The Team House - The Real Truth About the U.S.'s Nuclear Submarines | Thomas Shugart | Ep. 337

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

Thomas Shugart is a former US Navy submarine warfare officer. He previously served as a Navy Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where his research focused on great power competition between China and the United States. His work has been published in War on the Rocks, the National Interest and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings, and has been cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and various other international publications and think tank studies.Find Tom here:https://x.com/tshugart3-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:LUCY⬇️https://lucy.co/HOUSEUse the code "House" for 20% off your first order!GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!American Financing ⬇️https://AmericanFinancing.net/teamhouse or call 866-889-8010DisclaimerNMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org____________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"Want to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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With your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 337 of the Team House. I'm Jack. Here with Dave. And our guest on tonight's show is Thomas Sugart. Thomas served in the Navy as a officer on submarines going all the way up to be the captain of the USS Olympia, correct?

That's right. And then went on to positions at the Office of Net Assessment, essentially working in the think tank space and really focusing on the Chinese military. So we're going to talk to Thomas tonight about his career and all about his work today, too. So we're excited to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us tonight, Tom. That's a pleasure. Thanks very much, Jack and Dave.

So to kick it off, tell us a little bit about your upbringing and what sort of propelled you towards service in the Navy. So, I mean, I grew up in Texas and went to the University of Texas and was working out mechanical engineering. And right around the time of the very first Gulf War, and I'm dating myself here, but right around the time of the first Gulf War, I was a bit inspired to join up somehow while I was in college. And so I went to the recruiting station and I said, hey, you know, I'm interested in helping out. Is there a way I could be like a reserve officer or something? And the recruiter said, hey, what's your major? I said, mechanical engineering and hire your grades. They're good.

Okay, well, I've got a program for you. So the Navy's nuclear power officer candidate program. And that's a program that still exists very much, Colin Strong. And it's basically a way that the Navy can get enough engineers to be the nuclear-trained officers on its submarine. and aircraft barriers because they basically can't produce enough engineers out of the naval academy and out of ROTC. They need to pull some right out of college engineering programs and other technical majors to bring them into the Navy specifically to be nuclear trained officers. So all of our submarine officers are nuclear trains. They have one supply officer on board,

but all the other officers on the ship are what we call nuclear trains. They all go through, they have some sort of technical background. They go through nuclear power school, nuclear prototype, you know, about a year and a half with a training, and we're all trained on how nuclear hackers operate and are qualified to operate them as supervisors. So I got signed up for that program. It is a fantastic program back when I did it. So basically what you do is you sign up and the day you sign up, and you can sign up up to two years before we graduate, maybe two and a half at this point. You get a signing bonus and you become active duty enlisted in the Navy. the only job is to go to college. Interesting. You literally, I don't know if it works now, but I can say, I got a letter that said that I was both exempt.

I was exempt from grooming standards and that I was not required nor authorized to where you were found, but still could use space available air. I'm picking for retirement to your pound of leave while you're in school and your full activity paid benefits. Back then it was E3. I think it's like E6 now, E6 or E7. that you get paid.

And it's not scholarship. It's just, hey. So you do that program up to two years, and then when you graduate, you go officer campus school, and then nuclear power school, and then you enter the training pipeline for submarines or surface ships,

depending on where you're going. So that seemed like a good application of my technical backgrounds to really utilize that, but still be able to serve. And I thought submarines sound exciting. It was, you know, independent operation. and, you know, to come doing its own thing.

I thought about surface warfare, being a surface warfare officer, but I kind of looked at it as, well, you know, the surface ships are kind of there for the carrier, and the carrier is kind of there for the pilots. And so I'd rather be a submariner where we're kind of doing our own thing. Yeah, I haven't changed a lot since then, so that doesn't really speak that much the way things are now. But so that's kind of what got me into the Navy in the first place.

I had thought about going to the Naval Academy and actually spent a week there in the summer, before my senior year and ended up being kind of deciding, you know, I kind of want the regular college experience. And I'm sure the Naval Academy is great for a lot of folks, but I'm playing happy after. You know, Austin's a fun place to live and have a great time to college. What, you know, you go through this whole program, you go through college, you get into the Navy, and you mentioned all the officers are nuclear trained, but I mean, I guess that doesn't necessarily mean you are like the reactor guy per se. I'm just curious, what was like kind of your first

duty position when you showed up? So junior officers on board submarines, the first thing you do when you get there is you're going back to the end of the ground. You're learning how to operate all the equipment back there. Ultimately, there's a watch station you're trying to qualify, which is engineering officer of the watch. So you're basically the watch officer that is in charge of the reactor plan. Okay. You're about the guy that's actually flipping the switches on the panels and all that. Those really smart enlisted operators that have a lot more experience than you do that are doing that. So like in the control room for the engineering spaces, you'll have the watch officer,

then you have two or three panel operators depending on the type of shift. The ones that are really operating the reactor or whatnot. And you have a bunch of other watchstanders that are out in the engineering spaces, you know, turning valves and pick some pumps and all that other stuff. I watched a watch team about 10 or so, 10 or 11 people total back in the end of the room. So that's the first operational job you're learning is engineering officer to watch. So you're, you know, and I'll never forget the first time I did a reporter started off. And I was the guy, I'm actually on watch.

It wasn't a trainee anymore. And me and my guys started up the reactor. You know, it was, trust me, the engineer officer, the department head was keeping an eye on things by all means. But it was cool. You know, I walked out of the engine. I'm like, I just started up a nuclear reactor. you know, pretty 50. And I was like 26 years old, probably.

And then you have your administrative jobs, where you're a division officer, and you're notionally in charge of, you know, 10 or so enlisted personnel in a division. So you start with engineering, so electrical division or reactor control division or that kind of thing. So you start out in that job as a bit of a leadership

over and out. We all know if you spend time in a service that you've got some senior NCO, And yes, you're nominally in charge, but I mean, you'd be dumb but not take advice very carefully from, you know, from your chief. And actually my first electrical admission chief recently passed away, so I'll send to see that. But in any case, so yeah, you kind of start back in the interim

is the first thing you do when you get there. And you gradually work your way forward to where you're eventually a forward division officer, like the communications officer or SAR officer or damage control assistant, and then watch the, What your goal is is to be to stand officer of the deck. So you're the guy in the control room and charging the ship on a minute-by-minute basis on behalf of the captain, you know, while the ship is steaming the line. And what was the first boat you were assigned to?

That was my first ship was USS Houston. Okay. Which was in San Diego. All of you, all of you have seen USS Houston. So that was in the Hunter in October. There's the sea where USS Dallas comes flying out of all. water and crashes back down, that was actually USS Houston that did that. Wow.

They were the star of the show for that. So that was my first ship, yeah, in San Diego, which was awesome. Is the nuke program for officers enlisted, is it the same? Do they share classes when it comes to like the power plant stuff and things like that? you don't really share the initial so you don't share nuclear power school

so nuclear power school is a six-month classroom training and there's there is a it's all the same place but it's separate classes for officers that's listed

but then you go to the training pipeline so you go to nuclear power training units so it's supposed to call prototype and that is a it's an actual operating reactor but it's a training plant. So it's a, some of them

are an old submarine, which has been refitted to be a training submarine. It doesn't go anywhere. It just is tied up and it just kind of shirmed river water instead of going anywhere. But it's a real reactor. It's really operating. So at prototype, there are enlisted trainees and officer trainees and you're

each trying to qualify your respective watch stations. So they're qualifying, a junior enlisted watch stations. You're qualifying your junior officer watch station. Now, that said, to be engineering officer to watch, you'd have to stand watch on all of the enlisted watch stations as a trainee before you could go beat to watch officers. You'd have to at least for a couple of watches

have done their job. I mean, you're a trainee. It's not for real, so to speak, but you've experienced all the enlisted watch stations before you get to the point that you're supposed to be in charge on. What's, you know, you get to your first boat. What's it like? What's, you know, what is being on a submarine like? Well, I certainly remember when I showed up to my first ship. So again, I showed up to USS Houston, and here I am where I serve as dress blues up topside and show up. I've got my midsholder and got my white hat on, ready to go. And they call down and this young guy comes up topside. I won't say his name, though, but he says, who are you? I'm like, Tom Street, Hart. How are you doing? I'm

John Doe. Welcome to Hell. I was like, great. So my first ship was, our commanding officer was largely kind of a terror, not very well regarded by a lot of the crew. And the ship was, it was tough. It was, we spent a lot of time in the dry dot, which sounds great, but it's actually kind of awful. And it was quite challenging. So everything got much better when I got my next commanding officer. And it's amazing how the character of a CEO can completely change the quality of life on board of ship.

And, you know, my second commanding officer showed up and he came, got all the officers together and said, you know, I got a count on all you guys. All of you know more about what you're doing than I do about the whole, you know, the bigger picture of your individual part, you know better. It was a very different feel than his predecessor. So it was quite tough. So, you know, as a, we were relatively short on officer manning at that point. And so I was for quite a while, I was what they call three-section duty. So one-and-every-three days I was on duty, but that's on top of your workweek. And duty is 24 hours.

And it's not deeper duty. It is you're on the ship for 24 hours. So if your three-section, for example, let's say your work week starts on Monday and you are on duty. So you show up Monday at like six to take the watch from the offgoing watch section. Can you got to tour the ship? You got to renew all the logs. You got to reveal all the maintenance paperwork that's happening. And you've got to turn over from the offgoing watch officer.

So you're there like six. Okay, now you're on duty for 24 hours, you know, all the way until the next morning until you get released. And then your next day starts. You know, and you might get maybe four or five hours of sleep. And then you're on duty all the next day, Tuesday. Then you get a work day. And you go home. tired. And then, you know, Wednesday is kind of a normal work day. And guess what? You're on duty

you get on Thursday. Once every three days. Now, okay, now you're on duty all the way through Friday morning. So you go home Friday from work dead tired because you got, you know, didn't get much sleep. And then Saturday, you get to think about how you're going to have duty on Sunday. So, you know, you can't go really party on Friday night if you're tired. Saturday night, you can't really turn tight on because you've got to be on duty the next morning. So really, And you just repeat that. You basically never get a, you never get a real weekend that you're totally free because you got due to either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. And that's when you're important.

Right. That's not, that doesn't count when you're at sea. And, yeah, and I'd be curious to know about that because that's, one, that's a heavy workload. But two, when you guys do get underway, if you're doing a, you know, a float, you're talking about a few hundred people. I imagine in a very confined space. And sometimes, from what I've heard, like, nukes will stay underwater for three to six months at a time. Like, how do you manage that?

How is all that managed with personalities, with the workload, with everything else? I think the most challenging part is just the workload and it's kind of get up sleep. I mean, you know, it is, depending on what the ship's doing, it can be quite busy with all the training and the drills and, and watch standing. So people say like, oh, you know, aren't you get bored or, you know, do you think about being underwater? You're just thinking about how am I going to get in the rack?

Sure of. Yeah. I can get a decent sleep and not be dead tired. Or when's the next set of drills? Or, you know, when do I have to get this paperwork done? When do I have to have this training plan ready? When I don't have to prepare training for the guys? What are we doing?

And it just goes on from there. So I will say that only once or twice that I've been on a submarine where I wasn't part of the crew, you know, what they call a rider, where you're just somebody that's on the work. And we'll say that if you don't have a job on you're on a submarine, it can be a very super boring place to be. And because there's nowhere to go. There's no, in many occasions, the cruise mass, which is the one big space, will be used for training or they're eating or whatever.

and if you can't get in the war room, which or the officers hang out because again, stuff's going on there. There's really nowhere to go. There's nothing to do. So I will say that it was actually while I was longed to be a writer when I was a part of ship's company,

being one, it was like, okay, well, there's really not much to do here if you're not, if you're not working around and stuff. So. Yo, what's up guys? Today's episode sponsored by Lucy Nicotine. It's 100% pure nicotine, always tobacco free.

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866-8-8-8-6-8-8-6-8-8-8-8-10 American Finan. financing.net slash team house. So that really, it was a challenge just to get it all done, to get all the work done, get sleep. We've got, the summary force was getting a lot smarter over the year. So my first, my first couple of ships, you were jet, most of the crew was in a three-second, we're called three-section rotation again. So it was six-hour watches.

So you're six on, 12-off. And so you ended up being on-watched. you know, different, all different times of the day on a rotating basis. So you'd be like, pick the 12 and off until midnight. And then you'd come on at midnight. You'd be on until 6 and you're off until 1800. And you'd be on at 1,800 and you'd be off until 6. You know, you get the idea, 6 on 12 off.

It was really not a smart way to do things because we all understand now, circadian rhythm, you know, is really important to not being dumb all the time. And we weren't doing that. So you basically were continually jet-lighted because you're sleeping at different times of the day every single day. So the sports done a lot smarter around they did some studies.

It figured out that that was not a great bit of doing things and shifted to a like an 8 on 16 off rotation to again a circadian rhythm loss rotations where you're on up you're sleeping the same time every day. And that made us a lot smarter.

I mean it made the crews a lot better rested. Even if they were busy, even if you're being, even if you only got five hours in sleep, at least you're getting at the same time. Right, right. And is it true that, because I've heard all kinds of like horror stories about, you know, about nuke subs in particular in the sense of, did the enlisted have to hot rack generally? Or was there generally enough space for all of them? Well, so it depends on the kind of ship you're on. Okay. So our attack submarines, a smaller multipurpose, you know, they can do stank surface ship. They can sink submarines. They can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. They can do intelligence collection. There's a multi-purpose kind of boats. They generally will have some portion to grew hot racking.

Usually it's your pretty junior guys. It's E2s, E3s, maybe some E-4s, maybe a few E-5s, but not usually. And oftentimes your torpedo room will have some space. Yeah, they'll have racks where they would have weapons and freeze up some extra space. But when you on deployment, there's a lot of guys fine-wracking because you live in torpedo rooms full when you're all on deployment

over there for a reason and you sometimes will have extra riders on board. I'm sure folks that have helped you with stuff you're doing on deployment. And in that case, sometimes it's about these sixes are on-wracking. Yeah. Officers don't ever out-wrack.

It's just, you know, that's just the way it is. Right. It doesn't mean that their officers are not necessarily a state room. for example on like a Los Angeles class here's what's called nine man birthing which is a nine person bunk rooms and just we usually do this little gerratures on the

are in Zaire and you work their way up to a statero over time now our newer boats like the Ohio class summaries actually they're not newer but our ballistic missile summaries they're a humongous submarines they're you know they're two or three times a size in LA class and so they haven't there's no

hot wrecking on SSPN generally. They have enough bunks for everybody because there's all these bunk rooms in the missile department in between those huge missile tubes. So there's showing no high ranking there. Now there's a whole other rainbow now. We have towed crews, so speak.

We have integrated crews where you have, like on a Virginia class submarines, you have bunk rooms that are all female or all male. As opposed, all of the submarines are on. None of them were built to have women on board, so they were never integrated while all of us on board. Right. Interesting. And I'd like to, you know, ask a little bit more about, you know, you were saying that there's a big difference on the culture of your first submarine where the captain was a bit of a terror, and then the second was kind of a very different leadership style.

I was worried if you could expand on that, like, because you mentioned how big an impact that has on the entire life on the ship. Yeah, I mean, you know, the CEO has a lot of authority on how things go on. There's a lot of different ways that they can make life better or worse. A lot of it has to do with, you know, that they listen to the inputs that they're given by the crew, by their officers. And they treat them. I mean, are they nice? I mean, because there's always times that you have to be, you may not be pleasant all the time. But, like, for example, this guy, I mean, he, and he inspired his ex-in interview is saying, there's screaming sometimes in the control.

things weren't going the way that he wanted him to. He started yelling at people. And I took away from that as a young junior officer, here's the captain yelling at me or the person next to me that just, I couldn't really function when he was doing that. So he was attempting to get better performance out of us. But all he could do was, what do I need to do to make this guy stop yelling at me? And not so much of focusing on how we do things.

So I made it a point, that was kind of a lesson that I learned at that point was do whatever you can than not head a motion in the control room why you're trying to operate a ship you know if you're going to deploy a motion do so in a very planned manner with the goal of achieving specific results if you need to make an example or something you know make clear you're how important something is you know do it on a thoughtful way that's the kind of thing that you can do differently that i think helps people perform better that helps for attention. Now, that guy, I mean, to be clear, the ship did really well under his command.

I mean, they did really hard missions and accomplished them, but I think it came at an enormous cost of people that were not going to stick around after that. And in some cases, like, one of the things that could happen in the Navy is you can do what's called relisting for orders. So you re-enlist, and for re-enlisting, you get a new assignment. And so his retention numbers actually could look pretty good sometimes. because people were enlisting to get off the ship. And so that doesn't mean they're going to stay in a Navy forever. But, you know, that can be kind of a false indicator.

So, he, his command tour looked really great on paper. And he did really well. He was promoted. He went to go on a major commander. But just a terrible, terrible experience for many people on board. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, the tremendous authority that a sub-captain has. And I'd like to ask you a little bit more about that, too.

Because, look, I know nothing about this topic other than like the hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide and a few other movies. They always show these subs are in isolation. They have no comma with Big Navy. They're out there doing their own thing. And the captain kind of is like the god of the boat. Is that true? Is that accurate? It is true to some degree.

So, I mean, I would say that probably compared to any other part of the military, you were, I say, see you know, you're an O5 command, you're probably the most independent. I mean, because there are times where you're out doing stuff and, yeah, you're not communicating. And you know, and you're conducting, can be conducting pretty high stakes operations. And, yeah, there's nobody to talk to it. And certainly, when things go south, you're not going to have anyone to talk to for a while. And you really are going to be on your own. So I will never forget when I was on my command tour, I woke up in the, middle of the night to a fire alarm going off and we're hearing a fire announcement you know

fire fire fire in the engine room fire in this and that thing and i just remember you know the ran standing in the control room in my pajamas just and starting to think about while the guys are working on this and the fire was out very quickly and they're not being a very big deal but you know for that 30 seconds like are we going to wind up on the surface off of hawaii at night with the crew on the top side you know and what one am I going to abandon shit if I have to? You know, you start thinking through those things because in that time frame, yeah, you're not going to have any help. You're not going to be able to radio home that kind of time frame to make those really quick decisions.

That being said, you have a lot of guidance. I mean, you know, the sub-readers are all about procedures and requirements and technical requirements. And so you have beaten into you over years of experience exactly what the requirements are for most situations that you'd be in. So most conceivable situations that should be in there is a procedure for whatever the category is. Your people should be executing that. You should be overseeing

their execution of all that. Most of it should be happening, unfolding in accordance with some sort of script. But there is a great deal of the discretion requirement. In wartime, obviously, that will go up even more, which is why as you see much of the NOLTRA right now is talking about mission command.

So, you know, because communications may be quite constrained in a future conflict with China in particular. We're the military starting to focus on how do we default mission command to our commanders so that they can, in the absence of communication, still find effectively by making decisions. And I've always said, like, you all under the mission command? Talk to some reinforce, because we're the guys that do that all the time. It is in our absolute marrow of our bones. I want to do relatively independent operations with very little guidance,

except the way we've done before. And no, it's incredible. And so as you're going through your career here, you mentioned that you're going to these different duty positions across the submarine. And I take it, they're sort of like grooming you as a naval officer to potentially be captain. They must be like looking at you, like, you know,

are you going to be the guy? Can you tell us a little bit about like kind of what your career progression was like going to these different stations? Sure. I mean, so one thing that's kind of funny about submarine force is that when you sign out for it, there's literally a part that shows your entire career. It shows it's a timeline. It's three years, three years of the junior officer, two years on short duty. Then you go to department head school for six months, and then five months, whatever it is. Three years of the department head, two years of short duty. Two years is the next so, two years in the co. And, and And that is what is going to happen. As long as you don't fall off the wagon, you're going to be somewhere within plus or minus six months. Every one of those gates is going to happen on your career. The variables are which boats, where, what kind of racings are they doing?

And then what are you doing on short duties? So, you know, are you going to be, you know, at a submarine headquarters? Or are you going to be, you know, work on orange? Or are you going to be, you know, in Pentagon? So that's kind of the flavor. And it starts in the Divident Officer Tour that I mentioned. And then again, you go to Shore Deney for a couple of time, a couple of years. I went to Italy.

I was on the Sixth Fleet Staff in Naples as the submarine operations officer. Fantastic job. I got to travel all over Europe. Can't talk about the boats for doing that I was involved with, but, you know, it was good stuff. And then back as an apartment head in this case that was on an SSVN, a ballistic missile submarine. And I was the engineer and then I was the navigator. Oh, sorry, started as the navigator. and ended up as the ship's engineer for most light tour.

And that was in Bangor, Washington on the west coast. And then after that, then post department head, I'm sorry, I totally missed the tour. So junior officer, and then I went to San Francisco. I was a recruiter. I was recruiting college students to be a new officer like I was. And then Department Head and Bangor, Washington, and then Italy post department head. Then I went to go be Exo on USS Topeka in San Diego, back to San Diego for another tour, which was awesome. San Diego is incredible.

And then after that, I went to the Naval War College in Capeport, Rhode Island. Fantastic experience. Got into war gaming there. That was a big thing later. So I was part of something that's called the Halsey Alpha Group, which is the War Gaming Group at the War College. A.R. China War Gaming Group, we can also say that out. And that was a fantastic experience. And then from there, I went to the joint staff.

where I was on the, I was the nuclear, nuclear strike branch chief, which is a fun job. We answer the phone, nuclear strike. And so we were the guys that basically did nuclear command and control. So we expected all the nuclear command centers around the world to make sure that they were

able to execute nuclear command of control in accordance with the chairman's directives. And then also inspect, yes, we expected them. And we also wrote the black book. So we published, to write the black book. So the book that goes on the football, so the president's suitcase known as the black book, the nuclear decision handbook. So we took part in that. We maintained that book and ended up a day. Wow. And that was a really cool job.

So. Yeah, no pressure, man. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. Yeah, it's, it's an important book. Yeah. It's a humbling experience. So, and I, and I, it's a humbling experience. So, and I And also training the military, the guys that carried the football with the president. So I'll train them on nuclear command and control stuff. So a really fantastic job. And then after that, once a committee, so it's on a command tour. And that was in Hawaii. And people say it like, what's a great job, right?

In my opinion, one of the best jobs on the planet, operational, fascinic, submarine community officer in Hawaii. It doesn't get much better than that. You know, you get underway, there's Hawaii, you know, weather's always free. you know, there's a lot of places where it's not very pleasant to stand on top of a submarine, as the captain does coming in and out of port, but Hawaii is not one of them. It was awesome. So that was kind of up through the command tour.

And so I've heard, I've been told that being a submarine captain is maybe the most complex job in the military. I mean, would you agree with that? And could you tell us why or why not? I mean, probably, maybe. I mean, it's certainly some of the most, I mean, objectively, objectively, I would say, that it's some of the most training. I mean, you have, before you can get to the jobs. So, first of all, you have to have been selected over the years.

You know, you've got to keep getting selected. Well, getting selected for department, that's pretty easy. XO is a pretty steep cut to go from three department heads to one XO. And then XO's CO is another cut. And what's funny about it is that unlike a lot of other services, like as long as you're ever falling off the wagon, and the selection boards are what eventually will decide to rank. And like the motion boards are kind of automatic.

So if you get selected to go to CO, you're going. And then if you don't get fired during your CO tour, you're going to make 06. As they say, if there's a band of the change of command, you're going to make 06. Ditto rewinding your XO tour, if you successfully think that your XO tour, you won't make O5. I mean, it's kind of automatic. So it's the selection boards you have a long way. But on the way of that, COTOR, you know, the training pipeline is about nine or ten months between your life's

and when you take command. You know, you have three months of training and able reactors in D.C. at the headquarters headquarters headquarters are the very, like you're literally taking classes and talking to the guys that design the reactor and that, you know, are responsible for bringing out the procedures and everything.

So if you have a question about asking them, You can go talk to the board, design the thing, and resolve that. So really intensive training for eight-hour written exams or multiple oral exam boards, where you get through all kinds of situations where you go to command. And then you go through what we call the submarine command course. Now, to be clear, this might have changed. I'm talking 2013, 12 years ago, but I think it's pretty much the same. So submarine command course, you're spending a month in the books,

learning about the solar and fire control systems for the ship that you're going to go to, and then you're in trainers, simulators with other students, a bunch of guys that are PXOs and PCOs, prospective XOs and COs that are going to boats. And then you go to sea as groups and you ride multiple boats. So you'll ride a boat for several days and then you'll transfer to another boat. And you do all, every combat or peacetime operation you can think of if you're doing on these ships.

So you basically kind of get to be captain for a day. And as they say, drive it like he stole it. There's a real seal that actually owns the boat, and you kind of get to take the reins for 24 hours and practice doing it. So then there's the Navy SEAL leadership course. You go to that too, although compared to the other submarine training pipeline, that's a relatively tame course. So it is quite a bit of training.

And then when you get to the shift, you have a 30-day turnover period with the outgoing CO. So you're on board for a month for you to actually take command, which is much longer than I think most communities do. As they say, No, no, no, no, no, please. Finish that up. Yeah, finish up your thoughts.

Yeah, so that 30-day turnover period, you know, some might say that have been through it, like it's kind of the longest 30 days of your life for both you and the outgoing guy, because, you know, after a couple weeks, you know, you don't have any authority. You know, you have zero authority until the guy says, please say, I relieve you.

He says, I stand relieved. So you're not actually in terms. charge or anything, you're just going to watch it. You're watching everybody in business. After a couple weeks, you know, the crew will be looking to the current see, hey, what do you want to do about this or that? And he's kind of looking at you like, hey, man, this

is my event horizon ends in two weeks. So what do you want to do? You know, but at the same time, you're not actually in charge. So I think by the end of that period, you're both ready to get it over with because the outboying guy, wasn't just ready to go. Right. He's kind of had enough at that point. So it is kind of a long period.

So when all that said and done, I mean, I took command. Yeah, it was like 11 months after I left my last job. You mentioned the idea of going from 05 to 06 is pretty set as long as you don't, like, get fired when you're a captain of a boat, right? So one of the things that we've, like, been told from sort of the infantry-minded is that 05 to 06 can. be very political for them, you know, that there's also a political game to be played a lot of times. Do you feel like in the submarine field that it's a bit more pure that because you are so isolated times and whatnot, that really it's more job-based than than playing the politics the right way? I'm not sure I'm not a short political politics or not. I mean, there are further

selection boards, so there is a major command selection board after your command tour. And so that's everybody who went who successfully completed command who's going to make those sites, but they're not all going to be major commanders. Right. So your major commanders are your submarine squadron commanders. So you own five or six boats and their COs or submarine base COs or subordinate tenders or the big training facilities. So there's major commands.

And so there may be, you know, the selection stuff isn't over yet at that point. So they may, I mean, if I want to call it Paltite, something, it is, I would say, I would call it more like reputation and, you know, who have you oppressed or not? Now, what's interesting I think about how things boil down for submariners on your fitness reports, for example, most of what matters is how are you ranked by your squad. So, like, there isn't much competition. So you have like three department heads on the ship. There isn't that much competition between those three guys. I mean, they have three different jobs. They are kind of ranked against each other,

but nobody's really paying attention to that. What they pay attention to, for example, is that like if you're a navigator, or you rank against the other navigators on the other ships. Right, okay. And so the squadron staff and the squadron commoner war, they will issue a ranking letter that ranks, who are the top one, two, three navigators in this one, the top one, two, three XOs, the top one, two, three COs.

That is what goes into your fit reps. And that is what the COXO major command selection board see. That's how you get chosen, whether you're going to have to go on or not. Is that process? So is that process political? I mean, maybe it depends. I mean, again, people say political, but I mean, it can also be called reputation. It could be called a lot of things.

It's fascinating. As far as being the sub-captain, I know, like, when we talk about, like, deployments and missions, that's very sensitive. Actually, probably some of the deepest well-kept secrets in the United States government is actually what you guys do at sea. But with that in mind, I mean, are you able to speak a little bit to sort of like the pressure that you're feeling as a captain on one of these submarines, like the amount of different things you're having to think about at the same time? I mean, I must, it must be wild. Yeah, so, I mean, obviously you do different things depending on what part of the world you're in. So we can't say much about what we do on deployment.

I mean, it's, they don't call, they didn't call us a silent service for nothing. And so much of what you do, and obviously, you do stuff that you can't talk about. I will say that, you know, in terms of that pressure, for example, So what I can say is, you know, I went on deployment, just documented that my ship went on deployment in 2014, 2015. We were over there for about six months in the Western Pacific. And it's just really busy water space. There's fishing boats everywhere and lots of merchant ships. And it is just super duper busy. And so I felt like the entire time I was over there, you just can't ever look your guard down. You can't never be, you can never not be paying attention out of the corner of your eye. what's going on as long as you're over there because it's just so busy. One of the things that we do when you're doing operations, for example, a practically challenging operations is you have basically a

the XO will kind of be the captain in your stead, you know, while you're sleeping while you're sleeping. So it's, you know, we have a term for the job that it takes, but it's basically your kind of duty captains, so to speak. So, so we, so you can get some sleep. The EXO will take care of the normal. Most things that would need to be reported to the CO, they will take those reports.

Most things that require CO permission, they will grant that permission for the CO on the CO's behalf, so you can sleep. Because one of you, basically 24-7, has to be paying attention to what's going on. This is just so busy. And things can very quickly, you know, get interesting, which you don't want.

You always learn to be boring. Siding is almost never good in that line of work. So, yeah, there's a lot of pressure and it doesn't stop when you're in port. I mean, you know, but frankly, in many cases, I was more worried when I was in bored and I was a C because you're worried about your guys getting in trouble out of town. You're worried, you know, there's some piece of gear that's a break in that you need to get fixed so you can get back out and do your job.

And there's the parts here, how's the repair going, you know? And even when you're in port, you never really get to really let your guard down. So I would tell you that, you know, when we threw the lines over back in Pearl Harbor, we came back from the planet. It was just such a relief to be back. It's where, you know, my own hope were, and certainly, like I can tell you, it actually started before that.

When the tugs hooked up to me, when they threw their lines over, I felt better because, you know, like in many cases in foreign ports, you never knew which you're going to get from tugs. You didn't know if they spoke English very well or not. You know, how were they going to operate? You know, what are the operational characteristics?

How well do they understand your hip? And then we, I pulled back in a full harbor, and there is the glorious ski tractor. You know, it is this SMUL drive, multi-drive, like super powerful U.S. English-speaking pilot that knows are related back to his hand, you know, my ship well, and it's like, okay, we're all, I'm safe, we're all safe. So that was a very nice feeling.

And another one that I know this gets into some sensitivities too, but are you able to speak at all about the Russian or Chinese submarines and what their capabilities are, what the threat level is for, like, you guys as American submariners? Yeah, I can talk to Sundari about that. So we're fortunate in that there was a graph that the Office of Naval Tel was put out in 2015 that showed the relative noise characteristics of various adversary submarines, including Russian and Chinese ones, at that point.

So I could tell, I could point that graph and say, Chinese submarines are noisy, or at least they were in 2015. And the same basic classes are what they're still building to this day. Okay. I'm sure they may have been improvements to some degree, but the basic type 93 Shang class SSN, that's what they're building. The type 94 gen class SSBM, that's what they've been building. So Chinese nuclear submarines make it point at as it would be in our class,

way you can point out and say they're pretty noisy compared to Russian submarines, certainly, and compared to ours. Can you say why theirs are particularly noisy? Is it something with the propulsion technology that they just haven't developed? Well, I can tell you that open source countries will tell you that the Chinese, the nuclear power plant that is in Chinese submarines is a derivative of a Russian icebreaker nuclear power plant. Okay.

Which, you know, those were not built for sound silencing, right? It's a nice way for power plant. So you can imagine that for reasons probably associated with that, the power plant is just as loud. It's loud. I mean, it just makes a lot of noise for that reason. Now, they are, we keep hearing every year that they're about to build an entirely new class in China. And so that next class could be radically different and could be much wider than the old ones where. which could make life much more difficult.

Now, as diesel submarines, some of them can be quite quiet because they don't have that big as big power plant. They have a battery. In some cases, they're independent propulsion. So they can be very, as is known to be true for diesel submarines worldwide, but it can be very quiet for that reason. How do you see, you know, there was recently that issue with crew members on a naval vessel using Starlink, an unauthorized Starlink.

Obviously, when you guys are at depth, like you're fine, but how do you see, you know, modern technology off the shelf in the hands of, you know, anybody can go purchase it, being a threat to, you know, the silent service, for instance? I think mostly it would be a matter of something when you pulled into fork, you know, the guys go top side and turn their cell phone gone, you know, because you can tell, you can tell everybody, hey, don't turn her, like, let's say you're doing something where you don't want somebody to notice that you pull in somewhere,

and you're just going in to get parts or whatever, some brief stop, and you're not, nobody's getting off. You know, you might want to not have anybody turn their cell phones on, for example, just in case somebody's tracking cell phones that would let them know, let somebody know that you'd pull them into this port. So you can tell you through that, and she just never know when somebody's going to, you know, surreptitiously turn on their phone anyways,

because they think they know better. Right. But the kind of thing we saw with the Starlink, and you don't have to worry about that. Right. Because it's a summary, so you know, from Starlink on top of the thing. And all the antennas that you use it at Periscope depth,

they're all Navy antennas. They're all, you know. Now, obviously, you have to be concerned about, you know, somebody told their girlfriend where they're going, you know, you're not supposed to do that, but if humans are humans. And so there's always a possibility that upset maybe, maybe is always not 100% always always going to be perfect. So that's the kind of thing I'd probably worry about more. Yeah. And the other thing you had mentioned to us, I think, before we did start the interview,

was how easy it is to get fired as a submarine captain. tell us a little bit about that. Like, and I mean, we see with the, you know, surface fleet, you know, the Navy seems to fire those captains like it's going out of style. I mean, they don't really hesitate. And it sounds like it's even worse on submarines. I shouldn't say worse. I mean, I guess it's important to have accountability. But what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, so, so command is a privilege. You know, you're, there's no, not everybody gets to do it. Don't do it forever. and so you know when you go to command like if you swap paint or if you touch the bottom or if one shedders dies doing maintenance as they get electrocuted or whatever you are going to get fired like it doesn't it doesn't really matter what the reasons are you know it doesn't like if the ship if the ship does it collision with somebody and you're in the rack you're asleep it doesn't matter you're still going to get fired yeah that is that is the way the Navy views a kind of

that you were the senior officer in charge. So it doesn't, now while your more junior enlisted people might also be held accountable for if they didn't do their jobs, you know that you're done. And that's just kind of the way it is. Like, you know, you just, as far your calculus, you understand that if you have a collision, you're done. You're done as CEO if you have a collision. 100%. I mean, I've never seen anybody survive that.

I have. Okay. On a surface ship, but I think that they had a C-Dady that took care of it. It was crazy. Yeah. At least I can say in the years of my career. I don't know of any submarine CO in my career that touched the bottom or a swap paint that didn't get fired.

Sometimes it took a little bit. You know, they did the investigation. But as I mentioned, yeah, before the show, like the CEO is literally the easiest person on a ship to fire. because like let's say you're a CEO and you want to get rid of an apartment or even a chief you have to have documented like that they as you told them here's what you're not doing right and you gave them a get well planned you know letter of instruction or whatever and you counseled them and you know multiple attempts failed and then once you do all that you can put together a dfc package that stands for

something for cause. Anyways, all the paperwork involved. For you as the CEO, if the common orders decides, I've lost confidence here, and you're, boom, you're gone. There's no, there's no, there's no, all I have to say is I've lost confidence in your ability to can. And you're done. So, no paperwork required.

Would that be, like, if that happened, would that be the end of their career? Is there a way for them to redeem themselves and future Simon's, or is that pretty much they've fallen off the wagon in terms of like the promotion, the timeline, and that's it. Yeah, if you're a relief in command, you're, you've made me the final rank. Yeah. I mean, you're not like fired, fired. Like, I get it.

So, like, one thing I respect is that when civilians say, like, you say something like, you got fired, being fired in the building means, like, you lost your paycheck, right? And when you're fired, you don't lose your paycheck. You're still in 05. Right. still, you're just going to go, let me like I say, you don't have had a basketballs in the gym until you retire or whatever.

You're going to go, there's going to be some job you go to SaaS, and maybe you'll do valuable work. Maybe you'll do good things in that job. Because roughly, very talented, dedicated officers, in many occasions,

a bad day happens. And just the stars align and it wasn't your day. It wasn't your day. And doesn't mean they're not great people. They're not really, can't do things. And quite frankly, I've seen guys that I know got fired from command, but have then gone on to really successful civilian careers on the outside. So it doesn't mean you're a bad person and it doesn't mean you don't try in your best. But it is, that's just the way it is. It's the way the Navy works. Yeah. And so presumably you survived your time as sub-captain.

And what was the next stop for you career-wise after that command? So after that commandor, I signed up for the, so I applied for the Navy's fellowship program. So that's like a think tank fellows program. And I actually didn't get in initially. I was on the alternate list. And I actually was going to retire and go be an airline pilot. Really? Yes.

And I had gotten my policy license and my instrument rating and really enjoyed it. And I put in my retirement papers. I was going to, I was at my change of command. I was going to retire, at my change of command. It was going to be like a combined ceremony. And then I was going to follow my also activity wife, a different service. But I was, you know, all of her.

And because of an airline pilot is a good, good job if you want to commute. Like you can live one place and your job can be somewhere else. So that seemed like a good thing to do. And then after a couple weeks of being turned down for the fellow's program, I got selected off the alternate list to go be an A fellow at the Center for a New American Security, which is a really good quality, excuse me, D.C. foreign policy and defense-related think tank. And so I said, all right, that sounds great. I can maybe I can do something with that.

And I pulled my retirement papers and went to CNAS as a Navy fellow. Wow. And before I got there, I knew I wanted to focus on, China because I had seen, again, from my time at that Halsey Alpha group, the Naval War College, I had what I think was a little bit of the head of the curve understanding of the military threat that China was going to pose. Also, I mean, my ship was a Pacific Fleet ship, so I'd been thoroughly briefed on all the things the PLA was doing in the progress they were making.

So I was excited to go to that think tank and be able to apply to someone who knew and learn new things and really focus on on helping to understand the China, the military threat that was coming from China at that point. Starting to appear from China at that point. And so, I mean, there's a whole bunch of like sub-topics under that we can talk to. But at what point did the Office of Net Assessment come up on your radar? So that was a couple of years later. So I did my thing at CNAS for a year. And I wrote, I wrote some reports there. I first wrote a report about China, South China Sea, the South China Sea Islands, the big artificial islands they were building. So that one was, at that point, the kind of the

party line was that those were not military-related significant facilities, at least with respect to the United States. So they were just an airstrip and a reef. And I'll never forget, when I was there, I sort of looking at Google Earth and looking at those. And because I thought too, like, you know, it's just a reef with an airstrip on it. You know, I wonder, I wonder what's up with these things. And at that time, CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have been doing some great stuff with imagery. And it showed what they were building on these islands.

And you could see these huge towers on each corner of the island with multiple, like, places that look like turrets would go on them. And so I'm trying to think maybe these things are a big deal. And then I measured one of them. I'd have been mischief brief. And I measured the lagoon. It was like three or four miles across. And I thought, man, that is, that's really big.

And so I went on to Google Earth. I looked at the District of Columbia. And I looked at mischief brief. Walked into, I don't know, a copy of each. And I walked into the office of our executive vice president, Sean Brimley, who is now deceased for feeders. And I placed on his. on his desk. So this is the one of those island

air basins they built. This is the District of Columbia and these were at the same scale. He was like, oh my God, these things are huge. And so I wrote an article saying, as you know, master the obvious, these islands are huge. They are a big deal and they matter militarily. Each one of them

treat them as a full-sized air base because that's what they are. They have hardened. They have hangers. They have munition storage. They have hardened underground fuel tanks. This is all being built at that time. 10,000 foot runways, they're full-sized air bases. And I think that's started to change the conversation a little bit.

Later on, I looked at the PLA rocket force, which again is some viewers may not be familiar with this. The PLA rocket force is an entire arm of the Chinese military that is built around all-range pursuit and strike missiles, both nuclear and conventional. We could talk more about that later, but I was really fascinated with that, and I got to learn a lot about them while I was there.

wrote about the threat that they opposed to our face in the nation. What, the, the, so our, during World War II, like our war in the Pacific moving across to Japan,

it seemed like it was for a lot of atolls, a lot of inconsequential islands. Is that at all, like, remnant, reflective on, like, these artificial islands that China's building? I know. In some ways, it's kind of,

similar in some ways it's pretty different. They're definitely, definitely they are mostly for peacetime. I mean, like, so let's say lots of viewers, I'll say, well, I've seen on the news, these Chinese Coast Guard ships, water, you know,

water cannings, Philippine boats, and, you know, the islands of, those ships, they're all operating out of those island bases. The, not all, but a lot of them, that's one of the places they operate. from all these tiny maritime militia fishing boats. They're not actually fishing, obviously.

They're based on those island bases. So they are crucial in peacetime. They are a crucial facility that supports long-term operation in those water, those contested waters. Whereas we just kind of, the U.S. will kind of make these episodic trips down there, show the flag, do fun ops, through navigation operations, whatever. But then we leave, right? And so then the local, they're kind of on their own again,

where the Chinese are there all the time and are able to do that because of those bases. In wartime, those bases would help the Chinese to protect the South China Sea approaches to their major ports, Shanghai, Hong Kong. Those control the approaches to those ports, which really matters and their ability to maintain their supplies of oil and national resources and all that open. So it's a little more of a static thing.

In wartime, can we roll them up and move across that far of the world? maybe, it's going to be a very different challenge than the Japanese were. What we have to remember with Japan was, even the Japanese knew that when they launched the attack on Pearl Harbor that we had this absolute tsunami of naval shipbuilding that already started in 1938, 1940, a huge shipbuilding program. And those ships of ours were going to come online, 1942, 43, 44. They saw that company. Our shipbuilding industry was way larger than there as well.

us and all they could hope was to hold on. Now, this shipbuilding industry is literally hundreds of times larger than ours is. Right. We built 70,000 tons of shipping in 20,24, I believe, and China built 26 million tons of shipping. I mean, the numbers are astounding. The Japanese merchant marine that we sank in World War II,

about 9 million tons of shipping when the war started. and we will live down and there essentially nothing by the end of the war. China has right now more than 300 million tons of shipping. So it is, the numbers are incredible.

It's a very different situation. Can you tell us a little bit because I've read bits and pieces of this that our shipbuilding is really it's kind of a travesty at this point and it hasn't been addressed at all until recently.

Yeah, it's like one well. I mean, to put it bluntly. So there's a lot of different reasons for why that's the case. I mean, in general, in the United States, the defense industrial base in general is having lots of issues because we have turned into mostly a service economy. So we're necessarily the best anymore at building things. More specifically, the submarine force,

so at the end of the Cold War, we had this huge drawdown in the size of the Navy to the end of the cohort. And so while I can't state to specifics on surface ships at that point, we basically stopped buying submarines for about a decade. We bought one or two submarines

over a decade. And so the workforce at the strip yards that built our submarines just collapsed. And there was a lot of consolidation. And so we've really burned building submarines again

in the early 2000s, but we are still paying for that that kind of short sided huge contraction in a submarine industrial base. It's still taking time for us to do that. And what we have happening right now is we have this at the same time that we're trying to build more attack submarines to be able to deal with China because they're one of the few survivable platforms that can operate within range of China's missile forces on a regular basis in a wartime. We're also replacing all of our ballistic missile submarines, the

Iowa class. So they're being replaced with the Columbia class, the ballistic missile submarine. That is the nation's number one highest priority building program. So it crowds out the attack submarines for that reason, because it has to be a priority. Because if you don't have nuclear deterrence, the other side, if you don't have a nuclear deterrent or uter of a lion, then you're out of schlitz at that point. So that's, and the submarines are of these surviving all part of our nuclear tribe. They're the part that 24-7, 365, there's multiple submarines out at sea are the nuclear weapons that will never be taken by surprise that have plenty of time to shoot back in our adversaries know that. So there's this huge coming together of all of that together. So trying to build more attack submarines both for us and also now for our Australian allies, one of the August program, in combination with the recapitalization and replacement of our al-a-class submarines. Now, to be clear, the SSBN program is not an expansion. There may be, there are sometimes anti-nuclear folks that will say, oh, we're expanding the nuclear tribe. No, we're not. We're replacing 14 boats with 12.

Each boat Elaine has 16 tubes instead of 24. The previous class, it's not an expansion. It's a like-for-like with fewer numbers, replacement of ships that just happened to be replaced because that's 40 plus years old. And are we, do we have the manufacturing ability to do this? Are we outsourcing a lot of this? What is our government, like, what's our capability and our plan? I mean, so there's lots.

There's a really very complex plans for making this happen. There's not really much outsourcing in the sense of going overseas for any of this work, but they are building new factories. I think Austles shipbuilding just started to open a new factory down on the Gulf Coast that is going to start to build modules that go into submarines. So there is a huge amount of investment in the U.S. industrial base to try, to make, to get these programs, try to get them back on track. They're a little bit behind, some more than others,

and try to get them floating again. Things are a little different in the surface ship world. I think their destroyer program is generally coming along pretty well, our early broadcasts destroyers. This is in contrast to the LCS, Lutoral Combat Ship, and the Zimwall class, which both of which were disasters. Those were shifts that, a little different flavor than the submarine contraction is that,

the surface force, they kept building circus ships, but there was this decision the death of the Cold War, we're going to build these ships that are going to operate close to shore, probably not against the peer competitor, so we're going to have this transformation. We're going to have these lightly

crude, highly automated multipurpose ships, and it was the last year. I mean, LCS, we built two different classes of the ships, totally different classes, which made no sense, I think. We made a lot of sacrifice, is that they can go really fast,

even though they don't actually need to go fast for their missions. And then the ZoomWOL class, we built three of them instead of building the 30. So when all of your development costs are crowded into three ships, you cancel the rest of the class, and each one's worth $6 or $7 million. And then you cancel, I don't think it's more than $6 or $7.

It was just an incredible amount. So it just kind of all went sideways. And of course, none of those ships are really, at least in their original, form are really appropriate for a peer competitor like China. What's, you know, while we're on this topic of ships and shipbuilding, get a little bit deeper into the rocket issue that you talked about how the rocket program is kind of the crown jewel of the Chinese military.

And that would be the, you know, primary threat that I presume our Navy would be facing in a potential war in the South China Sea. It would be one of them. I mean, so what the PLEA rocket force does is, so first of all, it wasn't its own service until 2015. In 2015, Dijemping elevated the PILA rocket force to be equal to the other branches of the Chinese military. So it's equal now to the Air Force. It's equal to the ground force in the Navy. And what they've done that's remarkable is, you know, 20, 30 years ago, all they had was nuclear weapons.

So the PILA rocket force was kind of equivalent to our, you know, we have ICBMs too, we have submarine ballistic missiles, they're all nuclear tips, they're just for nuclear deterrence, right? That was what they had then. They also had a few very inaccurate conventional missiles, kind of like the scuds that we saw in the, you know, in the desert storm, right? They're not really useful against military targets. Maybe you get lucky every once in a while and hit some hit a barracks or something, but they're not, they're conventional weapons. They're not, if they're not accurate, then it's not nuclear, then I can't really do that much.

What China brought to the table over the last 20 years is accurate ballistic missiles, like a single-digit number of leaders, because we can see the impact points on their impact ranges, where they can punch a hole in the top of a building or in an aircraft shelter or whatever, using a ballistic missile. That is a unique combination of a new combination of capabilities, because now it means it can reach out 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 miles, and strike targets with Presidon.

And this is, to be clear, this is not what we saw from Iran when they struck in there, right? Rand's weapons were not very accurate. There weren't any of them. They didn't really, as far as you know, I don't really have any ability to get around ballistic missile defenses. China is far more capable of that. And the PLA rocket forces is, that's what they own.

And there's no, there is no equivalent service in the U.S. military that does that. We have ECBMs and the handling ability. Air Force, but they're all nuclear tips. The Army is now starting to have some long-range conventional ballistic missiles. The JASM. Typhon system. You know,

that's something, but the numbers are very small. They've been in development. I think there's a few deployed operationally, but there are very small numbers. As opposed to the alien rocket force, 500 intermediate range ballistic missiles

that can reach law that are almost all conventional, and they also have anti-ship capabilities. They also can be swapped for anti-shipboardeds. They have 1,300 medium-range ballistic missiles now, according to the DOD, the last China military power report. Like it's strike all of Japan, essentially, and the Philippines. I mean, you know, it's like, what else are these things for other than a wreck our basis in

Asian? Right. I think we fired a couple jasms at Uncle Assad just to prove that they work. But the number of them, yeah, aren't the numbers we have that are published? it's like in the hundreds. Of which ones? The Jasm. Well, Jasm is a

air-launched cruise missile, I believe, it comes off airplanes. So they got those two, trust me. The PLEA Air Force has and also has cruise missiles too. So out of curiosity, and something we've talked about on the show before,

is the level of Chinese espionage and our inability to stop it in the states and how really the Chinese don't have to they don't really have to have a strong development program because anything that's developed in the U.S. is immediately in the hands of the Chinese.

Is that something that you've seen? Is that something that you've spoken to? Is that something you believe? Can you give us like basically your take on that? So, yeah, SB&I is certainly a very real thing. We have seen in the last couple of years, we've seen multiple instances of, in some case, of service members that have been caught spying from the Chinese. Certainly there's been penetration of, in particular, of U.S. Department of Defense contractors

have been penetrated by the Chinese. We're something of a whole typhoon thing that's happened more recently. And so we're sure Chinese cyber penetration of U.S. organizations is a huge problem. What I would say is becoming less of a problem is for many years, we had this impression that they were mostly copying our stuff. So the V-20 helicopter looks kind of like a black hop. Their chain 35 looks kind of like an F-35. Oh, it's not the same. There are some major different.

It's not a copy, but it is similar looking. So there have been cases where they were, and quite frankly, a lot of their weapons. systems are Russian-derived or copies of Russian weapons. That's becoming less true now. So China is now, they're now innovating. They're doing their own things. So you have the J-36, the new Delta Wing, huge long-range strike fighter. That doesn't look like anything we have.

You have the new invasion barges that make the Gaza floating pier, like a bunch of tinker toys. Right. They have the Rentheye cruiser. That's probably the most powerful surfaced. combatant on the planet at this point. It doesn't look like anything the U.S. has. You have a new class of submarines, the type 41. This is one that the Department of Defense says,

actually the first one said it could appear last year. Regalmus, they also said it was like a hybrid nuclear diesel type propulsion system. First of its kind of the world. You have the type 76 new amphibious assault ship that has a catapult. Never seen that before. Infimps don't have catapult. So then anybody else's Navy. so they can launch its own drones, have its own strike aircraft as part of an Indy's assault ship.

So there's a lot of things. But that's not to mention the, again, hundreds and hundreds of anti-ship ballistic missiles, which the Houthis had a few of those that they've launched our ships, but they were way behind the Chinese, and I'm sure nowhere near is sophisticated. So the Chinese invented that weapon system. Nobody else on the planet had anti-ship ballistic missiles before they did. So the days of them just copying what we have, that was true for a while. but it is very much less true now.

And how do you think the U.S. can keep up or match? Because we used to be known for our innovation, right? Like we used to be on the cutting edge of military tech. Are we still, have we fallen behind? Like, what's your sort of assessment of that? I would like to think that things are turning around some. I mean, we have, I was done. certainly tremendous effort at DOD and try to innovate faster to develop

reformed acquisition processes, to come up with the kind of incubators for new technologies, to try to embrace on crude systems and smaller systems and more dispersion, dispersed operating forces to try to get away from those small numbers of large bases and large platforms. So I think there is an effort afoot for sure. is it as urgent as I think it needs to be. I don't think so. I think it's hard to get away from a lot of entrenched to be to some degree entrenched officer communities that are used to doing things one way or one way as well as congressional interest groups and defense primes that are invested in things being the way they are. So I do worry that it's both cathartic and it will have to

happen to really break loose of the old ways of doing business. But, you know, we certainly can innovate. I mean, there are incredible things we're doing, I'm sure, with AI and machine learning. There are big things we're doing for sure. But, I mean, yeah, it's not all a good news story. That's for sure, too. One of the topics that you mentioned that I'd like to make sure we hit up is that you had written an article where you found an impact range that's mine.

modeled off of an American naval facility. Can you tell us sort of what that was and what it means strategically, like what the conclusion was from this? So, yeah, this was, again, this was during my time at CNAS the first time. And to me, but I'm back at CNAS after I retired and now jumped to your fellow at CNIS. So I've affiliated with them to the stay that I reestablished after I retired from the Navy. But so what I found there was I was looking at Google Earth.

and I knew I was interested in the PLA rocket force and seeing what they were doing. And I found on the internet the coordinates to one of their impact ranges in Western China. This is where they test the missiles on targets. Like they shoot them from Eastern China. They go all over China and the impact in the desert in Western China. And so I found the coordinates for one of these impact ranges. I'm looking at it. I'm seeing some shapes and so the Mock runway.

and an airfield, and you could see Harden Aircraft shelters, and so you can see them testing against various targets that people had seen before and that were, you know, kind of thing you would expect that they were working on. But then I saw this shape that was like a long shape, kind of a long shape, and multiple multiples of them. I'm looking at it, and I'm like, is that a ship? Is it like an assort?

And so I made this thing, and it's about 520 feet long, something like that. I wonder how big a U.S. Arley Bird Class of Shrateries. It was basically the same size. Like, oh, this is the ship. These are ship-shaped targets that they're shooting at. Presumably for like warhead, I would guess it was for warhead terminal seekers, like the electro-autical seekers or something,

image recognition thing. Okay, but it could be somebody else in the Shorter, too. Other countries have the Shrars that size. Also notice this black line that was going around these shapes, the kind of black outline. And I thought something in that back my dad I thought it kind of reminds me to inner harbor in Yucca, Japan.

That's the headquarters in the 7th Fleet is where a carrier is based on us. And so I looked at on Google Earth and I found Yikoska and I looked at this impact range and they were a mirror image that the black line on the chart on the ground in Western China

was a mirror image of the inner harbor of Yikoska. And you get that article so I read an article about that. They got a lot of attention. Because if you think about it, they're practicing on multiple ships in a port. Well, how do you catch multiple ships in a port? You strike by surprise, right? That's how you do that.

Otherwise, they're going to be at sea if they have warning that an attack's coming. So here they are practicing, essentially practicing what looks like surprise attacks, against specifically a U.S. face. So that got a fair rate of attention. Now, in a couple of years after that, I also found that the same, impact range, a mock-up of an E3 A-Wax aircraft. So it's a spitting image of an E3-A-Wax, unmistakably that airframe,

we're the only country in the Western Pacific that operates those. So that was clearly about us. And then later, a year or two later, I had a Japanese reporter reach out and say, hey, I found this airplane target. Can you tell me, at a different impact range, the same idea.

So you tell me you to recognize it. And so I look at this, and again, it's an AWACS airplane, you know, with a big radome on top, big round radome. This certainly has two engines, which I thought, hmm, that's weird. AWax is our AWax have three. And I look at it and shirt out through like one airplane, only one airborne early warning aircraft on the planet that has those. And that's the Japanese. It's the E767.

It's only operated by the Japanese. This kid was like a finance reporter for NICA agent. And he just was interested in this stuff. And I said, oh, my friend, you got a story in your hands. they're the Chinese are testing against the specifically Japanese target at their impact ranges. So you can see some interesting things checking those out. I know that your specialty is sort of the military side of it. So I don't want to kind of put you on the spot talking about economics or anything like that.

But like some of the arguments we've heard against China utilizing some sort of first strike or actually wanting to engage in near-pure warfare, is there. economic investment and reliance on the United States, things like that, to the best of your ability or however you're comfortable, can you speak to what might be right, wrong about that, or what you're seeing in sort of China's movement towards a more military style approach to the United States? Well, so I would say that, I mean, I agree that I think if China could get what it wanted that out fighting the war with the United States,

it would want to do so, for sure. I mean, I agree with this, that ideally would be what they would want to do to accomplish their goals, you know, reunification with Taiwan. Not that Taiwan has ever been part of the people of Republic of China, mind you, they might say that. Whether it's, so whether it's seething Taiwan or whatever,

they would prefer to do that without finding the United States. I think that, you know, one of the things they may hope by building up this really potent and the goal to being intimidating force is that I think they would probably hope that the U.S. would choose not to get involved. We would decide that costs were too high. But I wouldn't take too much comfort from the idea that there could be an economic cost for them for a couple of reasons. one is that

Xi Jinping as a leader has made crystal clear that he is willing to take economic hits on China's behalf for the security interests of the CCP of the Chinese Communist Party. He has seen him cut down Chinese billionaires to size. He refuses to

they're apparently willing to just watch TikTok and go just disappear rather than sell it. There's a number of different signals that we see from now that he's not, he's a Marxist, he really is. He's a believer. And if you give him the choice of, well, I can unify with Taiwan. Actually, if it works, and maybe I take a 10% economic hit that I could gain back in a few years, he's going to take that hit. He doesn't care if it costs millions of dollars. He doesn't look at things, I think,

the same way as Democratic leaders do. You have to remember also, he's an authoritarian leader. He doesn't have to pay attention to what does people want to some degree. Likewise, we've seen kind of seen this before. There were people in 1914 who wrote quite confident. that there was no possibility that the English and the Germans would go to war because the markets are too intertwined, right? Everybody will lose too much money and what happened anyways? I mean, so the Kaiser, again, an authoritarian leader with a rising militaristic power makes a decision to, you know, get involved in a war that's going to cost us people,

but, I mean, they decided to do it anyways. So I do agree that there are lots of good reasons for them not to embark on military aggression, but they're putting pretty tremendous resources into building the capabilities, the kind of capabilities you would build to be able to do it. And then, you know, we talked a little bit before the show about the Belt and Road project and things like that. Can you speak to that and how that aids their economic military expansion? So the thing you have to remember about China is that the key underpinning, one of the key underpinnings for, China's growth in military capabilities is what they call military civil fusion.

So MCF. So this is their idea that they're going to leverage their civilian, industrial, and scientific and infrastructure investments to also support military purposes. And Belt Road's part of that. So people will say, for example, oh, look, the U.S. has 800 bases around the world, which by the way, that number is complete nonsense. So if you just go on Twitter, look for me and bases,

you'll see that number, the guy who did the study, like, counted like, so for example, there was a dog cemetery. That was counted as a base. If you actually go into the spreadsheet, I think I used to create that list, like naval base law on with like 12 bases. It's just completely ridiculous.

I mean, do we have hundreds of bases? 800, not even close. So anyways, they don't have that many official overseas military bases. They have one in Djibouti. They just built one for the Cambodians and re-in Cambodia. What they do have is probably dozens of these belt and road facilities where they built a court, they built an airfield, they built a highway. And so you've got all these key facilities all around the world that are built by Chinese

companies, two Chinese standards. Who knows what else they baked into these facilities? They're maybe monitoring surveillance. that maybe they can shut trains down if they want to. Maybe they can see what we're doing. So they are ostensibly civilian, but they're built by Chinese companies. What you have to remember is that in particular,

Chinese state-owned enterprises are not normal companies. They are arms in the CCP. And one way you can see this, I don't know that I always find interesting. The bigger ones also have an actual, you know, PRC representative, Communist Party representative, like in the corporation. So I was going to explain.

There are many times I found different Chinese state-owned enterprises where if you go look at the English language version of the company website and this is like not a communication construction company. It's a construction company that's going to contract all over the world.

They also are the guys that built the South China Sea Islands. You've got Costco shipping, which has, you know, shipping, and there are ports all the time. You see these companies, and you look at the English language version of the website, it looks totally normal. It's capable of the installation plants in Kosovo. We, you know, we're working on helping our customers.

Here's our chairman, vice chairman, yada, yada, yeah. It all looks very normal. Then if you go look at the Chinese language version of the website and just machine translated, there will be an entire section that aren't in this like the Hardy Building section where it talks about the company news now is she didn't think being sought and party members did this and party members did that and the org chart that used to say chairman and vice chairman now shows party secretary deputy party secretary and it's like crystal clear that all this company leadership is dual-hatted as CCP members that the company is they are an arm of the CCP that they are committed like their their leadership goes and no kidding like goes to party meetings and studies she didn't can't thought and I mean they are they are arms of the CCP and for many of these data on enterprise.

Now, it's not true of all Chinese companies. Like some are just kind of private companies, but many of the ones we care about that are doing infrastructure, shipping. And as for they absolutely are dual purpose companies in many cases. And Thomas, to add to that, because this is something that I think that it can be alarmist or actually realist. and I don't know what the answer is. But Chinese company, control of some of our ports, Chinese companies buying up, you know, land around military bases. Are those innocuous?

Are those just people participating in capitalism? Or are those things that we should be worried about? I'd say a little bit of both. I mean, so I'm not, I would never say, like, that every Chinese investment in the United States is, is some threatening thing. It's not. Let's face it,

I mean, we run a huge trade deficit with them. They have a lot of dollars in their hands more than the flow, the flows the other way. So those dollars have to come back. And so they use them to buy things over here, whether it's treasury bills or property or whatever. And I'm sure in many cases, it may be innocent. But I think there's certainly been plenty of cases where it doesn't seem like I said,

like why did this happen to buy property in these these locations you know it can get quite fishy so as for the ports i mean i really do i do think that there is a strategic plan on the part of china to dominate the port sector to dominate shipbuilding um it's i mean it's good to know economically but i think it's also it helps them in the long run on a very much a you know we're going to run the world someday i mean people don't understand like China is by every measure but one, they are the premier maritime power in the history of humanity. They are by far the largest shipholders. They have the largest merchant marine.

They have by far the world's largest fishing fleet. By far the world's largest coast guard now. They now have a Navy that has the most ships in the world. It has more ships in the U.S. Navy. There's only one measure, and that is sheer naval tonnage. And that's because the average U.S. Navy ship is bigger than the average U.S. Navy ship is bigger than the average Chinese Navy ship, but they are catching up there. So I've done the mass.

And over the last decade, on a tonnage basis, China has also outbuilt the U.S. Navy by about 50%. So they're catching up there. So they're the world's largest training nation. They have the most ships. We should expect they'd have the own most of the ports too. It's just, it's all connected. One of the things that you mentioned before we started the interview is that, you know,

kind of the topic or a topic you're focused on is, you know, the things we've been talking about, but leading into how do we avoid going to war with China? And so I'd like to kind of specifically put our finger on that topic and ask, you know, how do we deter a war with China? I'd like to avoid World War III. I'm sure many other people would too. And how do you think we're doing with that? Like, what grade would you give us so far as the United States trying to accomplish that? So, yeah, so what I had mentioned earlier was, like, since I retired from the Navy, it's like my number one goal is to do whatever I can to help us to avoid a war of a giant. Because I think it would be, you know, one of the greatest since Astro in the history of humanity, probably.

Maybe the Second World War might still be, who knows, it'll be close. It's super bad. So different people have a lot of different ways that they might want to go about that. There are some folks, they may call themselves restraining sometimes, who would choose to maybe make accommodations with giants. You know, we'll let you have a sphere of influence. Panda huggers. Your words.

What did you say? Panda huggers. I mean, I'm going to take it face value that Americans that represent Iraq, recommend those kinds of measures or that they're honest people that they really do with that what's best. I disagree with the method. I don't think that's the way to prefer not to do that in part because you don't know where they're going to stop.

I mean, you've got to understand. And I don't mean like China's going to invade the United States. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm not worried about an invasion of the United States by the Chinese. But what I will say is that a world that's the way that we want it where people speak out about human rights, that people speak out about democracy. That is not a world that's safe for the CCP. They don't want anyone in any other country to tell them, it's, to tell them that it's wrong for them to not let their people vote, to tell them that it's wrong to suppress human rights.

And then it's not a world they don't want to live in where we're able to say those sorts of things. We don't have to guess that that's how they would be about it because they already did it to Australia a few years ago. They inflicted trade restrictions on Australia because because Australian think tanks were saying, asking things, they basically have a list of demands. You need your politicians need to get their mouths shut, your think tanks need to not speak up about this and that, stop talking about the Uighurs.

I mean, Australia would have to not be a free country anymore to be able to make the Chinese happy. And we should expect to see that kind of thing continue on greater scale. So that's not a world that I want to live in. So I don't think that's the answer to avoid a war, just to give them what they want. Because we have to also remember that if China really does gain naval superiority, they will have the ability to coerce our allies.

So you've got to remember all of our allies in the Western Pacific were all island nations. South Korea might as well be. They've got ocean on three sides and Kim Jong-un on the north. They're all dependent upon maritime trade. So if China has naval superiority and can cut off that trade, then their economies exist with the pleasure of the CCP. And that's not a lot of all I want to be a part of. So how do I think we deter China?

I think we have to What I've said in testimony several times is that we have to create uncertainty in the minds of the Chinese China's leaders that their military action will succeed. That's the only way to deter them. You can't just

inflict costs. Like if you say, we're going to inflict costs and create off-frams. So we're going to Yeah. They're willing to absorb costs. Yeah, then take those costs. If you hang a price tag on Taiwan, he will probably pay it.

Yeah. If he thinks it's going to cost a trillion dollars with $2 trillion or whatever. Hey, I don't think he would, if he knew that we were going to stand aside, I think he would pay that price tag. So you can't just make it costly. You have to make them think we're not sure this is going to work. That this may not work. So how do we do that?

I think there's a lot of things you could do. I mean, the good news for us is that, invading Taiwan would be really hard. I mean, if these assaults are very challenging, you have to have complete air-enabled superiority to do it. You can't have anybody shooting at shrimp of these assault ships on their way in. You can't have fighters coming in. So they have to have complete superiority to do it.

So it's high bar to do that. So I think it takes lots of survivable anti-ship weapons, so antarship cruise missiles, mines, and those things have to be survivable on a day-to-day basis because China is obsessed with striking by surprise. And I'm not talking just here about what I saw on Google Earth. If you read Chinese doctrine, go read the 2006 science of campaigns and just go Control F and search for things like surprise, suddenness.

They mention it dozens of times in the documents. They are obsessed with striking by surprise. So if all your missile trucks are all in the parking line, somewhere, guess what? You're probably not going to get to use them 15 minutes into the war. If you have, if you're counting on minefields, if you haven't already laid those minefields, you're never going to get to lay them. You know, like people say, well, say, well, what does mine is mine to trade? Well, so like Taiwan has bought mine land ships. They look cool. They go fast, whatever. But if China has decided they're going to invade Taiwan,

they're not going to watch the Taiwanese lay the minefield that's going to stop them. So all of the stuff has to happen at P-Sign. Our air bases, our aircraft, have to be dispersed on a day-to-day basis, or they will be destroyed on the ramp. Sinai has more than enough missiles to do it, partly because we have not armed our air bases and they have. It just released the whole report a couple months ago about air base farming.

They built hundreds of new harming shelters at their air bases. We built 22 in the whole region, and most of them are out of range. I did some math. China has more than enough concrete, building hardened shelters, adding ramp area to air bases, adding runways, that you could pave a four-lane interstate highway from Washington, D.C., to Chicago over the last 10 years, as how much they've done. So those are the kinds of things we need to do to be ready to prevent this conflict from breaking out. So in addition to just the hard aspects of warfare, when you look at the soft at the propaganda

at China's, I think really successful sort of propaganda efforts within the United States and whatnot, whether it's through social media or whatever, and a lot of people who are lining up in support of China in support of 15 minutes to these, things like that, are there ways that we can combat that without giving up who we are, without giving up the First Amendment, without, you know, becoming a country that we don't want to be? Well, I mean, you can start, for example, you can start with the enforcement of TikTok ban. So not having not having a Chinese company with direction from Beijing controlling the algorithm that decides what people are going to see in their social media feed. Because to me, that's what this is all about. I don't care about China getting, I mean, I know it's bad,

but I'm not worried about China getting personal information about Americans from TikTok. They don't really care about, and I'm not that worried about them knowing where you live or whatever. What I care about is if China is the one deciding what it is that you're going to see. And what, you know, so if you have a crisis breakout, that China, you know, China be the one to decide what messaging are the American public is getting. That is the last thing we want to have happening. And that's why TikTok cannot be controlled from China. We cannot let that happen.

Like one of the major sources of information for our people, that's step one. So let's enforce the law that was already passed. That's already, oh, by the way, if folks haven't noticed, I did the math yesterday, the 75-day extension that President Trump gave them runs out on Saturday. So we'll see what happens with that way. So that's one thing we can do. we need to enforce, you know, foreign agent registration requirements. You know, some of that was starting to happen.

People certainly get in trouble for that. That's good. We can't, we can't shut down foreigners coming here anything. I don't think that's a good idea for a future for, you know, so much of our best innovators and the people that drive the industry that allows, gives us the income we need to buy, you know, to fund our defense. A lot of those immigrants, so I don't want us to do that. But it is a real challenge. But we faced this challenge before, right?

during the Cold War, we had an open society relatively compared to the Soviets, and we still won. Right. So it is possible. How do you feel about, like, for instance, you know, American, you know, high power American lawyers representing like DGI drones against the government and things like that? Is that part of the American process? Is this something that needs to be looked at more as a national security issue? I mean, I never have a problem with the lawyer sure present anything. I mean, every entity in the United States, you know,

that's the way our system is supposed to work, no matter what you did or that you deserve the right to a lawyer. I mean, ever since John Adams, you know, defended the guys, the three, the British soldiers that in the Boston Massacre, that's a key part of who we are as Americans. And so I don't, and this is my name is so I want to go out to dinner with the guys that do that. Right. I mean, I think they have a legal right to pay people to defend them in court.

You know, but I think there can and should be limits on what, you know, I know there are, I'm trying to get a little easier with legal, you know, legal stuff. Sure. You know, there obviously should be some limits on foreign money being used to conduct influence operations in the United States. I'll just believe it at that. Fair enough. Yeah.

Well, Thomas, thank you very much for this interview and sharing your expertise with us. Is there anything that I didn't ask? Do we have questions for Thomas? From Marcelo. Are there any differences in the day-to-day in culture from attack versus missile subs? Yeah, I mean, it's a very different mission. I mean, so, you know, as ballistic missile subs, I would say, tied with pride, right? So your your job is to remain undetected so that you're available and

survivable to be able to launch missiles. So that's a bit different than attack submarines, which are forward-leaning, forward-deployed, in many cases, multi-purpose. And sometimes you might get detected doing it. Like if you start sinking ships, there's a good chance you may be detected doing it. So it's a little different mission set. I think attack submarines are kind of a little more a little more swash fuddling, so to speak, pointing into the stick type platforms. However, doesn't mean that being an SFCNs data is easy.

It's obviously nuclear weapons are very zero defect. It has to be 100% rate every time planned admission. So it's certainly enormously important. One key difference between the platforms is that missile boats have two crews. So you have a blue crew and a golf crew. that allows the ship to be at sea more of the time. So you come in and swap out the crews, do some maintenance swap out the cruise.

And so one crew gets the wave goodbye to the boat. It goes out to sea with the other crew on board. That's a big quality of life difference. I'll tell you that much. You know, to be in that off group period when you don't have a boat that you're worrying about all the time, that is a significant improvement, which is why, you know,

when I finished my first tour on a division officer tour, before I would sign up to go back to see, I wanted in writing. That was going to have been, I had done road hard and put away wet on my first tour. And I wanted that a little bit more relaxed lifestyle. Yeah, I bet. Another one from M. Corbin. What were their best and worst meals on the boats?

Let's see. So there's kind of a routine you get in. So you have Friday after a Friday lunch of sliders. So burgers and fries and chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. on the pizza night. And so, you know, sometimes, like, the peeps will make the pizza. Sometimes the officers will make the pizza. You know, sometimes we'll have different folks make the pizzas.

And it's generally quite good. Oftentimes, Saturday nights, poker night. You know, so guys will play poker in the wardrobe. Sundays, sometimes surf and turf. So, you know, grab legs and steak. Generally, generally steak dinner Sunday night. And then Taco Tuesday. You know, you got fajitas and tacos and whatnot on Tuesday.

It's very easy to get fat on the suburb. Yeah. You know, one of the things that we had always, because I was a hard hat diver and we dove on some of the subs, and one of the things that they had said is that, like, the chow on subs was always top-notch, and they brought in the best, like, cooks that the Navy had to offer. Just because it was a major morale point,

would you agree or disagree with that? I do think the food is my understanding is quite a bit better, but I think the reasons might be a little different. One is you just get more money per person. So because you get a certain amount of food money that the supply officer can spend on ingredients per person and it's more in some ways. So it's considered the hardship duty.

So your supply officer has a little more money to spend on the ingredients as part of it. But I would say probably one of the biggest reasons why the food better is because it's all the same food for everyone. So on a surface ship, for example, the crew can, you know, you have like an officer's mess and you have a cheese mess and you have an enlisted mess. And so it's different cooks, cooking different food for the different groups. You know, submarine, it's the same food. So if the food sucks, the captain eats the food that sucks.

That makes sense. And the slasurer gets to hear about it. So on a sub there's, yeah, on a sub there's no option. officer's mess. There is an officer's mess, but it's the same food. So it's coming off the same line. All that's happening is that it goes into a little sober dish, you know, and you've got a quick guy that brings it into the warjum and you pass it around.

So the only difference is that it's probably colder is the officer food as opposed to coming hot off the line. But it is the same food. So what the E3 is eating is bad, then what the captain's eating is bad too. and then corrective action will be taken. Right. Fascinating. That's probably the biggest back, right thing.

We got a couple more from Sim. Which is more realistic, quote unquote, portrayal of life on a submarine crimson tide or the hunt for Red October? Or Das Boot. So, you know, they're kind of all a little different. I mean, I don't think, I mean, Huffer October isn't really portray life that much on a submarine. Although you do have a Jonesbee.

It was an E3, I think, mounting off to the chief of the boat, which is probably not very accurate in that sense. Or Crimson Tide, I mean, there was a lot of, there's some realism there. Obviously, some of it wasn't not all realistic. I mean, things have changed since then. Yeah, like Denzel is jogging in the submarine for PT at one point, isn't he? Yeah, like you can't run around the missile. Yeah, it doesn't work. There's a, there's a, they have a treadmill.

So, and actually that's rewind of it, that's one of the benefits of SSVN. There's a lot more exercise equipment. Because SSDN is way roomier. There's just a much larger ship. So you have like a little gym in the missile department where you have like a treadmill, an electrical, on a, on a blast on a attack submarine, you know, your treadmill is outboard their reduction gears in the an in your room. And there's like a pipe right in front of your face.

And, you know, you're running and trying to, it's a much more cramped spaces. But I don't know. I'm not sure that answers the question. I mean, my understanding of probably the most realistic summary movie is probably Dust Boot. No, I wasn't on a World War II submarines. I don't know, but my impression is that's probably the most accurate. Cool. From Big Tuna, which is hilarious.

What dynamic of subsurface nuclear warfare has grown significantly in the last decade? What's falling off? Well, I think as in as in few and many other parts of the military on current systems are becoming a much bigger deal. Now, those are nuclear. They're, well, at least not of ours. There's a weapon one that's a very nuclear power. But our UUVs are all, they're all electronic form or are diesel electric. So that's a really wrong part of undersea warfare is those and also UAVs that could be,

launched by submarines. It's the ability to send you a visa to get a targeting information or whatever. That being said, in some ways, there's not quite as much change as in other parts of the military. So, for example, if you read about quad-cockers in Ukraine, you know, I've had an arithuropo lot of those, and 99% of them only go about 20 kilometers, you know, that they can reach that far because they're limited by line of side communication. So most of what you see isn't very long range. So if you look at the ocean, 20 kilometers is not very far.

Right. It's not much of the Pacific Ocean. And quite frankly, in some rainforest and also the surface maybe, we've dealt with drones for generations. We call them anti-ship cruise missiles. That's kind of the original, you know, one-way attack drone or homing torpedoes. There's a kind of a U-U attitude, so to speak. So that's probably the biggest area of change, I would say, is like cruise systems. All right.

We have one more from a tax squirrel. What role do autonomous platforms from companies like Antigil General Dynamics play? Are they a danger to our own forces or allies, examples such as Darpa's Stingray? So in terms of that danger, I mean, so the Chinese are definitely working on grid systems in a big way. So pretty advanced platforms that they're working on, long-range aircraft. UD's have been spotted on the pier There's not a lot of details at this point But China has a very robust

Well they are the world's large of drum insactors by far I mean far in a way They build most of the world's drones So in that sense They're going to be a superpower In that kind of drone warfare How much of a threat are they So if we're talking about the undersea in particular

I think sometimes the threat from UD's two submarines can be a little can't be a little overblown, maybe, because it's just physics. I mean, so unless you have a nuclear power plant, as you submerge, you're on a battery, or you're running a diesel engine. So there's no drone on the planet that's going to keep up with a nuclear submarine for any significant distance.

So while drones might be a threat, like, close to a port for submarines maybe, kind of with a glorified mine, open ocean, not really much of a threat. Thomas, what do you think would be, you know, sort of in a sci-fi kind of futuristic idea, what do you think would be an interesting and beneficial way for U.S. Navy to move, whether it's subs that can go deeper, subs that can go longer weapons, you know, ideas that maybe aren't practical or haven't been experimented on yet, but ideas that would be beneficial to us? Well, I'll tell you, I wrote a whole article about this in 2017.

So I proposed, and I still think it's a good idea, an all-U-A-V aircraft carrier. So this is, and what I mean by all-U-I-I don't mean to carry itself is un-crued. I just mean that all it carries is on-crued aircrafts. Because I think that, I don't think that drone, you know, UAVs at sea are ever going to get to where they could be, as long as they're, as long as in a carry rule, I don't think they'll ever get where it will be, as long as it's bringing along all the liabilities associated with manned aviation.

So, like imagine, like, that's a good way to put it way to put it. So imagine ship this kind of, you know, much smaller 20, 30,000, tons, it's kind of stealthy looking and all the drones are inside of it. And instead of having a regular flight deck, like you're hurling these things out off a catapult,

you know, with G forces that no human pilot could ever withstand. Let's say they come in and they land, you know, they can land tail first because they're computer controlled and can land in ways that human pilots couldn't really do. So they land tail first, then they kind of go onto like an assembly line inside the ship. You could send them on one-way missions, you know, double the range if you had to. You could keep them a loft up in the air for far longer than human pilots could, you know, deal with. So I think that has, that's been my idea last year. Let's build a carrier that is 100% optimized for a crewed aircraft.

It really takes advantage of them while that kind of all the liability associated with manned aircrafts. Well, guess who went and built a drone carrier, the Chinese, they got him the last couple of years. Not quite what I proposed. It looks like they're mostly for exercise support, but they have built all UAV carriers. Interesting. And when it comes to submersibles, if we got really,

of the human, you know, a vulnerability to pressure. If we could flood compartments with, you know, with water whatnot, are there electronic, are there systems that could survive at deeper depths than we can imagine and sort of create the same sort of capabilities? I mean, they're definitely advantages to be had with you, UVs, one of them being like you don't have to have a pressure hole. Right. I mean, generally UDVs do still have a pressure hole.

that has the electronics and stuff like that. But it's much smaller. Most of the boat could be free flood. It doesn't have to the same safety requirements, the same, you know, you don't have to spend as much money to do the same thing. Which is why, you know, there are some reasons they're very good, they can be very good for.

They'd go deeper than an advanced submarine can go. They could be used for mining missions that you would never send a human, you know, a man submarine in for and shower water you can get into, riskier places. So to be clear, lots of advantages to you do these. I just think that I think there are some people that have these ideas that they're going to

be doing anti-subrain warfare, they're going to shoot torpedoes and that kind of stuff. And I think that's a long way to do that kind of thing. Because submarine, like just classifying what you're listening to can be really, really hard. Even with lots of humans with experience and a room full of computers, I mean, there's just, there's just a lot of noise in the ocean. Right. You'd be surprised just so harderness to even know what you're looking at sometimes. As opposed to, I can very much see, like, you've got this UVV out there.

Let's say it's got tomahawks on board. You know, you send it a message, shoot at this target, this time, this target package, you know. I don't think there's any engineering miracles required to do that. That sounds like something that could be doable. Or go to this place, drop mines in this location, or, you know, hang out here. and if somebody drives by, come up and send a message. I could see a lot of things that could be very useful. It's fascinating.

And so, you know, I don't want to make this political, and I'm not here to promote must, but I'm going to say that, you know, a private company was able to do something that a longstanding government contractor was not able to do with the rescue. And, you know, when we've talked like Alex Hollings about these small companies creating these, you know,

hypersonics, and things like that, is the government willing to look at these companies that are not like the traditional defense contractors and take on board what they are able to do or what their ideas are? Or is that sort of military industrial complex just so firm at this point that it's tough for them to do that? I mean, we certainly have seen some new entrance. I mean, nobody ever heard of Andrewill before, you know, not that long ago. So there's a lot about it. I think there are a fair number of other smaller startups that are working on some pretty interesting stuff.

And, I mean, it's a challenge for sure. And the prime, I mean, they've got their place. I mean, this is part of the yet again, again, one of those post-coort things is if you look at, there used to be like 30 or 40 major defense contractors. Now there's five. So if we can get those numbers backups on them and get some more new blood, I think that would be a good thing. You know, is there a model in SpaceX?

Let's be clear, SpaceX is part of it, too, right? I mean, there's definite military applications for a lot of the kind of launch stuff that SpaceX brings to the table. And it's very much a defense contractor. Yeah. So, you know, could, you know, Tesla bring new capabilities to military vehicles? I can imagine they really could. I mean, they're amazing vehicles.

So, again, I say again that I think that necessity will be the mother invention in many ways. I think we're now facing such a severe threat from China. Hopefully it will drive us forward to make some progress in any sorts of things. Are you seeing that in the government side, Republican Democrat, regardless that military, like, are people starting to wake up to this threat? Yeah, I mean, I think Congress, we have a pretty solid bipartisan understanding of the threat. You know, different people have different ideas about how to deal with it, obviously. Sure. And, but I mean, I certainly in every testimony that I've ever given, you know, should be.

Senate Formulations Committee or the U.S. China Commission, I mean, I get generally the same. It doesn't feel any different what's going from both sides. Right. And there seems, and certainly, certainly with the, like, folks like in the SAS and the Intel Committee is like, they're getting the details. And there is no ignoring the details once you understand them. You know, there are people who are not aware of the China threat because they're just not aware of it. Right. Once you understand the scale, once you understand the numbers, it's no denying. I mean, like, that's like I tell people like sometimes some people may think I'm alarmist

I give facts provide facts if the facts are alarming then they are what they are right Tom where can people go to find you and find your work so as I said

I may jump jump to your fellow to the CNAS so my work is some of it's on their website you know for the various articles I've been quoted in or whatnot

you'll see me from time to time in various media outlets I think I'm my interview for this and that about the Chinese military I'm on Twitter, T-Shibir at 3 that's where I do most of my talking and that's where I do a lot of my

morning-clined things. I talk about them there first, so get the new things I see in Chinese shipyards, new things I see in marine traffic or whatever's going on. Sometimes they'll return in my vehicles by other people. That's kind of like a labor-saving device for me is rather than have to go write an article, I'm just put it on Twitter and then if somebody wants to write an article, about it if you can.

So that's probably my number one outlet. I also most often when I do write articles, you'll find them at War on the Rocks. If you go to War on the Rocks.com and look under my name, you'll see all the articles that are written for them, which are most of my articles at them. Tom, thank you so much for spending your evening with us and walking us through a whole bunch of stuff I didn't really know anything about before. Yes, fascinating. We really appreciate your expertise. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your interest.

I mean, I watched some of your videos. I know this is very different content than you typically have. I hope I've kept your viewers interested in something that's very different than the really, quite frankly, exciting and exotic things you guys usually talk about. Oh, this is pretty exciting and exotic. I think so, too. It's all new to me, too. I learned so much when I talk to guys like you.

that are kind of outside that, you know, framework. So, yeah, again, thank you, Tom. And everyone else, we will see you again next week. Okay, thanks, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Thank you. Take care. Hey, guys, it's Jack.

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