WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist

**Jordan Schneider** (0:00)
War Talk, August 28th. We are back from our August hiatus. No wars ended, but no new ones started, except for a trade war with Canada, which we're going to write down to zero. This is War Talk. We have standards, people. We're going to kick it off today with the crisis in the American naval readiness and then turn to, I don't know, cyber war, Chinese rocket force tip hotline, maybe a little Shashank reflections on his first month living full time in America. Gods and Generals takes.
We're going to have some fun. We want to start with the death of the Navy.

**Bryan Clark** (0:46)
Yeah, that's a great idea. We can toast the end of America's Navy.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:53)
It was good. It was good while we had it.

**Bryan Clark** (0:56)
Yeah. Everybody loved it.
Lots of great opportunities for Liberty Port, see the world. Maybe now the Navy just is a quasi-tourist avocation. You join the Navy to see the world because that's all you're going to get to do is just drive around and do port calls as opposed to actually doing any fighting. Because you don't have any missiles or anything, so you just drive around and show the flag.

**Justin McIntosh** (1:23)
Well, and we're going to make sure that the new aircraft carriers can't launch any of the CCAs or other crafts.

**Bryan Clark** (1:30)
Yeah, exactly. I love the steampunk vibe that it's going to create as we're going to go back to the future and make the Navy great again.

**Justin McIntosh** (1:42)
The best will be when we have ships of the line.

**Bryan Clark** (1:45)
That's right. Yeah, I think we go to all steam, basically back to oilers and steam and lots of moving parts and valves.
I mean, that's the Navy I joined way back in the day. I'd love to see that return. All this electric stuff is really...

**Jordan Schneider** (2:01)
Yeah, Bryan, quiet is not cool, okay?

**Bryan Clark** (2:04)
Yeah, that's right.

**Jordan Schneider** (2:05)
Discoverability, you want people to see how badass you are if you're not discovered.

**Bryan Clark** (2:12)
Exactly. The ship drives by and you can't hear it. Did it really go by?

**Tony Stark** (2:16)
Yeah, run silent, run deep for losers.

**Bryan Clark** (2:19)
Exactly.

**Jordan Schneider** (2:22)
Why is American naval hegemony over, Bryan?

**Bryan Clark** (2:25)
Well, we basically run the Navy into the ground. So over the last three years, between the Houthis and the Iranians and then Israel and the Iranians and us and the Iranians, we've burned the Navy out. We've taken the entire fleet that would normally be deployed around the world. We've concentrated in the Middle East. We've extended the deployments of almost every ship that we've put out to sea over the last three years.
Now we're at a point where stuff is breaking, people are breaking, and we're going to have to have a big reset. So there's going to be years now for the next few where we're not going to have more than maybe one carrier deployed at any one time and maybe the app that destroyers that we would normally have deployed. So we've taken our small Navy. We've worked it, ran it into the ground, and now it's going to be even smaller because everything's going to have to go in for maintenance. So despite the shipbuilding bonanza that we're currently experiencing, in the near term at least, the Navy is going to be taking a knee.

**Jordan Schneider** (3:27)
Go one level down, like what breaks? Why does it take so long? Like why do human beings need sleep and time with their children?
They didn't sign up for that, right?

**Justin McIntosh** (3:41)
That's right. Exactly. If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one. That's a very famous phrase in all forms of the military.

**Bryan Clark** (3:48)
Did she arrive in your sea bag? No. Okay. Well, then she's not part of your issue. So it's on your own.
So what's happening, so just looking at the ships that are out there now, what's happening is mechanical systems break. You've got these nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. They still use steam, at least in the engine room. And there's lots of moving parts there that break and get worn out. The destroyers that are driving around, for example, we had a destroyer get stuck in the South China Sea for several days with no electricity because its generators failed. So these moving parts break because they're machines. And if you don't do the maintenance on them that's required because you're out at sea, they're more likely to break. So we have these ships that are suffering mechanical breakdowns in most cases. And those breakdowns either require the ship to go back into port or you sort of limp along while you're at sea until you can eventually get back into a shipyard. And then the people, obviously they're being run down because flight ops on a carrier, for example, normally you do basically one shift of flight operations a day.