Sea Control - Sea Control 494 - Global Force for Good with Dr. John Sherwood

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Links1. A Global Force for Good: Sea Services Humanitarian Operations in the Twenty-First Century, by John Sherwood, Naval History and Heritage Command, September 2023.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Anna McNeil is back as a host this week, and she has Dr. John Sherwood on to discuss his new book, Global Force for Good. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. 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 to 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. Hey, folks. Thanks for tuning back in to Sea Control. This episode, we're thrilled to have Naval History and Heritage Command's historian John Sherwood returning to the show to talk about his new book, Global Force for Good, which was published in September of 2023. A historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command since 1997, Dr. Sherwood has written seven books in military and naval history and was the recipient of the Fulbright-Schuman European Union Affairs Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year. If you've not already listened to it, please check out episode 133 of Sea Control, in which he talked with us about his article, UNAV4MED and the Frontex Operations in the Central Mediterranean Following the 2015 European Migration Crisis. Welcome, John. Is there anything else you'd like to tell the audience about yourself? Thank you for hosting me. Yes, I would like to point out that in the Fulbright,

I got to meet many partners of ours who also engage in humanitarian operations and who may engage in humanitarian operations with us in the future. So various European Union navies, Coast Guard. I got to go out on a patrol with the German Coast Guard, which was quite interesting. I got to go to a forward base in Samos on invitation of the Greek Coast Guard, the Hellenic Coast Guard, to actually see those operations, migrant operations. That was the focus. And I was able to interview quite a few people from an NGO sea rescue organization based in Hamburg, Germany, called Sea Eye. That organization really opened my mind in terms of how NGOs could potentially partner with militaries and Coast Guards in the future for humanitarian operations. They have a very professional outfit rescuing migrants.

They all have certifications. They get their RIB training from retired German Coast Guard. Very, very professional group. So that was useful. And I also want to mention that one of the main things I've done throughout my career, besides live in dusty archives and read documents is I've tried to get out and interview people in the fleet, everyone from sailors all the way up to four stars, one sec depth, secretaries of the Navy, et cetera, et cetera. So that's been really the core of my research. And I think with this

book, some of the most interesting elements for our readers will be material taken from those oral histories. Right. So what inspired you to write Global Force for Good? Well, really two things. The NHHC, Naval History and Heritage Command, conducted a gaps in history study in 2014, and humanitarian operations were part of that study, designated as a gap. For me personally, researching and writing about humanitarian operations meant that I didn't have to delve into classified material. So that made writing the book, publishing the book that much easier. And I had an interest in humanitarian operations that extended back to my research on the Vietnam War. We conducted many, many humanitarian type missions, then both the Navy and the Coast Guard.

So that's the origin of this study. In this study, you mentioned the U.S. Navy's role in promoting democratic values, protecting freedom of the sea. How has the Navy historically upheld those principles and what challenges have arisen in doing so? The role of the U.S. Navy goes well, well beyond warfighting. Warfighting is the core of what the Navy does, but they also engage in these other missions, naval presence, strategic deterrence, crisis response, peacekeeping operations, freedom of navigation operations, and humanitarian operations, just to name a few. Each of these operations, each of these missions promote democracy in a rules-based order. Humanitarian operations are just one tool in this toolkit, but they often showcase

the sea services, and that's the Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard at its best. The mission is really to alleviate human suffering. We don't go into these missions for ulterior motives. Some people have accused us of doing so, but we really go in there to help. And it's usually when the big one hits, the 9.1 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia, for example. But in the 90s, we went into Bangladesh. Now, Bangladesh, we have no strategic interest in Bangladesh, But we invested a lot of naval and marine resources there simply for one purpose, to save lives and alleviate human suffering. One of the other advantages that the military has in spreading democracy is that U.S. military officers, although they're not diplomats, have a lot of the same training. They get that training at the academies, but also the PME schools, and there are programs such as the Olmstead Scholarship Program, which send military officers abroad and embed them in foreign cultures.

They do this as part of mil-to-mil training as well, and that makes them particularly skilled when it comes to foreign disaster relief. It's not just a matter of, hey, we're here, we want to help you. But often you have to do it in a culturally sensitive manner. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, there were many cultural issues that we had to observe. We couldn't have our sailors drinking alcohol, for example. And we really didn't want our sailors spending the night on Indonesian territory because night time is when people get in trouble. We like to have heads on beds or heads on racks, as opposed to boots on the ground for that operation. Now, in terms of watersheds, historians love to talk about watersheds.

For humanitarian operations, a big watershed was the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Because all of a sudden, at that point, we didn't have any adversaries. The Soviet Union had collapsed. China was not yet the peer competitor that it was today. So all of a sudden we had resources to engage in these massive humanitarian operations. And it furthered the goal of not only helping people, but also stabilizing often unstable regions of the world, helping with famine relief, for example, or Bangladesh, for example, that would be another example of helping to stabilize a country that is not a Western democracy like

the United States. And recently, there's been a waning interest in humanitarian operations because we don't have the resources. We are very, very stretched right now with a revanchist Russia in Europe and an aggressive China in the Pacific. We simply don't have the resources. With that being said, it is a mission that the U.S. military is prepared to execute if the need arises. But the need will have to be big. It'll have to be the big earthquake, the big tsunami. me. Yeah, I really like what you said as well about the cultural aspect to this, because certainly there is a sensitivity that has to go into operating in a more or less remote area, or if you're the face of diplomacy, the face of the country, that's certainly something that has

to be considered. Absolutely. So you mentioned that disaster response is one of the U.S. Navy missions, and you talked a little bit about what sort of humanitarian missions are carried out by naval forces. Anything else you want to add on that? Well, right now it's not, but it's just, it's more of an other duty as a sign. If we look at capstone documents, strategy documents that are made public, the last time we saw humanitarian operations as a core mission was in 2007 with the cooperative strategy for 21st century sea power. Now, that was developed by Admiral Mullen when he was CNO and his successor. It came out in 2007. But it really bears the mark of a very intellectual, outward-looking admiral named John Morgan, who was very much interested in globalization

and the role of the Navy in the world and how the Navy could stabilize the world, how the Navy could, we of course were engaged in a war, a war against terrorism, but could the Navy do things to win hearts and minds other than war fighting? It was considered the sixth of six core capabilities of the Navy in 2007. And that's why my book focuses on the 2004 through 2011 period. That's a heyday for humanitarian operations. So in addition to the humanitarian operations aspect, how have naval forces been used as instruments of diplomacy throughout history?

And how does that contribute to a nation's global influence? So naval diplomacy is something that extends back to the age of sail. In its simplest form, it is a ship, Coast Guard or Navy, visiting a foreign port. That's an opportunity for the crew to get off the ship and relax, but it's an opportunity for diplomacy. And that's why our sailors wear their best uniforms and are supposed to be on their best behavior during those port visits. And incidentally, today, a hallmark of the port visit is a volunteer effort to rebuild a school or have medical personnel visit a clinic. Now, you also have fleet type diplomacy. And the best example of that in history would be the voyage of the Great White Fleet.

That was to show off the U.S. Navy to the world to say we are now a global power. But what people often don't realize is that in 1905 in Messina, Italy, there was an earthquake and a tsunami, and the Great White Fleet responded to that. That created a wellspring of goodwill that really extends to the present. And it's one of the reasons that Italy is such a strong ally. In fact, today, the Italian frigate ITS of Virginia Fassan is with the Eisenhower battle group. And some of that goodwill extends all the way back to 1905. And as I mentioned, humanitarian operations, that allows the Navy to engage with a foreign port partner or a foreign country in a different way. It's sailors doing good things as opposed to being tourists. That's some great historical context that I was not aware of. You've also given other historical examples in your book that I want to turn to now of how the Navy has contributed to global stability and humanitarian efforts. So specifically, you talked to Hurricane Katrina response, Operation Unified Assistance, which was responding to the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, and Operation Tamodachi, which was that response to the triple disaster in Japan in 2011.

So why did you choose these examples? Well, these were the biggest, costliest natural disasters in recent history, and they elicited the biggest response from the sea services. The earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia killed 250,000 people, 165,000 of which were in Indonesia, in the northern part of Sumatra. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, 2011, it killed 19,000. Katrina, the death toll was much smaller under 2,000. That's huge for the United States. But it was not only a costly event, but it really shook the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to the core. and it resonates up to today. If you visit that area, conversation often goes back to Katrina. It was really a defining moment for that region of the U.S. In writing on the Hurricane Katrina response, you mentioned command and control as well as the legal aspects of disaster response, and that really spoke to me. The Navy faced a struggle

there because DOD and domestic response were sort of working under different command and control structures. Did examining this give you any good insights into how the joint force can most effectively be used as a domestic response? Okay, domestically, it's very complicated. The reasons for that have to do with our federal system and our legal system. It really starts with the notion that under the Stafford Act, a governor of a state that has suffered a natural disaster has to go to the federal government to ask specifically for help. And then it is FEMA that becomes the lead agency. The federal government typically only provides a federal military response if local resources are overwhelmed. And local resources includes

local police, fire, medical, but also the National Guard. The National Guard is an enormous entity. And National Guards have agreements with other states so they can pull resources from other states. The Coast Guard is another resource, and they operate under Title 14. So they can respond very quickly. They don't need to jump through the kind of bureaucratic hoops that federal forces have to jump through. The other advantage of the Coast Guard and the National Guard is they have law enforcement capability. That became very important to Katrina because there was lawlessness, there was looting, there were a lot of people with guns, and it was problematic. Federal forces could not go in armed. And in fact, we had the Coast Guard

guarding units of the 82nd Airborne, which is kind of ironic because the 82nd is one of the Army's most lethal combat divisions. That whole process slowed the Title X response or the federal response that the Federal Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Air Force didn't slow the Air National Guard because that falls under Title 32. So once FEMA appoints a principal federal officer, which eventually became a Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, then a JTF, a joint task force was set up. It was JTF Katrina. All the federal forces reported to JTF Katrina. There was no unity of command because Governor Blanco did not want the guard units reporting to the JTF. She wanted the guard units reporting to the state adjutant generals and the governors.

So in the words of Captain Nora Tyson, who commanded the baton, that created a bit of a goat rope in terms of unity of command and effort. And it required, again, the diplomatic skills of people like Admiral Tyson to kind of break some of these log jams. And in New Orleans, it was literally at the parish level, which is what they call counties down there. So it was having to deal with county officials in many cases to make sure aid got to where it needed to go. There were other issues. I mentioned posse comitatus, which is the law that forbids federal troops from engaging in law enforcement on domestic soil.

There are also issues of medical licensing. Title X medical personnel on the USNS Comfort, the hospital ship, couldn't initially render medical aid to locals. And there was a pushback from local hospitals because their fear was it would take their patients away and their livelihoods. So it was actually very interesting. The Comfort had an NGO working on board, which consisted of volunteer doctors and nurses called Project Hope. They were allowed to send Project Hope ashore. They were eventually allowed to treat people on the ship, only on the ship. And so that created a lot of issues.

Hospital ships are strategic national assets. So the whole issue of deploying a hospital ship, they steam very slowly. They are amazing ships. They are literally the equivalent of the Mayo Clinic or Mass General Hospital at sea. They have that much capability, that many beds, that much equipment, specialty doctors and nurses. Lastly, it's the command and control slowed and impeded the federal response because everything with JTF Katrina had to go through JTF Katrina. and then FEMA, it was hard to go directly to the Title X forces. Now, there were some workarounds that were created, but it was difficult. With that said, I should emphasize that the relationship between the Navy and the National Guard, the Navy and the first responders, the Navy and the Coast

Guard was sterling. The Navy provided birthing, hot showers, food, medical support, enablers for these other first responders. The Navy Coast Guard relationship in particular is treasured by the Navy. Admiral Mullen, who was CNO at the time, said, quote, we know that the U.S. Coast Guard punches well above their weight class and that its personnel possess exquisite seamanship skills. We have nothing but respect for them. And it's interesting with the Coast Guard, they are America's life-saving service as epitomized by the orange slash on their cutters and their orange helicopters. So that means every Coast Guard person, whether they are a pilot or sailor, They're trained in search and rescue. So they had a group of IT people that just happened to be there. They took boats, so-called morale boats that the Coast Guard has, which are just basically pleasure craft, and they went right to work rescuing people.

There was a female C-130 pilot. She was airborne and realized that they needed some airborne command and control with all these helicopters flying around in the dark with wires and other hazards. And she immediately used the C-130 in a C-2 configuration. So that's the other thing. The Coast Guard officers are used to operating on their own without much support and making decisions. And that's everybody from the pilot down to the small boat commander, which in Katrina, if you're talking about a flat bottom boat with a few people, that could be a petty officer. So yeah, the Coast Guard also was able to surge forward well before the Navy. And so that's why they rescued over half of the 60,000 people stranded by the storm. They engaged in the most helicopter rescues. The Coast Guard trains in water rescues, but they're really not trained to land on a rooftop and use a fire axe or a rotary saw to cut through a roof and then pull people out. But that's what they did during that operation. Like I said, they also employed small boats to rescue people. And they also had a ferry service to move people across the Chalmette River.

And one of the interesting things about the Chalmette ferry service is they were worried about people with guns. Coast Guard officers had a barrel at one end and said, any weapons you have, put them in the barrel. No questions asked. Get on the ferry. We'll take you across. If we find there are weapons on the other side, we will arrest you. They did heroic work. The Navy also did some heroic work. They transferred 10,000 people to safe havens. They engaged in a much more limited number of helicopter rescues. What the Navy did that was extremely useful was the logistics, bringing its fleet, especially amphibs like Bataan and Iwo Jima, with all the equipment that are contained on an amphib, so not just aviation, but vehicles and landing craft like LCUs, not so much LCACs for this operation. And also, they were involved, like the Coast Guard, in survey and salvage. So it was vital to get those waterways open because of their impact on the U.S. economy, vital to get the oil rigs open, vital to clean up oil spills, that sort of thing. So the Navy did all that and more. What a great summary you have there. And I really do appreciate all of the stories and firsthand accounts that you've drawn from your oral history research to help bring these events back to the forefront of our minds and be something very relatable for every service member today. So I do appreciate that.

Success when working on international disaster response missions, whether, as you articulated just now, is in the homeland or overseas, clearly requires cooperation. Could you talk a bit about some successful examples of multinational naval cooperation in addressing global challenges? Going back to this period that I looked at, Admiral Mullen, when he was CNO, had this concept of a 1,000 ship Navy, so that the capability of our naval force is not just the sum total of all of our ships, but the sum total of all the warships of our allies. So allies are instrumental, especially when it comes to humanitarian operations, and especially as we move forward, where our exquisite warfighting ships are going to have to be more focused on their core mission of warfighting. So we're going to have to lean harder on our allies. We're also going to have to lean harder on NGOs as well. And much more has to be done to reach out to NGOs in preparation for the next disaster. It can't just be a handful of NGOs. We have to think about partnering with hundreds of NGOs across the world. Project HOPE is a good example, but Project HOPE is staffed with a lot of former U.S. military. We have to look beyond that. But in terms of partners, every operation I worked on, we worked with partners.

In the two foreign disaster responses, we worked with the Indonesians and the Japanese. And in fact, the Indonesians and the Japanese were in command during those. They led the operations. One of the things, Admiral Crowder, when he first came to Indonesia on the Abraham Lincoln, we had no military relationship with Indonesia at that time. Zero. And in fact, we had a strained relationship because the Leahy Amendment forbid us from transferring weaponry to Indonesia at the time because of atrocities committed by the Indonesian Armed Forces in East Timor. so long story short we weren't the flavor of the month they even had a war college study taught in indonesia whereby the u.s would use a humanitarian response as a pretext to invade indonesia as crazy as that might sound so there was a great deal of suspicion and lynn pascoe the ambassador gets on the phone with Admiral Crowder, and he says, Doug, I have two questions for you, and you better pass.

First question, who is the senior American official in this disaster response? And Doug Crowder says, you, sir, says, right answer. In foreign disaster response, it's always the State Department and its subsidiaries, the USAID, who are in charge. The military works for them. And the second question that the ambassador asked Doug Crowder was, whose country is it? And Crowder says, it's the Indonesian, sir. Right answer. We're going to get along perfectly. And that's how we approached the situation in Japan. We wanted to work with the Japan Self-Defense Forces. We wanted them to be in the lead. We wanted more than that in both cases. We wanted the media to show them more than us. We wanted to be in the background. So we didn't want to

hog the spotlight. We wanted the spotlight to be on our partners. So you have the senior partner, so the partner whose country we're operating in, and then all these other band members, essentially. In Katrina, we had the Dutch, the French, the Mexicans, and the Canadians. This was the first time since the Mexican-American War that Mexican troops had operated on U.S. soil. And it was a huge diplomatic effort by the ambassador in Mexico City to get the approvals to get them here. They wanted to participate. And then it was a huge shot in the arm for the Mexican military that they were able to do this well. They operated with the baton, so with Admiral Tyson or Captain Tyson at the time, and they did magnificent work. Canada sent four ships and a

thousand personnel. They were there only a short amount of time, but their buoy tender, which was a Coast Guard ship. The Sir William Alexander was there a lot longer because we had to restore aids to navigation. The Coast Guard needed their help. This was the first time their Coast Guard had operated this far south. Sir William Alexander is an icebreaker buoy tender, so it has hardened hulls and all that. So they were of great use. The Canadian military also covered the Coast Guard sector that includes Cape Cod during the Labor Day weekend. And because of NORAD, they were able to seamlessly cover that sector because the Coast Guard had a lot of units from there down in the Gulf. And lastly, I'll just speak about Japan. More than a third of the Japan Self-Defense Forces,

106,000 personnel and 60 Maritime Self-Defense Force ships were involved in Tomodachi. They led coalition. This was the first coalition operation that the JSDF had ever led. And in a nation that is very suspect of their military for obvious historic reasons, this operation proved beyond a shadow of doubt for a large majority of the Japanese civilian population, the value and utility of the military. The images of the Japan military dropping water on the reactors at Fukushima and the willingness of their ground forces to assist in putting water on those reactors on the ground, those images really demonstrated that these soldiers are willing to give their lives for the country. So now, after Tomodachi, there's not that much of a

controversy about, oh, do we need a military or we don't need a military? That's no longer an issue in Japan. What were some of the challenges of working with coalition partners? Because we need to always be learning lessons for the next events. Anything you'd like to highlight? Well, there are a lot of challenges. I mentioned the Leahy Amendment and our lack of relations with the Indonesian military. And at the beginning of the operation, the general in charge, General Bangbang Daramo was sitting with his staff in a tent, Banda Aceh Airport. And this member of the U.S. Embassy, an army officer who was part of the country team, he basically flew in, managed to get to the scene, flying in with a bunch of NGOs, wearing civilian clothes. And he

comes to the tent and he says, hey, I'm Major Nelson Chang, and I want to help you folks. and the US military is coming. And the reaction of the Indonesian general was, who is this? Is this guy a CIA? What's he doing here? He's not in uniform. And Nelson Chang pointed to the sky at that point. And there are all these helicopters from the Abraham Lincoln coming. And from that moment, because Nelson Chang was really one of only two people on the US government side who spoke fluently in indonesian he attended all the meetings with our forces their forces to figure out where the indonesian military wanted us to move material and supplies at first it was an 06 a captain part of the air wing who came and he saw that they had a two-star and he called back

to the ship and said sir admiral crowder we need you there's a two-star here so admiral crowder gets in a helicopter flies in and admiral crowder was an olmstead scholar so as an olmstead he went to a business school in switzerland so he learned how to act in a foreign culture so he one of the first things he said to the general is hey you're in charge we're going to do what you tell us to do sir but the second thing he said is hey would you like to come up with me just you and i will we'll do a survey on one of the helicopters the indonesians didn't have helicopters at this point. They had nothing. So the two of them went up and they saw the devastation. Admiral Crowder gets back to the ship and one of his CBs calls him and said, hey, we're prepared to build roads

and restore infrastructure. And Admiral Crowder said, there isn't even any ground left in many places for you to build roads on. The devastation was so, so severe. Yeah, that's a good example of one challenge. There were challenges. Mercy went to Indonesia, the hospital ship Mercy. That was the first time the medical staff had worked with Project HOPE. And they essentially had to train the Project HOPE doctors and nurses in how the military does medicine, which is different, during the course of the transit over. And a lot of, especially the nurses, the Navy Nurse Corps folks were very concerned because Project HOPE sent all these doctors and nurses with PhDs from Harvard who were working at major research institutes like Mass General

and the Cleveland Clinic and all these highfalutin places. And they thought, hey, you know, we need people to deal with patients and clean bedpans and do a lot of grunt work. They had to do a lot cleaning to get the operating rooms and wards in shape for this. And they found that these folks were willing to do all the grunt work gladly. And not only that, at the end of the day, they would have these lectures where the US military doctors and nurses would give a lecture on military medicine. And then you would have an infectious disease expert from Harvard give a give a talk about tropical diseases or their own specializations. And when they finally brought patients aboard, the whole system worked seamlessly. You couldn't tell who was Project Hope

and who was U.S. Navy. Everybody was in their scrubs. Everybody worked together. Tomodachi is unique, the Japanese operation in 2011, because of what happened at Fukushima. That was a live fire exercise in having to work in a radiologically contaminated environment. Good preparation for war, incidentally. But that required our first responders, our aviators in particular, they would fly these missions and then they would come home. They would have to strip out of their flight suits. They would have to scrub.

They would have to lose pieces of their clothing. One officer, Mary Robinson, went in to see the CO and she said, look, if we keep doing this, we're not going to have anything to wear. We're not going to have boots, for example, that type of thing. One of the admirals, Bob Gurrier, actually went to a Japanese ship to confer with the Maritime Self-Defense Force on the first day. And that was when the Reagan went through the plume. His helicopter got hit pretty badly coming back by radiation. so he he's the admiral he went back to his stateroom and an enlisted radiation technician comes in and says sir let me scan you over and he does so and says uh i want you to take off all

your clothes down to your underwear put them in this bag and then i want you to take a shower a long shower and scrub every part of your body very well so only in the u.s navy can an e5 order a two-star to strip naked, essentially, take a long shower. And as Gurrier said, that's the beauty of our Navy, of our military. The respect goes up and down the chain of command. We respect people for who they are and their specialization. In Indonesia, there was a female petty officer who was unloading these large rice sacks from a helicopter. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who was an Indonesia expert. He had studied Indonesia. He'd been the Indonesian ambassador. And so he had a great interest in this operation. He approaches a truck. They were

loading helicopters. And he's about to give a challenge coin to the petty officer. And she said, sir, if you show up in my truck, you carry rice. She had no idea who he was. And she threw this huge rice bag over the deputy secretary of defense, number two person in the defense department. and said, take it to that aircraft. And there's a picture of Paul Wolfowitz with this rice bag that still sits on his desk. He's very proud of that moment. So a lot of interesting stories, to say the least. The audience won't hear me absolutely dying of laughter on the other side of that, but those were great. From your research, what are the key takeaways or any other lessons learned that policymakers and the public should consider regarding the role of navies in promoting

global security, diplomacy, and humanitarian efforts? So I look at one type of humanitarian operations, disaster relief, but there's also non-combatant evacuation operations. There's famine relief. And while we don't have a lot of resources, we are stretched. We need to be prepared to respond from time to time when the conditions are extremely dire, because the military at the end of the day, is the only force that can help in some of these circumstances. It possesses airlift and air mobility, sea lift, expeditionary capabilities, the ability to operate and sustain itself in austere environments with its own self-contained logistics capability. Case in point, armed forces or the Navy can make a lot of water. Water is a basic, basic need when you have

these situations. Our combat logistics force is second to none. We can move a lot of stuff quickly and effectively to areas of the world affected by a natural disaster. We have medical personnel. We have construction and engineering. An aircraft carrier has 5,000 people. It's a small city. They can repair or fabricate. If they can repair a nuclear reactor, they can fabricate pieces and parts for nuclear energy. So if they can do that, they can build a water manifold on a flight deck capable of producing gallons and gallons of water that can be quickly flown by rotary wing aircraft to the beach or put on landing craft. Large numbers of young, healthy people with the skill sets required for humanitarian operations. They are, in essence, a 9-1-1 force,

whether they like it or not. So as the Marines would say, they have to be prepared to do it, but it doesn't necessarily have to absorb a lot of resources. It could be a pickup ball game because a lot of what the military does in a humanitarian operation is consistent things it does on a day-to-day basis anyway. Working with foreign partners, that's something the military does on a day-to-day basis anyway. It's really incumbent upon other agencies of the government to spend more time and effort working with foreign partners. We've been doing it for years and we'll continue to do it in the future. Domestic disasters are always going to be fraught with complexity because of the Stafford Act.

And I think more and more in the future, we're going to see the National Guard, especially since 9-11, the National Guard is a much more robust and capable organization than it was, say, during the Vietnam War, where we didn't deploy them to Vietnam. So now they deploy, they're essentially the same as regular forces. They're large, they have agreements between states. I think we'll see a lot more of that. Obviously, the Coast Guard, I should also mention some of the other DHS entities that can and do respond. So Customs and Border Protection, The Border Patrol has extraordinary search and rescue capability. For law enforcement, we have law enforcement agencies second to none, the FBI, ATF, even

agencies you've never heard of, such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Park Service have incredible law enforcement capability. So for domestic response, I don't see the U.S. military doing many of those in the future. But foreign disaster, yes. And that's also our global presence. No other Navy has the same kind of global presence that we do near disaster-prone areas. We have a network of bases throughout the world where we do have pre-stocked HATR kits, humanitarian and disaster response, that can be put on naval vessels, that can be put on

logistics vessels, auxiliaries, and move quickly to wherever they need to go. That's a lot of capability that other nations simply don't have. And if their local resources are overwhelmed, and the U.S. military will never go into a situation unless we are asked and the local resources are completely overwhelmed. Yeah, we can do it. But so can some of our partners, especially our European partners, some of our Asian partners. And we have to look more towards NGOs like CI to help out. it's a big tent as far as who can and will respond in the future. Can you tell us a bit about what

current professional projects you've got coming up or where the audience can find you on social media? Okay, I am working right now on a leadership book geared for midshipmen, but I think junior officers, even senior officers will benefit from it based on the career of Admiral Michael G. Mullen, conducted about 14 interviews with him, and I've been interviewing some of his contemporaries as well. So look for that in a few years. And I'm also a co-host of the Preble Hall podcast, which is the podcast of the Naval Academy Museum. And I have some of my Mullen interviews on that podcast, as well as I've interviewed people like John Ismay, Naval Academy class of 1999. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the New York Times.

I have an upcoming interview with the former acting secretary of the Navy, Tom Modley. I interview other admirals. I interview historians. So look for me there and people can find me on LinkedIn. Thank you so much, Dr. John Sherwood, for all the insights, the anecdotes, the really good research that you put in and helping to bring these important lessons back to life and relevant to what we're doing today. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. I enjoyed it. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning back in to Seed Control. © transcript Emily Beynon

Thank you.