Sea Control - Sea Control 451 - The Philippine Pact with Dr. Claude Berube

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

Links1. The Philippine Pact, by Claude Berube, Milford House, 2023.2. "The Maritime Story Missing in 'Civilian Warriors,'" by Claude Berube, CIMSEC, December 17, 2013. 

Hey everyone, it's Jared. Our old friend Dr. Claude Baraby is back today to discuss his latest entry in the Connor Stark series, The Philippine Pact. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarby. We are rapidly approaching our 300th episode since relaunch. I think it'll actually be the episode that you hear after this one. To celebrate, we're going to attempt a bit of a mailbag, so if you have a question about the podcast that you'd like me to answer on the air, please send it to seacontrol at simsec.org. 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 our website 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 pile 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. Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is our old friend, Dr. Claude Baraby, and we're going to discuss his latest book in the Connor Stark series, The Philippine Pack. So, Claude, welcome back. Could you refresh the listeners on your background,

please. Thanks for having me back, Chair. It's good to talk with you. I am a historian, author, novelist. I have worked in the U.S. Senate for a couple of senators, worked on political campaigns, worked as a contractor in the 90s for Naval Sea Systems Command and Office of Naval Research, later worked for Office of Naval Intelligence, now retired commander in the Navy Reserve. And I still teach at the Naval Academy and I'm director of the museum there. And I've been there off and on for 18 years, off and on, depending on if I had a mobilization to Gitmo and such. So yeah, that's the summation of my career. Welcome back again, Claude. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which

we might be otherwise associated. So Claude, I was reading earlier this year, Uncommon Courage, Yachtsman Volunteers, World War II, and Ian Fleming makes an appearance in there, as we're talking about sort of these Royal Navy auxiliaries who mobilized in the course of the Second World War. And part of what it's talking about there with Fleming is how James Bond is really, you know, what he envisions is like his wish casting that he was James Bond.

Is that who Conor Stark is and what he's based on for you? Is that like, do you wish you were, it's like, man, you know, if I could go back and do it all again, this is what I would lay out for myself. No, no, not at all. I don't think so. I originally, as I envisioned Conor Stark ages ago, long before even my first novel that was published, because I wrote an unpublished work 25 years ago, I wanted to see a character who, not like a Jack Ryan or James Bond, I wanted to see somebody who was flawed, who makes a career decision and his life goes in a very different way.

And the character of John Stark enabled me to look at issues from a maritime perspective that were on sort of the low end of things. They weren't these big naval conflicts. It was these little places that could spark something greater or low end wars or irregular warfare, if you will. So, no, I don't think I would wish myself in that character. But that raises a really good point, because with authors, you're often asked this. And I would say I'm a little bit of every character only because you, as a novelist, you have to insert yourself into the mind and actions of each of the characters. So when I'm writing, whether, you know, the female ambassador, now National Security Advisor CJ Sumner, I have a character, two pager about her that I wrote ages ago, and I figure out, what would she do in this case? So I think the characters, yeah, are part of me only because I'm trying to create them, not because I'd like to insert myself. Although, to be honest, he does command the really cool ship that I wish we would have had continued in the United States Navy.

So in that regard, yeah, I think I'd like to be Stark. But other than that, I'm good. All right. That was an elaborate trap to try to get you to say that what you really had aspired to all your life was the noblest profession of all, which is surplus warfare officer. But you artfully avoided it. Well done, Claude. Can you tell us a little bit about his ship, though? Sorry, go ahead. You had something else. No, you know what? You got me. Yeah, actually, when, so this goes back like 30 years when we were doing the drawdown and I was at a Boston recruiter's office for the Navy. And yeah, I was looking at being a SWO long before I became a reserve intel officer. And at that time, because of the drawdown, the recruiter said, yeah, we can get you through OCS in about a year and a half to two years because of all the backlog. So yeah, there was a case where it could have been a soil. My closest was that I was, as the intel officer on the Bunker Hill, I believe I'm the only Navy Reserve intel officer to have qualified as an OOD underway of a major surface combat, and so I'm pretty proud of that. But in the novel, Stark had commanded, and now he brings back with his company, his private security company, FSF-1 Seafighter, and he renames it Siren, so that's why the second book is called Siren Song. I interviewed the first captain of that ship. Brandon was, I think, lieutenant commander at the time, but it's a really unique ship.

It was designed and built by the Office of Naval Research, not by Naval Sea Systems Command. uh high speed you know swath had like 12 12 places for modules you had you could put two ribs aboard and no heat helos but it had a big flat helo deck and the the admiral of onr who i interviewed about the ship admiral jay cone uh even then was thinking about drones 20 plus years ago so uh that's i i just always was fascinated by the ship so i spent a lot of time studying it talking to the people who operated it. So there are things in the novel, the second and third novels, at least,

about that ship that come from these interviews. So is Seat Fighter a prototype, if you will? And I'm asking purely out of historical curiosity here for what was originally, quote unquote, Street Fighter, which was supposed to, whether then transformed into LCS long-term, or was this something completely separate? And this was pretty separate from that.

Jay Cohn designed and built this, I want to say within about 18 or 24 months at a cost roughly, and I know somebody's going to correct me. I think it was somewhere about 100 mil. And the subsequent ships would have been about 70 to 80 million per copy. I'm pretty sure on that. And he was just looking at it. It was a prototype and it was pitched. And at one point, they were thinking of deploying it to the Persian Gulf. I want to say it was right before 9-11. And then Navy did a shift. Now, Navy didn't really approve this because it wasn't designed or built by them in terms of NAVSEA. And at one point, Jay said, okay, well, if you're not going to man this ship, then what I'm going to do is I'll go to the Coast Guard, Coast Guard's expressed interest.

And I think that would have, you know, there have been a lot of questions raised about that. But I think that there were a lot of benefits to Seafighter that would have been interesting to explore. And it's still down in Florida. I think they still use it as a test bed. So you kind of mentioned this when we talked about the character piece here. For those of us who know you or like interact with you and your Twitter feed, there's a lot of things in here that are on like Claude's greatest hits list here. So like the privatized maritime security companies, I think you've come on. I think you talked with Walker Mills actually about the work that you had done previously. It wasn't Blackwater. Who am I thinking of? Sea Shepherd. I think you discussed that with Walker. so these privatized maritime security companies which like i know sea shepherd doesn't necessarily fit neatly into that but that's one of these things that appears throughout the novels here your hatred of ac lcs shows through pretty frequently here it's like it's it's like how

how much are you using uh you know sort of your own stuff to come through your characters here to get your points across or do those just come out naturally it's like no i believe these things These characters believe all these things, too. That's a really complex question. I'm sorry. I was surprised you didn't have the characters eating crickets at some point, too. It's like the other things that I think about when I think of your Twitter feed. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, that'll be the next novel. No, what I wanted to do with these novels initially is explore a maritime challenge in each book. I wanted to discuss the growth and influence of China's Navy, and I wanted to explore it through the eyes of this private maritime security company. So part of it was I wanted to educate a broader audience, and the way I've explained it before is, like with the Naval Academy Museum's NavyCon that we did first in 2017, think about it this way. The general public has seen Star Wars, they've seen Babylon 5, they've seen Star Trek. They understand navies without knowing they understand navies. So what we try to do with the NavyCon series is bring in navy experts to show, hey, this is what happens in these shows, and this is why, and this is what the navy does. I try to do that with the novels, too.

I want a broader public that may not be familiar with the Navy or naval operations to at least understand what the maritime issues are and to learn a bit about geography or about these private security companies. And, yeah, Blackwater was the first one that I was thinking of. I had interviewed Eric Prince, and then I – actually, if you go on a SimSec site and type in, you know, my last name, Bearby, and Blackwater, and Eric Prince, you're going to see the interview I did with him on his ship, the MacArthur. And that was on – let's see, it was the day – it was the inauguration of Barack Obama. I went down there. So it really is about bringing out these issues. Yeah. And it also comes down to people, too. And it's people like you saying, hey, wait a minute. Yeah, you can see this. I could see it. Actually, when I saw one of the LCSs came down to get me while I was there, so I got a tour around with the XO. But it takes smart people. And you know what? We have smart people. We have creative people in the Navy. and it just they just need to be wind them up let them go let them go and do what what the navy has

always done is innovate when we really need to and right now we really need to so so long as we we support those individuals those jo's those mid-grade officers as senior grade officers who want to actually do it right let them go what now go ahead that that sorry that that said in in the in the novels i have an example where it's a leader who doesn't do those things who doesn't encourage his junior officers or mid-grade officers and does just the opposite and he appeared he's appeared now in every novel and he'll continue yeah we'll uh we'll get to him that's he's kind of on my last list of uh things to talk about here but um what fiction writers inspire you inspire your work

the so this goes back 30 years um you're too young to remember the spencer for hire tv series with robert yorick it was a he's a boston detective boston pi and it was based on a book series by robert b parker and i love the spencer series if you if you wanted to take something on the plane that was one of them and the way the characters spencer and hawk and susan interacted they're the ones who influenced this triad that i have with stark the diplomatic security agent damian gonzari and ambassador cj sumner and how she interacts with them etc so that was one another one was bill granger's book series the november man series uh 30 years ago that also really struck me in in terms of developing characters i really like the william f buckley jr spy novels people

don't recognize that the guy who who founded the national review wrote this spy novel series and they were fun to read so those are those are some of the influences on my writing and they're not always the you know i write geopolitical thrillers and on my fiction hat but i also you know read a lot of naval history too just because of my job and because i also write naval history books yeah can you tell us a little bit more about your writing process as far as like do you sort of block out do you know how the book is going to end when you start and do you storyboard everything or you just kind of like hey let me get one chapter down here and then what do i think is going to happen next i didn't do that with this book the first two books i knew

how they would end and in both cases i knew of situations that i wanted to bring out from naval history that would influence what Stark does Stark and his team do with regard to naval tactics and it's it's pretty clear and I spell it out in both of those books in this book I just started I I had no idea what it was going to get and all I knew is I wanted Stark and his team on an island training another country's navy uh in terms of just some small exercise that they're paid to do and they get into trouble immediately and from there i just i just it just kind of spilled out this time i had just finished working for uh congresswoman and i i just took time off and went up north and wrote as much as i could and it just it spilled out in a way that

the other books hadn't and then i obviously i always take notes i always have moleskin notebooks with me and that's for both my fiction and non-fiction work so if I'm traveling somewhere I'll take notes everything like when I was in Paris uh several years ago I took notes I went I just walked around Paris and took notes and so a lot of those things you see like when Damien Golzari in his subplot he's mostly in Paris in this book I've been to those places uh you know near Notre Dame and where Golzari's apartment would be so I think that tries to lend a little bit of realism. So again, when he pops over to the Azores, you see, I at least could envision this place as I'm writing this. Yeah, I was going to ask if your process was affected all this time,

because I know when you were writing this, you were at a little bit more of a transition career-wise than probably your previous ones, where I think you've been kind of ensconced at the Naval Academy as you wrote those previous books here, where you were between a couple of different things here and this is probably closing it at the point where you were retiring as well closing into retiring as a as a navy reservist yeah so you know sometimes yeah i get to go into stark's mind because he's he's maybe he's roughly my age but there are certain things you go through in your in your 40s or your 50s uh with regard to the careers that you can start asking yourself about or reflecting on and i i try to bring those in and some of the challenges that that those

characters go through as well all right hang on because like as i read you said he's your age and i think you just told me what your age was before we got on here and like as i was reading it i was reading it was like stark is probably close to my age based on like where it would have been you and i have a slight like there's about a generation's gap in between us i think so i was just wondering if you know when i wrote the first i think because when i wrote the first book he had he's a uh a former olympian not a not a great he got the bronze medal for for the pentathlon and i think it was the 88 or 92 olympics i think it may be the 92 olympics and so i think because I placed it there. However, getting back to Robert B. Parker's series, you have to start

it somewhere. So when I start writing the series, I know he's been out of the Navy for about 10 or 15 years. And that's where you start. I mean, if you were to read a Robert B. Parker book on Spencer today, God, in reality, he'd be in his 80s doing this stuff. So yeah, I think one of the problems with writing a series over a long period of time is you know character's age you're not like bart simpson who's you know been you know 10 years old for the past 30 years right but who also exists in like a fictional world whereas yours is all set kind of in the real world dealing with real world problems um i just thought it was interesting it's like you having said that just changed uh several things for me as i read through because he has a very sort of

paternalistic relationship with some of his subordinates. And it makes much more sense if he's mid-50s versus if he's 40s. I'm going to generously call myself young 40s now. Are you trying to convince someone of the value of privatized maritime security and the value of some of these systems as well as you're writing this too? Or is it just, hey, I've come across systems and i want to talk about them to show if there's one thing that i'm describing what i try to do at simsec it's expose people who particularly naval officers who work in the maritime realm is like there are all these other parts of the maritime realm that you never get introduced to unless you actively go out and find them and i feel like that's a little bit of what

you're doing here when you discuss what some of these privatized maritime security companies do and then what some of these systems do that if we don't lay hands on them because they didn't get developed by NAVSEA, ONR, whoever, we may not know that they exist or if we're seeing them in an intel briefing? I think it's part education, but also they help the storytelling. In the case of private security companies, yeah, I have advocated for them in the past if they adhere to three things. They're incorporated into the Navy system somehow or in our laws if we can coordinate their activities and if they're regulated. I don't mean to say that private security companies should be the first line in terms of warfare. I think they can be used on low-level operations,

Somali piracy, for example. The Navy could, the United States or others, could have done what companies did. Companies actually hired ships and private navies emerged out of those, and they've since fallen away so you can you can contract out for certain work maybe there's a way to do it for illegal fishing as sea shepherd is done now they they work they have moas with a number of african countries uh i have i'm part of an international study team on sea shepherd and two of our folks were just out in benin and gabon the past year in in studying how they do these things so if we can release the navy from these low-end missions assigning a coordinated and monitored firm or firms i think there's a way to do it that way it frees up our ships for what they really

need to do in the big fight now that we're the second largest navy in the world and i think that's the same thing with systems i want to expose the broader public to some of the capabilities In fact, the DP-14, which is one of the drones, the larger drone that I mentioned in the Philippine pact, you see it doing some things. I had it doing something that the CEO of that firm never envisioned. So I was talking to him about that this week when I was up in Philly, and we were laughing about it. He says, oh, wow, you know what? Yeah, we actually really could do that. We just modify it this way, and yeah, we could do it.

So, in that regard, I think it's important, you know, I'm not just writing for Navy, Coast Guard officers, other military, I want a broader public. And I think it's really neat when I get emails or something or direct messages on Twitter from readers that I've never met before. So, hey, I was really curious, you talked about this, I didn't, you know, had no idea about the Navy or what you guys do, but does this, could this occur? How do you, how do you do that? And that's what I want to see. I want to see more interaction from the general public because, you know, in the end, it's Congress and Congress responding to the general public and their constituents who will drive the Navy and fund it. now there are a couple different quote-unquote villains here uh the first being you know those contriving driving the chinese plot the second is stark's russian counterpart although i think the role he plays is yes he is on the quote-unquote villain side of the plot i'm not

necessarily certain that he is a villain based on some of the thoughts that you haven't expressed or at least you've written sort of things in there that make you seem more sympathetic than your standard villain the real one is kind of the quote-unquote evil flag officer here is theoretically on the stark side of his obviously kind of a martinet so his vice admiral rossberg is he based on a real person or he's composite of people that you work for here or just you know basically put there as sort of an obstacle or to be in stark and his the folks on his side's way to give them something else to overcome that's a really good question so let's start with a villain is a villain isn't always you know james bond's dr no who's like pure evil

uh you know a couple of my novels yeah they've been really bad characters but in some cases a villain can be somebody who is a lot like you and either they've been put in in position to do something bad or they just resorted to some situation they're going to do in the case of makarov who's the russian mercenary uh he is russian version of connor stark who was in the russian navy russian navy becomes a mercenary but he he goes for hire for things and he doesn't at this point he doesn't care who's paying him and for what and you learn in the book what he's what he's part of so he does things that Stark wouldn't do but otherwise he could be a very sympathetic character I'm trying to make the character of Mr. Hu the Chinese businessman a

little more more understandable as we get more into his personal life but with regard to Admiral Rosberg so that started off and I point this out in my first novel in the acknowledgements the the finest officer and individual perhaps that i've ever known retired captain daryl hancock slow turned intel officer and i worked for daryl twice once at jack molesworth in england and then we went to sea together and what i did is i took all of his traits that i admired and i inverted them so Rosberg becomes the counter Hancock if you will

and Rosberg is not named as the captain of the USS Bennington in the first book I never mentioned his name purposely but yeah he is somebody that I have taken Daryl's characteristics however what I've realized

over time is that I actually see him more as a CO I had in the reserves several years ago many years ago now and somebody who never went to see and kind of took it out on you if you if you went to see which i did and i just envision him now so it's it's become less the anti-hancock and now the more that this other guy uh and i think that's okay and so now that you can picture somebody you can then write about them. Damian Golzari is probably a combination of two people that I've come across

in my career and enhanced. I mean, I don't know anybody who's a gauge of medic security agent. There's a lot going on with Damian, but there are things, you know, whether if you're an immigrant and what that does to you and how, what the challenges are, especially 9-11, if you were an immigrant from an Arab nation but was an American citizen and serving in the military I wanted to bring those issues out so that's how those some of those characters develop sometimes they care I just write down some character traits and hit it sometimes it says it might be seeing that individual that future swore on on the bridge of the ship or boat and saying okay i've got it now uh bobby fisk is another one bobby fisk is is somebody i think about because he's uh

he's sort of based not sort of based image wise when i write on one of the jo's on the bunker hill that i was on and i in fact i recently told him that and we had a really good chuckle but so that that i try to do that in the books just because it helps you read them help helps you right excuse me and it's not unheard of i know a guy who's a writer in dc he's done really well and whenever he's stuck for a character he gets on the dc metro and just stays on there for eight hours he just observes people behaving what are they doing are they looking up are they looking down and he'll get characters as a result of that but you're bringing up the ship's name reminded me of like your your last hobby horse i wanted to catch there i forgot to put in when i

was riding there which is like bringing up the uss charles as charles stewart repeatedly have you made any progress on uh convincing one of our congress people to advocate for uss charles stewart this will be my final question i have not been successful uh so charles stewart was the subject of my very first book it was a biography he served in the navy from 1798 to 1860 uh probably commanded more ships and future commodores and admirals in the 19th century than anybody else i i wrote a piece a blog ages ago called where is charles stewart a uss charles stewart there hasn't been a uss charles stewart since the since world war ii i think there's only been two or three ships named after him uh so not successful so you know maybe

The if lightning strikes and I become sick now, that's that's going to be my first job is to name a new ship after Charles Stewart. Well, I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Claude Barabee. Claude, where can we find you online? What are you working on next? Are you going to try to option some of these and get a television show going, a Netflix series? There I was actually working with a producer and screenwriter a few years ago, and they pitched it to Hollywood. and it came down to two things and then the other one got picked up because they said yours would be too much to to to produce uh the let's see you can find me on twitter at cg bear b cgb e r u b e uh and currently i'm i've just finished researching uh rickover and i'm going to be coming out with a

new book on him that's a little different it's not quite a biography it's certainly not fiction this is going to be truly Rick over in his own words I went through more than 200 archival boxes that were donated to the museum and it's going to show Rick over in a very different light it'll certainly confirm things that we already knew about him but the breadth of personal papers and transcripts

is astounding and I'm bringing those out alright I'm going to be waiting with bated breath for that one There's a lot of Rickover opinions out there, particularly centering around his leadership style. So I'm going to be extremely interested to see what you uncovered and what you're going to share with us. But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Thanks a lot. There I met with great Ciali, Poligliani Cimbalau. So help me, Boban, Poligliani, way, hey, Poligliani. Help me, Boban, Poligliani, Poligliani Cimbalau. A bottle of rum and a bottle of gin, oh, way, hey, Poligliani. © transcript Emily Beynon