Sea Control - Sea Control 598: Continental Powers and Naval Development

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Links No paywall “Erasing the American Global Military Footprint Won’t Make a Better World,” in Newsweek “Five Recommendations for Left-of-Boom Security Assistance to Taiwan,”in War on the Rocks “The Taiwan Question: Cross-Strait Relations and US Policy Past, Present, and Future,” virtual lecture for the Naval War College Foundation Paywalled “Muddied Waters: Freedom-of-Navigation Operations as Signals in the South China Sea,” in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations “New Imagined Geographies into Old Geobodies: Problems and Prospects for China and Taiwan in the South China Sea,” in Territory, Politics, Governance “Security in the Asia-Pacific and Signaling at Sea,” in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your host, Jonathan Selling, and my guest today is Dr. Brian Chow, Assistant Professor at the Naval War College, and we're going to be discussing his book, Continental Powers and Naval Development, Strategy, Coherence, Threat Diffusion, and Success at Sea. Brian, welcome aboard, and would you mind starting by telling us a bit more about yourself? Thanks very much, John, and thank you for having me on this podcast and for a chance to talk about my book.

I'm an assistant professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College, and I'm also a non-resident associate of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm a political scientist by training. I study the Asia-Pacific, especially China and Taiwan. I also study geostrategy and naval power, as well as great power politics. So my work has tended to focus on one or some combination of these topics. And the book I'm going to talk about today actually combines all of these interests. Jonathan? Thank you. And thank you for joining us here today.

And before we begin, as a reminder to our listeners, all opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So let's get started. And you write, a continental great power that tries to build a strong navy faces a more difficult task than a naval great power that tries to build a strong army. Why is that? And what is it with navies that makes them harder to build than armies? So historically, navies have been more difficult to build and use than armies for a couple of reasons. First is the issue of personnel and expertise. Now, relatively speaking, it has been easier to train a human being for combat on land than for combat at sea. At sea, sailors don't simply fight each other. They also have to combat the environment itself in a way that soldiers don't terrestrially. The expertise that is required to navigate a ship through what can

be a very tough and inhospitable climate, especially if you're alone and cut off from outside help, isn't something that can be drilled into you through a few months on the parade ground. And if you go back just a few centuries to when technology was less advanced and less ubiquitous, seafaring expertise was something gained through long, hard experience. So this meant that not only did it usually require more time and more money to train a good sailor than a good soldier, but the cost of replacing one who had died in combat was arguably also greater. The second issue is one of materiel and cost. Building one warship can be far more expensive than equipping entire army units, whether it be with swords, crossbows, muskets, cannon, horses,

tanks, etc. In other words, the navy tends to be technologically more intensive and more expensive. So pound for pound, the Navy tends to drain the treasury more than the Army does. So what is the effect then? If you're a continental great power, unlikely to be familiar with naval development in the first place, and you want a Navy, but not just any Navy, a strong one, then you'd be embarking on a project that is very expensive, requires a lot of tangible and intangible expertise, which you probably don't have a lot of, and crucially, is not something that can be turned into reality very quickly regardless of whether it's made of wood or steel a fleet

takes time to build so for all these reasons all else equal it is more difficult for a continental great power to build a strong navy than it is for a naval great power to build a strong army thank you so the concepts that you bring up are military hybridization and hybrid great powers Could you explain what you mean by those? So as I use the term in my book, military hybridization refers to the process by which a great power that possesses one of the world's strongest armies or navies seeks to build up the other service as also one of the world's strongest, and to be able to use that newly built-up military service to achieve national objectives.

So, a great power that possesses a strong army engages in military hybridization when it seeks to build and use a strong navy. Likewise, a great power that possesses a strong navy engages in military hybridization when it seeks to build and use a strong army. If successful, then the great power that simultaneously possesses and uses both a strong army and a strong navy is a hybrid great power. The country that I'm sitting in right now, the United States, is a real-world example of a hybrid great power. Indeed, the United States is probably the most successful hybrid great power of all time.

And these definitions encapsulate how I think about great powers when we categorize them via military force. So, unlike much of what you see in naval history, I categorize great powers by measurable dimensions of their military forces. not by things that are more intangible and subjective, like culture or societal attitudes. And for me, this creates sort of an issue, because if you decide to categorize countries by things like culture or societal attitudes, then you risk turning the definition into a circular logic, where you can say, this country is not a naval power because it didn't build a fleet, and this country didn't build a fleet because it's not a naval power. What I do instead is I take measurable standards of army buildup and navy buildup to categorize great powers.

What causes a great power to attempt military hybridization and what are predictors of success for that attempt? So the reasons for why a great power would attempt military hybridization are in fact numerous. A hybrid military is a tool, a means, and there are many goals or ends for which a great power might think, rightly or wrongly, that a hybrid military would help achieve. Some causes, which don't have to be neutral exclusive, include domination, for lack of a better term. So having both a strong army and a strong navy allows you to project power across much of the planet's surface, and in terms of naval power, it can help you connect disparate regions of the world.

Another reason would be to symmetrically counter an adversary's military strength. For example, if your adversary is powerful at sea and you're not, you may decide that you need a navy to match theirs. Conversely, a third reason would be to asymmetrically counter an adversary's military. Maybe it's precisely because the adversary has a very weak force at sea that you want to exploit this and build up a navy to take advantage of their weakness. A fourth reason could be less offensive and more defensive. You want to have military strength both on land and at sea to deter adversaries or potential adversaries from taking advantage of you in a particular geographic domain.

This is especially true for countries that have both sizable land masses and extensive coastlines. A fifth reason might be greater strategic flexibility, and that's for flexibility's sake. So this reason has less to do with achieving a concrete goal and more to do with offering decision makers more options in the toolbox when executing foreign policy. A sixth reason might be to use the military as a political chip. By having a hybrid military that increases your capabilities, increases your geographic reach, you might gain a stronger position in political maneuvering against other countries. The idea here being that this newfound military strength of yours might persuade

other countries to be more amenable to your foreign policy goals. So there are any number of reasons for why a great power might want a hybrid military. But the question that my book really holds in on, this is an equally crucial question, is how. So whatever the reason for wanting a great power hybrid military, turning that desire into reality is incredibly difficult for some of the reasons I described earlier about cost, expertise, and duration. Add to that the fact that for most continental great powers, something like naval development is also unfamiliar. This isn't something that's in their wheelhouse. For some continental great powers, this might be something they've never done before, or at least have never done in living

memory. So in my book, I argue that there are two factors that play important roles in determining how a continental great power fares at naval development. And I call these two factors strategy coherence and threat diffusion, hence the subtitle of the book. Strategy coherence is a naval force design capable of executing national strategy. If you're in the military or work on strategic issues, you'll recognize this as ensuring that the ways and the means are appropriately aligned to achieve whatever ends you may have. This sounds intuitive, and it is, But that doesn't mean it's easy or simple, especially for a continental of great power. I mentioned earlier that naval development takes time, sometimes measured in years, sometimes measured in decades.

During this longer duration, things could change. The budget might decline. Strategic priorities might shift. A bureaucracy dominated by the army might try to stifle greater prioritization of the navy. Geopolitics could happen and make the navy seem less desirable or prudent. technology could render what you're building obsolete. The point here is that there are plenty of opportunities to halt naval development or to change the naval force design such that it cannot actually execute national tasking. This is important because one doesn't build a navy just for its own sake. As Churchill famously said, no one builds dreadnoughts for fun.

The state must be able to actually use the tool it has so laboriously constructed. And if the fleet that ends up being built can't execute national strategy, then one is left with essentially a boondoggle. So, strategic coherence, it sounds simple, it sounds straightforward, but it's exceptionally difficult and easy to derail. Then the second factor is threat diffusion. And this is the deployment of one's navy to places or for purposes that don't antagonize the dominant naval power. When a continental great power does something as conspicuous as naval development, other great powers, especially the dominant naval power, which is the one with the world's most powerful navy, will question quite reasonably why the continental

great power is building a navy at all. This could be perceived as threatening or at a minimum bizarre and puzzling. But by sending the navy to places that are of relatively less importance to the dominant naval power, or by having the navy do things that don't seem to go against the dominant naval power's interests, the continental great power can ameliorate this threat perception of not just the dominant naval power, but perhaps the threat perceptions of other great powers. Diffusing the threat in this way signals that the continental great power's new navy is not the threat that it would otherwise appear to be. So if a continental great power can combine strategy coherence, a naval force design capable of executing national strategy, with threat

diffusion, the deployment of the fleet to places or for purposes that don't antagonize other great powers, especially the dominant naval power, then the continental great power stands a greater chance of not only building a strong navy, but, and this is the important point, actually using it effectively to achieve national objectives. It's very important, as I underline in my book, that the construction of a navy not be seen as sort of the end, okay? It's one thing to build a Navy is another to actually be able to use it. And that's the really important thing. If you build a Navy, but then are unable to use it for whatever purposes you built it for, I think it's highly questionable whether you could consider that to be a success.

Let's move into some of your historical examples. And let's start off with the French Navy. Could you give our listeners a little bit more about their experience regarding military hybridization? This is a really overlooked example. I think it's very much overshadowed, and I'll explain a little bit why. But the first case study I look at is 19th century France. So this is the post-Trafalgar pre-World War I French Navy. It's overlooked by scholars, and I think both the general public, usually by the Royal Navy, okay? And this is a little understandable, right? We're talking about the height of the Pax Britannica,

the aftermath of the decisive Battle of Trafalgar. This is when the Royal Navy helped build and police the world's largest empire, et cetera, et cetera. So from the commanding height of Britain's Navy in the 1800s, one can easily look down on not just the French Navy, but indeed all other navies, okay? And that's what a lot of naval historians do, naval historians working in the Anglophone world, writing in English. They have tended to look down

on the 19th century French Navy. And it's not difficult when you read histories in the English language to find descriptions of the French Navy that are put-downs or statements that are really just damnation by faint praise. Now, I go against this perception, and I argue that the French Navy was actually a success, because despite all the domestic turmoil that France went through in the 1800s, it was able to consistently deploy a navy that effectively executed national strategy. And if you look at how France managed to do this, it did strategy coherence and threat diffusion very, very well. France relearned a lesson after the Battle of Trafalgar, which and the Napoleonic Wars more generally, that trying to beat the British at their own

naval game was unlikely to result in success. So the French, for most of the 19th century, decided to have a fleet for two purposes. The first was to deter British attack of French territory. And the second was to build a fleet that go out and, in a way, sort of mimic the British Empire by building up a French Empire, which meant, of course, you were essentially picking on countries and peoples who were weaker than you, at least in terms of naval power. And if you look throughout 19th century French history, through all the domestic political turmoil, through all the changes in political systems and individual leaders, this was a consistent theme in the French Navy. So you had strategy coherence managed to go throughout the

19th century, despite domestic political turmoil. You had a French fleet that was meant to deter the British, and that was to go out and conquer less capable peoples in terms of material capabilities. Now, of course, it didn't stop the British from being worried about the French. There were various naval panics throughout the 1800s. That's not to say that the French fully ameliorated British threat perceptions, but they did do quite a bit, I think, to actually tamp down the concerns throughout the course of the 1800s. The second thing that the French did was threat diffusion, if you looked at where the French went and you looked at what the French fleet did, the French basically tried to create an empire for themselves that would assert French interests,

but that would not push Paris and London into another conflict. You look at how the French moved into West Africa and Northern Africa. You look at how the French established themselves in Vietnam. You looked at how the French and the British basically negotiated spheres of influence in southeastern Africa, especially Madagascar. You'll see the French were quite prudent in terms of where they went and how they went about establishing their imperial domains. And the Navy played a major role in this. This was the world's second most powerful navy for almost the entirety of the 1800s that helped create what would become the world's second largest empire. And so I hold up the case of 19th century France as a success because of its use of

strategy, concurrence, and threat to fusion. And here is, again, where I take a different tap from most of the English language literature. And I was able to do this using a lot of not hidden, but overlooked French language sources from the 1800s and from contemporary writers working on these things today. So the French case is something that's definitely, I think, underappreciated. And I think certainly for those of us in operating the Anglophone world, it's something that merits much greater study. Now, the example of France, they're rebuilding their navy instead of starting from scratch, which I would imagine had given some major advantages. They went about actually rebuilding this. So the French definitely had, they were certainly at a nadir coming out of the Napoleonic Wars. And what's interesting is that French shipbuilding was actually quite robust.

In fact, if you look at the Napoleonic Wars time period, the French actually built more than the British did. But they kept losing battles and the British kept taking French ships as prizes. So that was the disadvantage for the French. One of the things that the French decided to do throughout the 1800s, This is how they basically turned strategy coherence into practice was they focused on innovation. They realized they could not match the British pounds to pound. And so they decided we have to find some, the 21st century term was asymmetry.

They defined some asymmetric way to negate British superiority without just trying to match the British symmetrically. So if you think about a lot of the naval technological innovations from the 1800s, nearly all of these were either created or made militarily effective by French innovation. You think about the screw propeller, think about steam propulsion, think about the ironclad warship, steel load warship, the Pexel gun, so on and so forth. It was the French operating from a position of being number two, knowing they were going to stay number two, that allowed the French to try to level some of the playing field against the British. And this did lead to some, as I mentioned earlier,

There is some, in the retrospect, being called rather fanciful naval panics on behalf of the British. But the British were standing across the English Channel looking at these French innovations and never really being quite sure of just how superior their own navy was vis-a-vis the French, because the French kept rolling out these new technologies that the British weren't exactly sure what to do with at first. So what's interesting about this argument I make is a lot has been made about the French Jeune École from the 1880s and their sort of heterodox interpretation of naval warfare and

their emphasis on these new technologies and new tactics. I would argue if you look at the Jeune École in the context of the long 19th century of French naval development, the Jeune École, far from being unique or heterodox or strange in some way, was really just the latest in a series of heterodox French naval views on how to maintain their position in the world and deter the British. As one French official put it, the job for the French Navy in the 1800s

was to figure out how to not let the British dominate the oceans. And that's what the French, I think, were largely able to do. Just quickly, could you define what the genic hole is for our listeners? So the Jeune École French for the Young School was a group of naval officers who hit their peak in the 1880s, and they emphasized what we would consider today commerce raiding or guerre de course, warfare, in conjunction with new technologies that were coming onto line or about to come onto line at the time, like submarines and torpedoes. And so the idea was that if you combine these new technologies with this new way of thinking about how to do naval combat, that you could then, from an inferior position, inflict damage upon a superior adversary.

And this was something that was actually very, very popular for a time period among other navies as well. It actually got so popular that at its peak, I think in one year in the 1890s, there was one year in which no navy in the world commenced construction of a battleship, because the idea of the Jeanne d'Ecole was, let's focus on these other asymmetric capabilities instead of the capital ships. Ultimately, looking back in retrospect, we can say the Jeanne d'Ecole, its influence did not live particularly long past the 1890s. It was going up against the traditional naval mindset of fleet-on-fleet battle, of having capital ships.

This went up against issues revolving service identity, service culture. But for the period of the 1880s to 1890s, it was a profoundly influential school of thought going up against the traditional orthodox belief in battle fleet engagement. And so historians and even analysts writing at the time have tended to look at the French genicle as very unique, very heterodox, a very sort of outside-the-box sort of thinking. But I would argue if it plays in the context of French naval innovation in the preceding 80 years, this is actually unsurprising. Even to one of your other cases, and a much more recent one, tell us about your research on the Soviet Navy and how that fits into your thesis. So Soviet naval development from the 1950s

to the USSR's collapse in 1991 is an interesting case because it represents the fact that success and failure occupy a continuum. It's not as simplistic as an either-or dichotomy. There were elements about Soviet naval development that were arguable successes, but equally there were elements that were clear failures. If you look at Soviet naval development through the lenses of strategy coherence and threat diffusion, you see why the Soviets ended up with a navy that was simultaneously feared and looked down upon. So for strategy coherence, the Soviets went from what was initially a rather limited and narrow goal to broader objectives, broad in both a functional and a geographic sense.

The Soviets were initially focused on bastion defense, one thing that required naval forces to be closer to Soviet territory. This meant a fleet that was focused on geographically proximate waters and on this one mission. However, after the 1956 Suez Crisis, Moscow realized that there were potentially many post-colonial regimes ripe for support, even if those regimes weren't all officially Marxist. So the USSR decided it wanted to expand the mission set for its navy and to use the maybe as a tool for political-military diplomacy. But here you run into a problem,

especially for a submarine-focused fleet, it can be difficult literally to fly the flag, especially the fleet is not built for long-distance endurance. So you had a fleet, the Soviets had a fleet, that was built for one thing, in proximity, being tasked to do other things in more distant waters. This didn't mean that Bastion Defense Mission went away,

but it did mean that other missions got tacked on, missions for which the Soviet Navy wasn't really built to do. Now, threat to fusion also proved to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, the Soviets wanted to assert themselves, to stand up for their interests, to enhance Soviet prestige, to come to the aid of friendly countries.

On the other hand, the Soviets knew that their Navy could not actually defeat their U.S. counterpart, and they didn't have any territorial ambitions themselves. So the resulting tension meant that the Soviets wanted to assert themselves, but not so much as to have things spill over into outright conflict. What happened then was that the Soviet Navy could do things like show up in the vicinity of a crisis, but not actually be able to influence events in Moscow's favor. So there are two Middle East crises that illustrate this,

the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In both cases, the Soviets did dispatch naval flotillas to the eastern Mediterranean, so it would look like the Soviets were posturing themselves in an assertive manner and not allowing the United States with its naval forces to just do whatever wanted in those crises. However, the Soviet naval presence was actually relatively limited and heavily outgunned by U.S. forces in theater. Furthermore, in the case of the Yom Kippur War, the Soviets did not actually surge naval forces into the area until after the war had already

peaked. So what you got was a Soviet navy that could be a serious irritant and a very serious latent threat, but that in the end did not substantively impact the outcome of whatever was being disputed. And some scholars posit it was precisely this Soviet ability to show up but not do much, that ended up pushing countries like Egypt to break their links with the Soviets and to make peace with the United States. So overall, you had a Soviet Navy that had strategy coherence that was uneven and threat diffusion that was contradictory. And this is important because the Navy was actually the instrument that Moscow relied upon the most for overseas influence. So the Soviets did achieve some successes, and they were definitely more successful than their

imperial Russian predecessors, and they're more successful than imperial Germany, two of the other historical cases I look at. But the Soviets didn't achieve anything as lasting as what the 19th century French were able to do. So it's mixed results. Depending on your perspective, you could say, as one scholar did, that the Soviet Navy was simply the sharp end of an inexpertly wielded spear. You could also say that the Soviet Navy was actually a very cost-effective tool of Soviet diplomacy because it did achieve for a time political effects that were out of all proportion to the Navy's actually military operational effectiveness. And for those of you who are familiar with Admiral Stavridis's memoir, he writes about how in the 1970s as a young U.S.

naval officer looking at Soviet naval advances in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean and sort of feeling like, my goodness, the Soviets are making advances everywhere and the United States are getting nowhere, right? So that's a great sort of anecdotal illustration of the attitude of the Soviet Navy at the time. And I think the contradictions and ambiguities that I highlight in my chapter help explain the division that you see from Western analysts who are writing about Soviet Navy during the Cold War. There's a very amusing mixture of alarm and condescension at the same time. Some arguing that the Soviet Navy was a very real threat, others arguing that the threat was grossly exaggerated. I think both groups were actually correct simply because they were

focusing on different aspects of the same naval development process. So the Soviet case study for me is an extremely interesting example, and I think it's a fount of ceaseless debate over how actually to analyze and measure naval power so could you go go more into the diplomatic effects of it being kind of ineffective in diplomatic senses so the soviets want to use the navy as sort of their premier uh military diplomatic tool and so what they tried to do and what the longtime commander of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, tried to do was try to use the Navy to help build up relationships with various third world countries. And they would build up these relationships to, among other things, get port agreements whereby Soviet naval vessels

could use commercial ports for resupply because the Soviet overseas naval base was very poor, especially when compared with what the United States possessed. So he was using the Navy here as a tool of diplomacy to create stronger overall bilateral relations while also helping the Soviet Navy be able to operate better in different parts of the world. And so if you looked at the 1960s and 1970s, you could see Soviet Navy making advances here, getting agreements to use this port, getting closer relations with this country, improving bilateral relationships, and so on and so forth. The successes were, however, largely temporary, because for one very basic political reason, which is a lot of regimes the Soviets had good relations with were also authoritarian

regimes. These authoritarian regimes tended to be a bit capricious, and if they started feeling like they weren't getting what they wanted from the Soviets, then they would pivot elsewhere. Some authoritarian regimes were also unstable. They were simply overthrown, and the Soviets would discovered they had lost their privileged port access overnight because the new regime came in, and because the old regime was associated with the Soviets, the new regime did not want to be associated with the Soviets. And so it was very arbitrary and idiosyncratic in terms of what the Soviets had to deal with in terms of naval diplomacy. So they did have some successes, but the successes, looking back, relatively speaking, were not as long-lived or permanent

as you might think the egypt case obviously you know other there were other factors at play here in terms of why egypt made the geopolitical shift that it did but some scholars do argue that it was seeing the soviets repeatedly show up and not be able to do anything that pushed the egyptians to recognize by the late by the mid to late 1970s that the soviets were really not the not the help that they were all crept up to be and that it was time to think of a different geostrategic approach. Along the lines of the French Navy, how do you see the Soviet Navy utilizing technology? Do you see that kind of technological, you know, avant-garde that the French have, or is it different? For the Soviets, it was very different. The Soviet Navy was technologically not comparable

to the U.S. Navy. And that wasn't the Navy's fault per se. That was more a reflection of the general Soviet economy and the malaise it went into and the decline that it went into, especially by the 1970s and 1980s. So in a sense,

you couldn't really say that was the Soviet Navy's fault, quote unquote. They were simply doing the best they could with the rather hampered economy that they were operating from. This did lead to some rather comical situations, like, for example, Soviet submarines would stay on the surface and be towed

because that was cheaper, and you'd save more on both maintenance and on fuel. You know, it led to sort of situations like this. But on the whole, the Soviets were not naval technological innovators for their time period. And there is a bigger debate here. If you look at not just the Soviet Union, but also Imperial Russia in the 1800s, There's a bigger debate about to what extent could you reasonably expect the Russian or Soviet state to deploy a capable navy, given everything I said earlier about cost, duration, expertise, et cetera, et cetera. You know, could you have seriously expected a state, given Russia's condition, to actually deploy a navy? I would simply note that if you go back a little further in time and look at how the Imperial Russian Navy was operating and how, and we look at its deficiencies, I would argue that its

deficiencies were not things that were preordained. For example, why was Imperial Russia so far behind Britain and France in terms of steam propulsion or ships with screw propellers? It wasn't because the Russian economy was somehow incapable, per se, of producing those things, it was because the emperor at the time made the idiosyncratic decision that these were just passing fads and so not necessary. If you think about even such a nadir as the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian fleet of the 1890s and early 1900s, you will see that while the Russian fleet might have had some technological issues, the far worse problem was that it had officers and crew who were simply not good at their jobs. You had officers who were very poorly trained, crews that were very poorly

trained, often drunk, sometimes mutinous, right? This was a matter of sort of software, not using the hardware that they were given. So there is a bigger debate here about sort of the economic and technological potential and capabilities of the Russian and Soviet economies over the last, well, now two centuries and a quarter. I think there's definitely a major factor there, but I I don't think it's deterministic. So we're running up on time, but one final question I have. So in that sense, would the French Navy's reliance on technology be more the outlier than the norm among these military hybridization powers? it's i would say it's not so much reliance on technology because given the way naval power

works technology is sort of part and parcel with naval power it's much harder to sort of separate in terms of naval if you think about sort of the course of naval development i will say what really stood out what the 19th century french was their perpetual desire indeed i would say obsession to innovate so that being number two, they could prevent number one or put enough doubt in the minds of number one from just doing whatever it is that they wanted. Imperial Germany is also very much obsessed with technology. It just happened to go about it in, as I describe in the book, a very illogical way. And it was very strategically incoherent. And instead of threat diffusion, there was threat concentration. So it's for those two reasons that Germany ended

of doing what it did so that its naval development actually proved to be a pretty massive failure. In fact, one historian described General Germany's strategy at the time as so illogical as to be nothing more than a throw of the dice. So it's not just a matter of whether you embrace technology, but how it is that you are actually able to use it, how you're actually able to employ it. If you read the France and Germany chapters side by side, you will see two countries with overlapping time periods, taking very different approaches to naval technology that was available to any great power. And that helps explain, I think, the stark difference in outcome. Well, unfortunately, that's all we have time for today. I'd like to take my guest,

Dr. Brian C. Chow. Brian, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So you can find me on my website, briancchow.com. I do occasionally tweet on X. My handle is at Wine Blue Water. Some of you might recognize that reference from The Odyssey. Otherwise, an internet search will reveal my Naval War College homepage, my LinkedIn page, and you'll find a couple of YouTube videos of lectures I've given. In terms of my next work, I do have a project with Ben Cho at Korea University. We're looking at how international security concepts apply in the maritime environment. So we've written about crisis signaling, for example, and how crisis signaling is much more complicated at sea than it is on land. Right now, Ben and I

are studying U.S. freedom of navigation operations as political signals, not just as assertions of international law. So we have one article out for those who are interested, and we're also working on further articles. I've always been interested in Taiwan and cross-strait relations, so I'm working on a project right now that thinks about the status quo and how we interpret that. That's early days, so some more to come. And finally, of course, I am thinking about my next book, and this project gave me so much to think about and so much that I want to pursue further. so it's kind of a matter of narrowing down all the threads that I still want to follow and deciding

which one or two I want to explore for the next book Yeah, we'll keep an eye out for those and when you get those done we can have you back on but thank you again for joining us and to the listeners, thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time Thank you.

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