Sea Control - Sea Control 474 - AUKUS, Naval Procurement & Grand Strategy with Dr. Jonathan Caverley

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Link:"AUKUS: When naval procurement drives grand strategy," by Dr. Jonathan Caverley, International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, September 2023. 

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Dr. Ed Salo is your host today. He's joined by the U.S. Naval War College's Dr. Jonathan Caverly to discuss AUKUS and how naval procurement can shape grand strategy. This episode was edited and produced by Brian Kurukula-Soria. Here at CIMSEC, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out CIMSEC.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. Our latest call for submissions is for the annual fiction contest. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. 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 pot of our 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. Welcome to Sea Control. My name is Dr. Edward Salo, and our guest today is Dr. Jonathan D. Caverly, who will talk about his recent essay in the international journal, AUKUS, When Naval Procurement Sets Grand Strategy. Dr. Caverly is a professor of strategy in the Strategic and Operational Research Department of the Naval War College's Center for Naval Warfare Studies and a research affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the inaugural director of the Bernard Brody Strategy Group.

He is also a former assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, where he founded and co-chaired the working group on security studies at the Roberta Buffett Center. He has previously served eight years as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy and as Assistant Professor of Naval Science at Northwestern University. Welcome to Sea Control. Thanks, Ed. I'm really excited to be here. Well, first question is, can you tell us a little about your career and background? I know I just gave your brief bio, but anything else you want to add? Yeah, you gave the CV pretty good. Well, I guess I joined the Navy after college and

I convinced the extremely skeptical Naval Reactors Admiral that I should be on a submarine, despite having just appalling math and physics grades. And that would have been in the mid to late 1990s. And then I was a ROTC instructor, Naval ROTC instructor, when 9-11, the Iraq invasion happened. And I decided to pursue the PhD to think about what was going on in the world, given those experiences. So really, a lot of what we're going to talk about today wouldn't exist if I didn't have those two kind of formative experiences. At the Naval War College, I'm at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, which is famously the home of Navy Wargaming, which has a very august reputation as a historian like yourself knows. And I do a

a given amount of applied research, particularly working on the future of the fleet. And if you had told me when I resigned my commission or defended my dissertation, I'd be working for the Navy again, I think I would have given you a very rude response. But I do feel these experiences that I just talked about have given me a series of perspectives that have made this paper possible. And I would not have written this a few years ago. And just to give you more context, and then we'll go to the meat of it. It wasn't until I got to the fleet that I thought about being a professional nerd as a vocation. And that's because being on a submarine in the Pacific during the late 1990s was really fun. And the reason for that is because ironically, it was during the post-Cold War

drawdown. And so submarines in particular were open to being questioned because they're very expensive in a way that they never were during the 1980s. So the silent service started getting pretty loud. This was the era when blind man's bluff, which was all about Cold War, highly classified submarine operations came out. And so the submarine force did a lot of cool things that might have been a little more risk acceptance than we were used to doing. And that really made me think about why democracies invest in their national security when they decide to devote resources to defense. And the one thing I learned, and again, this is no surprise to you, is that the reason why democracies or any other country invests in

defense is almost never entirely about national security as you and I would understand it. But these decisions, whatever the causes behind it, have a tremendous effect on how security is pursued in the future. And so that's what I'm trying to talk about in this article is the decisions we made, not necessarily for strategic reasons, still have strategic effects going forward. So that takes me to, yeah, what made you want to explore a submarine deal with Australia? Well, first, that's just a cool topic. But there's three other kind of major reasons, I'd say. First, in my day job, like I said, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to build a fleet and how to operate the fleet that we have and are planning to build in the United States

as a designer and a participant of war games and exercises. Secondly, I've noticed that we have lots of experts in war games on what we call RED, which is the opponent. So we have lots of subject matter experts who speak the language, read all the strategic documents, and can really kind of channel what they think red would do. And then we have these other players, right, which we all refer to as green. And green could be Australia, it could be Taiwan, it could be Brunei. It's just everything is sort of green if you're not red or blue, the good guys are the bad guys. And we have almost no experts on green, even though the National Defense Strategy rightly assigns allies as being the fundamental comparative advantage that the United States has in a competition with

China or Russia. And so that's the second reason. The third reason is that I'm just fascinated by the enormous resources that democracies can dedicate to security. So a deal as big and important as AUKUS is like total harmonic convergence over what I care about. Totally agree. This was a really interesting subject. So you start the article by saying, quote, grand strategy should determine a nation's, excuse me, a state's foreign policy. But the unique political economy of naval procurement ensures that decisions about fleets determines a state's grand strategy for years after the face. Can you explain that to the listeners? So let me undermine my case a little bit by even officially a strategist with my job

title. I'm not always certain what grand strategy is. I'm actually very sympathetic. I don't think anyone is. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing. It can kind of be everything to anyone. And that's part of the problem, right? That's a very good point. There's an excellent book by Simon Reich and my colleague, Peter Nabrowski at the War College on whether grand strategy, particularly when it comes to maritime operations, is actually desirable. So when you think about grand strategy and it's the theory of grand strategy, it's supposed to be the high level idea of how a state should produce security for itself. And it has to come from on high from the wise men. And they're usually always men. And they marshal ends, ways and means. And

they come up with a theory of how to get security. And then that trickles down and it sets the tone for the rest of the foreign policy apparatus. And we know that doesn't really work that way. So we always say that the ships we buy should follow from the strategy, but it's just structurally hard to do, right? Because ships are uniquely expensive, they take forever to build, and then you're stuck with them for generations. All major defense projects, Joint Strike Fighter, the Stryker, M1 Abrams, you take it, you name it. They all have this tendency, right? They're very expensive. They take a long time. You're stuck with them. But it's really ships are kind of an order of magnitude more. The other way to put it, it just takes a lot of politics to build

a ship relative to buying even something as expensive as the joint strike fighter. So that's one reason why Naval Procurement might work differently vis-a-vis grand strategy than other tools in our toolbox. The second thing is that unlike a lot of other military instruments, you operate the fleet all the time, okay? So they are constantly at sea, whether you call it presence operations or diplomacy or deterrence, right? Where they operate is a manifestation of a state's foreign policy in a way that other things like airplanes or troop deployments, unless they're actually forward deployed as a tripwire, they don't exhibit the same qualities, right? You're not just saving them up for war as a deterrent, you're actually operating them. And so the

capabilities of a ship and the portfolio of investment you have really shape how you practice foreign policy day to day in a way that other military instruments, other aspects of military instrument don't have. Yes, that kind of went into what I was going to discuss next about the fleet being a true gauge of a nation's grand strategy, because it's such an investment. It's costly. It takes time to build. Hard to change when you're, takes so long, you kind of are stuck with it for a long time. And you bring up a good point in there, just the maintenance. You're always using them. Just basic using them wears them down so much. I was really shocked and probably shouldn't have been if I thought about it when you pointed out that most middle-sized

powers really have small navies, few ships. That made me think, do you think most nations now just rely on the U.S. for protection and means of navigation, other things, when before they may have wanted to do that themselves or be included? That's a really good question. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I would want to say that I think there are important exceptions. I think Japan and South Korea have pretty solid navies. They're quite capable and they are investing more and more in them. Canada and most European states seem pretty underinvested. But that, again, it doesn't seem that much different than how Canada and Europe treat its military writ large. And I also don't see that changing thanks to Ukraine, which obviously Russia is a primarily

a land threat. So protecting the Eastern front of NATO is the primary, probably strategic goal of Europe, or at least it should be. And just because it's small, I want to point out that you can actually still tell a lot about a ship, about a state's grand strategy, even as a small Navy. So obviously the size of Navy says something about what it thinks grand strategy should be, But what they do with their scarce resources sends a big signal because it's a big opportunity cost. Right. So I testified for the UK Parliament and part of the testimony was I looked at the tonnage among a bunch of relatively small navies and looked at whether they, relative to the world, overinvested in certain capabilities, submarines, assault, fast attacks. And you can actually learn a lot about what a state's theory of itself is going to be. So if you look at the UK, the UK actually has a ton of logistics and it has two big

brand new aircraft carriers, but it has almost no surface capability to defend them, right? So this is basically an expeditionary fleet that is designed to do livias, right? Whether you want that or not, that is the thing that the UK has stuck with for quite some time, all right? So that's the way that a fleet actually determines grand strategy rather than vice versa. You know, Japan and South Korea, and especially Russia, overweight submarines, right? So they have a very different theory about what a Navy is for than a lot of European states, and that's probably understandable.

So again, just because it's small doesn't mean it doesn't have a signaling effect, doesn't mean it doesn't communicate a costly signal about what it cares about, but it does kind of mean it's not going to contribute much to a high-end fight. But I think we kind of assume that about most countries anyway. To get to your original question, I think there's definitely a sense of free-riding. And I do wonder if Europe will ever return to prominence as a naval power. It's kind of one of those things that if you stop a naval tradition, say a tradition going to sea, a tradition to understand the importance of the fleet and maintaining it and keeping that tacit knowledge in your military to continue to generate naval power, it's very hard to build it from scratch. So we'll see how Australia does.

So I think there is a free riding aspect. And I do think Europe is unlikely to build a navy that is roughly in keeping with the size of its economy and how much it depends on the global economy for its wealth. But I also, I might get in trouble for this. I want to consider something that might be more shocking than what you're saying is that I think in general, the sea can largely take care of itself in a way that territory can't. It's really big, the sea. It is in everyone's interest to use it freely as much as possible. There is a great shared sense of commerce needs to be free because everyone's livelihood depends on a globalized age. You know, we talk about piracy, but pirates off the coast of Somalia or the Straits of Malacca, they're not the same as the Barbary states where during the early years of the

United States, these were states that their primary revenue generating mechanism was piracy, right? It was state-sponsored coercion and compelence. That just doesn't exist anymore. So in terms of protecting navigation and freedom of the seas, I don't think that's something that europe is ever going to worry about and then the question is how can you work with a country like the netherlands right the netherlands the defense minister shangri-la uh two years ago said it was going to send a frigate one frigate every other year to the asian pacific that's 25

percent of its naval capability right that's a big signal right so even though it's small it still has a role in how the United States and its allies can approach global politics. Yeah, I totally agree. So going back to the submarine deal, based on the cost that you estimate, it sounds like you're arguing that Australia is going all in, if I can use the poker term. You know, you write that, quote, that this will signal its total reliance on the U.S. for security, and a belief that long-range power projection in the form of nuclear submarines will be Australia's principal means of defense. So is this a good bet for them?

That's a tough question. Well, first, that's exactly what I'm arguing. So you got that right. Whether it's a good bet, arms deals are funny things, right? They are. Just ask the French, like, it's not over until it's over. There are a lot of ways this can change. So whether it's a good bet or not, it's definitely a bet, but it's not a bluff.

So sometimes when you go in, you're bluffing. This is not a bluff. They are literally putting all their chips in, and if they lose, they lose. Having said that, if you read a lot of the coverage in Australia of AUKUS, there is real concern that the United States will not live up to its end of the deal. And I think that's overplayed. I think the United States is a reasonably good bet for a couple of things that we could talk about maybe a little bit. I think the United States is getting a pretty good deal, in my

opinion. Even if you look on this AUKUS as just a transactional arrangement, which is sort of the approach to the arms trade that the Trump administration favored, which is a perfectly plausible way to look at arms deals. I think there's tremendous bipartisan agreement on the need to work with Australia and Japan and South Korea vis-a-vis China, much more so than bipartisan agreement on Ukraine. So I think in general, the United States is a safe bet. I think the United States is going to really do its best, definitely will station submarines forward in Australia. I think that's in its strategic interest. I think it will probably, barring some disaster in Congress, will provide the SSNs, the Virginia-class SSNs that are part of the deal.

I think those two things are quite likely. And then the third tranche of AUKUS, which is the joint UK-Australian submarine, I don't know if that's going to happen, but that's a long time in the future. But sometimes I wonder if Australia is a good bet and what I mean by that. So I think in hindsight, you know, you always, once you submit, publish on a paper, you always think of things that you wish you'd said. I think it's true that Australia sent a very powerful signal that they are tying their, they're hitching themselves to the United States wagon and that this form of naval power or military power is the thing that they are going to emphasize because they're putting all their chips on nuclear submarines.

So I think of all the plausible ways that Australia could provide security for itself, I think it's very hard to go back to any other now that it's put so much of its prestige, so much of its money and given such a costly signal by reneging on the French deal. I think it's a very strong signal. It's hard to renege on that, except for one thing. And actually, if I had the ear of Americans in the policy world, I would emphasize this, that there is one option that is available to Australia. And I think the United States should consider this when it gets to the sort of more coercive part of alliance politics, because alliance politics can be pretty coercive. isolationism is a perfectly defensible approach for that part of the world. Australia is a giant island. It's pretty resource rich. It's far away from everyone. It's pretty defensible. It is possible that the outside option for Australia is not another ally or not another military, but to really just turn inward and take care of itself. And I think as the United States

thinks about negotiating with Australia, because alliances are always negotiating, that's something to think about that is the outside option that is remaining for australia and if you read a lot of the discourse in the debates in the labor party in australia recently about august again it's a perfectly defensible approach for australia yeah and uh if you ever played risk someone always uses that strategy to just wait in australia till everyone else just build up and wait so yeah you're elaborate you make some statements about arms agreements between allies, and you, you know, you say that even between allies, arms agreements are a zero sum. Would you like to elaborate on that, Eddie? Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning that point. I

think it's really important to understand this. If people get nothing out of this paper or our conversation, except this, I'd be really happy with what we accomplished with this work. So for all the talk of a strong bond with Australia and the UK, alliances, especially ones centered around arms transfers are business transactions. And they are negotiations between self-interested actors. And there's lots of politics. It's very complicated. It's not like I'm going to buy a widget from a commodity supplier and I'll give them money. It's much more complicated. But at the end of the day, the reason why alliances happen, and this is a longstanding research tradition in political science, is two self-interested actors have comparative advantages

is that will open up an economic surplus or a political surplus through gains from trade. All right. So what happens is at the very simplest level, let's just say the United States is really good at building weapons. And let's imagine it's not true, but let's imagine Australia has a lot of cash on hand. And so rather than building the submarines itself, right, Australia will give money to the United States and the United States will take that money, build more submarines, transform over, and then everyone is better off, right? That's the principle of trade, That's Adam Smith 101. But then what happens is it's cooperation in the sense that we create a surplus that didn't exist before. But then you have to negotiate over who gets what percentage

of this surplus. This is what the economists call the Pareto frontier. So we've identified a gain from this trade, but now we have to decide how to distribute that gain. And that's the competitive of bargaining because if I get 52% and then you get 48%, that's zero sum. And the United States bargains really hard and really ruthlessly with its allies. And we should expect it as American voters, we would expect that. And certainly other countries' voters would expect that of their country as well. And so there is definitely a cooperative aspect to alliances, but then there's a zero-sum bargaining aspect where each country is trying to minimize what it gives up and maximize what it's getting in return. You mentioned that the U.S. is coming in this deal with many

competitive advantages and a different bargaining point than Australia is and the U.K. too. What are some of these advantages and how do you see this kind of elaborating what you were just speaking you know, how it's going to, you see it affecting this deal and relationship? That's a good question. So, you know, when we think about just an ordinary business transaction, or even if you and I were to co-author together, maybe you do the empirical work and I do the theory work because we'll be more efficient if we do that together. You know, a business transaction is I give you some money because you're better at making something and you make that thing more efficiently and you make a little profit and I get the product at a lower price than

if I made it myself. Okay. A deal like AUKUS, right? An arms deal actually involves lots of different things you exchange. Let's call them different currencies. And they're all, you know, they're comparable, right? Money for weapon, but then there's also technology transfer. There's jobs, prestige, there is security. So the idea is many countries think if they buy American weapons, that the United States is more likely to pull their chestnuts out of the fire when the balloon goes up. They're giving the United States a lot of money. They're buying the kit. And in return, they think, and probably not wrongly, that they are communicating to any adversaries that they're under the American protective umbrella. And then the final thing you can trade is autonomy.

At the end of the day, every sovereign state has autonomy. And it might be the thing you are most jealous of, but it might be the thing that you have a comparative advantage in. You may not be able to build a weapon. You may not have a ton of money. You may not have any technology to generate. You don't have a ton of prestige, and you're dependent on other people for security. Well, guess what? You have to give up something in the zero-sum game, and that's going to be autonomy. And so the United States has tremendous competitive advantages in the global arms market. It has advanced technology because it has a ton of research development.

It's pretty efficient at building most of its weapons, even though we think that the United States defense industrial base has an efficiency problem. It's pretty good compared to anyone else's. You know, we don't build a lot of ships compared to, say, Japan, South Korea, or even Europe. But building submarines is definitely a matter of scale. They're hard to build, and we're pretty good at that. Just as importantly, like we were talking before, the United States operates nuclear submarines all the time, right? And that builds up a tremendous amount of human capital and tacit knowledge that is hard to develop on your own.

We test out all our systems, maybe not in combat. that. But one of the reasons why I joined the submarine force is that the missions that submarines do during peacetime are very similar to the ones they do during wartime for the most part. We have a robust supplier base. And there's been some criticism of the defense industry base being pretty uncompetitive. But compared to any other country, we actually have a pretty competitive and efficient defense market. It's managed, but there are at least two different prime contractors that can make nuclear submarines, make ships in general. And we have prestige, right? We are giving something valuable to Australia by letting them use,

get this nuclear technology. Now, I've always been puzzled by this because nuclear technology is ancient, right? It was years old. I just watched Oppenheimer, but it still has this prestige attached to it, right? Australia is very, very proud, might be a little patronizing, but they want to make sure that everyone knows that besides Britain, Australia is the one that is trusted with this crown jewel of the United States, right? And that's politically valuable, both domestically and internationally. So again, basically everything you're thinking about, the United States actually has not just a comparative advantage, but a competitive advantage. And so we would expect the United States to use its market power effectively to

get the best deal it can. So does Australia come with any advantages to the table? Well, location. Location is not nothing, right? That's the first rule and the second rule and third rule of real estate, right? Australia does bring things to the table. I think they are a few. One is it builds a more powerful and credible and larger set of countries that are growing closer together, largely in response to China's rise and perception of aggressiveness. and does this mean australia is certainly going to fight in a conflict with china that the united states is involved in australia is still a sovereign nation i won't count i can't count them but it's a little more likely and it certainly means that australia will support a lot of efforts

by the united states up to that point so i think that's a valuable gain for the united states Again, real estate matters. I think this will add time on station for submarines. And we have a pretty limited submarine portfolio right now in the United States. So even if Australia never buys another submarine, being able to operate effectively from bases in Australia will be the equivalent of adding a couple submarines to the United States fleet. And then there's two other things that I think are going pretty well. Australia is going to invest $3 billion into the United States submarine industrial base. That's really valuable. We can talk a little bit about that later, maybe. That's a concrete thing that the United States is getting out of it. And finally, I do think Australia has less wiggle room vis-a-vis the United States. It has less autonomy. It is basically giving up a little autonomy or a lot of autonomy, depending how you measure it, in exchange for all these other benefits. And I think that's useful for the United States. So, yeah, let's talk about that investment in the U.S. economic base.

Why is that important? Well, simple question, but complex. Yeah. I mean, like, listen, I was just bragging about how good we are at building submarines. The United States is not that great at building submarines. We're just kind of better than most other countries. But given what we expect the submarines to do, given the magnitude of the operational task that the United States has assigned to the submarines, especially in the Pacific, we are not building enough. The Submarine Defense Industrial Base is very stressed. I think I think it's generating like 1.2 submarines a year. And for the United States' shipbuilding

plans, it needs to get up to two a year. And then if it's going to actually come through on AUKUS and still build the submarines the United States requires, it's going to have to churn out 2.5 Virginia-class submarines a year, right? That is just a really hard thing. And money can solve a lot of those problems. And the more money you throw at it, the more likely you are to get there. But it's a tremendous lift. And I think I think that matters. So I would say that that's the primary thing I think about when I think about AUKUS is how can we build the submarines efficiently? And maybe we've actually got to maybe I'm wrong. And maybe Australia, United Kingdom can produce more economic efficiency and it gains from trade besides autonomy. And we'll just have to see, you know, the defense industrial base is pretty impenetrable. So in the end of the essay, you say that AUKUS is not a bad deal for Australia, but what is it? And should other nations look at this as a model for future deals in the future? It's a bad deal. It's not a bad deal for Australia. I think Australia has a quite rigorous marketplace of ideas.

I think Australia has a quite well-developed national security apparatus within the government and also a pretty rich and robust national security expertise inside the country. Australia is very attentive to what's going on in the world. It is very strongly linked to China economically and even culturally, and it obviously has very strong ties to the United States. So the Australian government is not stupid, right? They're not being fleeced. They have a very tough strategic problem, and tough strategic problems require making tough decisions and deciding where you're going to spend scarce resources. And so I think this is a very plausible deal to improve the security of Australia. It will shape Australian security irrevocably going forward, but I'm sure the Australians knew that when they embarked on it.

So I think Australia is a sovereign state that made a decision and got the best deal it could under very tough circumstances. And I think that's the right thing to do. But the thing about making deals under tough circumstances is it involves lots of compromise and people are going to be unhappy. And you can see this in the discourse in Australia right now. As to other nations, we could think about the Joint Strike Fighter, which many essays that I've read from Australians make the analogy of AUKUS to the Joint Strike Fighter, where there's a lot of technology sharing.

We develop it together. You're not necessarily building every component yourself, but you're contributing what components to everything, to every plane. And so there is some interdependence and gains from trade there. And there is a thought that the states that kicked in money to develop the Joint Strike Fighter earlier got a better deal. They got more technology transfer. They got more work share. They could kind of count on the Joint Strike Fighter being built. So I think there is something to be said for Australia as a first mover advantage, because it probably has a larger effect than any country that comes subsequently. So let's think about Canada. Canada is a plausible

customer for nuclear submarines from the United States. That deal was sort of floated a couple decades ago. I don't have the timeline right. So let's imagine Canada wanted to get in on this. There's ways to think about it. There's economic ways to think about it. The model I would use is this idea called the network effect. And a network effect is an economic theory or an economic outcome that the more people buy a product, the more valuable it is for everyone, right? So the classic example is email or Microsoft Word. So Microsoft Word, I know people are starting to get away from it. Microsoft Word for probably our entire career was the dominant word processing software

and everyone used it. So it made sense if you used it, then you could send documents to everyone else and vice versa. So every time someone bought a Microsoft Word license, everyone else's license got more valuable. And so that generates more efficiency, but it also means that the last person to buy Microsoft Office has almost no effect on the overall economic value of the product, right? It's vanishing.

And that last customer is going to pay a surplus, a premium, because the network is so valuable that you pay Microsoft extra money than a competitive product would be charging because you get so much value out of it. So I think, again, Canada and other countries are sovereign states with pretty well-developed strategic communities inside them.

They will have to make a decision whether the network effect of buying these submarines is sufficiently powerful that they're willing to spend a little extra money or give up a little more autonomy than Australia did. So is there anything else you'd like to leave to our listener about this? Of course, we'll be posting a link to the article and everything in the show notes, but is there anything else you'd like to discuss about it? Yeah. So, I mean, I know your audience here and I take your audience very seriously and there are a lot of American navalists. And so what I really want to communicate to that group of listeners is this mechanism is not just about Australia, right? It's not, you know, we talked a little bit about middle powers and why they have small navies and so the small navy actually makes a big signal because of opportunity costs.

But in the United States, I think the United States is also prone or susceptible to having naval procurement set grand strategy rather than vice versa. You know, so navalists, right, we work with them, are constantly complaining that the United States Navy could solve all its problems if only it had a strategy, right? all these listservs, all these essays, say, oh, you know, we haven't had a good strategy. And that's why the Navy is having such a hard time. And then a lot of people hold the 1980s maritime strategy as this preeminent example of a great strategy. That's the thing that really drove real strategic change. If you read John Layman's book or other people who were involved in the time, they kind of credit this 1980s maritime strategy with the end of the Soviet Union. I'm pretty skeptical that the maritime strategy was all that remarkable or effective.

It seems like the shipbuilding program preceded the strategy in significant ways. Again, the shipbuilding program came either at the same time or maybe even a little bit before we developed a strategy for what to do with nuclear submarines, new class ballistic missile submarines, Aegis, and many nuclear carriers that John Layman wanted to build. And then you think about it, it's debatable what the aircraft carriers were actually going to do during a war in Central Europe during the Cold War. it's not clear what role they would actually have or how well they would do in that role but the bottom line we were stuck with them the 1990s and we actually kept building the nimitz class carriers even as we reduced spending on other priorities in the navy and military with this peace dividend and as it happens aircraft carriers as they were built for a different geopolitical era the cold war were suited to a certain type of foreign policy that the united states decided

It's a practice in the unipolar moment. Right. You know, the Navy loves presidential quotes. The Navy always talks about John F. Kennedy saying anyone who served in the United States Navy should be really proud. I'm doing that one a bad turn. But there's a great one that Navalists like to try it out. It says when word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it's no accident that the first question that comes to everyone's lips is where is the nearest carrier? Right. That wasn't Ronald Reagan. That wasn't George Bush. That was Bill Clinton. Right. That was peace dividend Clinton. And so this Cold War legacy that was built a long time ago for a completely different mission, we had on hand. And so that was the hammer that made everything look like a nail. And so I think as we think about the future fleet, because this is an ongoing debate, I would really like the Navy and the Navy civilian masters to get the causal arrow in the right direction. Not only is how is the fleet we're building serving the current grand strategy that we have, but how is this fleet going to shape our grand strategy going forward?

And sometimes that can be in unpredictable ways. So that's this is an Australian focused paper that was written for a Canadian journal. But I think it has lessons for people who largely care about the United States Navy. Well, thank you. So what are you working on next and how can our listeners find you on social media or other places? Well, first of all, I really want to thank you for reading this paper so carefully. It was great. I really enjoyed it. Oh, thanks. You know, I've been doing other stuff, getting ready for the first week of class, but I was like, this is a lot more fun. So you honor me. I mean, you and I know and your listeners know that time is really valuable and this is its own opportunity costs.

Right. When you invest in reading a paper. So I'm just very grateful for that. I want to thank you and the listeners. You know, it's social media has become a little fragmented, but I'm still on Twitter. Jay Caverly and Blue Sky. You can go to JonathanCaverly.com and we can put all this in the show notes and look at the stuff I'm working on. For those who want to read the paper in its entirety, because I'm a U.S. government worker,

I don't hold copyright over the paper. And so anyone can reach out to me and I will share it, no problem. So you just use Google to find my email address at the War College. I have a War on the Rocks piece that just came out That is another aspect of how defense industrial base issues shape strategy and warfighting. And it looks at why the United States and Europe should think about munitions more as commodities than as these sort of fancy differentiated products like tanks or aircraft or even high tech missiles.

So the way we invest and procure something like 155 millimeter shell, or even like a drone, right, is going to be completely different than how we would invest in a platform like an aircraft carrier. And you'd be surprised how few people in the United States or Europe involved in acquisitions understand that. So that's the thing I'm working on. And I would, of course, appreciate if anyone read it. And I'm always happy to engage with your listeners. I think it's a really important part of working for a place like the United States Naval War College. And so I'm definitely open for dialogue because I don't have a monopoly on criticism at all. So I really appreciate your time. Cool. Well, thank you so much. And this is all the time we have for this episode. Thank you for listening and subscribing. And we will see you next time. We'll be right back. Water, wine, both white and red, oh, put it on the shimbo now. Oh, help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley. Why, I'm putting it in the alley. Help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley.

Put it on the shimbo now.