Sea Control - Sea Control 391 - Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour with Blake Herzinger & Jimmy Drennan

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Links:1. YCAPS2. Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power, US Navy, US Marine Corps, US Coast Guard, December 2020. 3. Goals and Objectives for a Stronger Maritime Nation: A Report to Congress, Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration, 2020.4. The National Strategy for Maritime Security, Department of Homeland Security, September 20, 2005. 5. National Strategy for Mapping, Exploring and Characterizing the United States Exclusive Economic Zone, Prepared by the Ocean Science & Technology Subcommittee of the Ocean Policy Committee, June 2020. 6. National Strategy for the Arctic Region, The White House, October 2022. 

Hey, folks, it's Jared. What we have for you today is our initial collaboration with the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, or WICAPS. It's a discussion moderated by our friend John Bradford and featuring former SimSec president Jimmy Drennan, frequency control guest Blake Hersinger on why the U.S. needs a comprehensive maritime strategy. This episode was edited and produced by Nathan Miller. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org.

So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. 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 paw of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Good evening to you all, or good morning if you're in the United States, or good day if you're someplace else in the world. I want to welcome you to this evening's Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour, hosted by the Akosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, WICAPS. I'm John Bradford. I'm the WICAPS Executive Director. I'm also a Senior Fellow in Maritime Security at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

I'll be your moderator this evening. For those of you who aren't familiar with WICAPS, we are a professional development and community building organization focused on advancing thinking and discussions of Indo-Pacific strategic issues, particularly in the communities which host U.S. bases in Japan, but also elsewhere in the world. This particular series, the Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour, is a 60-minute webinar that we do about once a month. We bring together a variety of speakers, sometimes quite famous and senior, and sometimes people that are doing some just really interesting work that may be a bit of less well-known. Tonight, we have two individuals that I would consider the leading thinkers about sea power in the United States of their generation. I think both of them are slightly younger than me, so I'll call them young, but some

of you might think that they're already middle-aged. We have Jimmy Drennan, who among the many things he has done is one of the founders of SIMSEC, and Blake Herzinger, who's here with me in Singapore, wearing a variety of hats and always writing and commenting. Speaking of SIMSEC, this particular Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour, unlike other events, will be recorded. We are bringing it out in partnership with SIMSEC, and eventually it'll be cut down and sliced and diced and turned into a Sea Control podcast. If you haven't listened to Sea Control podcast, I highly recommend it as a place of parallel thinking and much greater content in terms of volume than our little maritime hour here at Whitecaps.

So if you've been to a maritime hour before or you haven't, it doesn't really matter. But let me talk about some of the basic ground rules. After I shut up here in just a few seconds, I'm going to turn it over to Blake, who's going to give some comments, and then to Jimmy. Unlike normal maritime hours, this, as I've said, will be on the record. But it being on the record, I think we all need to understand that everyone here, myself, Blake, Jimmy, and everyone who asks a question are doing so in their own personal capacity. They're not representing any organization that they work for or have worked with or

otherwise are affiliated with. So tonight's topic is why the United States needs a real maritime strategy. And I really want to give my own thoughts on the biases that are implied in that question. But rather than doing so, let me turn it over to the two individuals who wrote the question. Mr. Blake Herzinger. Thanks very much, John. And thank you to YCAPS and to SimSec for putting this together. And thank you all for joining us tonight. Despite my big promises on Twitter this evening, if you saw them, this will not be a battle royale between Jimmy and I, but more so Jimmy and I against the machine. And I think we're both in violent agreement in regards to the U.S. need for a real strategy? And John alluded to some bias and bliss in that question. I think

I'd like to address that first. So I think every year, or every few years, at least, the United States does publish what it calls a maritime strategy. You can read those from 2020, you know, advantage at sea, going back to 21st century cooperative sea power, you know, back through the decades to the mid 80s. And I think what you'd find, especially in the most modern examples, is that the bias in all of our strategies leans heavily towards the defense and military component and unfortunately abandons even the civil maritime, let alone industry and all the rest. And so we end up with a very lopsided kind of one-eyed look at what the maritime domain consists of, what happens at sea, and what is important. And I think what we're

seeing now is that a generation or more of over-reliance on a military arm has led us to let the others to wither. And they have. And we've unfortunately neglected things like domestic shipbuilding, a domestic maritime workforce, and effective regulation on maritime space. And we have what instead, almost a federalized system of maritime strategies, none of which have one person at the top who's ultimately accountable for all those strategies in a holistic manner. And so if you look kind of top to bottom, just at the cabinet level in the United States government, Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, Transportation, Department of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, State and Interior all own very important authorities in the maritime

domain. I would love to believe, as I'm sure all of our participants would tonight, that there is someone out there who is maintaining visibility on all of these maritime do-outs and items and key engagements. But unfortunately, that's just not the case. There is no one out there who has situational awareness of all these things. So what we have is, like I mentioned, kind of this headless, federalized maritime space where everyone sort of maintains their petty fiefdom, for lack of a better word, sometimes at the expense of others or, you know, in the most benign sense, in a vacuum. And we lose out on so much cooperative energy that I think there is to gain there if we had a unified focus for all that energy and all those plans and ideas. So actually, I wanted to mention something that John actually led at the S. Roger Otten School, which for any other RSIS graduates or professors or employees tonight, I'm also a proud alum of RSIS. So John led a project that was published at RSIS and via the Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative, tracing conceptualizations of maritime security.

Now, that's simply one part of an overall maritime strategy. We got to dig in each person and each representative from each country involved in the project into what our country thought about maritime security. That really led my thinking to this place where I realized how many different organizations and people and experts are involved in this problem, but writing and thinking and engaging from just every direction. And so we end up in the U.S. defense environment. We'd have a term, colloquialism, called all thrust, no vector. Plenty of energy, smart people, a lot of great work being done, but just in every direction. Charlie Brown, who's on the line, he would refer to it as a drunken octopus, legs everywhere, doing things, but the head doesn't probably know what's going on. And I found that to be very true in just the maritime security domain. I think it's broadly also true, unfortunately.

And every strategy we put out compounds that problem because we still haven't addressed it. And you'll notice in Advantage at Sea in 2020, the Department of Defense published a tri-service maritime strategy. And we didn't even think about our own civilian maritime workforce, our own military seal of command, barely great to mention in that report. And the United States can't fight a war at sea or anywhere else without MSC, but somehow it is not a part of our own maritime strategy. I think that problem is just visible pretty much in any direction you look. I saw John Conrad on the line. Him and Sal Miracogliano have done a lot of great advocacy work for our own civilian sea lift and maritime fleet. These are aspects that, you know, if we had a national, a real national strategy for sea power, I want to believe that we could better take advantage of the innovation and the industrial dynamism that the United States can generate, but is simply failing to do. And there's a lot of, you know, I won't get into the Jones Act debate tonight, but I don't know if the market-driven approach, well, I think it's become clear that the market-driven approach has not really worked for sustaining a vibrant maritime workforce or commercial fleet. You know, the United States commercial fleet is limping. It's small, it's old. Most of its sailors are also aging. And we're just, we're failing to make this a place where people want to work. And we're not a commercial sea power the way that we were 50 years ago.

and and we're only getting worse without diving too far into how much should the federal government be involved in shipbuilding and nationalizing building national shipyards things like that i think if you want to be a sea power in the 21st century you do have to have the ability to from the head of the state generate shipbuilding and generate drive towards shipbuilding infrastructure and if you want to be a department of defense that thinks that you are facing a rising threat from the people's republic of china you have to be able to rely on your domestic shipbuilding, capability to restore battle damage, to produce new ships, which will be sunk at an incredible rate in any war against China, which has built a world-class navy in the space of the

last 25 years. Getting to my point, ultimately, we talked about some definitions, clarity, clarity of voice, involving industry, reaching into industry for best practices, engaging better with industry to get ships built that will be used, creating the type of legislation and advocating for the type of legislation that will enable those ships to be used. Because right now, Sea Power doesn't have a good advocate. It has many small voices, but there's not one big one. And I am fairly agnostic on whether that's a maritime department or simply someone who's designated as the person in charge of executing a maritime strategy. Despite a long career in defense, I don't necessarily think I would put that to the department of defense to execute

because I think some of the most important parts there are market driven. And I don't think that the military understands the market that well, which I think you can see from a number of failed shipbuilding programs and struggles to engage and control costs and all the rest. So defining what we need, talking to the industry and then accountability. I think ultimately the need strategy means someone has to drive it. There has to be someone at the end of the day who answers to the President of the United States or his representative for where the United States is in the process of supporting itself as a maritime nation and rebuilding its own maritime capacity. Right now, if you ask them to raise their hand, who owns the maritime domain? I think in the

cabinet, you'd see 10 people who feel that they have a meaningful equity there. And unfortunately, Unfortunately, as I'm sure everyone on the call knows, you can't really command by committee, especially when there's going to be a lot of unpopular things happening. Unfortunately, there's a lot of painful decisions probably to be made in the maritime domain, costly ones, and just immense responsibility that someone's going to have to shoulder. And I think a strategy would help align under one person accountable for the strategy. I think I'm running up against 10 minutes. I want to hear from Jimmy and get into more of a discussion. But thank you again, everyone, and look forward to what's to come. Thanks, Blake. Without a pause, straight over to you, Jimmy.

All right. Thanks, John. And thank you to YCAPS and to SimSec. I'm no longer affiliated with SimSec as the president, although I'm certainly a member and support the organization. I support YCAPS and Blake. Thanks for your comments. As you mentioned, I think we are in violent agreement. I will go through my remarks and I may take a little bit longer. And if we run out of time, John, just cut me. Feel free to cut me off and we can save time for discussion. The question is why the U.S. needs a real national maritime strategy. And I thought it might be useful to back up and first describe why we need a national maritime strategy in the first place. Well, we're a maritime nation. I think we've said that a lot. And, you know, what does that mean? Well, over 70 percent of our foreign trade flows through our nation's seaports. That's a value of over one point five trillion dollars.

It's about 18% of our GDP flows through our shipping. And the president's new national security strategy, one of the things that it says is that one of the deepest sources of power in the world for the United States is our economic strength. I think a bulk of that economic strength comes from the sea. internally to the U.S. The bulk of the economy flows through the marine transportation system, a network of over 8,000 facilities, 25,000 navigable waterways. Around the United States, we have our economic exclusion zone that spans about 3.4 million square miles. That's not just an economic concern. That's also an environmental concern. We need to sustainably manage the resources within the EEZ. You've got the Arctic region, where the seabed, there are estimates

that it could contain up to 30% of the world's undiscovered supply of natural gas, 13% of undiscovered oil. So you could see that we have significant interests in the maritime domain, which is why I think people say the United States is a maritime nation. And that goes all the way back to the beginning. I mean, if you go back to just after the Revolutionary War, 1790, Hamilton convinced Congress to commission 10 cutters and establish the revenue marine. And that was to enforce tariffs because we needed to pay off our war debt. And certainly Hamilton understood the risk that the U.S. faced if they lost revenue from customs evasion, smuggling, Estimates that annually about 700,000 pounds in goods were smuggled into the colonies annually.

That's about $150 million in today's dollars. So it's something that we've known from the beginning. The sea is the lifeblood of our economy, and we depend on it for our prosperity and our security. Okay, so then the question is, why do we need a real maritime, national maritime strategy? Well, I would say it's because today we have at least four national maritime strategies. And I'm going to put air quotes around national and maritime. Blake mentioned the tri-service national maritime strategy, 2020 version titled Advantage at Sea. And to me, that's really just a naval strategy, a good one, but it's a naval strategy.

It incorporates the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard, signed by the chiefs of all three. Well, the Marine Corps, I've been told reliably many times that a Marine Corps officer is still a naval officer. And, of course, we all know they're part of the Department of the Navy. The strategy does incorporate the Coast Guard, but really only in the ways that it contributes to the Department of Defense's mission. Like mentioned, it hardly gives mention to Maritime Sealift Command or even Sealift in general. So I don't think of it as a true maritime strategy. It does make some interesting points. It kind of echoes Mahan when it says that the Navy's peacetime missions include safeguarding global commerce and extending American influence, and that naval forces will preserve a stable and secure global maritime environment that is free, open,

and advances prosperity through transit, trade, and lawful pursuit of natural resources. In fact, if you go back to Mahanian thought, Mahan believed that navies serve a primarily economic purpose. So it's interesting. In the Navy, in advocating for its own diplomatic and economic value, it kind of created a conundrum for itself. If the mission of the Navy goes beyond national defense, then how can the Department of the Navy ensure that it gets the resources it needs when it competes for funding with all the other military branches in the Department of Defense, who's responsible only for national defense? So we'll get back to that. I have some ideas. And Blake kind of alluded to them. So the next national maritime strategy that I want to talk about is the National Strategy for Maritime Security. This was developed in 2004 by Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense together to better coordinate federal maritime security efforts. And it really focuses on, and you can tell by the timeframe, just after 9-11, it focuses on preventing weapons of mass destruction from entering the country, preventing attacks in the homeland.

And it hasn't been updated since 2004. And it's really in that post-9-11 global war on terrorism mindset, everything is tied back to the risk of a terrorist attack on the homeland. Even when it considers great power conflict, and China's not specifically mentioned, it still ties back to the risk of a WMD attack on the United States. Given the timeframe when it was written, you can see why it had that flavor, but the fact that it's not been updated is concerning to me. And here, I think it's worth, you know, if you allow me to go through a little bit of a history lesson, going back to how DHS kind of came to be. And if you go back to the Revenue Marine, predecessor of the Coast Guard, they were charged with enforcing tariffs. And then we had the Barbary pirates and Congress decided, OK, we're going to need something a little different. And they established the U.S. Navy and commissioned six frigates to be able to address that problem.

The Revenue Marine, eventually the Revenue Cutter Service, and then eventually the Coast Guard became a separate service. They did shift over to the Navy Department in World War I and World War II. So in times of war, they shift over, but they are separate. Initially, they were supporting the Treasury Department, but that faded over time. The U.S. Customs Service was established at the same time as the Revenue Marine, and they were charged with overseeing that cutter fleet. And then so the two services jointly collected and enforced the nation's tariffs. But eventually, by the early 20th century, that became the role of the Border Patrol element of the Customs Service. and then uh the association with uh you know protecting federal revenue for the coast guard

that was officially ended when the coast guard transferred to the department of transportation in 1967 and then after 9-11 the department of homeland security and and then in dhs obviously has a significant maritime border security mission but they also have in dhs they have customs and border protection that was created after 9-11 and then the immigration and customs Enforcement. And these two organizations are separate under DHS. And in fact, CBP has an Air and Marine Operations Division, which is tasked with securing the nation's maritime borders. So now you've got the Coast Guard and this Air and Marine Operations part of CBP under the same department doing ostensibly the same thing, but separately. To me, that perpetuates this

bureaucratic fragmentation that Blake kind of alluded to. Okay, so that's two national maritime strategies. What about the other two? Well, also in 2004, President Bush directed the Secretary of Transportation to chair the Committee on the Marine Transportation System that I mentioned earlier. And then a decade later, Congress directed DOT to develop a national maritime strategy to make the U.S. maritime industry more competitive. That strategy was finally released by the committee on the MTS in 2020. However, it specifically does not address issues that are outside the scope of DOT's jurisdiction. It also does not supplant the CMTS's five-year national strategy for the MTS, which was published in 2017. So now you've got

one committee, the CMTS, which owns two parallel national maritime strategies. And so now you've You've got those two, plus the tri-service maritime strategy and then the national security, the national strategy for maritime security. And then, you know, I think it is, again, going back into history, if you'll allow me to, it's helpful to look at the history of our oversight of maritime commerce. Oversight of maritime trade falls between the Maritime Administration, which is under the Department of Transportation, and then the Independent Federal Maritime Commission. Both of these organizations find their roots in the 1916 Shipping Board, which Congress tasked with boosting American shipping and addressing over-reliance on foreign carriers. At the time, about 10% of U.S. trade was carried in U.S. flagged ships. And if you fast forward to 2010, less than 2% of American goods sailed in U.S. flagged ships. So just keep that in mind.

And just some more statistics on our shipping fleet. In 2018, the U.S. owned 1% of the world's container ship fleet with an average age of 20 years, compared to China and Hong Kong collectively owning 18% with an average age of 10 years. And U.S. flag merchants represent 0.4% of the world's fleet, compared to in 1947, 40% of the world's fleet. So if you look at 2004, President Bush said he wanted to make the maritime industry more competitive. And then you look at where we are, 2010, less than 2% of American goods sailed in U.S. flagships. And then where we are today, I would argue that it has not worked. Although we have a vibrant economy, our maritime industry is struggling to keep up with competitors, namely China. What else do we have in terms of national maritime strategies?

Well, there's a National Ocean Council, which sets ocean policy. 2018, President Trump replaced the Ocean Council with the Ocean Policy Committee, focusing more on economic concerns, vice environmental. But they really do overlap. Environmental concerns and economic concerns, particularly in the maritime, are intertwined. 2020, the committee published a national strategy for mapping the EEZ. So that's another national strategy. And then we have a national strategy for the Arctic region, which clearly has maritime equities and a separate national research policy for the Arctic. And if you at least on the surface, neither of those two Arctic strategies are coordinated with the the Ocean Policy Committee's strategy to map the EEZ, which, you know, obviously there are there are common interests among those strategies that should be coordinated.

And I haven't even mentioned the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and its subordinate National Marine Fisheries Service. They fall under Department of Conorists, the National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office under the Director of National Intelligence, Army Corps of Engineers, the Independent EPA, and of course, various maritime related offices within the State Department. So you can see why I'm bringing up all these kind of bureaucratic tangles. You can really see why in 2007, the Committee on the A Thousand Ship Navy concept, they studied this concept that was brought forward by the Navy on global maritime partnerships. And one of the things that they found was that no single agency, and I'm quoting here, no single agency or department can effectively speak for the president or the nation's maritime concerns. Responsibilities are fragmented. Authority is often exercised, but decisions are not coordinated. So the result is less than optimal. And that was in 2007. And they weren't even talking about China. That was not even in the report.

So you can see where that even the U.S. Navy, with all of its resources and authorities, fall short of addressing the full range of our maritime interests. so so there you have it there's uh at least four national maritime strategies plus the strat the national strategy in the arctic and the eez but still why does it matter if we have one well i think 20 years ago you could argue that you know we could we could be asleep at the wheel and no big deal you know we still number one uh global superpower uh number one economy and that's that's not the reality that we live in today, namely because of China. They are growing rapidly and arguments on whether or not they'll ever overtake our GDP, but certainly it is possible. So I just want to take a minute to kind of compare and contrast what we're doing in terms of maritime

strategy versus what we see China doing. And first they've got the Bridge and Road Initiative. They're investing in ports all over the world and in some key places with our trading partners, even our military partners, Israel, even in Germany with the Hamburg port, Pakistan, some very key places that could really affect us and not just our military operations, but also commerce as well. Because even if they never attempt to, you know, they have ownership of these ports, and even if they never attempt to convert them to bases, military bases, like the one they have in Djibouti, they can project power in other ways. They can use their influence to deny port access, like they did in the Solomon Islands earlier this year, or just simply delaying shipments and our logistics. and you know you got economic competition for access to natural resources and influence over regional governments you know that's that has a real national security implications beyond the scope of naval operations the arctic component of bridge and road the polar silk road another key one china is looking to capitalize on the northern sea route which is a part of the northeast passage

along russia's arctic coast and they could cut transit distance to europe by 24 and some some say that that that will thaw they'll fully thaw so we'll have year-round passage before the northwest passage does which is on canada's coast that we would use and then of course all the different all the various resources on the seabed in the arctic there's the digital silk road another infrastructure investment that China is doing, investing in 20 countries, $79 billion in projects, undersea internet cables, a navigation satellite network, an alternative to GPS that they can sell to other countries. And again, when you talk about IT, now you have even more influence because of the various things that we know China does with espionage and cyber operations.

in in india in 2020 october 2020 they had a power outage in mumbai and it impacted two seaports and investigative groups were able to determine that it was linked to a chinese hacking group and they think it was in response to clashes earlier that year in the um i'm forgetting the name of the region and the mountainous region between india and china but they they think it was a message to india and so you can see how that could play out in the future as they start to gain more and more influence over this IT infrastructure. And I'll quickly go over a few more aspects. There's the nine-dash line that's an aspect of their maritime strategy,

kind of closer to home for them, but clearly far exceeding the 12 nautical mile territory waters that UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, establishes. They basically want to claim all of the South China Sea for their own territory. They've got the maritime militia, which is an element of their military. and they use that to intimidate their their neighbors kind of undermine the standards of uncloth they're not usually armed ships but they they just kind of they they get into the areas that they they shouldn't be operating uh per uncloth uh you can look at the whitsun reef in

the philippines uh that incident a couple years ago as an example uh they're just kind of trying to establish a new normal using the those uh those ships and then related to that you've got their distant water fishing fleet, that's not necessarily an element of their military like the Maritime Militia is, but that's a real economic and environmental concern. I mean, this fleet, some estimates up to 17,000 vessels, which by the way, in 1985, they had 13 vessels. So they've grown exponentially and they exert massive economic and environmental influence. For example, in 2010, Mauritania signed a deal with the Chinese state-owned enterprise promising to create over 2400 local jobs. However, job losses in fishing total 13,000 in 2014 alone,

partly at least caused by competition from foreign industrial vessels. So they've got this massive growing appetite for fish. There's a forecasted to be between a 6 to 18 million ton domestic shortage by 2030. And their need to go overseas to fish their distant water fishing fleet is only going to grow and we're going to have to be able to respond to that but we can't necessarily respond to it militarily most of the navies of the world ourselves included are not going to be willing to engage in armed conflict with fishing fleets especially when they're not overtly breaking any laws or international conventions a lot of times you'll see them lined up you can look at ais and you can see them lined up just outside the eez

and then they might go dark on ais in order to go in a little further but they're they're very careful about what they're doing. It's a gray zone strategy. So I see I so much want to catch up here on my notes. So I think that's probably enough about China and the potential that they have to be a real economic challenge and a national security threat to us beyond just navies. Because our maritime interests are not just naval. I mean, our national interests in maritime maritime security economic prosperity uh sustainable use of natural resources uh and of course uh freedom of the seas so they it goes beyond uh naval operations going back to and i'm kind of getting close to wrapping up here and going back to the uh the committee on the 1000

ship navy they concluded that a novel and extraordinary approach is needed to break through the international barriers abroad and interagency barriers at home so blake kind of alluded to this. One of the ideas that I've had and I've written about is to establish a cabinet level maritime department with a mission of integrating applications of national power to foster American sea power and to protect our maritime interests. Combining all the different organizations that we've talked about under one department and then allow them to craft and develop a single national maritime strategy. So, I mean, and you know, there's precedent for establishing new departments, obviously Homeland Security in the wake of 9-11, Department of Energy

created by President Carter following the 1973 oil crisis. Even DOD itself was created after World War II by President Truman to address some military dysfunction among the services. prevailing in uh what i would say you know modern maritime competition requires more than just warships and you know our heritage of sea power has never been about national defense alone where you see china's activities at sea or integrated facets of a national strategy in full execution our federal maritime entities have kind of meandered aimlessly we do badly need a comprehensive maritime strategy i'm just not sure that we're capable of producing such a document you know we have without uh some sort of bold strokes

or federal realignment i don't see how a nation with at least four independent national maritime strategies can maintain sea power in the 21st century and if you look at both russia and the UK this year have published National Maritime Strategies, and they seem to get that sea power extends beyond the scope of naval operations. Now, both of those are kind of aspirational in my mind. I mean, Russia's is borderline fantasy, and the UK probably needs to emphasize the importance of navies more than they do. But I think they're on the right track in terms of addressing it holistically and not just from a naval perspective. So, you know, I think we need to consider in the united states that china could be purposely goading us into a an arms race

to distract from their their true aim of becoming a the world's number one economy you know so we build up our our fleets and our arsenal we focus on military readiness for a conflict that might not ever come and we risk sitting out of this uh strategic competition altogether and we never really truly see china's strategy for what it is and then we never actually develop one of our own so with that i'll stop and um and turn it over to you john okay thanks so if i can kind of summarize i think the primary point although in 30 minutes jimmy made a lot of points that you guys talked about were the idea that the maritime strategy or strategies or strategic documents. We kind of used one word to cover all of those things.

In the United States, it's problematic because it's not comprehensive and it's not enforceable. So towards the end of your presentation there, Jimmy, you talked about the idea that if you created a maritime agency or a maritime ministry, which many countries have, then that would put everything under one umbrella and give it a boss. So I have kind of two questions that are closely related to that point. So the first would be a simple one. I'm going to ask Blake if he agrees. But then I think the second one is the more difficult one.

We're rearranging the deck chairs. And yes, all the maritime things go into one place. But what would you put there? Would you put the Coast Guard? Would you put the Navy? Would you put the Department of Transportation's maritime roles? And if so, OK, now we've moved all this. We have a comprehensive maritime strategy, but we no longer have a transportation strategy.

We no longer have a commerce strategy, or we no longer have a military strategy. So does it fix one problem and just create another? It's over to you first, Blake. I think that's a valid point, John. And I don't think anyone with a, well, I don't necessarily think I would trust anyone that was going to tell me that, you know, a federal agency was going to be necessarily the model for efficiency and strategic alignment because I think that is one of our greatest hallmarks

is making sure the strategy is as hard to understand and execute as humanly possible. If you think back to the anecdote that the Soviet army found it so difficult to deal with the American military because we had all this doctrine and we didn't follow any of it. I think it would be bureaucratically difficult

to pull all of those roles from where they sit. I think there would be a lot of backstage knife fighting who would you know would or would not want to give up you know it's energy going to want to get off give up um their equities in in the maritime space is homeland security going to give up uh the coast guard and all the rest because the coast guard then works hand in hand with a lot of other dhs elements so yeah i think there's a very real possibility that it creates a different problem i i do this is maybe more of an emotional position but i do feel like there needs to be a if not maritime seat at least a naval seat in the cabinet i think that would be

a an effective adjustment or maybe a a first step uh putting you know the secretary of the navy back um as the cabinet level position i think there was a question earlier from um adrian about Goldwater-Nichols. He mentioned Stephen T. Will's book, Strategy Shelf, Collapse of Coldwater Naval Strategic Planning, argues that Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the Gulf War created a political environment where the Navy was pressed to shift to supporting land forces in regional conflicts. Can we address federalization of maritime strategy without fixing that? I would say no. I think it'd be very difficult. I think we'll always be fighting this rule of thirds inside the Department of defense, I think it would be very difficult to align all the other maritime functions as long

as the Navy also remains kind of a lesser actor. So I guess this would really require kind of a national conversation and probably an administration that we're big believers in America as a sea power to make this happen. And I don't know exactly how we get there. Jimmy, any thoughts? i completely agree the maritime department idea is not a panacea it's a really i mean i believe in it i think it could work and obviously not anytime soon and i and i not without reform on goldwater nickels so i i think it's more important to get the conversation started and to get people understanding how important this problem is how important the the sea is to

our way of life and this is just one way to do that i would think that uh and i do i do envision that the united states navy would be moved under this department and then if and then follow a similar model that the coast guard follows where in times of war or you know in direct support of overseas contingency operations or however we want to do it because we don't you know it's been a long time since Congress has declared war and we kind of, we operate a little differently, but however we wanted to do it, that the Navy would be in the maritime department and then shift it over to the department of defense for discrete time periods for specific functions or portions of the Navy, of a fleet or a task group. I think there are smart ways that you

could do it, but otherwise the Navy would be under this maritime department. And honestly, I would think the number one supporter of that idea would be the U.S. Navy, because they would be free of the one third, one third, one third tyranny of budget allocation. And they would they would potentially see an increase in funding for shipbuilding or whatever priorities that the secretary deemed most important. and things that we're just not, we're simply not going to be able to achieve under DOD while we compete with Army and Air Force and Space Force for budget dollars. That's interesting. I mean, I question whether or not moving the Navy outside of the Department of Defense would really mean that it would get more money. I don't think any other agency would feel that way, but possibly. But both of you touched on Goldwater-Nichols, and as Blake

mentioned, it was one of the questions that came up, and I'm genuinely puzzled and interested. So this argument that, you know, Goldwater-Nichols drives a joint force, and as the joint forces have developed, the Navy has been seen as a supporter of wars ashore. And so now I hear both of you mentioned, and definitely Hadrian in his comments talks about the idea that that is tied directly to the nature of the legislation. So I want to ask if you guys think that, and if so, you could tell me a little more why it's tied to the legislation. Because my assumption, perhaps falsely, is that it's not so much the legislation, but it's the strategic place that the United States was from the end of the Cold War until the last five to 10 years, where our primary focus strategically

was on land wars and was on land conflicts. And so that if the strategic view of what the highest priorities in the United States government were to shift to be a maritime focused domain, then although it was probably be stuck with a one-third, one-third, one-third, then the Army and the Air Force could become supporting elements of the Navy. And it's not so much a matter of the legislation, but the national priority. So I don't know. I'm here to learn.

So to hand it back to you, Blake. Can you talk us through that question? You bet. Thanks, John. I think that's a valid critique of the position, but I guess my take on the Goldwater-Nichols dilution of American sea power is that it's kind of exactly your point, but maybe flipped on its head is, yeah, exactly, but in any alignment, we are still debating dollars and cents with other services.

We're still debating requirements with other services. As opposed to, I think, on a grander strategic standpoint, yes, we could have some land-focused strategic objectives in whatever next landlocked country we decide to have an adventure in. But pushing the Navy out of the cabinet, I think, allows us to go too far over too much rudder and abandon some of these things that a maritime power should not. You know, OK, you want to fight wars in the Middle East for the next 20 years. OK, but you still need to maintain a vibrant and strong merchant marine. You still need to build ships that are modern and large and capable of executing the commercial mission of the United States. You can't forget those things just because you want to fight in Afghanistan for 20 years. And I think that's what Goldwater-Nichols has allowed us to do. And we've taken full advantage of it, unfortunately, to do the wrong thing and let all these capabilities atrophy, which should not have been affected by national military priority. You know, I'm a I'm a firm believer, as many know, and many in the army rue that, you know, we should cut the army pretty heavily on a regular basis. And that's partly just going to a bad person and partly because I believe that as a maritime power with allies north and south protected by two oceans, we are a country that must have a strong navy at all times. We don't always need a very large army. We don't always need, you know, an enormous air force.

I like the Air Force, but we don't need an enormous standing army. And yes, it's not 1900. You can't press a million people into service and hand them a rifle and send them over the trenches. It's not that military anymore, but it is a force that you can generate a bit faster than you can build ships. And if you want to be a maritime power, you have to build ships and you have to keep ships and you have to keep them going. And you can't let them be 40 years old, 50 years old. All right, Jimmy, your answer? Is it the legislation or is it the national priority?

You know, I'm not sure. I do think that the point that Blake made of having some sort of naval voice in the cabinet is really important. Having one voice that advocates for these priorities is critical. You know, I think one of the things that Goldwater Nichols did was establish the combatant commands that we have. And the Navy is not just subject to the budget debate with the other services under DOD, but it's also subject to the demands of the combatant commanders. And the way that we have our national defense strategy, it lists threats that we face. And what it's basically become is sort of a marketplace for resources apportionment among the combatant commands. The geographic combatant commands like INDOPACOM or UCOM or CENTCOM will say, well, these, you know, the number one threat in the NDS is in my AOR, so therefore I need these things.

And then other COCOMs will say, but I've got the numbers three and four threats in my AOR, my area of responsibility. And they argue for resources, and those come from the services and the Navy. And we're pulled apart trying to support all of these global resource demands driven by threats, and we're not able to support our mission, the Navy's mission that exceeds national defense, that goes beyond just countering these threats in these overseas AORs. So we don't even get to the part where we can talk about supporting our global economy, for example. Okay, so we are thinking globally here. So I wanted to bring in a non-American perspective to maybe take us a little bit comparative. One of my colleagues here at RSIS, Mark Su, had a question. Mark, you want to come on mic? uh yeah that's what john says i'm doing a master's in rsis right now under strategic studies and my question is for american-based maritime strategy how much thinking does it take to account for the u.s to work together with other nations who have interest in the indo-pacific like japan

south korea australia or maybe some parts of southeast asia i say this because i know canada as being a late player in the Pacific game. As far as I know, the prime minister does raise support for like FYP, but we don't have an Indo-Pacific strategy. So I would like to know, I guess, how much collaboration would there be? That's all. Thanks. We'll keep going in the same order, Blake. Yeah, thanks for your question, Mark.

I put something in the chat there, but I'll say it for the group as well. I agree. I am a strong proponent of working together with our allies and partners whenever and wherever we can, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. However, I think a national strategy has to take a fairly selfish look at American power and American capability, because with very, very few exceptions, we're going to have to think about how the United States gets ships, how the United States keeps its economy afloat. And that obviously means trading with our partners and allies but i think what we're seeing at least in my opinion what we're seeing now in 2022 is a maybe a reversion to the mean wherein um you know the the world of the thousand

ship navy that jimmy brought up in 2007 wherein well hey we don't need to build all these ships because we got all these partners has not actually worked out the way that we thought it would uh and our navy has gotten too small our merchant marine has gotten too small and we don't have the ability to do these things for ourself. And when it comes down to it, you know, if it's an allies and partners approach to your economy and Canada needs that ship

more than we do and they own it, guess who's going to use it? They are. So we, you know, I think in the end, a lot of strategic documents are fairly selfish. Yes, they're going to look into, you know, we're going to include

and consider allies and partners and we're not going to trample over their objectives and their strategic initiatives. But at the same time, we very much have to consider in a national strategy, it's, you know, U.S. national priorities above all, because it is fundamentally an American strategy. Jimmy?

No, it's great, great points and great question. You know, something that came to mind was the new national security strategy. One of the things heartening is that it opens up the space for cooperation with partners, and that it talks about two different kinds of partners, one being allies or democracies, people that we are aligned with based on values, the traditional partnerships that we might think of. But then it also talks about another category, which is just basically any country that is willing to work with us toward global common interests or mutual national security interests, for example, combating climate change that's just one example but uh illegal fishing would be another where it doesn't

have to be a democracy or somebody that we are aligned with based on values it could be uh one of our so-called adversaries or competitors like china russia iran that that we could we could partner with anybody toward a global toward common interests and i think that that's helpful um and and we we can we can use that to really make progress uh on some of our our maritime interests And then the other thing I would I would say is that my in my line of work, I work at the United States Central Command. And, you know, one of the things that is a core tenet of our theater strategy is partnerships. And it's because we want to support the national defense strategy, which has a clear tilt toward the Pacific. And that's not it's not new. It's something that's been progressing for many years now.

But what we're what we're trying to do is focus on our partnerships within our region so that we can extract the United States from the center of these partnerships and allow our partners to work together so that we are not drawn in further into a land war in the Middle East, for example, that would take away from the priorities of the national defense strategy. So I completely agree with Blake that, you know, we need to be somewhat selfish when it comes to our economic interests, but there are, there's a lot of common ground and we can, we can really capitalize on our partnerships to, to get there. Blake, was that a hand up? Two finger intervention? Yeah, just, just one quick one. And I did want to caveat my remarks with particularly to Mark that in that national strategy, of course, like Jimmy mentioned, I would expect there to be a carve out where we explicitly say, you know, we're going to execute this in cooperation with our allies and partners. But Mark, in the way that we would normally execute something like a national strategy, it would fall down to like what Jimmy was saying, like a theater plan for how we do that exactly. And that's, yeah, of course, the people who are, you know, working in the Indo-Pacific or working in the Middle East are going to think more granularly about how these things are done with our partners and in cooperation with them, as opposed, you know, a national strategy isn't necessarily going to go down to the line item and like, here's how we're going to do this with, you know, Japan, here's how we're going to do it, X, Y, and Z.

Like they'll get a mention, you know, if you just if you saw with the national security strategy, you know, a few allies and partners get a glancing mention in the strategy. But in those more detailed plans, those things are fleshed out further, not in a national strategy. Yeah, so I think that shortfalling of the national strategy kind of brings me to my last question, and I want to apologize to everybody who's asked questions in the chat I haven't gone to. And there's been a really vibrant discussion, but it's a maritime hour and we're already one minute over. So I'm going to ask a final question and we're going to wrap it up. So in your discussions, both of you talk about the problem with the reason we don't have a real maritime strategy was a lack of comprehensiveness and involvement of all partners. You were less explicit, although both of you mentioned in various different ways, the lack of resource prioritization. Meaning, you know, the point of a strategy is not just to lay out the ideal state or the goal,

but it should be to marshal resources and make hard decisions where necessary to get to the end. And the conversations we've had so far have focused on undervaluing or under-resourcing the Navy. So I don't want you to talk about that. I want you to talk about the under-resourcing that's been alluded to all the other maritime sectors. Now, I think for the most part, this has happened because of the American free enterprise system. The American industry has moved out of building ships because they can be built elsewhere more cheaply. It's moved out of owning ships because it finds that it can rent them or lease them or rent space on them more cheaply. So if that's the case, are you recommending a market intervention on strategic grounds?

and exactly what that would, I mean, I don't want to be too exact, but what does that look like? Is that an incentive? Is that tariffs? Is that funding and subsidies? What are we thinking here? How are we going to pick up the rest of the U.S. maritime sector? Blake? Sure. Super quickly. I think there's room for maybe some thoughtful Jones Act reform. Certainly I'm not an advocate of scrapping it, but I think there's a way maybe to include this as part of Jones Act or a reform of the Jones Act, which I do believe holds an important strategic purpose in the American maritime space. But I think we do need to incentivize our domestic shipbuilding industry to reconstitute itself. We have to make that affordable. We have to help train workers.

And we have to, you know, there's no reason the United States can't be a powerful nation of shipbuilding and shipowning. I mean, look at Greece. I mean, for God's sake, there's 100 greek ship owners that own a million tons or more and it's greece the united states can do this we just need to create the space for enterprise to do that and incentivize them i think there will be some subsidy you know there there probably will be some sort of terrorist regime whether you know i'm not i'm not a trade expert but i would imagine that there would be some sort of advantage given to american shipping beyond the jones act so yeah i would i'd advocate for of federal intervention into that space. Okay. And for all the listeners that are

hearing mention of these different countries, yes, what Jimmy said earlier, the United States owns less than 1% of the world's merchant shipping by tonnage. That's entirely true. It's also true that the United States is number four in terms of ownership by value. And what Blake was just talking about is Greece is ahead of the United States in terms of both value and tonnage putting itself in third place, generally speaking, depending on how you're counting the numbers. Jimmy, answer your question about how do you get involved with the market and rebuild the commercial sector? That is a, John, that's a fantastic question that I don't think I'm going to be able to answer. Number one, because I spent my entire career in the Navy

and focused on naval operations. And I bring that up to say that I don't think that anybody in the Navy, I don't think the U.S. Navy is the right organization to answer that question, which I think is the right question. The strategic vulnerability of allowing ourselves to depend on a logistics network that is owned and operated by our competitor cannot be understated. And we are going to suffer the consequences if we continue down that road in a conflict, which is not a given. I just think that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we continue without some sort of reform or intervention.

And so that's why I think that there's got to be some voice that speaks, some voice that is not a U.S. naval officer retired flag officer somebody who can create an organization that speaks for all of our maritime interests and can can demonstrate the vulnerabilities that we have and then start to create a roadmap toward alleviating some of that and i i you know you mentioned the jones act like and i'm not going to touch it but uh there are some i think there are some common sense steps that could be taken. I just think we've got to find the people and the organization that can start to do that for us. Yeah, Jimmy, I think that's a very powerful point. I mean, you reiterated several times about an organization, and I don't disagree with you,

but I think what you've just come up with in this last statement may be even more illuminating or may be a more unique, interesting observation. And that is that the United States has very few, even for a country of its size and being a maritime nation, the United States, in my experience, has very few truly maritime thinkers. We have a lot of naval thinkers. We have a lot of people that make a lot of money in the insurance industry and the shipping industry, but there's not very enough cross-pollinization. You know, if I look around and I see the chat, I mean, I think most of those people that understand that and are striving to cross through those silos, many of them are here. So I want to thank CIMSEC for being one of the glues in the organizations that sort

of pulls those folks together. I think it's still pretty Navy-centric, but at least it's making an effort, just like YCAPS is trying to do on a regional basis. And I wonder if as much as anything, as much as an organization that would capstone this, one of the reforms that we might look for is to promote maritime education, to develop maritime schools, which are not inside other universities and small and niche, or maybe aren't called maritime, but are really just training, one or two particular specialties, but real maritime colleges and education, both at the university and the secondary level. But now I'm taking the soapbox. So I'm going to hand it to both of you, just in case you had something you wanted to close off with.

Please make a brief, just so we can all fit it onto the podcast. Blake and then Jimmy. Nothing else from me. Just a quick thank you. Thank you to John and to YCAPS and to SimSec. And thanks to Jimmy for, as always, bringing his A-game and teaching me a lot of new things. The final word is yours, Jimmy. I'll just say that I am honored to be included in this conversation. It's extremely valuable. The work that you are doing at YCAPS and the work that SimSec continues to do, it's great. And keep pressing on.

Thank you. Okay, all. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next month. preview already. The next talk is going to be about what Quad Coast Guards could do cooperatively together to advance the free and open Indo-Pacific. It'll be two events, each one focusing an expert on two of the Quad members. So see you then. So help me for wine, put it in the alley.

Way, hey, put it in the alley. Help me for wine, put it in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now. A porter of, and a porter of gin, oh. Way, hey, put it in the alley. A porter of wine, of white and red, oh. Put it on the shimbo now. Oh, help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts.

Why are they bullying the addicts? Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts. Bullying addicts, you know now.