Midrats

As with most concepts and good ideas, you really don't know what you need and how you need to do it until you put Sailors to task and head to sea. The idea of an Afloat Forward Staging Base has, in a variety of forms, been a regular part of naval operations arguably for centuries under different names and with different equipment. What about the 21st Century?  More than just a story about the use...

This Sunday, join our guests Vice Admiral Bill Moran, USN, Navy Chief of Naval Personnel, and Commander Guy Snodgrass, USN, Prospective Executive Officer of Strike Fighter Squadron ONE NINE FIVE, in a discussion of the challenges in officer retention that is facing our Navy. As over a decade of major combat operations ashore winds down, economic & budgetary stresses grow on defense spending, a str...

The Chief of Naval Operation's Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) was established in 2012 in order to provide junior leaders with venue to identify and rapidly field emerging technologies that they see needed in the Fleet. Who is in the CRIC, how do they get there, and what are some of the projects they have been working on? Join us this Sunday for the full hour with Commander Ben Salazar, USN, Director...

With the new defense budget out, new QDR out, the withdraw of maneuver forces from Afghanistan, rising interest in INDO-PAC operations, and a resurgent Russia: after over a decade of COIN and land wars in Southwest and Central Asia - what is the status of the United States Marine Corps?  Materially, intellectually, and culturally - is the USMC set up to move best towards the expected challenges an...

In concept, execution, and ability to effectively provide its part of the national defense infrastructure, has a separate Air Force served this nation well, and does it make sense to keep it a separate service. Our guest this week makes the case that the experiment in a separate US Air Force is over, and it has failed. Though we need airpower, we don't need a separate service to provide it. With u...

Revisiting a show from NOV 2011,  They share the hazards, smell the smells; all that is needed so that those at home may understand what their countrymen are doing in the far reaches of the world on their behalf. The best know that to tell a story, you have to be in it. Sometimes, the story catches up with them. Our guest for the full hour will be Kimberly Dozier,  foreign correspondent for CBS Ne...

What direction do we need to go for our next maritime strategy? Using he recent article, Control of the Seas, as our starting point, our guest for the full hour will be Seth Cropsey, Senior Fellow and director of Hudson Institute's Center for American Seapower.   He served in government at the Defense Department as Assistant to the SECDEF Caspar Weinberger and then as Deputy Undersecretary of the...

Nothing like some time snowed in to focus the mind. Join us this Sunday from 5-6pm as we cover the maritime angle from China to shipbuilding to Cyber with a Midrats free for all. Have a topic you wished we would cover? Well, the phone lines are open.

When you send your elected representative to Washington DC, you are not just sending one person. For each Congressman and Senator - there is a cadre of staffers that makes it happen. Bills do not sprout out of the heads of politicians - no - they are carefully crafted, often over years, by the people you see in the background on C-Span. Politicians cannot and do not read source documentation all t...

For those who don't care about Football or get all grumpy if they don't get enough of their Midrats, we're heading back to early in our second year and visit our old friend.  In the small world of the Navy blogosphere, when you think of Japan, one name should immediately come to mind; Skippy-san of the blog FarEastCynic. Though most know Skippy by his "interesting" perspective on some of the "inte...

Lost to many whose news sources in the USA consists of the major newspapers and the standard networks, for most of the last dozen+ years, the conflict in Afghanistan has not been a USA-Centric battle; it has been a NATO run operation. When the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force has been an American 4-star, the visuals can be misleading. For most of the last decade, American f...

That's right ... Midrats has been on the air four years. This week we aren't having guests, just the two hosts and any listeners who want to take the opportunity to call in or throw a question or topic to us in the chat room. Breaking news, regular topics, or whatever you pull out of your seabag - we're going to cove it Green range, as it were.

Though nations for thousands of years have been wrestling with the challenge of Joint operations,  we're still trying to get it right. As an island nation with significant global interests ashore, the USA has a rich history of doing Joint right, and blind parochialism as well.  Using this as a starting point, this Sunday for the full hour we will have returning guest, John Kheun. Dr. John T. Kuehn...

Many continue to focus on the "Pacific Pivot" and/or IndoPac, but the news seems to keep finding its way back to Africa. This Sunday we're going to leave IndoPac and all that in order to focus the full hour discussing the eastern part of Africa with a returning guest Alex Martin who will give us a first hand report from a personal and professional perspective. Alex graduated with distinction from...

Though over three years old, this topic remains at the top of the list of importance and if you are a new listener to Midrats and haven't listened to it yet - this is required listening. If you caught it in a previous year, then it is well worth a relisten. Look at the performance of the US Navy in World War II - those ships came in the shipbuilding programs of the 1920s & 1930s. At a time with no...

For a maritime power with global requirements, what is the role of the small ship in times of peace and war? What are the tradeoffs between quantity and capability, size and range, survivability and affordable? Does the US Navy need a high-low mix; or a Strike Group-Flotilla mix?   Where do our national requirements influence how we build our Fleet vs. the process other nations build theirs? Do we...

In less than a month we will be firmly in the middle of the 2nd decade of the 21st Century. What path were we put on at the start 21st Century that got us here? How do we evaluate the right decisions, the neutral decisions, and the less than optimal calls of the last decade and a half? What lessons can we take away now in order to make decisions to best position the Navy on the approaches to 2030?...

Almost two and a half years ago we had a show that is a fitting ago now as it was then.   Almost a decade of involvement in two land wars in Asia combined with a series of costly and ill timed shipbuilding programs that have yet to produce ships anywhere near promised cost and performance has brought our Navy to the growing budget crisis in a delicate position.  The national security arena suffers...

When one hangs up the uniform after decades of service, but still wants to contribute to their nations national security needs, what paths can that take? How does one find a path forward, and what are the keys to success? In a budgetary challenge not seen by the US military in two decades, what are the important "must haves" that need to be kept at full strength, and what "nice to haves" may have...

Are there lessons one can learn from the most exceptional edges of the military experience that can be useful to the civilian world? Was there something from the experience of American prisoners of war imprisoned at the "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam War that had to do with their success in their subsequent careers? Our guests to discuss for the full hour will be Peter Fretwell and Taylor Baldw...

Going back 14 months, this Veterans Day weekend, let's review the war we have been soaking in. There are certain points in a nation's history that define a transition from one era to another.  These moments are so clear that you don't realize it in retrospect - you know it the moment it happens.  No one argues the fact that everything has changed; from all sides, everyone sees it.  September 11th,...

In an arch that spans the immediate post-Cold War era through the Iraq War, what are the observations & lessons a front-line leader at the tactical level and, for those who are injured in service to their nation, through recovery. Our guest for the full hour will be Jason Redman, author of The Trident: The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader. Jason joined the Navy on September 11, 1992 and...

If you have only started to think about the budget problems this year, you are late to the game Shipmate. We are years in to it, and almost 2-yrs ago, as many were sobering up to the fact that the military was about to face a budget challenge not seen in a generation. Especially those who have seen this movie before, they knew that this one has the potential to be the most challenging seen in over...

This week, we'll go back to 2011 for an interview with one of the better reports from an embed this decade. For those who listened to All Things Considered on NPR in 2011, you caught an outstanding series on the 3rd Battalion 5th Marines – the  Darkhorse Battalion — the Marine unit that suffered the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the 10-year Afghan war. Our guest for the full hour...

While good ideas are often forgotten, bad ideas seem to pop up over an over again - especially the sexy ones that sound so good, but never seem to work well. The answer, of course, is to try again and hope for a better result. Some would argue that sea swap is one of those sexy ideas that just isn't that practical in actual operation. A good idea? One of the good ideas mostly forgotten is that of...