Photo, left: 10 U.S. Riverine Sailors Released from Iranian Custody - USNI News  Riverine Command Boats (RCB) 802 and 805 participate in a bilateral exercise
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Captain Jerry Hendrix, USN (ret.) and Center for New American Security. Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 1, Block A: Captain Jerry Hendrix, USN (ret) [LCDR Claude Berube, USNR, biographer, novelist, intelligence officer, professor, and museum director], in re: the future of the US Navy – the last hundred years of US history. Fog of war in the Persian Gulf: Iran has detained ten US sailors, detained between Kuwait and Bahrain by the IRGC – Ira aj Revolutionary Guard Corps. An element of a riverine patrol squadron (these boasts have normally been in the Tigris or Euphrates) was taken to Kuwait for unknown reasons, then sent to Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is headquartered.  The 26-ft boats are designed for placid waters, whereas the Persian Gulf  sports 5- or 6-ft waves. At some point, both boats became mechanically disabled, then seem to have drifted to Farsi Island, whose sovereignty is contested.  Then the crew were detained by the IRGC and the ships taken to Farsi Island. Ten sailors: nine male, one female, are being held.  Under international law, the crew is to be kept together; we don't know if this has been followed here.  Commander is a First-Class Petty Officer - unlikely to have a commissioned officer on such small boats - in charge of a group of young sailors in difficult circumstances. / The Navy doesn't have enough ships at present:  . . .  Given eighteen maritime regions, base requirement of around 355 ships; US currently is at 272.  Precipitate retirement of Reagan-era ships.  [Unlike some military threats,] Naval presence requires an actual ship's presence.  To keep one ship up and deployed, need five ships at one time: one deployed, one en route home, one in train to come back out, and [two: ______].  The  Pacific is large; it can take weeks – even months - t0 to get a ship there.
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 1, Block B:  Claude Berube, author of Conor Stark novels [CDR Bryan McGrath, USN (Ret), principal of the Ferrybridge Group and an Associate Fellow at the Hudson Institute, McGrath commanded the USS Buckley while on active duty and was the principal author of the 2006 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. Since then he has consulted heavily with the Department of the Navy and has heavily influenced current conversations about distributed lethality and how many carrier we need]; in re:    Ten US sailors have been taken hostage by a predatory organization, the IRGC; the Secy of the Navy and the Secretary of State have not yet succeeded in freeing them. The Navy is entirely willing to recover them; US political will may not be.  Ancient Greek: "Whoever commands the sea controls everything"; similarly, Sir Walter Scott.  When a country takes a reef, builds a small island on it and then claims a 12-mi-zone of sovereignty, . . . South China Sea: China has even built runways on them. A flashpoint for the future. Chief of Naval Operations's recent report; note that the Russian navy is resurgent, China is surging, esp its coast guard. White hull-on-white-hull operations: expect a fight for sovereignty [white hull is coast guard, for rescue; gray hulls are warships. Here, suggestion of deception, rather like putting a Red Cross emblem on a military vehicle.]. Think of fish as a major resource; when it feeds 1.6 billion people, expect more Chinese fishing vessels where you wouldn't expect to see them.    Current high-seas governance  was established back in earliest times of Western civilization.  Russians in the Arctic, China on high seas, all challenging ancient protocols.   . . .Eastern Med also flashpoints.    . . . It's important not to diminish the number of ships you have that [sail in conjunction with] your allies; otherwise, you cede the sea to pirates and enemies. British royal navy: 35 ships??  Does the US have a decade to rebuild its fleet? In my opinion, no. 
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 1, Block C:  Bryan McGrath,  Ferrybridge Institute and Hudson Institute [LCOL Noel Williams, USMC (Ret) is one of the most innovative thinkers to come out of the Marine Corps, which is why he had to come out of the Marine Corps. Noel has challenged the basic underlying assumptions of the Corps, to include its adherence to amphibious assault as its primary mission or adherence to heavy, expensive amphibious ships to get around the world. Noel has also written about the superfluous nature of the carrier in the face of current threats.];  in re: a debate at Mahan Hall in Annapolis; Carrier battle fleet.  Assessing the next seventy: do we have what we want. Supercarriers; trouble around the world ocean. Do we have enough ships? No. We need to be postured forward in East Asia, and ___, and Europe; need 16 aircraft carriers; we have ten, will reach eleven next year.  We then can cover two places, need 16 to cover three.  If the money tree were in full bloom, we couldn't catch up in less thatn 25 years.  Carrier air wing; range.  Can we invest only in carriers and ignore the air wing?  BMG: You (JH) have been a leader in this.  The first dollar spent on an aircraft carrier is wasted if we don't have an air wing with the range it needs to strikes far enough away to cover an area of mitigated risk. We stopped looking at aircraft carriers as a sea-control platform after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now both Russia and China are contesting; and we need to be able to fuel our own aircraft pretty darned messed up. First: fix range problem.  To expand the carrier air force will cost billions. Chinese missile on parade: the carrier-killer, or the Guam-killer. Does this defeat the US Navy at present? Not defeat, but changes the calculus. It's a threat that can be countered - esp in interrupting the targeting chain (easiest way) – deny the other side knowledge of where the target is; it's hard to hide a 100,000-ton ship but we're getting better. Systems create false targets; can try to neutralize a weapon while it's in flight. Hard to hit with our current systems, but capabilities are under dvpt  - the electromagnetic rail gun has promise. The aircraft carrier has been under siege for seventy years, but we developed counters.   Bryan: you as commanding officer of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.  China bldg a 10,000-ton coast guard cutter – a shouldering ship (sail up next to something and push it out of the way!).  China's propensity to mix non-mil activities into military actions so they can pretend not to be escalating the situation. We need to think more deeply about how China carries itself; how do we match, escalate, in a way that serves our  needs? I have no particular anxiety about this ship.  Now about the USS Zumwalt (14,000 tons – expensive and we can probably take the technologies and put them to work in other kinds of future ships)  - a battlefield commander: fabulous, but not the future of the Navy, although pieces of it are: the stealth, the electric-drive power system with very high technology. 
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 1, Block D: Noel Williams, naval defense consultant; Lt-Colonel (ret.); in re: The futire of the US Navy. United States Marine Corps; fog of war/diplomacy in the Persian Gulf; IRGC is a warfighting group of a sinister nature.  Navy & Marine Corps team work excellently together. Marines worked on shore a lot in recent past – "because it was needed."  As technology progresses, it as important if you're at sea or on land.  One effort is to get back at sea and work even more closely with the Navy; and a lot of the threats now are maritime.  Lot of tech opportunities - area-denial threats.  Yes, a re-assessment, a shift back to our naval roots, but we'll do whatever the country needs. Dep Secy Def (also Col, Marine corps [ret] – ready to adapt to the wave of unmanned tech coming? Yes.  We have exoskeletons to let Marines travel with heavier loads, and ___ breechers to be the first ashore; unmanned tanks (armored vehicles) ashore to deal with the initial threat.  Looking at large UAS capabilities, also surface/ground capabilities. A huge area; the commercial sector is making great strides.  We have good entry and end-retention – we even have to shed Marines. But we're getting good quality. Tarawa Atoll – an awful experience in WWII into a kill zone – the Marine Corps resolved never to do that again.  We're refining our thinking further – including unmanned operations, abut also the knowledge- ISR (intell, surveillance, reconnaissance).
 
 
"China does not know how to play well with others. It knows only how to be the leader."   ---Jerry Hendrix, Friday,  24 April 2015 
 
 
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 2, Block A:  Larry Kudlow; & Steve Moore, Heritage, in re:  the abducted sailors, held by the IRGC.  The State of the Union speech: nothing helpful about foreign policy; going on and on about Osama bin Laden; happy about releasing hr last prisoners at Guantanamo – even though they're known to be the most dangerous; spoke of bombing ISIS oil truck – after 15 months of not having done so. The GOP must stand up and quit dithering.  Why are we giving Iran $150 bil? The ultimate whitewash, incl the economy.  [This president is] A guy trying so hard to sell a progressive-big govt vision he's had for seven-plus years; it's not working!  This experiment must be ended.  Look at he polls: he's underwater in the economy, in defeating terrorism – no one believes the American economy is strong enough . . .
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 2, Block B: Larry Kudlow; & Steve Moore, Heritage, in re: . . . "Democracy is breaking down because there's no compromise; too much rancor" – said Pres Obama.  Yikes.
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 2, Block C:  Mary Kissel, WSJ, in re: . . . He praised the Iran nuclear deal without mentioning the ten US sailors in captivity since this afternoon. Unhinged.  LK: I think he's delusional; I think he believes that changing the balance of power in the Middle east to  Iran was a good idea. We're about to fork over $100bil to $150 bil to killmore Americans. Iran runs Iran, Iraq, and via proxies, also Gaza, Syria, Yemen. For Pres Obama to say that the world fears the US ism frankly nuts.  MK: He made no argument of coming to the aid of Ukraine, or our democratic allies in the Pacific; nothing of the violations in Hong Kong; quoted numbers about fighting ISIS in Iraq as though they made sense. He loves to raise a straw man again – [in this instance,] World War III – and even his own defense secretaries have raised questions – called his Syria policy "a Chernobyl," meaning that the problem spreads.  I felt that the president hurt the prospect of Democrats up and down the ticket.  He characterized the health of the US economy: 2% growth as great; no mention of innovation, of freeing the animal spirits of the economy – it's all about government in every corner of American life.  I was disturbed by the speech.  I think he's delusional, and the next twelve months are dangerous.  Hope the next president is better grounded, or we'll be in a lot of trouble.  This was the candidate who spoke of bringing the American people together!  LK: He made this challenge to the GOP: "You have a chance now – you can follow through on this war by authorizing the use of military force against ISIS." I think that's the only sensible part of his speech. I say, Yes! Do it; and see that it contains a clear war resolution. This is a kind of resolve he's never demonstrated. The GOP leadership has never done this! There should have been a war resolution months ago.  MK: His speech confirms what we've known for seven years: every problem is the result of the previous president, Pres G W Bush. Thus, the next twelve months are the best time for our enemies to take advantage of US weakness. His speech never mentioned the North Korea nuclear test, or domestic ISIS terrorism inside US borders, or the ten US sailors held by Iran – a frightening time.   
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 2, Block D: Larry Kudlow, in re:  Ten American sailors have been taken hostage, abducted, by an enemy foreign power.  They were taken on an island that is not Iranian territory – and the one female officer among them may have been illegally separated by the thuggish IRGC.  In 1904, a Greek-American named Ion Perdicaris was kidnapped in Morocco by a bandit named Raisuli; President Theodore Roosevelt was enraged; Secretary of State John Hay proclaimed to the then-Republican convention, "This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead."  [Would that we had a such a representative today.]  . . . LK: we have a president who refuses to lead. He could have said that, "in 24 hours, we'll have our sailors back or the treaty is void."  Republicans should do this, break the treaty.  The main thing is to communicate that America is strong. 
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 3, Block A: Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re:  Putin sat down with Bild Publisher Kai Diekmann and Senior Politics Editor Nikolaus Blome in the Russian resort town of Sochi, where he owns a home. According to English translations of the conversation released by both Bild and by the Kremlin, Putin blames much of the tension between Russia and the West on what he plainly views as a betrayal by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Related: Eau de Putin: Russian Leader Inspires Cologne  NATO officials, Putin claims, promised Russia that there would be no eastward expansion of the alliance after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Putin also criticized NATO nations for lacking the political will to deny membership to former Soviet Republics that met the alliance’s requirements and requested membership. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/putin-says-tensions-europe-fault-123000515.html
“NATO and the USA wanted a complete victory over the Soviet Union,” Putin said. “They wanted to sit on the throne in Europe alone. But now they are sitting there, and we are talking about all these crises we would otherwise not have.”
To the extent any of the fault for tensions in Europe can be laid at the feet of Russia, Putin said, it is because Moscow failed to push back hard enough against the West after the Berlin Wall fell.
“If we had presented our national interests more clearly from the beginning, the world would still be in balance today,” Putin said.
Related: Putin Would ‘Welcome’ a Donald Trump Presidency  He did allow that much of Russia’s problematic economic crisis is due to internal pressures and a failure by successive governments to modernize the economy.
“After the demise of the Soviet Union, we had many problems of our own for which no one was responsible but ourselves: the economic downfall, the collapse of the welfare system, the separatism, and of course the terror attacks that shook our country. In this respect, we do not have to look for guilty parties abroad.”
When asked about the crisis at the root of much of the tension between Russia and its neighbors to the west, the invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Putin was unapologetic. He blamed the situation in Ukraine on the government in Kiev, which came to power after former president Viktor Yanukovych was driven from office following his refusal to act on a deal to align the country more closely, in an economic sense, with Western Europe.
Putin cast Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and its continuing support of armed rebels in eastern Ukraine as some sort of humanitarian effort.
Related: Donald Trump’s New Role – Apologist for Vladimir Putin
“The nationalists’ coup in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in February 2014 has hugely scared 2.5 million Russian people living on Crimea. So what did we do? We have not gone to war, we have not fired, not a single person was killed. Our soldiers have merely prevented the Ukrainian troops on Crimea from impeding the freedom of expression of the people.”
Of course, thousands of people are dead, and Russian soldiers have done plenty of the shooting and the killing, as multiple independent non-governmental organizations have documented.
Putin described the “annexation” of Crimea by Russia by pointing out that the people of the region voted in favor of it. “This is democracy, the people’s will,” he said. Conveniently, he left out the fact that the vote was conducted in a country under armed occupation by a foreign power with a very strong interest in the referendum’s result.
“Of course one always has to follow international law,” he said, when questioned about Russia’s role in the referendum. “This was also the case in Crimea. According to the Charter of the United Nations, every people has the right to self-determination.”
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Russia has opened a new front in its Syrian air war, striking the south of the country and forcing western-backed rebels into retreat, to the alarm of Jordan and Israel.  The Russian bombardment, which has intensified in recent weeks, has allowed Assad regime forces to launch their first offensive in southern Syria in two years. Western diplomats and Syrian rebel commanders reported that the Russian raids had significantly altered the balance of power
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Putin and NATO  http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/01/world/putin-nato-security-strategy/index.h...  ;  Ukraine Cyber attack:  Did Russia Knock Out Ukraine's Power Grid?  A Russian-linked group may have done exactly that in Ukraine, killing power for 700,000 people on Dec. 23 — and offering a warning of how . . .
US firm blames Russian 'Sandworm' hackers for Ukraine outage  ; Ukraine-EU vote:  Juncker: Dutch Ukraine vote could spark 'continental crisis'  ;  In an interview published on Saturday by the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, Juncker said Russia would "pluck the fruits" of a vote in the Netherlands against deepened ties between the European Union and Ukraine. The April 6 referendum, whose result will . . .
Ukraine and NATO   'Quite a formidable foe' Ukraine facing: Canadian training commander They are not at the front lines of the war in eastern Ukraine, not even close. But the commander of Canada's training mission in the western part of the country feels that his team is having "a profound impact" on the culture and professionalism of the ... (segment 1 of 4)
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 3, Block B:  Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com) (segment 2 of 4)
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 3, Block C:  Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com) (segment 3 of 4)
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 3, Block D:  Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com) (segment 4 of 4)
 
Hour Four
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 4, Block A: Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; in re: Does the US Have a Middle East Strategy Going Forward?   Senior-level sources in nu- merous Middle Eastern governments have privately expressed bewilderment at recent and current US Government strategies and policies toward the region.  But a closer examination of US policies, now almost entirely dictated by the Obama White House, shows no cohesive national goals or policies exist, but rather an ad hoc set of actions and reactions which are largely dictated either by ideological positions, ignorance, whim, or perceived expedience.
This is unique in US history.
In short, the consistent pattern of policies developed over the past century has now been broken up, apart from some of the physical consistencies of legacy military deployments and basing, and by some trade and weapons program commitments. Even there, military deployments have contracted substantially in the past few years, and new US defense systems sales to the region have been lost to suppliers from France, Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Germany, Pakistan, and the like.
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 4, Block B: Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; in re: Nature has often been de- scribed in the verse “Little fish have smaller fish, upon their backs to bite ’em; / Smaller fish have lesser fish; / And so, ad infinitum.” We see in it the inevitable, albeit infinitely variable, hierarchy of the natural world.
It follows, then, that regional strategic dynamics are subordinate to . . .
Thucydides Trap: In a major essay for The Atlantic, Graham Allison argues that the best lens for clarifying the dynamics of the U.S.-China relationship is the Thucydides Trap: the structural stress that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. In reviewing the record of the past 500 years, Allison and the [Hvd] Belfer Center’s Thucydides Project have identified 16 cases that reflect this pattern of hegemonic challenge. In 12 of the cases, the rivalry between the rising and ruling powers produced war. Yet, as Allison points out, the four cases that did not end in bloodshed show that war is not inevitable.   . . . Thucydides wrote: "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."
A massive global population decline is coming up;  it's a great challenge to Pres Xi and his successor to manage population uncertainty and water uncertainty. This will be genuinely difficult; if they fail, they become unstable. If that, what to do to re-create coherence domestically – lash out at Taiwan or Japan?
The nations that preserve their civilizational identity will fare best - Russia, Ethiopia, Israel, Persia. This could obtain in Europe but they've destroyed their civilizational identity. US could preserve itself if it reverts to its Constitution – identity, values, rights, goals, freedoms.  Things that create a sense of rights and identities cause coherence. US has abandoned those in favor of multiculturalism – which splits societies
 caused by, greater global trends, even though we, as humans, tend to focus on, and react to, the issues which we feel threaten or benefit us. Of course, the strength of the trends determines some of the outcomes: strong local trends may expand to resist or overwhelm weak global or trans-regional trends. But, in essence, greater is greater. And, as the Cold War saying about “quality versus quantity” went: quantity eventually has its own quality.
So where are we today? What are the essential trends, visible now, which determine long-term outcomes?
Periods of transition between “rising powers” and “declining powers” have been described in terms of the so-called Thucydides Trap, when fear within a static or declining power (historically, Athens) of a rising power (historically, Sparta) makes war seemingly inevitable. The phenomenon today applies not only to the China (PRC)-US dynamic — as has been widely remarked — but to the Middle Eastern imbalance, the “north-south” imbalance, and so on.
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 4, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Static fire test of next Falcon 9 successful The competition heats up: In its routine preparations for its January 17th launch, SpaceX has successfully conducted a static fire launch test of the Falcon 9. The test was longer than usual, 7 seconds, because of the time that has elapsed since the first stage’s last test firing, a delay caused by the launch failure earlier this year.
Tuesday  12 January 2016   / Hour 4, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Philae officially dead. After another attempt to contact Rosetta’s lander Philae ended with no response, engineers now consider the spacecraft dead “We did not hear anything,” says lander manager Stephan Ulamec. In the best-case scenario, Philae may have received the command and moved, but be unable to respond due to a damaged transmitter. It is more likely that the signal was not received. The team will try a few more commands, but it looks like Philae has officially gone. “We have to face reality, and chances get less and less every day as we are getting farther and farther away from the sun,” says Ulamec. “At some point we have to accept we will not get signals from Philae anymore.”