminal issues, oftentimes that has linkages with much higher forms of violence. And this by no means is perfect and has a tendency in an enforcement sense to run away with itself. So we've had real problems in the U.S. in terms of policing environment with police really kind of running away with these ideas to the point

where they're no longer policing with their communities, they're policing against their communities. It could be quite detrimental. At its purest distillation, it would mean that somebody who was picked up for fair beating on a New York City subway may also actually have an outstanding warrant, let's say one time in 10, right? And so you've got sort of a forced multiplier by paying attention to a small scale issue like fare beating, you are also sort of slowly working your way through folks that have more substantive impacts in the criminal environment. And as a result of doing so, you may bring down risk of homicide or burglary. The maritime argument, I find actually is even more compelling, which is looking at the maritime arena as the medium

upon which crime takes place without being overly concerned about, oh, right now I'm just doing the counter-narcotics patrol, right? I mean, let's think about the Caribbean as a good test case for this, right? The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Stone was recently deployed down on its maiden voyage to the Atlantic coast of Latin America to do fisheries enforcement because, you know, in the heady days of great power competition, now we really care a lot about illegal fishing, which I things are good, right? On its way down to conduct fisheries enforcement off the coast of Latin America, it just so happened to secure a drug bust off the Dominican Republic, right? Because the maritime arena is a substrata upon which actors act to move all sorts of things. And the

U.S., along with its partners and allies, has had a tendency to be very focused on, now we're doing counter-narcotics. Now we're doing counter-piracy. Now we're doing counter-terrorism. Now we're doing countering human trafficking. Now we're doing IUU enforcement. The reality is, you know, if you're a criminal actor with a skiff, you might be a narcotics trafficker on Monday and a human trafficker on Tuesday. You know, you might be a pillar of your community on Wednesday. And then on Thursday, you might be out there fishing illegally, right? You know, or frankly, maybe fishing legally on, you know, on Thursday, right? Because there's this blend of sort of the licit and the illicit. So part of my argument in the book, in addition to sort of helping to clean up

the context in which actors act in a littoral environment, in the maritime space and in coastal arenas, there's also an element that we shouldn't get overly hung up on, oh, the United States is really keen on, let's say, you know, counterterrorism operations at sea in, you know, in the Straits of Malacca in Singapore, you know, if it turns out that your allies and partners in the region aren't superseded by the idea of counterterrorism, but they're really energized by the idea of countering illegal fishing, or they're really energized by the idea of countering human trafficking, if it means that you're getting buy-in and that you are filling a local need and you are helping making coastal communities safer, odds are, because of this rule of

multidimensionality, you're also going to have a fairly large impact on the security issue that you cared about the most. And so it makes sense to lean into what your allies and partners, and frankly, what the local communities are most concerned about, because you're going to have this sort of force-multiplied impact as a result of that enforcement. So those are the twin pillars, really, of the book, looking at what does it mean to tackle context in the maritime space, And then what does it really mean to operationalize the idea that these crimes have a tendency to be multidimensional in a maritime arena? I think that's a really important observation about the multidimensionality of crime and illicit activity in the maritime space. I mean, certainly down here in the Caribbean and in South Com, you know, we've been paying increasing attention to IUU fishing and both Coast Guard Colonel Schultz and Admiral Fowler, our commander down here at South Com,

has said that when they travel the region, that's persistently one of the most important issues because it touches on several different things, right? And it's often related to the counter-narcotics mission. But as you mentioned, Josh, sometimes, you know, allies and partners are not as interested in the things that you're interested in. And so I think we have to kind of adjust approach there. I do want to ask a little bit, because we kind of talked approach and mindset about platforms specifically. And sometimes it seems a little reductionist when you want to talk about things that are more subtle, but something that definitely I've been watching, and I think some of our listeners have been watching, is how the Navy and the Marine Corps

and the Coast Guard are approaching kind of platforming for great power competition and kind of fleet structure. How does a fleet right size or how do you build a fleet architecture to be competent in the kind of smaller scale, smaller scale maritime insecurity issues that we're talking about? And what do you think that that looks like? Yeah, so that I think that's a critical question. You know, my attitude on sort of this question, sort of the high low mix is, I think we're not messaging effectively what the real risks here are. You know, I had a professor at my PhD program who used to say that state reactions to non-state violence change history much more than the acts of non-state violence themselves. And I've kind of adapted that to

a little bit of a bigger proposition, which is the U.S.'s reaction to smaller scale threats has a tendency to change history much more than the small scale threats themselves. So what does that mean in practice? Well, I think Iran is a perfect test case, right? For four years at this point, everybody has, I think, been on the same page that there is a need to focus a greater amount of attention and resources and platforms to operate in the Indo-Pacific because the sort of the China challenge is much more robust and much more strategically evident than the Iran challenge. I think because of sort of a long-term sort of historical grievances, you know, the United States and Iran will probably likely continue to sort of tangle with one another in a local context. What ends up happening, though, is something flares up, throws up the balloon that it needs a, you know, 1.0 carrier presence again.

And you end up with the most capable platforms that the United States can deploy afloat sitting in the Persian Gulf or in the Arabian Sea doing deterrence missions, and I'm putting that in air quotes because I know that podcasting is easy for people to watch, and it's just ineffective, right? And so that, to me, links back to that statement of our reaction to the small-scale threat is much more profound and much more debilitating to our own readiness and our operational capacity and our overall strategic approach to sort of the global issue than the nature of the threat that we're attempting to deter. I think that's true across non-state issues, right, and small-scale issues, including in Latin America and the Caribbean. As I've argued, you

know, the NDS, the new tri-service maritime strategy, all of these are fairly transparent that these smaller-scale issues don't just disappear because the U.S. is more interested in focusing on China and Russia. And I think that's sensible, right? I mean, ultimately, the Navy, as much as it wants to operate in the Indo-Pacific and prepare for and hopefully deter a conflict with China,

you know, it doesn't get to make that decision independently. Policymakers, you know, get the final call about where they're sending platforms. To your question about a high-low mix, to me, it would seem like building a more robust, low-end set of platforms

that are capable of providing that deterrence capacity or in some cases that law enforcement and that prosecution capacity without tying down the larger more capable uh capable assets in the fleet seems advisable right it not just because you are focusing on small scale threats effectively which i happen to think is is important just generally speaking but also because if the only thing you're interested in is preparing for great power competition you want a more robust set of options at the lower end of your asset and your platform class, because you want to stop deploying DDGs and cruisers and big deck amphibs and aircraft carriers and shoot.

Sometimes we're even shooting guided missiles from submarines to do strikes in Syria or Iraq, right? That just doesn't seem like a sensible use of those platforms. And I think we have definitively seen that policymakers have a hard time going on a demand diet, right, as do the COCOMs. And unless you can find a way to solve that problem, the best solution is to feed that demand with assets and platforms that don't erode your higher end warfighting capacity. So I feel pretty passionately that the answer here is to start talking about the need for small-scale platforms and capabilities, not because they're going to win the day in a conflict with China. You know, I mean, the LCS is not your go-to platform for that. But because a platform like it provides you with the capacity to respond to smaller scale issues, almost like a fleet station or a squadron type deployment that you had in sort of the 19th century, you know, a small collection of local assets that really stayed in a given territory for an extended period of time. They weren't the most robust gunboats in history, but they were enough to do the job that they were there for. And they didn't tie down the larger fleet from its capacity to exercise or, you know, operate against more strategic missions or more strategic actors.

So I think the high-low mix is a really critical question, even if you're not interested in the small-scale threats, because it's really about how are you going to free up the force to do the things you wanted to do without convincing policymakers to go on the demand diet that I don't think they're ever going to go on. No, that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, I'm kind of reminded that maybe another way to look at what seems like an increasing demand for the Coast Guard to participate in some of these great power competition exercises, you know, straight freedom of navigation exercises through the Strait of Taiwan and et cetera, is that the Navy doesn't have vessels that are really well matched for that itself. So it's having to pull some of these Coast Guard assets and, you know, maybe it should be focused a little bit more on kind of developing those assets of its own accord. And then, you know, in my own community, in the Marine Corps, we, you know, we kind of talk about this incessantly, this like, well, you need to be ready for a China scenario or an Iran scenario. But at the same time, you look back at the history of the Marine Corps, and it has had much more involvement in kind of small scale counterinsurgency type campaigns than in really big, large scale combat operations. So it's, you know, you kind of have to be able to do both. But I think if I'm understanding it correctly, what your argument that by doing the little stuff well, makes it easier to do the big stuff, to me is more compelling than the kind of old tired argument of, well, if you can do a big one, you can do a little one, because I think the last 20 years, the story of the US military has been that's, that's not necessarily the case. Yeah, no, I completely agree. My whole pitch has been, you know, the last five or six years, you know, you just think strategically about the small scale stuff so that you don't overreact, so that you don't apply, you know, sort of an overmatch strategy that drains resources and makes it harder for the United States to stay prepared for the types of things that the sea services in particular should be paying attention to, which is that capacity to deter aggression on the part of a major power competitor.

So really is there's a there's a linkage that I don't think gets talked about enough that goes right from the little stuff straight up to your capacity to prosecute a major power conflict. And it's about making sure you've thought strategically ahead of time to avoid these sort of classic knee jerk reactions and an overinvestment of resources when something does happen. Totally agree, Josh. And kind of before we close out here, I do want to give you an opportunity to kind of provide us with some closing comments. Yeah, I mean, I guess the, you know, the only thing I sort of I want to wrap up with are kind of to some extent where we started, which is, you know, I think there's a and our conversation to some extent mirrors this. There's an obligation on the part of folks who work in maritime services in particular to ask the questions about platforms, right? Because it is uniquely challenging to design, to build and to deploy those platforms. And that has particular resonance in the Arctic, right? I mean, one of the reasons, and I make this argument in the War on the Rocks article, one of the reasons I think it's partially okay that the services are generating strategies for the Arctic in a way that they are not for other regions is because it's an austere environment and it requires a unique approach to certain types of design issues, whether that's the C4 that you need to get from polar inclined satellites or whether that's potentially in the future icebreakers and ice-hardened vessels.

You know, there are a lot of platform-oriented questions. What I get worried about and where I think there needs to be sort of an inclination to ask the bigger question first is whenever there's a question about what does the Navy need to buy, what does the Marine Corps need to buy, what does the Coast Guard need to buy, it should always start with why and where, right? It should always be a question of what missions are really strategic in nature, right? And that, to some extent, really needs to guide this question of what do you purchase? And I think that can lead to some counterintuitive answers, you know, like the conversation we were just having on there's value in small-scale platforms in an era of great power competition because it is strategically useful to address small-scale issues with small-scale assets, right? So there's, you know, sometimes it can lead you to answers you wouldn't necessarily anticipate, but the why is fundamental instead of jumping to the how. And then in some regions, the where is also an equally critical question. And this really comes up, I think, in the Arctic context. It's not a novel insight, but it's certainly one that I think gets left out of the conversation a lot. there's an instinct to talk about the Arctic as kind of one unit, but it is different both in

terms of its strategic interest for the United States across the Arctic regions. It's also just from a weather and an operational standpoint different. Some parts of the Arctic are colder or more subject to bad weather or more subject to icing over, right? And so if there's a sort of a broad interest in the Arctic, that question not just of why but also where is really critical when we then take that conversation into the the ways and means component where we start talking about what platforms do we need to start thinking about building um and so you know i i just i i always put that out there when we're having these these questions that in the in the c service space the palm mill always blends into the operational component there's no hard line there but it is

important to go really kind of high into the right to some extent you know start with that the biggest question you could possibly ask and then try and draw that logic train out from that And I think, you know, it can lead to some really interesting and perhaps unexpected answers all the way down to that force structure level and to the operational employment level. Well, I'd like to thank my guest again, Dr. Joshua Tallis, who's an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and author of the book, The War for Muddy Waters, Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers and Maritime Insecurity. And before we close out, just give you, Josh, a second to let our listeners know where they can they can track you down a line and tease us if you've got anything else that's just about to come out of the pipe. Sure. Yeah. So I'm pretty active on Twitter at Doc Tallis. And in terms of next stuff coming down the pike, actually something that I'm working with you. Hopefully we'll see it on King's College Strife blog in a couple of weeks.

And it's about these sort of hard choices that the sea services, in this case the Coast Guard, might need to make in terms of matching what does it mean to be strategically invested in great power competition and how is that going to line up with its obligations and commitments to do some of these smaller end missions. And in this case, we're looking specifically at the Coast Guard. So another case where I think maybe the argument's a little bit counterintuitive, but it starts with that big strategy question, and then you sort of see where the chips fall as a result of that. Yes, and that's the Strife blog for King's College London is going to have a series coming out on Caribbean maritime security sometime in March. Thanks again for coming on. Again, the opinions presented in this podcast are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we are associated with. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week.

Put it on the shimbo now. Oh, help me, oh, I'm bullied in the alley. Why am I bullied in the alley? Help me, oh, I'm bullied in the alley. Put it out of the chamber now.