Interesting, I'll have to come back and listen to this whole thing

Thanks for Uploading.

very interesting high level discussion!

Re: Jerry's comments around 1:30:00 on CSGs, I think it's pretty clear in retrospect, if not at the time, that the decision to nix further development of the F-14 Tomcat in the early 90s doomed the supercarrier to obsolescence in the next few decades. That incoming reality has been somewhat obscured by the use of carriers since that time against non-peer and non-state targets that have little capacity for staunch resistance. However, the increasing maritime competition with China and the steady advance towards power projection parity between the classic supercarrier strike wing and advanced long-range missile platforms like the Ohio SSGNs, means that this may be the last decade of the supercarrier's relevance as the ultimate naval weapon/capital ship, much like the 1930s was for the battleship.

Are going have a human free submarine in our lifetime & what China catching up to us?

This talk is dead-on. The US military has badly lost it's way strategically over the course of the Cold War and even more since then. Our military system was designed to be much like the British military system--arguably the most successful in modern history--with a powerful permanent Navy, and a small standing army, capable of temporarily growing to enormous size in times of war and then scaling down again. That model won us the Civil War, The Spanish American War, WWI (though our contributions particularly in the naval domain were rather small), and WWII. It was still in effect in the last significant war we can reasonably say we won, Korea. In the aftermath of the Korean conflict, as the speakers rightly pointed out, the US military fell into a completely novel (for us) state of maintaining a large standing army. Now, perhaps this was necessary at the time to keep the Soviets at bay at Central Europe. There is some argument to be made there. However, besides the arguable deterrence of Soviet aggression in Germany, what did the large standing conventional army accomplished for the United States? It gave us the debacle of Vietnam. Grenada and Panama were pinprick affairs largely achieved and achievable by Marines and Special Forces/Airborne. You could point to Gulf War I as a success, but that was followed up a decade later by a disastrous repeat of the mistakes of Vietnam by Big Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former of which was a non-issue which had been neutered by the Air Force, and the latter of which was a war that special forces had already won before Big Army entered to screw everything up and set us up for the eventual national embarrassment of 2021. Unfortunately, for US national strategy, I think Big Army views the Russian invasion of Ukraine as shot in the arm for its relevance, but that perspective couldn't be further from the truth. Russia's adventure in Ukraine has turned into a slog. Almost 6 months into the war, they still haven't secured Eastern Ukraine. The idea that their conventional forces could somehow threaten Central Europe is laughable. The current administration has made clear that they have no intention of committing US ground forces to this conflict. The most that could expected is an aerial intervention, and even that seems highly unlikely. Where is the role for the bloated US conventional army in this? Meanwhile, the true near-peer Great Power threat of the 21st Century lurks in the Western Pacific. That confrontation will inevitably be a naval confrontation, and one in which we are increasingly losing our edge. It's clear that the total extent of an army we need in peacetime is the various special forces units, a QRF of a division or two like the 82nd Airborne, capable of responding quickly to emergency situations, and a large Reserve/National Guard force capable of being spun up into a deployable army in a couple of months in the unlikely event of some sort Red Storm Rising style conventional ground-based WWIII. The country, however, is in serious need of a 400 ship navy that support US strategy while providing the sustainable four-phase deployments Jerry pointed out as a major factor in reducing crew fatigue, and improving readiness for growing maritime military competition. (And scaling down the outmoded carrier strike group model in favor of more distributed surface warships and systems as such as potent SSGNs as suggested is likely an important step in that direction). The Marine Corps of all the services, seems to be the most clear-minded strategically and has its structure, acquisitions, and deployments pretty well figured out. The Air Force I'm not sure on, but it may also be bloated like the Army. One thing I am sure of is that its ground-based missile silos are an outmoded form of nuclear deterrence and clearly not worth the massive investment required to upgrade them. For certain however, the macro strategic picture for the US military demonstrates a need to transfer a serious amount of resources from Big Army to the rather neglected Navy.

Zzzzzzzz 😴😴

⚓️ Thanks NHF 😎 the relevance of these organizations > US Naval History Fanboys < are thicker than fleas on an ugly dog’s back… and particularly limited by choosing a narrow field…. US Naval Imperial focus on conflict as a diplomatic solution does the US population a disservice by completely disregarding the complex influence of the US Merchant Marine. The severe disregard of the merchant marine by naval influences has weakened the US not only economically but socially as well. The overt hatred of the US Maritime Organized labor movement has weakened the middle class, leading to this decline of many institutions & threatening the constitution. Please reply. 🥸