Sea Control - Sea Control 282 - Maritime Capacity Building & Southeast Asia Lessons with John Bradford

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Links1. "Maritime Governance Capacity Building: A U.S.-Japan Alliance Agenda for Rule of Law in the Indo-Pacific," by John Bradford, Pacific Forum, Issues and Issues & Insights Vol. 21, SR 2, pp. 38-43.2.  "10 Things Every Sailor and Marine Should Know Before Deploying to Southeast Asia," by John Bradford and Blake Herzinger, USNI Blog, August 2, 2021.3. "What is China's Strategy in the Senkaku Islands?" by Dr. Alessio Patalano, War on the Rocks, September 10, 2020.4. Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by John Bradford. He'll be discussing two pieces, the first on maritime government's capacity building and the second on lessons for anyone deploying to Southeast Asia. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We just launched the call for submissions for the SimSec Forum for authors and readers over at the main website. If there is a particular piece that you enjoyed this year, nominate it, and if it gets enough votes, you can hear the author present his or her work. We've also officially put out our call for articles for the end-of-year fiction contest, So go over to SimSec.org for full details.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Bumps. 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. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello Hashimates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're joined by John Bradford making his first solo appearance with us here. We're going to discuss two of his recent pieces, Maritime Governance Capacity Building, a U.S.-Japan Alliance Agenda for Rule of Law in the Indo-Pacific, which appeared in Pacific Forum, and a collaboration with our friend Blake Herzinger for the USNI blog,

10 Things Every Sailor Marine Should Know Before Deploying to Southeast Asia. So, John, welcome back. Would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners again? Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on board. So I spent 23 years as a surface warfare officer, almost all of that in Japan or in the Pentagon focused on Asia. I retired last year and I went straight into, I spent the summer as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow in Japan. And then I came down here to Singapore. I'm a senior fellow in the Maritime Security Program at the S. Roger Ratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University. Thanks. And as a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we

might be otherwise associated. So John, first question to you then, we read plenty about great power competition, but you started your article on the maritime governance capacity building by pointing out that a lot of the smaller Pacific states have much more mundane concerns than a force and force engagement in the South China Sea. So what are the primary challenges to rule of law for these states? Yeah, I would start by challenging your use of the word mundane. The day-to-day maritime security issues and challenges which Southeast Asian states, from where they sit and from what challenges they face, are in no way mundane. You know, IU fishing costs Southeast Asia, we don't know how much, but it's certainly in the tens of

billions of dollars each year. That IU fishing is not only something that costs money immediately, it's also something they have to deal with in terms of international pressures, which costs a lot of money and costs a lot of resources. It's also a matter that the fishing itself is depleting the fish stocks. We don't know when the fish stocks are going to collapse in the South China Sea, but we know it's going to happen. And when it does, this is going to be a huge economic problem for the region. Not only is fishing just a major industry, it's both an industry which drives local protein consumption

and major export, but beyond that, now you have mass unemployment, you have people with boats that have skills at sea, but they have unemployment. This creates the same pressures that you might see elsewhere. such as the ghost ships off North Korea or even the piracy situation in the Gulf of Aden, I'm not suggesting that those are the particular outcomes you'll see, but you will see real outcomes which are going to impact communities.

So I could go on, but the point is that between IU fishing and piracy and terrorism, the Abu Sayyaf group is still active, even though it's been kind of on its heels for the last year. It was only a year and a half ago the last time it conducted an amphibious raid ashore. And so all of these things add up to an immediate cost to the health and well-being of coastal communities, of mariners in those waters, a drain on national resources, a distraction from other issues. And so great power competition is also a concern, and the possibility of war at sea is also a concern, but it's more of a concern about something that could happen, whereas these other things are things which are happening, and they are a huge impact to the regional economy and the safety of regional maritime peoples. So why are Japan and the U.S. best positioned to help Southeast Asian states address these concerns?

You know, well, the simplest answer is they're the world's second and third largest economies, and they're both trading economies, and they both have robust maritime sectors. I don't know if I can scratch a little bit deeper. Pretty much all the polling data that we have suggests that Japan is the most trusted extra-regional power in Southeast Asia. And in the maritime space specifically, they've been working very closely with their Southeast Asia partners for decades. They've made major investments in maritime infrastructure. They remain the biggest investor in maritime infrastructure in Southeast Asia. They're a primary proponent of safety of navigation. For many years, all of the buoyage and lighthouses, et cetera, in the Strait of Malacca were funded by or maintained by Japan.

As late as the 1980s, even very rich Singapore was getting dredging support in the Strait from Japan. Since the 1990s, the Japan Coast Guard has been very much involved, and it's the leading provider of maritime law enforcement capacity development in Southeast Asia, et cetera. I think it's also important to realize that Southeast Asians see Japan as a viable third option, which is neither the United States nor China. And just by virtue of not being the United States or China, it becomes a place that they can go and partner to without getting drawn into the security dilemmas and the other traps which are associated with the great power competition. um but more so it's also important to note that you know japan makes a point to uh keep that uh you know to establish itself and establish a political posture for its assistance that it um you know enhances that ability for them to be a sort of third third party independent third party uh and now i think the united states most of the listeners to see control have a much better

understanding of what the united states does in southeast asia i mean it is the world's biggest economy. I would have to say that in terms of, you know, naval capacity, the United States is the partner of choice for almost every Southeast Asian nation. You know, there's a lot of concern about Thailand buying Chinese gear and developing larger exercises with the United States. You know, but all of that sums up to something that's a fraction of what it does in Cobra Gold. And that's true of pretty much every other state. That's true of the Philippines. It's true of Malaysia. It's true of Indonesia. It's true of Singapore. You know, these states want to work with both China and the United States because there's something to gain from both. But when it comes

to military to military cooperation, the United States is the partner of choice. You know, and I just would also echo that, you know, or add the United States, other maritime capacity assistance and partnership with Southeast Asia doesn't add up to the same sum as what Japan offers, but it's also quite significant. And if you start looking, almost every agency and cabinet office has some sort of maritime capacity development program in Southeast Asia, whether that be agriculture, commerce, et cetera, USAID, Coast Guard, Navy. We're just kind of everywhere.

Yeah, that was one of the real lessons from my time working in the Pentagon with the interagency was just how every agency had its own little niche maritime, I don't know, branch is probably too strong of a word, but every agency had some sort of weird, unique maritime capacity that does not get a lot of attention. I'm going to jump ahead in our question roster here just a little bit, because you already kind of touched on this topic. But how would you compare the Japanese and American approaches to capacity building? It sounds like Japan is much more soft power infrastructure focused versus the U.S., which is heavily defense focused, even though you mentioned these niche capabilities. Yeah, I would agree with that. The United States is more defense oriented. Now, I think that's, you know, there's interesting juxtaposition. The United States is more defense oriented, but it's also those are also it's also DOD, which gets all of the sort of news in the play. And in fact, the U.S.'s military capacity development, military capacity building projects and the U.S.'s naval exercises, et cetera, sometimes overshadow or eclipse all the other things the United States is doing.

But that said, it is, you know, it is rather militant and muscular. It's sort of more aggressive. It's less consistent in that we, you know, we don't keep good records in the United States. We don't have great turnovers. We have lots of people that show up in office and have a new good idea. You know, and there's a lot of finger pointing towards senior officers that do that. But action officers do it well. The aggressive action officer often has the best new idea and swaps things out.

So louder, more muscular, less consistent than Japan. Now, I don't want to make it sound like that's all a bad thing. I mean, there's some goodness in that. And I think in many ways, that's why the United States and Japan can complement each other so much. Japan's not necessarily been there longer, but it's also been there for decades. And it's seen as a steady, consistent, quiet partner that doesn't bring as many sort of political strings to its assistance towards projects. I'd like to ask a follow up on the consistency question. Is the consistency struggle, if you will, driven by DOD being in the lead on a lot of the U.S. projects just because of that? the nature of DOD is that people change out very frequently, oftentimes after just a year or two

years, versus I'm not sure what the structure of the Japanese arrangement is, but I would imagine that if you're talking about civilian projects, a lot of the people associated with those projects may be there for a longer period of time, which may help address some of the consistency piece from their side. But that's, I guess, I'll ask you that question. Yeah, I suspect you're right. um the preponderance of leadership that comes from dod on the u.s system and whether that's by design or just because they happen to be the loudest or the most well-funded in the room um does does decrease the consistency um but i also think there's a cultural element um you know the united states uh well just i mean my experience in foreign policy is that

Americans find a problem and they want to solve the problem right away. There's not a lot of patience. And sometimes that's very good and useful. In the U.S.-Japan alliance, managers will often criticize the Japanese for being very incremental and very slow. And that's true, and it definitely has its downsides. But it also means that they're relatively consistent. It also means they have much better records. And when they do swap out people, The new guy is more likely to have spent time studying the history of the process and continue on a new course rather than jump in the seat and say, okay, I'm here now, time for me to fix this, which tends to be what the United States action officers and leaders do. So what difficulties would the U.S. and Japan face in pursuing a cooperative strategy in this area? Yeah, so I think that the United States and Japan absolutely should cooperate more.

I think that there's both just simple efficiencies of combining forces. And I think that, as I've described, differences in style and approach mean that they can complement each other. In fact, the article that we're kind of talking about here is specifically titled an alliance agenda calling for U.S.-Japan maritime security cooperative or maritime security capacity building in Southeast Asia to be an alliance agenda. You know, but the thing is, that's easier said than done. um you know when i was working in the office of secretary of defense as country director for japan um in you know about nearly 10 years ago now uh this was one of the pushes this is one of my pet projects when i was that guy who showed up and wanted to fix everything and and i thought we made some progress and you know certainly thereafter when i was uh back in japan for my

experience uh president uh obama and his prime minister counterpart uh signed a signed off on a statement where they stated that the U.S. and Japan would cooperate in precisely this way. And you continue to see this sort of top-down push, not necessarily at the presidential level after that, but at two plus two and cabinet level statements until 2019. And since 2019, it's disappeared. Disappeared for the remainder of the Trump administration. It has not reappeared in the Biden administration. Now, I'm not a believer that good policy has to come all the from the top. But what I will say that when it disappears, that creates a lot more room for people to set their own agendas. To some extent, you know, the good policy from before remains

good policy. Nobody told people to stop, so they continue on. You know, but when people are looking to see what is, what's my boss's priority, it gives them more flexibility. So I think that's kind of one of the first problems that we're facing right now is a lack of a real top-down push. And that helps break down interagency barriers and also maintain motivation. And I would say that's those interagency barriers that are the second problem. Neither the United States nor Japan has a good sense for all that it's doing in terms of maritime capacity building in Southeast Asia. And we've already talked about how the United States, almost every agency has some project. Some are very big and some are very small. There's no unifying strategy. There's

no unifying office. There's no single point of contact that knows. The closest thing you have is that in theory, each embassy should know everything that's going on in their country. But from experience, I'll tell you, they don't always. And even if they do, since there's no common clearinghouse in the embassy, it often means someone at the embassy knows, but that doesn't mean a single office or a single person. Many things fall. Even the ambassador may not know or the chief of mission may not know because it falls beneath their threshold of what they need to know to run the relationship. In Japan, it's the same way. Japan's not as big and it's not as diverse in its approaches, but their stovepiping issues, although getting much better, they're

nefarious and they're probably even worse than those on the United States side. So I think the biggest, you know, the kind of one of the first steps is that if you want to work together as both countries need to do a stock taking of what they're doing on their own and then they can come together. But honestly, I think we've tried that a few times and it, you know, we get, we get an 80% stock taking and then it kind of gets forgotten as we get distracted with something else and we have to start over again. So, you know, my paper, what I suggest is that there should be a process, a recurring set of meetings. And I don't want to have meetings for meetings sake, but meetings collect, meetings mean that there have to be deliverables. It means that on a periodic process,

somebody has to dust everything off and make sure that things are up to date. So I think that would help a lot. And then I think the final point I'd make is, you know, when you get down to the operational level. I mean, this idea that, you know, this, this, this theoretical idea that there's complimentary capacities and that there's synergies to be found, you know, it's very true. But when you get down to the deck plates level, they don't always make as much sense as they did at the upper levels. So you've really got to work with the partners to see what really, really makes sense. You know, some examples of some things that we've done that's very good is some Japanese craft where surface vessels were sent to the Philippines.

They were sent unarmed and we were able to source the weapons for those. I mean, that makes sense, but it doesn't necessarily make sense for every, you know, every surface craft that comes from, that comes from the United States. And it doesn't necessarily make sense for every different initiative. And so that's why I guess the last thing I'd say is that the real coordination needs to take place in the capitals. There needs to be a push from Tokyo, and there needs to be a push from Washington, and those need to hold people accountable. But the real coordination needs to take place in Manila, in Kuala Lumpur, in Jakarta, where both the Japanese officials and the American officials can see each other face-to-face.

They can see their host nation officials face-to-face. They can work through problems and they can get down to the nitty gritty detail about, you know, things like what voltage is that system going to be that's going to get latched onto an aircraft? Or what day is the upcoming training event going to be that we can maybe bring some extra trainers to or a complementary capability? So it's actually a pretty significant effort to get it right. And we've been kind of working on it for a while. And there's some deliverables that we've achieved, but not nearly what we should or could be doing. Now, I'm going to ask you the last question on your first piece, and then we'll transition to the 10 things every sailor marine should know. You mentioned some of what China is doing in the gray zone in the Senkaku Islands.

So what are some examples of that Chinese gray zone strategy there? And what are the Japanese doing in response? um you know well in this case i'm talking about gray zone as a concept where the chinese are taking persistent actions uh which are neither purely peacetime nor contingency situations and that's drawn from the japan's uh 2020 white paper and and what china is doing is it's using i think this is pretty well known i mean it's using its coast guard forces And it's using fishing boats and it's using some of those fishing boats, our maritime militia, to intermittently enter the territorial seas and to hinder Japan Coast Guard activities. That keeps the Japan Coast Guard busy. It keeps the Japan Coast Guard distracted.

And it slowly erodes Japan's administrative control. And their goal is to slowly continue to amp up those activities until they can contest the argument that Japan has administrative control. That causes all kinds of issues within the Japanese legal system. It also potentially creates questions about the applicability of the U.S.-Japan alliance to the Senkakus. I think it's a very slow game. And of the concerns I have, I'm least concerned about somehow breaking the alliance over this. But the erosion is real. And I would just rather than me going on about it, I'd like to point out two other sort of authors and articles that I'd recommend you read.

Alessio Patilano from King's College London last year did a really good War on the Rocks article about the Chinese strategy. And then in the Issues and Insights volume that I edited, where my chapter that we're talking about today is Chapter 7, Shushan Liu wrote a great chapter about the Senkakus. And she talks about why these gray zone activities could really be troublesome and spends a lot of time really digging into both the sub-state and non-state actors and how they can escalate the situation and drag the states into unintended places. And so I really highly recommend those, especially Dr. Lowe's paper. i'm gonna go track those down and it may need to correspond with you afterwards but we'll ensure both those links are included in the show notes and i may reach out to you to talk to dr lot as well um that sounds like a great great episode um so your second piece was co-written with blake herzinger but it had its genesis in a conversation that you had as part of i believe

as part of your command pipeline almost 10 years ago so can you tell us where that where that list had its genesis um yeah in fact that's exactly right so it was in command pipeline one of the final stages it was uh surf four pack tycom in doc week and uh in my group uh was uh fred kacher rear admiral fred kacher he was headed out to be desert on seven in singapore uh and one of those is noteworthy as he was the first to admit that uh well he'd done a lot of work and he had a very impressive resume he didn't have a lot of asia experience uh and so when he was just talking And he knew that I'd gone to graduate school in Indonesia, graduate school in Singapore, been a midshipman in the Malaysian Navy or an exchange program, done a lot of years with the FDNF in Japan. He just kind of asked me, like over lunch, I think it was, what do I need to know?

And I, that afternoon, thought the easiest thing to do was just jot down 10 things for him to know. And by the end of the week, we went over it. I can't remember if it was over Subway sandwiches or during a coffee break. um and you know he's also quite prolific in his writing as as you and many of your listeners will know uh and he said well john this is really useful to me it's also a great article you should publish it and uh it's been in manuscript form slowly evolving for for about a decade um i wanted to get it just right uh you know to be succinct on an article like that i think you you really need to, you know, get every word right. One of those matters where it's much harder to write short

than long. It still ended up longer than I thought. But working with Blake, you know, the SimSec president of the Singapore chapter really helped me close the loop on that. He's been down here in Singapore for quite some time. So he was able to up the content. Also made me, maybe to some extent, feel more confident about what I was saying. But he also just got a great way with words. So he was able to make the language a little more interesting, a little more approachable. And so I'm really pleased that that came out. You mentioned it was on the U.S. Naval Institute blog, but it got a lot of play there. And former Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly read it, and he's on the board at Pacific Forum.

And he kind of went to Pacific Forum and told the staff there, See if you can work out with republication rights from U.S. Naval Institute Press. So it came out as a PACNET, a shorter version, a thousand word version, came out as a PACNET this week. So it continues to get play. So I'm pretty pleased with it. We don't have time to cover all 10 points individually, but I do want to walk through a few of these with those that are less intuitive, I think, to a lot of our audience. And I'd like you to start with Southeast Asia is neither with us nor against us. Yeah, thanks. I mean, the reason that one is there and it's towards the top of the list is, you know, on the Seventh Fleet staff and other staffs I've worked on, it's one of the first questions that I would get from people. Why aren't they on our side or why do they hate us so much? Or, well, they're on our side, right? And I mean, the fact is that they're not on anybody's side. They're on their own side.

They, you know, Southeast Asians are out for themselves. Of course, they should be. And they recognize that if they heave too close to China or the United States, they isolate themselves from the other. And that's a problem because they benefit from both the United States and China. And also because they don't really trust either one of us enough to jump into our camp and to think that we're not going to abandon them later. Or the opposite of abandoning, they're also worried about invasions of their sovereignty, which makes sense because both, you know, over the decades, both the United States and China do have a record of interfering with their local sovereignty. So absolutely, they should be concerned about that. So they're trying to maintain good relations with both. That's not to say that there's not tilt by some of the states towards one or the other. And it's not to say that they couldn't be forced one day to make a decision. But as long as they have the option, they're going to continue to maintain relations with both.

And they're going to continue to get what they can out of both of us. So next, I'd ask you to explain it. This is the reason I asked the question about the Senkakus earlier. Southeast Asian sailors have planned to teach you about gray zone operations. Yeah, absolutely. You know, put yourself in the shoes of those sailors and think about what they're doing every day. They are dealing with terrorists. They're dealing with pirates. But they're also dealing with gray zone operations from both China and sometimes their neighbors. right you can look on youtube and you can find videos of clashes at sea uh where these ships

are ramming each other kicking each other throwing things at each other um and if i can talk about china specifically you know when there's a uh incident uh that draws our attention you know the west kapala incident or the scarborough show incident uh the united states may or may not show up. When it does, it makes news. When it does, there's an influence and an impact. But eventually, we go away. Now, there's a problem with the narrative that suggests the United States is not persistently present in the South China Sea. That's not the case. We've been there for decades. And in recent years, we've had the capacity and the where and overall to ensure that that presence is almost never gapped. But we're still a few ships and

the borders are not our own. And these sailors are dealing with the gray zone tactics every deployment, every day. They're up front doing their patrols. And I think it's important to recognize that many of these sailors, they don't have the same classroom skills that we do. They They don't have the same technology, you know, but they're out there and they're navigating and they're figuring out how to how to do these real operations. So they deserve a lot of respect for that. And then final question for you, because I've advanced at least one of these ideas myself as a JPME student years ago. Could you please expand on Southeast Asia does not want an Asian NATO nor an Asian combined maritime force? Yeah, I'd make a couple of points there.

um so first you know the question of a nato uh you know when we take nato we assume that this means uh collective defense we we believe this uh means that an attack on one is an attack on all um and so that presumes a common enemy and i've described before uh the southeast asian nations don't necessarily perceive a common enemy um and if they were to make an announcement that there was, even if it was a hypothetical unnamed enemy, it would push them into those security dilemmas that absolutely they want to avoid. So there's really kind of no appetite for that. There's absolutely no appetite if you name the adversary. I think that's broadly recognized. Yes, I too got the paper at the Naval War College about an Asian NATO, but I think that most people come to the

conclusion on that. One that's a little more frustrating to me is I continue to hear, oh, well, we'll start a combined maritime force because that worked really well in the Arabian Gulf region. And I think the point here is whatever a standing task force would be or combined maritime force, it still has to have a reason for being. It still has to have a standing objective. So, and if it's not interstate rivalry, then what is it? And if it's things that we've talked about earlier today, if it's IU fishing, if it's smuggling, if it's piracy, if it's human trafficking, well, these are all things that are of great concern, but they, for the most part, take place in domestic waters. And so, you know, while states welcome assistance in terms of

information and intel sharing, you know, nobody wants somebody else coming and patrolling their waters, right? And they don't want the United States coming, but they don't want the other ASEAN members coming. That's why even things like the Malacca Straits patrols, which are combined patrols or coordinated patrols, you know, they only go so far. And they don't include, you know, they don't include cross-border law enforcement. So it gets really watered down really quickly. well, you can't do that. What can you do? But I'm not a pessimist that multilateral cooperation is impossible. In fact, I've spent a lot of my time thinking about what can be done. And so I have a few kind of points that I'd like to share there. So first, we have plenty of

experience doing this. We being Americans have plenty of experience doing this around the world. Sure. Bring that experience with us, but don't template it. Every time that we hear, oh, let's bring this thing that we did in the Middle East. Let's bring this thing we did in the Gulf of Guinea. Let's bring a giant of South and we'll bring it over and stick it in there. Well, you know, we should definitely learn from those experiences, you know, but the idea that a solution was right for a different problem set with a different set of actors and can be templated in is just, it's just wrongheaded. We need to build up from the ground an answer, which is right for that region. So that's kind of my first point. My second point would be there is one of

the most useful avenues towards building multilateral cooperation is a slow and steady approach towards networking bilateral relationships. And to some extent, the United States has figured this out. I mean, this is why, you know, Cobra Gold is a U.S.-Thailand exercise, but we've brought other partners in over the years, Bala Katan the same way. You know, the multilateral carrot initiative that took place about five years ago. Right now, a crown jewel that I'll call out from just last week was CCAT 2021, which started as a multilateral exercise with a small number of navies and involves more navies. Then it came to involve Coast Guards and now includes NGOs. So the idea that you can take a core thing and add things to it slowly, the right things

through consensus, that makes a lot of sense. I think that we could do more work in interconnecting logistics hubs and information hubs, facilitating exchanges between those, you know, and I think that's invaluable. I mean, the idea that you're going to have a standing headquarters doesn't make a lot of sense for reasons I've just described. But if you have all the standing relationships in a time of crisis, you can turn on coordination really quickly. And I think kind of the last thing I'd point out is this kind of goes back to my comparison between the United States and Japan. And I don't want to overplay that. I'm not going argue the Japanese have it just right. But the United States should do a better job at being

consistent and knowing its own history. We do a lot of work in Southeast Asia that we forget about and we redo a few years later. So for example, I mean, we have a multinational maritime SOP in the region. It was signed off. It was developed, you know, kind of in the post 9-11 era. And it was when we wrote it it it was we had terrorism in mind but when you look at it it doesn't talk about terrorism it's it has all the bells and whistles that you need to build them you know to operate multilaterally in the region um and if you talk to your southeast asian partners many of them remember it um as a big thing from years ago and they go why did you stop paying attention to that and that's as far as they take it um and i don't know that that's the right

document that we want to be pushing and using. Maybe it needs a lot of revision. Maybe it needs to be thrown out the window. But the point is that we kind of start over again and again. And I think that would be a great, you know, just a stock taking of not only what are we doing across the region, but what we have been doing would be a very useful step towards building multilateral cooperation. And then the final thing I'll just say is in my article with Blake, we said that Asian problems require Asian solutions. That doesn't mean the United States can't be a part of the solution. It really just means we can't invent it in Washington and we can't try to import it from another fleet headquarters. Thanks, John. I want to thank John for coming

on today. What are you working on next and where can we find you online? I think my next major project that should be coming out is a special report with the U.S. Institute of Peace. It's on PRC force posture in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and the implications of that force posture for maritime Southeast Asia and the United States. This is actually a topic I didn't know a lot about about a year ago, and I dug into it and found it really, really interesting. Online, you can follow me at Twitter. My handle is at marstech underscore Bradford. But I'd also encourage you to check out a nonprofit where I operate, YCAPS, the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies. You can find their website, www.ycaps.org.

One of the things I think might be most interesting to the listeners is our Maritime Hour. Sort of like Sea Control, we try not to go on too long, short and sweet, dive into a new topic at least once a month. We do a combination of, much like Sea Control, we do a combination of, you know, high-level speakers and admirals and senior policymakers and sort of niche topics where we think some really interesting work is being done. So please check out our website and you can follow and join us for some of those. I host half of them and then the other half are BICO guest hosts. That's excellent. We will definitely have a link to the YCAPS website attached to the show notes for this episode. But thanks again for joining us, John,

to listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you for watching.