Midrats

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Episode 519: Going Sideways in Afghanistan & Iraq, with Daniel P. Bolger Dec 16, 2019

Show notes

In the 5-years since the publication of his book, Why We Lost, each passing day more and more people are starting to look at what, 18-yrs on, we have brought in to being with our long running land wars in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Using his book as a starting point, this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern, our guest will be Daniel P. Bolger, Lieutenant General, US Army, (Ret.) to discuss these two conflicts and larger implications of our Long War.
Bolger served 35 years in the U.S. Army, retiring in 2013. He commanded troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His military awards include five Bronze Stars (one for valor) and the Combat Action Badge. He earned a bachelor's degree at The Citadel and a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago. The author of nine books and numerous articles, he teaches history at North Carolina State State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Episode 518: Holding the Line with Guy Snodgrass Dec 08, 2019

Show notes

How do you report history as you live it? When, why, and how do you write about it?
When even the most experienced DC watchers are having trouble tracking what is going on in the Trump Administration, what can people expect to learn from first hand accounts?
If you haven't already heard about our next guest and his book - and you count yourself as someone interested in national security - then welcome back on the grid.
Returning to Midrats, our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss his new book, Holding the Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon with Secretary Mattis, will be Guy Snodgress, CDR USN (Ret.)
Guy is a retired American naval aviator, Topgun instructor, and former commanding officer who served as Jim Mattis's chief speechwriter and communications director during his time as Secretary of Defense. Snodgrass owns and manages a strategic advisory firm in Northern Virginia, serving government and tech industry clients.

Episode 517: Best of Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Captain, USN (Ret) Dec 06, 2019

Show notes

First aired in November of 2012.
"If we cannot have the navy estimates of our policy, then let's have the policy of our navy estimates."
---- Lieutenant Ambroise Baudry, French Navy
As our guest this week noted in his book Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, "These are the watchwords for the twenty-first-century American navy."
As we leave our land wars in Asia and look forward to the future maritime challenges of our nation, what size and kind of Fleet should the US Navy have?
How will budgets impact the size and nature of our Fleet, and how will that impact the ability of the Navy to meet what it will be asked to do?
What are the major schools of thought on what should drive our Fleet design, and what does history have to tell us about where we should head, and what we should be cautious of?
Our guest for the full hour to discuss this and a lot more will be Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Captain, USN (Ret), who in addition to being the author of innumerable books and articles, is a Professor, Department of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
Captain Hughes received an MS in Operations Research from NPS in 1964, and returned in 1979 and continued as a civilian instructor for thirty-two years, including 5 years as Dean of the Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences, he is a Distinguished Alumnus of NPS.
On active duty he commanded a minesweeper, a destroyer, and directed a large training command. Ashore, he was Deputy Director of the CNO’s Systems Analysis (OP-96), and Aide to Under Secretary of the Navy R. James Woolsey.

Episode 516: Making the Fleet Ready for a Peer Challenge, with Bryan McGrath Nov 25, 2019

Show notes

Keeping a fleet ready for war is a process of years of careful, consistent, and sustained stewardship of both personnel and material.
The easiest parts are the buying of equipment and recruiting new people.The hard parts, maintenance, training, and retention – mostly because they are hard – rarely break in to the open.
For our fleet, the structure we live in is the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP). It is a system few understand well, but is one designed around a peace time “efficiency” with only a passing interest in wartime “effectiveness.”
Decades of dominance at sea has provided the US Navy the luxury of such, but as China expands her fleet at an alarming rate – do we need a new construct?
Our guest for the full hour to discuss this and related topics will be Bryan McGrath, CDR USN (Ret.).
Bryan McGrath grew up in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987. He was commissioned upon graduation in the United States Navy, and served as a Surface Warfare Officer until his retirement in 2008. At sea, he served primarily in cruisers and destroyers, rising to command of the Destroyer USS BULKELEY (DDG 84). During his command tour, he won the Surface Navy Association’s Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Award for Inspirational Leadership, and the BULKELEY was awarded the USS ARIZONA Memorial Trophy signifying the fleet’s most combat ready unit. Ashore, Bryan enjoyed four tours in Washington DC, including his final tour in which he acted as Team Leader and primary author of our nation’s 2007 maritime strategy entitled “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.”
Since retirement, Bryan has become active in presidential politics, serving first as the Navy Policy Team lead for the Romney Campaign in 2012, and then as the Navy and Marine Corps Policy lead for the Rubio Campaign in 2016.

Episode 515: Building a Thinking Force: the Navy’s CLO, John Kroger Nov 17, 2019

Show notes

A byproduct of the April 2018 memo from Undersecretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, the newly created position of CLO is described as, “A senior civilian with educational leadership experience headquartered in the Pentagon, with a small supporting staff transferred from extant Navy and Marine education management billets, responsible to the President, Naval University for all matters related to education in policy, budgets, promotion board precepts. Congressional interaction, future requirements, and assessments.”
The Navy's first Chief Learning Officer (CLO) John Kroger will join us for the full hour to describe his mandate, the path ahead, and the opportunities and challenges of building a position from scratch.
John served as an enlisted Marine between 1983 and 1986. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard University. After college, he spent a significant part of his career in the public sector, as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor and Attorney General of Oregon from 2009 to 2012.
Kroger’s academic experience includes working as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Leader in Residence at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. For the past six years, Kroger was president of Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Ore.

Episode 514: Best of Stolen Seas; Tales of Somali Piracy Nov 15, 2019

Show notes

Episode first aired in July of 2013.
We have heard from industry, military leaders, Marines, and private security providers, this Sunday we are going to look at piracy at a more personal level with director Thymaya Payne of the documentary, Stolen Seas; Tales of Somali Piracy. He will be our guest for the full hour.
From the show promo:
The filmmakers have spent the past three years traveling to some of the world's most violent locales in order to make this documentary on Somali piracy, Stolen Seas. Utilizing exclusive interviews and unparalleled access to real pirates, hostages, hostages' relatives, ship-owners, pirate negotiators and experts on piracy and international policy, Stolen Seas presents a chilling exploration of the Somali pirate phenomenon.
The film throws the viewer, through audio recordings and found video, right into the middle of the real-life hostage negotiation of a Danish shipping vessel, the CEC Future. As the haggling between the ship's stoic owner Per Gullestrup, and the pirate's loquacious negotiator, Ishmael Ali, drags on for 70 days, these two adversaries' relationship takes an unexpected turn and an unlikely friendship is born.
Stolen Seas is an eye opening refutation of preconceived ideas on how or why piracy has become the world's most frightening multi-million dollar growth industry.

Episode 513: Naval Aviation with Kevin Miller Nov 04, 2019

Show notes

With the sequel to "Top Gun" coming up, if you ever wore the uniform of the US Navy, you're going to get asked a lot of questions.
For this week's show we are going to talk about today's Naval Aviation experience with author Kevin Miller, CAPT, USN (Ret.)
Kevin is a third generation naval officer. He graduated from the University of Mississippi and was designated a Naval Aviator in August 1983. In his career he flew the A-7E Corsair II and FA-18C Hornet, deploying overseas six times throughout the 1980’s and 90’s aboard the aircraft carriers Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Enterprise. He finished his career in the Pentagon serving on the staff of the Secretary of the Navy, retiring in 2005.
After leaving the service Kevin was employed as an associate at two Washington DC defense consulting firms, and it was during this time he drafted his first novel Raven One. In 2010 he joined the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Today he is a self-employed defense consultant, Amazon Best-Selling author of the military action-adventure novels Raven One and Declared Hostile and serves as Vice President of Legislative Affairs for the Tailhook Association.
Kevin earned a Master of Science in Business Management from Florida State University and a Master of National Security Policy and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College.

Episode 512: Best of the Union and Confederate Navies, with James M. McPherson Nov 01, 2019

Show notes

The War Between the States, the American Civil War - whichever description you prefer - this crucible on which our nation was re-formed has legion of books, movies, and rhetoric dedicated to it. Most of the history that people know involves the war on land, but what of the war at sea?
What are details behind some of the major Naval leaders of both sides that are the least known, but are the most interesting? What challenges and accomplishments were made by the belligerents in their navies, and how do they inform and influence our Navy today?
Our guest for the full hour to discuss this and more will be James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He has published numerous volumes on the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, Crossroads of Freedom (which was a New York Times bestseller), Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, which won the Lincoln Prize.
As a starting off point for the show, we will be discussing his book, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865.
Show first aired in 2013.

Episode 511: Baltic Security with Dr. Sebastian Bruns Oct 20, 2019

Show notes

From Finland to Denmark, Sweden to Poland - from small Latvia to the Continental power of Germany - the return of Russia has brought a renewed focus the last half decade to the Baltic.
Not just a SLOC, there are important economic and cultural ties that predate written history that continue to be important today.
Our guest for the full hour in a wide ranging discussion will be Dr. Sebastian Bruns.
Sebastian heads the Center for Maritime Strategy & Security (CMSS) at the Institute for Security Policy, University of Kiel (ISPK). He is the author/editor of six books, including "Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security" (edited with Joachim Krause, London 2016), and his latest, "US Naval Strategy and National Security. The Evolution of American Maritime Power" (London, 2018).

Episode 510: A Half-Baked Navy with Jimmy Drennan and Blake Herzinger Oct 13, 2019

Show notes

Everyone has half-baked ideas ... some quarter-baked and some three-quarters-baked ... that in a just world of their making would have a funding line.
Are there some ideas so far "out of the box" that they really should be "in the box?"
Find yourself saying, "If I were CNO/emperor/Chairman of the HASC for a day, I would..."?
Have some ideas that you are convinced our Navy needs to win, but everyone else thinks is impossible/stupid/insane?
Well, that is the Navy we're going to ponder today.
With our guests Blake Herzinger and His Exalted Saltiness Jimmy Drennan, EagleOne and I the Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will talk about our pet "half-baked ideas" that ... in all seriousness ... we'd like someone to at leave give a serious thought to for a few seconds.
Blake graduated from OCS in 2010 and affiliated with the USNR in 2017, having spent time in the Navy’s anti-submarine warfare and intelligence collection communities. As a civilian he supports planning and execution of Indo-Pacific Security Cooperation and he works for Commander, Naval Forces Korea as a reservist.
At the moment he’s getting his first real taste of 5th Fleet and starting his sea counter for the first time (which, as a mobilized intel reservist, is basically like being struck by lightning and bit by a shark at the same time).
Jimmy Drennan is a Surface Warfare Officer, President of the Center for International Maritime Security, and Boat Rocker in Chief at The Salty Herald.
You can find them both on twitter at @BDHerzinger and @SaltyHerald.

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