Sea Control - Sea Control 288 - Chinese Civilian Shipping and the Threat to Taiwan with Tom Shugart

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Links1. “Mind the Gap: How China’s Civilian Shipping Could Enable A Taiwan Invasion,” by Thomas Shugart, War on the Rocks, August 16, 2021.2. “The Better China is Prepared for War, the More it Can Crush US-DPP Collusion,” by Hu Xijin, Global Times, August 28, 2021.3. “Davidson: China Could Try to Take Control of Taiwan In ‘Next Six Years," Mallory Shelbourne, USNI News, March 9, 2021.4. “China Maritime Report No. 4: Civil Transport in PLA Power Projection,” by Conor Kennedy, China Maritime Studies Institute of the U.S. Naval War College, December 6, 2019.5. “Ramping the Strait: Quick and Dirty Solutions To Boost Amphibious Lift,” Conor Kennedy, China Brief from The Jamestown Foundation, July 16, 2021.6. “PLA Uses Large Civilian Ferry Ship for Vehicle Transport in Cross-sea Landing Drills for 1st Time,” by Liu Xuanzun, Global Times, August 19, 2021.7. MarineTraffic.com.

Hey folks, Jared here. We have Walker Mills back as host today alongside guest Tom Shugart discussing Chinese civilian shipping, its possible use in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. This episode was edited and produced by David Cihita. We recently conducted our SimSec Forum for authors and readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work as well as answering audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. you can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your

podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. 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. Today, we're talking with retired Navy Captain Tom Shugart, who's an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. Today, we're going to be talking about his recent article in War on the Rocks, Mind the Gap, How China's Civilian Shipping Could Enable a Taiwan Invasion. Tom, welcome aboard. Can you introduce yourself a bit more formally to our listeners? Yeah, thanks, Walker. Yes, I am a retired naval officer, career submariner. I retired about a

year ago, and now I'm a proud Army husband following my wife around for while she continues her career. I'm also an adjunct fellow at Center for New American Security and the Defense Program and I also do a little bit of consulting on my own. I recently founded a small consulting company, basically me, called Archer Strategic Consulting. Awesome, well, we're excited to have you on. Before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own

and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions we're associated with. Tom, can you kind of give us some background on the status quo between China and Taiwan? Why are we worried about a potential cross-strait invasion and where do things stand now and kind of the balance of power and the balance of forces. Like what I emphasized in testimony I gave to both the U.S.-China Commission and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year

is that what I would say that we're in with respect to the cross-strait military balance is that we're in a period of increasing uncertainty as to how things would go in a potential conflict or military aggression by China against Taiwan. You know, there was a time in the past, and certainly 20 years ago, where there was no question about how something like that would go and what the results would be. But now we're in a period where I think a lot of folks aren't quite so sure, myself included, as to how things would go. I think there is a great deal of uncertainty. And if things continue on their current trend lines, I would say in another 10 or 20 years, we will again be in a period where there isn't much uncertainty about where it goes and that it would be fairly obvious that China probably would win a cross-strait invasion. And we've seen quite a bit of ever more bellicose statements on the parts of China about Taiwan. We've seen in particular some fairly, quite frankly, bloodthirsty article in Global Times this week talking about explicitly threatening Taiwan.

We've seen statements from Chinese leaders that there's only so much time they're willing to let go without reunification, peaceful or otherwise. And also we've seen increasing indications that the people who live on Taiwan are increasingly feel themselves to not be Chinese and rather to be Taiwanese. Certainly the events in Hong Kong, the Taiwanese have watched what happened to the people in Hong Kong, kind of makes it likely that they're not going to want to entertain the idea of peacefully becoming part of China. So I think that the future certainly points towards the greater likelihood of conflict. Tom, you started your article talking about the Davidson window. Can you, with reference to the Taiwan Strait situation, can you kind of explain what the Davidson window is? So it's a term that folks came up with in the last few months, not something that I came up with. Admiral Davidson, the former PACOM commander, gave testimony earlier this year, and he was asked, you know, under what timeline does he think China might attempt an invasion of Taiwan?

And he said something like within the next decade, and I believe six years was a number that he provided. That time frame has become somewhat of a marker for people to debate about. Is that number accurate or not? If it is, what does it mean? How should it affect how we plan our defense programming and spending? Should we focus on earlier term, close to nearer term readiness, or should we accept decrements in readiness and force structure for increased modernization further down the line?

That's kind of what it's been about. different people in different parts of the defense analysis world have taken it more seriously than others. I personally, in my testimony before he gave that testimony, it's not that I have any feeling that what he said was derived anything from what I said, but I did say, I believe that the late 2020s are probably a period of greatest peril in that you have an intersection of a number of retirements of late Cold War platforms, both in the surface Navy, also the submarine force, declining numbers of Air Force fighters, kind of all coming together at the same time as many of China's systems that have been in development for some time are coming

into fruition and before some of the advancements that our Department of Defense has been working on as a response to China's rise, kind of before they come into effect. So I've kind of figured a similar timeframe in terms of a point of greatest peril. To be clear, this is mostly from the perspective of the military balance. It doesn't really encompass international relations theory with respect to where we are. It also doesn't necessarily encompass demography where China has significant demographic issues coming up soon. But quite frankly, those demographic issues could prompt China to go sooner. Although I think it's sometimes overstated how much they would affect the ability of the PLA to get the numbers of people it needs

to do what it wants to do. So it seems like we're kind of seeing both what you're saying, the increasing uncertainty and then agglomeration of short-term risk kind of approaching at the end of the decade. That's right. And so now I want to kind of shift to the article that you wrote for War on the Rocks. You looked at Chinese civilian ferries being used as amphibious vehicle delivery platforms. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you explained in the article and what you found in your research? So the thing that really got me interested in looking at this was a few months back, I was scanning around Hainan Island on Google Earth looking at imagery, as one does. I noticed a really striking construction within the last

few years, a major port facility on the coast, and kind of zoomed in and started looking at it. It was this huge ferry landing built within the last couple of years with all these ferries lined up going back and forth. That really got my interest that this was a fairly striking facility in terms of its size. So I started to wonder, you know, what could be the strategic mobility implications of something like this? Is there anything to it? Is there any reason to think it's not strictly commercial and that it could have power projection implications? So I started to kind of dig into China's ferry fleets and ferry operators to see if there was any there there in terms of them having any kind of effect on the military balance in the region, and particularly

with respect to Taiwan, because in the back of my mind was most analysts, quite frankly, agree that it seems like despite all the other kind of scary looking developments in the military balance in the region, it just doesn't seem like China has enough amphibious shipping to actually do an invasion of Taiwan. And so for that reason, it seems fairly safe for now. With that in the back of my mind, I wondered if there could be something there that could affect. So around that same timeframe, I saw a study come out from Conor Kennedy, the China Maritime Studies Institute wrote that talked about the organization of China's civilian shipping fleets, that they are organized as auxiliary units of the PLA, that they are part of the

maritime militia. You know, we oftentimes hear about the maritime militia and, you know, the ship, the fishing boats that you see down in the South China Sea that are, they operate very suspiciously, don't seem to be actually go fish that much. apparently have steel hulls and they're built to ram other vessels, which most fishing boats are not. But it turns out that another part of the maritime militia is these larger ships and ferries that are also organized as part of the PLA. And then what really electrified me more recently was again, Connor Kennedy showing evidence that the Chinese have been testing the ability to directly

deliver amphibious vehicles off the back of their ferries. What I thought this was quite interesting is, you know, here was just graphic, very obvious evidence that they really are taking steps to be able to use these ferries as adjunct units of the PLA to deliver amphibious assault forces. And this was a bit of a change because in the past, there have been plenty of folks that for years now have figured that China would use, would clearly use its pretty massive civilian shipping fleet to provide additional transport capacity, but more in the second waves and on of an invasion of Taiwan to supplement its amphibious first wave assault forces. But first of all, it would require organization that folks hadn't seen on their part,

and also would require either the seizure or the construction of temporary port facilities, which, you know, it's fairly straightforward to see how there's a lot of things Taiwan could do to make that hard to do. This combination of things, the evidence that these civilian and shipping fleets are already organized into units of the PLA as auxiliaries that they are practicing delivering amphibious vehicles directly right off the ferries straight to the beaches really indicated that perhaps a new chapter has opened in the capabilities that they could bring to a cross-strait invasion. Right after that report came out I also personally saw just by scanning around marinetraffic.com as I started to look at the ferry fleets and see you know

what size are they? Where are they going? What do they do? I spotted a couple of Chinese ferries operating far from where I knew they normally operate, about more than a thousand miles from the normal routes, just stationary, and had been for a couple of days off the coast of southern China. Really an odd location for them to be and a strange thing for a civilian ship to be doing. If you spend much time at sea, you pretty quickly firmly observe that commercial shipping doesn't spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing unless it's waiting to unload or port or something. And that's not what these ferries are doing. Turns out a few weeks later, Global Times announced that the TLA had been doing amphibious assault exercises using

civilian shipping. So all that kind of came together to make me want to look at what this pointed to and was there some there there. Do you think that this is kind of a deliberate strategy that they're forgoing, augmenting their gray-hulled amphibious vessels, or that they're kind of trying to fill a stopgap need, and they will eventually go on to procure a full fleet of more conventional Navy amphibious vessels? If you think about the different possibilities, I mean, they are building amphibious assault ships, and they keep building bigger and bigger ones. They've moved on from mostly having just LSTs to now, they've built eight Type 71 LPDs, which are 25,000-ton ships, and more recently, in pretty quick succession, built three 35,000,

40,000-ton LHDs. They are moving on to larger amphibious assault vessels. But this assessment has generally been that those are probably more oriented for expeditionary, further afield employment, perhaps in a South China Sea campaign. And certainly, they could have secondary roles in humanitarian assistance and NEOs. And then all the different kinds of things that we use are multi-purpose long range amphibious assault vessels for. But what's been puzzling is given that they clearly have a strategic objective to be able to reunify with Taiwan, whether Taiwan likes it or not, they just puzzlingly seem to have not been building the necessary capacity, which is pretty easy to see, to be able to actually do it.

That's caused some speculation by a number of folks. Lonnie Henley, who's an extremely seasoned watcher of the PLA said in his testimony, a US-China commission, that it's pretty clear that he thinks that they have a plan to be able to invade Taiwan by about now. They probably have. The indications are that they don't seem to be talking about the fact that they can't. So there's something we're missing here. And he himself said that he thought perhaps that they had creatively come up with a way to do it in a manner that we may not normally recognize. And I think that's consistent with what we see here, the organization and equipping that appears to be happening with these civilian ferry and vehicle carrier fleets. Why would they do it that way? Well, some of it

may be efficiency. I mean, they're kind of the reserve forces. They're also leveraging a very asymmetric advantage that China has versus Taiwan and the United States, which is that commercial shipping industry, which the United States essentially has virtually none, hardly any international shipping industry and certainly no significant merchant shipbuilding industry. Taiwan doesn't really build much in the way of ships either. Not that they're trying to send troops the other way, like the Chinese are, but this could be a way to, in a relatively efficient manner, leverage those commercial assets. It's also entirely consistent with China's military-civil fusion strategy. That's something that people have talked about a fair

bit in recent years. It is very much something that China has talked about a lot. But I think for the most part, people have thought about this military-civil fusion in esoteric ways like AI utilization, and that could be for military means or diverting high-tech industries to be employed by the PLA. And here's a pretty straightforward, easy-to-grasp way that it looks like that strategy may be being employed at scale, which is just using these civilian vessels, which are built to carry people and carry stuff efficiently over moderate distances consistent with something like the Taiwan Strait, drop them off and come back and get more. That's a pretty straightforward way that you could utilize that civilian industry in the service of a military goal.

Is it possible that the Chinese are not, that their operational plans for an invasion of Taiwan wouldn't involve a first wave of amphibious forces and maybe it would be airborne or is it an absolute requirement that they have to land heavy equipment and troops pretty quickly onto the beaches with amphibious shipping? That's to say, basically, is it possible that we're not necessarily missing their amphibious, that we're not missing their amphibious shipping because it's just not there? I mean, it's theoretically possible, but it would be highly unlikely that they would attempt to invade strictly by air. I mean, Taiwan has major heavy units, or lots of armor. I'm not an infantry guy. I'm not a ground forces person, but the airborne

troops would not do very well against the mechanized forces that Taiwan has. You kind of have to fight fire with fire. And it also wouldn't be consistent with what China has talked about in its own open source doctrine that is available for us to look at on the internet. If you look at China's science of military strategy, if you look at their science of campaigns, they talk quite freely about how they would engage in an island assault. And they talk about a 3D island assault. So using means of invasion from all directions and all modes. So I would expect to, it's not that I wouldn't expect there to be airborne and helicopter born, I would expect that to be in addition to forces delivered by ship. But if you do want to get

heavy forces ashore, and it seems I have a hard time imagining them being able to succeed need in a major ground campaign without doing so, then the vast bulk of them just have to come over by ships. If you look at airlift for that, it's just absurdly small compared to what you would need. There was a writer that recently talked about that. They could bring tanks and airlifters. That to me is a symptom of some of the kind of innumeracy that sometimes plagues analysis of the military balance. And that if you look at, okay, you can put one tank in a Y-20 and they have about 20 of them. That's just not a realistic way to get armor across the Taiwan Strait. They're going to have to come on ships. Do you think there's a role in a cross-strait operation of

the kind of smaller People's Maritime Militia vessels that we've been talking about a lot in the South China Sea, the fishing vessels that don't seem to fish and things like that? I mean, I'm kind of envisioning almost like a reverse Dunkirk type scenario, or is it really the focuses on these larger vessels that can carry, like you were saying, armored vehicles and things like that? I think there's absolutely a role for the maritime militia, but I don't think it's mostly for transport. We've seen them talk about the roles that they envision for the maritime militia that are in addition to the ones that we see in the gray zone conflicts. I would expect, and we have seen them talked about, as being used to provide concealment and decoys for naval

forces. What does that mean? I would guess it would be radar reflectors placed on these to make them look like bigger targets than they actually are. So that if you launch cruise missiles at an incoming invasion fleet, that they decoy away the cruise missiles towards themselves. That's a risky business for sure, but it may be something that they're called on to do. We've also seen them employed for mine laying and practicing mine laying. There could be different ways that they It could be used to, for example, to lay mines at the north and south entrances to the Taiwan Strait to seal it off to our forces or to those of Taiwan. It could be used to place mines to blockade the Taiwanese Navy port, to blockade the ports on the east coast of Taiwan to prevent resupply. Now, that'd be a risky business on the east side since those are not stealthy platforms.

But I mean, there are quite a number of uses for ways that they could be very helpful for facilitating cross-strait invasion. I don't think for the most part, it's going to be transporting significant amounts of forces, because I don't think that they need them for that. China has plenty of very large ships that can carry a lot more than fishing boats can to be able to transport those vessels across. But I think that understanding of the kind of things that they might do is something we have to consider in what an invasion would look like. I think there's a misconception on a lot of folks' parts that an invasion would look like you'd have all these gray-holed vessels and a few dozen cruise missiles on your part and Bob's your uncle, there you go, you've got it all. And I think that misses the point of what you'd be seeing would be a whole of government invasion, so to speak, where you've got hundreds of vessels in the strait, whether they're militia boats being used as decoys, escorts for the amphibious assault vessels and the civilian shipping that's carrying the invasion, or maybe just large numbers of ships that are just there to absorb damage instead of the ones that were the most precious forces are on board. So there's a lot of different roles there. I think that's a good segue into a question about vulnerability. So I've definitely seen some people arguing that, you know, you could do this, but these ships aren't built to military standards, or they don't have people on board to do damage control. How are these civilian ships much more vulnerable to anti-ship weapons than conventional military ships? I mean, one, I think kind of immediately thinks of the Atlantic conveyor in the Falklands War. You know, to a degree that might be true, but I don't think it's nearly as absolute of a difference as some folks may consider. In particular, when you think of the Atlantic conveyor example, well, there were plenty of other British ships in that conflict that didn't survive that were military ships.

So it's not like vulnerability to anti-ship missiles is solely a thing that commercial vessels have to deal with. when folks say, well, they're not built to military standards. We don't know that anymore because we know that China has a military transportation law or national defense transportation law that went into effect in 2017, I believe, that talked explicitly about establishing national defense standards that apply to civilian vessels. So we don't have a lot of details to what that means, but you certainly could imagine that the kind of thing that you would want to do would be to apply better standards for damage control to those vessels so they would be more likely to survive. And again, it's not something we have to guess at. They've

told us this themselves. I mean, so if you look at the, I was able to find evidence on websites for some of the Chinese shipbuilders that, where they talk openly about the fact that these ferries were built to dual military and civilian standards and were built to support national defense needs. they've said out loud that's what they're doing so it's almost more of a case of of military vessels with civilian paint and and livery than civilian vessels being repurposed by the military well it's kind of a mix of both i mean they really are civilian vessels like you can go watch them on on marinetraffic.com they're busy shuttling people back and forth i mean they really are they are used for uh civilian employment not only that if you went up to the washington state ferry system

for example, and said, hey, we want to use your ship for an invasion or we want to go use it to do an exercise or we want to modify it. The U.S. government can't just tell a civilian ferry operator that, hey, go weld this ramp on your ferry because we're going to use it in an exercise. I mean, it doesn't work like that and they're not used to doing it. They're not organized. And that's where these efforts in the last few years have made it so that while they are civilian vessels, they are being organized, they are used for practice, and they are apparently being built to some degree with standards that apply to that. I think also the fact that they are being built to different standards shines some light on the idea that China's military budget is probably a lot

bigger than it looks. Because if these ferries are being built to dual military civilian standards, there's going to be some increased cost of doing that. I saw in some of Conor Kennedy's work, We talked about some civilian shipping where they estimated increased costs of 10 to 15%. Well, is that included in China's defense budget that people point out as being so small sometimes? I doubt it. That's a really interesting point about hiding the defense budget numbers. The other thing I'd ask is about capacity.

Do we think that they're overbuilding these ferries? I'm reminded of when you mentioned the big ferry terminal in Hanyang, and that to me would seem like a big indicator that they're planning on using these things for dual use if they're building a lot more ferries than one would think that they would need or the ferries are being used and they're not being filled up, et cetera? I wouldn't claim to be able to do the analysis

to know that they built more ferries than they need for the routes that are there. That would involve analysis of factors that are well beyond my ability or time to collect or have the expertise to analyze the business case that they operate on. What I can say is that one of the things that struck me immediately when looking at this,

some of their newer ferry facilities is that they look awfully empty compared to how big they are. You know, riding the ferries in Washington State and in other places, you know, what I'm used to for a ferry landing is they're usually full and usually traffic is backed up into the neighboring neighborhoods well beyond the size of the available parking areas. You can go look at these ferry terminals on Highland Island and across the Highland Strait, and it's just striking how they're,

first of all, they're enormous. And they're mostly empty. The parking lots are, there's trucks and stuff there that look like they're waiting to operate, but they sure are much bigger than what I'm used to seeing. It doesn't necessarily mean that they were built explicitly for a military need, but I can imagine how they could be pretty useful for that. Could have a throughput of ground forces that would be much larger than I think you might see in what I'm used to seeing for ferry landings. So I want to circle back to something you said about the whole of government invasion. If we were trying to gauge the Chinese readiness for a cross-strait operation, what other platforms do you think would be absolutely critical to look at besides amphibious lift and amphibious shipping? If you look at previous examples of large amphibious operations, like, for example, the invasion of Okinawa, there's a lot of other shipping that has to be available to support an operation like that.

So you're going to have to have tankers loaded with the appropriate fuel to be able to supply armored vehicles and or in general vehicles. I would expect to see some of that. I would expect to see container ships with containers. I mean, if you do some there's a risk of mirror imaging here. But if you look at our maritime prepositioning fleets, for example, or our maritime security program fleets or ready reserve forces, You can see the variety of forces that at least we seem to think are necessary to project power overseas and can use your imagination. Some combination of the containers, row-row vessels, bulk liquid carriers. The tough thing would be to be able to tease out changes from the norm. If you just go look at marine traffic, go to marinetraffic.com, go look at the east coast of China, go look at the East China Sea and the area around Taiwan, and just look at how much shipping there is there.

It really is extraordinary. It's far more than either our east or west coast. It would be really challenging, I think, in some cases to perhaps pick up the subtle changes that might be occurring there before an invasion happened. And I do think that the fact of what looks like significant involvement by civilian shipping in the preparations for an invasion just adds another thing that our intelligence community has to track. That isn't the stuff that are kind of used to tracking the gray holes that have pen and numbers on them that they're used to looking at. I can imagine it makes the strategic warning indicators harder to track. Yeah, certainly not envying the lieutenants or ensigns that are tracking that stuff. To kind of wrap it up, Tom, do you have any big recommendations for U.S. or Taiwanese kind of defense leadership or officials?

I mean, should this change kind of our posture or how we're thinking about deterring or potentially having to defeat a cross-strait operation? I think there's been a feeling of safety and an assumption on the part of most strategic planners and analysts that for all the other alarming indicators, they just didn't seem to have enough lift to make an invasion happen. And what I hope that the facts of the matter brings to the table for folks as an entering argument, it's that the broader considerations as they're looking at the military balance and at the threats in the region, that they look hard at that and reconsider whether that's really true or not. It should change the calculus for a number of other calculations on the way folks are looking at the region and making decisions about things. And so that's kind of the broader impact that I hope this knowledge brings to folks. Because honestly, I didn't know how this was going to turn out. They're working on this. They're organized.

They're testing things. But I didn't really know until I started crunching the numbers what the scale was going to look like. And quite frankly, if I'd crunched the numbers and figured out that China had a half dozen ferries and they could add 10% to the amphibious lift capability, then I would never have written this article. The scale wouldn't have mattered enough for it to change things in a strategic way. But the fact that, no, that would triple the size of their split capability, I think really does call for a reassessment on a lot of different levels of how we've looked at the level of threat from China against Taiwan. In terms of very specific recommendations, I made some of these in my testimony to the

U.S.-China Commission and also to the Congress, and I as well added them somewhat to the article itself in that on a very granular level, I think we need to be deploying weapons that can specifically do image recognition and specifically pick out individual high-value ships and target them. If you don't think through what this scenario would actually look like in a very granular way, people may gain an excessive sense of safety from, for example, the 450 Harpoon missiles that Taiwan ordered from the US. on a number of levels.

First, they're not delivered and won't be anytime soon. But even if they were, it's not a hard math exercise given the type of whole of society invasion that I talked about before. Let's say between those and Taiwan's other coastal missiles, they had 600 in the inventory. Let's say half of them survived. Ready and survive whatever China throws at Taiwan

as a precursor to the invasion because they made very clear that they would act preemptively before that to lay the groundwork so let's say you have 300 and of those 300 you're able to launch 200 of them you know as we also know that they're going to go after command and control so you launch 200 and let's say half of those are decoyed by electronic warfare they're shot down whatever now there's 100 left you know if you're 60 or say 80 or so amphibious vessels and civilian ferries you got them surrounded by you know hundreds of other vessels all of a sudden you do the math and

And what sounds on paper like it would be a slam dunk to stop an invasion, now maybe only a couple dozen missiles hit home and only a few of those actually hit ships that are carrying the invasion force. And, oh, that didn't go well. Now you just got invaded. So I think it's critical to be able to have weapons that can get past all of that, that can accurately pick out the ships that matter. Beyond that, from a rules of engagement perspective, obviously the use of civilian vessels is going to complicate that. And we need to figure out now, while things are calm and while our C2 systems are intact, how it is in consultation with the Taiwanese that we're going to decide at what point you're going to start shooting at these things in the case of an invasion. If you do it too soon, well, now you're going to hit up very full civilians. If you do it too late, well, now you're going to lose to an invasion.

So that's the kind of thing we need to be figuring out now. Those are very uncomfortable decisions to make in a peacetime environment. I appreciate those recommendations. And I think, you know, your pieces definitely gained some traction judging by some of the other outlets that have picked it up. So I think you've met your goal of kind of opening up the conversation and moving it forward. Unfortunately, we're just about out of time for today. But before we go, I want to ask you to tell us if you're working on anything right now and where, if anywhere, our listeners can find you online. well i'm online at uh i'm on twitter at t-shoe guard three um have been for quite some time now as for new things that i'm working on i don't really have anything i can talk about at this point i'm working on i have a number of clients and also some and do some other work that i have to keep under wraps until it comes out sorry i can't say more but i look forward to doing my best to try to bring new facts to light and help folks uh get a clearer idea of what things look

like out there in the Western Pacific. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. And maybe when those things come out, we'll be able to get you back on. I'd like to thank my guest, Tom Shugart, for joining us today about his recent essay, Mind the Gap, How China's Civilian Shipping Could Enable a Taiwan Invasion. And we'll do our best to put all the links to the articles that we've referenced below the podcast. Thanks and take care. Thanks, Walker. Put it on the shimbo now. Oh, help me, Bob. I'm bullying the alley. Why are they bullying the alley? Help me, Bob. I'm bullying the alley. Put it out of the chamber now.