Midrats

We just stress tested our Strategic Sealift. We'll discuss what we can learn from it this Sunday with returning guest, Salvatore Mercogliano. Sal sailed with MSC from 1989 to 1992, and worked MSC HQ as Operations Officer for the Afloat Prepositioning Force 1992-1996. He has a BS Marine Transportation from SUNY Maritime College, a MA Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology from East Carolina Univ...

Happy New Year to everyone and you know what 2020 means? It means that Midrats is having its 10th Anniversary. Come join us this Sunday as we look back at the previous decade and do our best to see what is coming over the horizon for the next. Who knows, we might have a surprise guest or two.

Going back three years, today's best of we look back to a forgotten corner of the Cold War. If you define the Cold War as lasting 44 years from 1947 to 1991, then for over half the Cold War there was a simmering proxy war in southern Africa that involved, to one extent or another, the present day nations of Angola, Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa. Over the course of time, it would involve nation...

Let's go back to October of 2010 for a great pair of guests. First, since the end of US involvement The Vietnam War almost 40 years ago, there are just a few USN Commanding Officers who know what it is like for a warship under attack; one of the handful will be our first guest, CDR Kirk Lippold, USN (Ret.). He was the Commanding Officer of the USS Cole (DDG-67) when it was attacked while in port A...

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...

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 wel...

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 marit...

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 (...

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 educa...

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 s...

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...

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 i...

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....

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 everyon...

As the USN continues its slow goodbye to 355 ships, what are some other measures it can use to expand maritime power, presence and influence? Would better and expanded integration, support, and interoperability with the USCG be part of the answer? Our guest this Sunday for the full hour to discuss this and all thing USCG will be Chuck Hill, and we’ll used his recent post, Navy, this is Coast Guard...

First aired in October 2015: One man's chore is another man's hobby. Another man's dread, is the other's fantasy. Such, in a fashion, is Program Management in the Navy. To be a good one, step one is to be self-aware. From his latest article in USNI's Proceedings, Confessions of a Major Program Manager, Captain Mark Vandroff, USN just lays it out; "Face it: Everyone hates MPMs. For the budget-consc...

From the week before the 2016 election, in this episode of Midrats we discuss the systems that trains, mans, and equips our military - and provides guidance and support to their civilian masters is broadly shaped by Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. There is much discussion that in the middle of the second decade of the 21st Century, is there a better system to serve our national security requirement...

Almost to the day, our direct military involvement in Afghanistan has reached its 18th year. Those Afghans, American, British, and others who were had yet to reach their first birthday when the attacks of September 2001 led us to move in to direct military action in Afghanistan, those children of 2001 are now on their way to that Central Asian country to pick up the conflict other generations have...

Even developed nations have difficulty effectively managing marine resources, enforce pollution controls, and maintain the rule of law in their territorial seas. With most of the world's coastal nations struggling to maintain authority ashore, the sea is left lawless. From fisheries to waste disposal, bad actors are taking advantage of these localized challenges with negative impacts not just on t...

First aired in AUG 2018. With a resurgent Russia, the security environment from former Soviet Republics to the traditionally neutral nations of Finland and Sweden has changed dramatically. What are those changes and how are they changing how these nations see their place in the larger Western security infrastructure? We’re going to look at how thing are changing in how they work and see each other...

Not since the last decade of the Cold War have ballistic missile defense, land based cruise missiles, as well as short, intermediate, and medium range ballistic missiles received this much attention outside the compartmentalized and esoteric warfare specialities they belong in. With the realities of our century bidding farewell to the previous century's INF limitations, you shouldn't expect the to...

In parallel efforts that in the Navy which led to Top Gun, the US Air Force looked hard at the lessons of air to air combat in the Vietnam War and brought forward "Red Flag," Moving beyond the technical focus, they looked to training and fundamentals to bring back a primacy of combat skills. Our guest for the full hour to discuss this and his new book, The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Tr...

Put the popular, and mostly accurate, image of the flamboyant General Patton, USA given to us by popular culture to the side for a moment. Consider the other side of the man; the strategic thinker, student of military history, and innovator for decades. This week's episode will focus on that side of the man. For the full hour we will have as our guest J. Furman Daniel, III, the editor of the next...

It is a civil war, tribal war, religious war, and proxy war with local, regional, and global implications. The specific and larger implications of the war in Yemen will be our topic for the full hour with our guest Katherine Zimmerman. Katherine Zimmerman is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the research manager for AEI’s Critical Threats Project. As AEI’s senior ana...

From Baltic air policing, through the Russian border areas, to Afghanistan and curling back to the Strait of Hormuz, NATO alliance members are being tested not just by external powers, but by domestic politics and the slow churn of history. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO members continue to grapple with their larger mission - and what alliance members mean and owe to each other. From purpose...