Midrats

Beat the heat by joining us today from 5-6pm Eastern for a mid-July maritime free for all. We're going to cover the chart from Iran seizing Brit owned tankers, to the future impact of growing naval powers like India & Japan, to the new-new CNO to be, and anything else that seems to be breaking above the natsec ambient noise. Jump in the chat room with your own question, or you can even call in.

From limpet mines on tankers, drone shootdowns, and the HMS Montrose just short of loading grape - the decades long story of Iranian posturing in their near seas continues. A lot sounds familiar, but the economic and security environment has changed a lot in the four decades. What is a constant, what has changed, and what should we expect to evolved in one of the most globally important areas of w...

First aired 3.5 years ago, but worth a re-listen. How do you design a game that has practical tactical application to the naval tactician? Even more ambitious, how do you make one accessible and understandable with the goal of making it a mobile wargame for eventual use by sailors and warfare commands. For today's show we will discuss one of the projects of the CNO's Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC),...

China will continue to expand its holdings and presence in the South China Sea and the first and second island chain as long as it can and does not face pressure to do otherwise. They have an unmatched shipbuilding program to expand not just their traditional navy, but their coast guard and maritime paramilitary fleets. To discuss these and related topics will be returning guest, Hunter Stires. As...

Punitive expeditions, retaliatory strikes, raiding, hitting pirate camps, attacking enemy ships in the dark of night, striking enemy facilities & resources on shore and other forms of irregular naval warfare - sound new, transformational? No. They've been with the US Navy from day-1. Join us this Sunday with returning guest BJ Armstrong to discuss his latest book, "Small Boats and Daring Men: Mari...

Recently, when one hears of disease and Africa, if you only listened to the media, then what would come to mind would be Ebola. That is not the real challenge in Africa. There is a disease that not only kills, it impedes economic growth, interferes with good governance, and as a result is just another catalyst to conflict there and in South Asia. To give a better understanding of the ongoing impac...

How does our Army help officers understand military doctrine, history, and theory? How do we ensure that our staffs have leaders capable of generating options for commanders engaged with our most complex operational and strategic problem sets? It doesn't happen by accident. To address these questions and related topics, our guest this Sunday will be Colonel Kirk Dorr, USA the Director of the U.S....

He’s back! EagleOne is back in the studio to help us kick of summer with a Midrats early-summer melee! With most schools out, what you need right now is a good maritime hour to refocus the brain. For the full hour we’ll try to cover it all from the latest McCain kerfuffle to WESTPAC to NATO to the FFG(X) dropouts and more, we’ll cover the waterfront. As always, the phones and chatroom will be open...

Today's Midrats Best of first aired on August 2016. We live in a crowded world with limited resources. What happens when this meets modern technology's ability to shorten the time/distance equation and increase the ability to know of what lies below the waves? What complications do we fine when the above two points meet up with the eternal search by growing nations to reach for the seas to support...

What if they gave a war in WESTPAC and we couldn't come? It is easy to talk tactics, weapons, and warship numbers - but on balance, that is not what ensures victory in any major war. For a maritime nation, nothing can last very long without a large, sustained, scalable, and resilient merchant marine. When you look at our numbers, we are not ready. Our guest for the full hour will be John Konrad, u...

Stowaways, poaching, piracy, smuggling, and murder - the global commons of the open ocean is as wild of a place as it is vast. Using as a baseline his series on lawlessness on the high seas in the New York Times, The Outlaw Ocean, our guest for the full hour to discuss the anarchy of crime and violence on the high seas in the 21st Century will be Ian Ubina. Ian is a reporter for The New York Times...

What is a good strategy and posture for Taiwan to take for her defense? Are there things she can learn from Japan? What is Taiwan’s posture today towards mainland China, and where are trends taking her? To discuss these and related questions today is our guest Grant Newsham. We will use his recent article in the Global Taiwan Institute, Rethinking Taiwan’s Defense: Looking at the Japanese Experien...

Do we have the means, capabilities, national will - and more important - the support of the American people to meet the demands from the global entanglements we are obligated by? What is the grand strategy? To discuss these and related questions this Sunday will be Dr. David Gioe. We will use his recent article in The National Interest, Make America Strategic Again, as the starting point for our t...

Well inside an officer's career arch, we saw the American Navy move from the Great White Fleet, The Spanish American War to the age of the Dreadnought. Our Army, from ad-hoc volunteer units to a professional army going head-to-head with the finest professional army on the planet. How did our military and our Navy build up to WWI, and how did that experience inform the evolution of our national def...

Time to look back at an episode at the dawn of the Trump Administration. Our guest back in March of 2017 was Frank Hoffman. At the second month of a new President is building a new national security team, we looked at what direction they might take our nation. What role should realism, alliances, and the requirement to anchor all to a strategic discipline focused on the long term interests of our...

Almost everyone who follows military issues can clearly point to what the Army Reserve, National Guard, USAFR, ANG, and USMC Reserves do – their individual and unit deployments have been highly visible so far in the Long War … but what about the Naval Reserve? What are they doing? Are they being best utilized to purpose? As we re-look at the challenge of a maritime power facing emerging powers on...

The generation that will lead Sailors forward over what is shaping up to be the most challenging environment at sea for the USN since the 1980s is just now rolling in to their first shore duty or out of it. What culture and experiences marked their formative junior officer years? How will they change the fluid culture of our navy? Will their habits in writing, discussing, and experimenting differ...

Wars are full of accidental battles, unexpected horror, and the valor of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Often lost in the sweeping stories of the Pacific in WWII, there is a story that - if not for one man's inability to properly recognize one ship from another - should have never have happened. Because of that one man's mistake, and a leader's stubborn enthusiasm to double down o...

When this show first aired in May of 2016, we were coming up on the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Jutland. Stop for a moment, close your eyes, and then tell me what image comes to mind. If your image is of a huge mass of steel coming at you out from the mist at 25-knots belching out sun-blocking clouds of coal-smoke and burned black powder and searing fingers of flame pushing tons of armor...

How are unmanned systems and the increasing use of robots from the kitchen to the battlefield impacting how our personal, professional, and national lives are being run? What are the obvious and not so obvious places they are already a dominate presence today, and where are trends leading us? Our guest for the full hour to discuss the issues he raises in his book, "One Nation Under Drones" will be...

During the 2016 election, then candidate Donald Trump ran on building a 350 ship Navy. That number soon moved up to 355. Two years after his inauguration, the path to get there is hard to see. There is a movement of navalists who are not just looking for the path to 355, but looking to the challenge of China at the end of the next decade, want our Navy to move north of 400 ships. To that end, in F...

We are going to take a clear, cold, and unsparing look at the status of the conflict in Afghanistan and the Long War in general with our returning guest, Bill Roggio. In a far-reaching discussion, we will touch on the rather unpleasant reality of where we have put ourselves through our own action, and what people should expect going forward. Bill is a senior fellow at FDD and editor of FDD’s Long...

The best fiction doesn't just entertain, it informs and causes the reader to think. Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern is August Cole, the co-author with P.W. Singer of one of the best received military fiction novels on the last year, Ghost Fleet: An Novel of the Next World War. August is an author and analyst specializing in national security issues. He is a nonresident s...

From showing the flag in the Mediterranean in the first decades of our republic's history, through Teddy's Great White Fleet, to FONOPS in today's South China Sea - "being there" is a little understood strategic mission. What is its history and utility in the 21st Century? Our guest for the full hour will be Dr. James Holmes, returning to Midrats to discuss this and related issues. Dr. Holmes is a...

Stowaways, poaching, piracy, smuggling, and murder - the global commons of the open ocean is as wild of a place as it is vast. Using as a baseline his series on lawlessness on the high seas in the New York Times, The Outlaw Ocean, our guest for the full hour to discuss the anarchy of crime and violence on the high seas in the 21st Century will be Ian Ubina. Ian is a reporter for The New York Times...