How Prepared is the United States for War in the Indo-Pacific?

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. I'm joined by Bryan Clark. Bryan is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.
He's an expert on Naval Operations, Electronic Warfare, Autonomous Systems, Military Competition, Wargaming. He's brought that expertise to Hudson. Before that, the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, CSBA has done a lot of work for the Pentagon, DARPA, Secretary of Defense, served as a Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Head of the US Navy in his Commanders Action Group, which is the brain trust that develops strategy, concepts, doctrine, operation. The Asia Chessboard is meant to be a chessboard. It's meant to be big picture strategic questions, but very few people connect the operational to the strategic the way Bryan does. I'm really looking forward to this. Bryan, welcome. Great to have you and looking forward to having you join us in Australia shortly for a while.

**Bryan Clark** (1:15)
Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. I'm really glad to be on the Asia Chessboard. I'm looking forward to seeing you here in a few months.

**Mike Green** (1:20)
Tell us a bit about what got you into Navy, ELINT, electronic warfare, operations. Did you have an interest in the sea when you were a kid or an interest in strategy or both or neither?

**Bryan Clark** (1:32)
Yeah, really neither. I enlisted in the Navy in the 80s, early 80s as part of the Reagan build up because the economy wasn't great and it was an opportunity to do something different.
I enlisted as a 17-year-old right out of high school and then I continued on the Navy and got to go to college to get my degree and became a submariner. I spent 25 years as a submariner and doing mostly operational stuff, both at shore and at sea. Then as I got to my last tour, I got this opportunity to be the CNO's, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander's Action Group Director. That really opened up a different world to me of connecting, like you talked about before, strategy to operations, looking at the bigger picture, thinking about what the Navy might need to do in the future.
And one of the, and this is for Admiral Greenert, John Greenert, when he was the Chief of Naval Operations. And one thing that he and I looked at was the electromagnetic spectrum and how we treated it as a Navy. And it was interesting to us as submariners that we treated it very differently than we treated the acoustic environment as submariners. We think of the acoustic environment as being the environment we live in, right? That's all of your detectability comes via the acoustics and your ability to detect your enemy comes via the acoustics. So it's all about managing acoustic signatures and exploiting the ability to detect things with sound. But you look at the people that most of the folks in the air and surface communities, they tend to treat the electromagnetic spectrum as a tool, like as a thing I use to go and talk to somebody via radio, or I use it to use my radar to go detect something. They didn't think of it as an environment back then at least.
That was, I guess, about 10 years ago. So now 10 years later, we've seen this really kind of re-emergence of electronic warfare as a discipline in militaries and you can see in Ukraine obviously, where it's in a lot of ways become kind of starting point of the battlefield is everything happens in the spectrum first and then secondarily becomes kinetic or doesn't become kinetic, depending on how effective your electronic warfare is. But the electromagnetic spectrum really kind of emerged out of my experience as a submariner and dealing with the acoustic environment. We did a lot of work in the Navy when I was working for Al McGreenert looking at electromagnetic maneuver warfare. How do we think about fighting in the spectrum the same way we fight in the acoustic environment under sea? I think the Navy's made at least the US Navy's made some progress there. You'd see worldwide how the spectrums really come back in as a domain of military operations. Now, if you don't have a good plan for how you're going to manage the spectrum, you're going to find yourself quickly annihilated like you do see in Ukraine where troops were getting killed right away because they failed to manage their spectrum signatures.