Admiral James Stavridis
Subject: War in the Pacific
Bio: Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and the former Dean of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Reading: The Restless Wave is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history.
Today’s topic is War in the Pacific.
Our speaker is Admiral James Stavridis who is the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and the former Dean of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Admiral Stavridis is the author of 14 books and his most recent is a work of fiction called The Restless Wave which is a novel set during World War 2.
In today’s podcast, I want to learn about the use of fiction to better understand the life and trials of a young officer in the armed forces. I also want to find out about how technological disruption can change how the military operates.
Leadership is critical in war, and I want to find out if you need to change the officer corps during wartime.
Larry Bernstein:
Admiral, tell us about your new book The Restless Wave.
Admiral James Stavridis:
The book is historical fiction. It is set in the late 30s and early 40s and centers on the Pacific War. The action begins in the Naval Academy in Annapolis with a group of midshipmen who graduate early in 1941 and are thrust into the inferno of war. Two of them are close friends, Scott Bradley James a Navy officer, and Sean Kelly, a Marine officer. They end up competing for the love of a beautiful young Hawaiian woman in a love triangle. Pearl Harbor happens, they both go to war, and the events of the book carry you forward to about 1944.
It is a book about three things. Number one, it is about the human impact of war. Number two, it is cautionary tale of a great power war in the Pacific. If the US and China ended up in a war, we do not have to imagine how terrible it is. We have already had a great power of war in the Pacific 80 years ago in World War 2 between Imperial Japan and the United States. Third, it is a novel about new technology sweeping a battlefield early in the war that has relevance to what is happening in Ukraine today. The little Easter egg inside the book that you must look for is that it is loosely based on Dante's Inferno. So that is the story of The Restless Wave. It has been out just over a month and sold more than 20,000 copies and its going strong into the holiday season.
Larry Bernstein:
I just read Craig Symonds biography of Nimitz, and his book on the Battle of Midway. In those books, he focuses on the leadership, big war strategy, the luck of battle, but not on junior officers. And that is what your book does. Tell us why we should focus on junior officers.
Admiral James Stavridis:
Number one, because those junior officers go on to be senior officers: Nimitz, Halsey, King, and MacArthur. It is valuable and interesting to understand how the events of your twenties end up creating the person you are in command in your fifties, 30 plus years later. Secondly, you ought to be interested because all literature in the end is about the human condition. It is about love, anger, betrayal, and the consummation of an affair. It is about the failures and the flaws that we each experience.
I love Craig Symonds’ books. They are terrific, but by moving to the venue of fiction and turning the filter toward those in their twenties. I would invite all the listeners to recall yourself as a 24-year-old, did you make a few mistakes?
I love writing fiction. This is my 14th book but my third novel. I love fiction because you can get out of the straight jacket of nonfiction where Professor Symonds is required to footnote everything and to be precise about every little detail. I can move things around, put characters in unlikely places, and change details. The book's historically accurate, but part of the fun is splashing some paint around on the big canvas of the book. That is what The Restless Wave does.
Larry Bernstein:
Your novel starts with the protagonist at Annapolis involved in a cheating scandal. It is not with great pride in how he performs. I wonder how you think that character flaw proceeds through the book.
Admiral James Stavridis:
You are touching on perhaps the most important aspect of the book. It would have been easy to write a Horatio Hornblower like character from the C.S. Forester series who always made the right decision and was brilliant and always knew where he was going in battle. That is not my protagonist. Scott Bradley James has strengths, he is empathetic, physically very fit, smart as hell, and willing to take risks. There is a lot to like about Scott Bradley James. He is also flawed as he is constantly striving and ambitious to a fault.
He is willing to betray friends for benefit, and you alluded to this that he will shade the edge of morality at times. And early in the book, he becomes embroiled in a cheating scandal at the Naval Academy, which has a simple honor code. Midshipman will not lie, cheat, or steal. Anybody caught doing that is ejected from the Naval Academy. What Scott Bradley James encounters a cheating scandal. A vast majority of the brigade had some advanced knowledge of the exam. He faces a moral quandary of whether to turn himself in or not. And he decides ultimately not to do so. It is a morally flawed choice, and it stays with him.
We make mistakes in our twenties, and we remember it and that can become a moral compass later in life that allows us hopefully to steer True North the next time we are faced with a moral dilemma as Scott was in The Restless Wave.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the interesting aspects of that cheating scandal is that we were on the cusp of a war, and they cannot throw out half of the Annapolis class over a cheating incident. How should universities deal with a scandal of this sort?
Admiral James Stavridis:
You follow the facts without fear or favor. The Class of 1941 facing down the guns of war is a scenario where the academy could well have made a very pragmatic decision, but you must wait out the entire investigation.
There are firms that will do this accountability review or find a highly respected internal candidate who can complete the investigation. Step one is what happened? How many people are involved? Find out what happened and then make a pragmatic decision. In this case in a war, the academy decided to let most of those midshipmen go forward, which was probably the right decision.
Larry Bernstein:
The process was slow and stressful, and one of the kids ended up committing suicide. Mental health issues where you put stress on young people who are incapable of withstanding it shows up in the film Full Metal Jacket, for example. How should the armed forces think about mental health problems as it relates to high stakes events like the decision of whether to expel a student at Annapolis?
Admiral James Stavridis:
There's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that suicide rates in the military remain stubbornly high. They began to rise above the level of the general population about 20 years ago at the start of the Forever Wars: Iraq, Afghanistan. Before that suicide in the military was well below the civilian level. Now it is above it significantly, and to some degree these wars have had that impact.
The good news, there is a much higher level of appreciation of the challenges of mental illness, and you see it, for example, in sports, think of Simone Biles, the great gymnast who walked away from an Olympic gold medal and said, my head is not in the right place and spent four years rebuilding her mental health and came storming back to win the gold medal.
There is a book out called Bipolar General by a general officer with a fine combat record who experienced bipolarity mental health issues, how we dealt with it, and in days gone by, it would have been a different outcome. Today, the military takes this very seriously. However, the suicide rate remains stubbornly high in the US military, so we have work to do.
Larry Bernstein:
Education plays an important role in the novel. It starts with the protagonist at Annapolis and then ends with him teaching a continuing education course about what he learned in the Pacific War.
Tell us about naval education, why continuing education is important. There is a meeting where Scott meets with Nimitz, and Nimitz recognizes the importance of continuing education to pull people out of the battle to learn new techniques. Tell us about the Navy, its education and continuing evolution.
Admiral James Stavridis:
The Navy and all the armed services have had historically robust pipelines for educating people in the basics: how to drive a ship, how to aim a gun, how to chip rust off the deck, how to anchor the ship properly so that it does not go drifting away if a storm comes up. We have been particularly good at that kind of education. Then as navies have become more technological, we layered on top of that robust technology schools that look at sonar an acoustic analysis in the oceans.
This is the same with our radars that look into the sky and with our big guns and how they operate. There is a technology piece that the Navy's gotten quite good at taking young people in their twenties and thirties and teaching them how to maintain the catapults on aircraft carriers. So, the technology piece is good.
Where we have failed is on the tactical piece, making sure that our young officers and sailors at sea are absorbing the changes that are happening on a battlefield and capable of flowing them back into the system. I would give us an A on the basics of seamanship navigation. an A on maintenance and technology, a D on tactics, war fighting strategy, knowledge of the enemy. That is a line I tried to draw in the book is that the protagonist in The Restless Wave, Scott Bradley James becomes seized with this idea of fusing tactics, technology, and information into what's called today a combat information center, CIC.
In the novel Scott with sufficient top-cover. It's not just a young lieutenant spouting this off, but with sufficient top-cover convinces the Admiral and Command of the Fleet Chester Nimitz to create a schoolhouse where those who are headed to battle can practice it. The continuing education we see Scott assigned to destroyers at sea to help them understand how to use this new technology. A little bit of that happened in World War 2, not enough, and we need to get better at it today, learning the lessons of the Black Sea and the War in Ukraine for our fleet as we go forward.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a challenge when things radically change because of technology. It used to be that the captain of the ship is on the bridge making decisions. But as technology changed you needed to be next to those professionals who are giving you information in real-time to make decisions. And that is what Scott was harping on in the novel.
Tell us about how shifting technology requires adaptation and how command and control works in a naval battle.
Admiral James Stavridis:
For millennia, the captain of the ship was up on the bridge because that is where you could see everything that was unfolding in front of you. Going back a thousand years, you do not have radars and sonars. Everything is about what you see around you. What courses that enemy ship is on and how many cannons does it have, are they going to achieve the weather gauge and get above you and be able to maneuver in a way that allows them to cross your T and rake your ship. So, captains have always been on the bridges.
In World War II is when we see the ability of technology to provide a view around you that goes out in those days, tens of miles on radar pushing maybe toward a hundred miles. Today those radars go out 350 miles. Sonar, very crude, could pick up in World War 2, maybe a thousand yards around your ship. Today those sonars in the long acoustic tails of sensors on the back of our destroyers can see dozens of miles under the ocean to find submarines. I have personally tracked submarines a hundred miles away from one of my destroyers.
Being on the bridge with your puny eyesight that can see eight miles off the bridge and cannot see in the water at all is a lot less relevant. The captain needs to be down in that combat center where all that information and data is coming together. How far away are those incoming fighters? Where are our fighters that are going to oppose them? How do we get our fighters in front of their fighters? How far away is that submarine? Did the submarine just open its doors to launch a torpedo at me?
You are not going to hear any of that up on the bridge. You need to be down in that combat information center is what we call it today, the CIC. It has become the bedrock that the captain is down below. And up on the bridge, you put the second in command, the executive officer more as a safety observer to separate the captain and the XO in case the captain gets killed. Your second in command is not in the same place with him or her. Now you have separation, you have a backup to the captain. For all those reasons, it is now standard procedure, but back in the days of the novel, The Restless Wave, it certainly was not. You have to make that leap of faith to change the way you do things and that's a central theme in the work.
Larry Bernstein:
You were Dean at the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and you recently took a course on fiction writing. Tell us about lifelong learning and how to encourage that.
Admiral James Stavridis:
As a young boy, I lived in Athens, Greece in the late 1960s when there was no television. So, I became a reader. Every week I would go to the English library and get a stack of books, bring them home, read, read, and read that continued through my life.
Good leaders are great readers. Every book it is a way to step into another set of events. I can pick up a novel like The Restless Wave and I could say, I wonder if I would make those same flawed decisions about relationships, about a cheating scandal, about getting into fights. Would I make those? I am not sure that is how I want to be.
Lifelong learning has two big components. One is that bibliography you assign yourself, the books you choose. And then secondly, there are amazing opportunities today available online to take courses from educational institutions. The coursework where you are exposed to a professor, a mentor is immense, and I continue to take strong advantage of that in my sixties as I am today, and I anticipate I always will.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned a weakness at Annapolis relates to tactics. What is interesting about studying World War 2 is that the naval lanes that become important in World War II will probably be the same in a fighting war between the US and China.
Geography is what it is. It is not like it can change. It determines how naval battles will be fought. Technology can change. The relative role of carriers will change, but those straits are not moving. Tell us about how geography plays a central role in tactics and the relevant importance of naval history.
Admiral James Stavridis:
A wonderful book along these lines is by my friend Robert Kaplan. It is called The Revenge of Geography, and it makes these points, and it is not just at sea where there are sea lanes of communication and maritime choke points. It is also on land. The placement of the Ural Mountains in Central Asia has again and again been an organizing feature of what happens on the plains of Europe as Mongol hoards come across them.
70% of the world surface is ocean, and as you correctly point out, there are major sea lanes of communication, and they have small choke points. Let us look at a couple of those. One is the Strait of Malacca, the point between the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Singapore sits atop it but all commerce going back and forth between the East Coast of Africa, India, all of Asia, a lot of Europe through the Red Sea and back to the Pacific must go through that critical Strait of Malacca.
Strait of Hormuz is the choke point between the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Its principal importance is because 40% of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Who guards that? Iran. Iran sits right on top of it, a malevolent rogue nation. Watch that one.
The Suez Canal is an important choke point as is the Red Sea, a very narrow finger of water that flows north and south below the Suez Canal. This is important because it connects Western Europe with the Indian Ocean and Asia. Who controls that? Unfortunately, a group called the Houthi Rebels of Yemen are effectively cutting that off by attacking commercial shipping. I think you will see the West react more strongly against them.
Those who know their 19th century history will remember the Barbery Pirates of North Africa attempted to control the Strait of Gibraltar which separates the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. These are so important that the global shipping world will fight hard for assistance from global militaries to keep these open.
Two others worth mentioning, the Taiwan Strait in between the Island of Taiwan and China mainland itself guards the northern approach to the vast South China Sea. China believes it controls that. Taiwan believes it controls that, and the US constantly drives our warships in and out of it to point out that we see it as open sea lanes.
Finally, the Panama Canal is vitally important. Good news there no malevolent actors here in the Americas. That one is the safest of those choke points. They are all important. They all have a role to play. Watch the ones I mentioned for military activity to keep them open.
Larry Bernstein:
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain was the primary naval power in the world, and those choke points were held by the British at Gibraltar, Oman, and Singapore. England is no longer the major naval power. We are and therefore we need to be thinking about those choke points.
Admiral James Stavridis:
The answer to this is allies. We need to structure our alliances globally. There are different aspects of why we have alliances to include economic, diplomatic, cultural, historical, but certainly the idea of freedom of the high seas. The ability to navigate around the world, to keep the global sea lanes of communication as Alfred Thayer Mahan would have called them to keep them open. To do that by ourselves the way the Royal Navy did is a task that is not beyond our capacity, but it is beyond our common sense.
We could build a thousand ship Navy. Our Navy today has roughly 300 ships. We could build a thousand ship Navy and declare ourselves the masters of the high seas and challenge everybody to take us on. I do not think that is smart.
What we ought to do is use our alliances starting with NATO, which has very capable naval vessels. US Navy about 300 ships. The Europeans have 180 very capable ships including aircraft carriers, nuclear powered submarines, diesel submarines, strike cruisers, strike destroyers, air defense, and mines sweepers.
Over in the Pacific, we do not have a formal alliance like we do with NATO, but the Japanese, the South Korean, Australian, Singaporean, even the small New Zealand Navy, when you put it all together, it is probably 80 very capable ships, not quite as big or strong as the Europeans, but you start adding up what I'll call the Global Maritime Coalition.
That is the West, and we are more than a match for the combined forces of Russia and China, which are the threat out there.
Here is what I worry about. I worry about China's ambition and the rapid rise of their fleet. We have about 300 ships in our Navy. China has 330. They are building roughly twice as many every year as we are. We have nuclear powered carriers. They have nothing like that. We have deep experience operating this fleet globally.
If you ask me as an admiral, which fleet do I want to command for a game of battleship, I am still going to take the US fleet. In five years, if the building rates continue where they are, it is a wash. In 10 years, my hand is in the air to play the Chinese Navy.
We need to increase our naval construction, but we also need to energize this global maritime coalition of the navies of the democracies and push them to build more. The French, the British, the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans, the Dutch, the Japanese, the South Koreans, they all have indigenous capable naval construction yards that could be contributing to this global maritime coalition. Bottom line doing it all ourselves is not beyond our capacity. It is beyond our common sense. Therefore, we should leverage our alliances.
Larry Bernstein:
You referenced in the novel a flaw in torpedoes. The first generation in World War 2 if you fired a torpedo and it hit the opposing vessel it did not blow up. The captains complained but the guys back home said, you must be doing something wrong out there in the field. It is the use of technology in the battlefield and the learning feedback loop. This took a long time for us to get these torpedoes to explode. Tell us about that.
Admiral James Stavridis:
It is two parts. One is the actual detonators, the second part is the torpedoes themselves, which were designed to run straight, and all the calculations that a submarine captain was making at his periscope, adjusting the dials, and looking at the speed of advance of the enemy ship knowing that the precise amount of time that opposing cruiser would then end up right in front of the submarine. We had stopwatches and devices that would tell us how to do this complicated task, but then unfortunately, those solutions were ruined when the torpedoes would just drift off to the right or go too deep and go underneath. It is the detonators and the running path of the torpedoes.
Both those things were flawed in the early days of the war, and nine out of 10 times these torpedoes would fail one way or the other. It was not that the skippers were doing the wrong thing. It gets back to this idea of lifelong learning. If you are open-minded and curious and willing to continue to learn, when those reports start coming in that you are open to them. Too many submarine encounters early on were failures of this technology. War has a way of clearing those decks.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Fleet Admiral Ernest King, and the previous Chief of the Navy, Admiral William D. Leahy correctly decided that the admiral we went to war with is not the admiral we want to fight with. They fired the Commander of the Pacific Fleet Husband Kimmel. Admiral Kimmel was right out of central casting: six two, beautiful silver-gray hair, trim, wonderful genial, fabulous guy at the weekly officers’ club parties. He was not the admiral you want to go to war with. And they cleared him out. They brought in Chester Nimitz. As they say, the rest is history.
That also happened with the technologies that maybe you would have limped along with in peace time, and we can fix that later. Suddenly, we are in a war, and we are going to figure this out now!
We did get those torpedoes fixed. 18 months into the war before our skippers had reliable torpedoes that were going to run straight and detonate when they hit. That is way too long.
Larry Bernstein:
Life experience is critical. You mentioned the size and scale of the Chinese Navy, but I am not sure they have ever experienced battle.
We get hit in the nose all the time and we readjust. We can put in the right officers. How important has continuous battle been for today's Navy?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Imagine a room full of military admirals if they are Chinese, I say, all of you who have been in combat, raise your hand. Not one hand will go up. China has not been in a real war since the 1950s Korean War. Had a little dust up with Vietnam in the seventies, some border skirmishes with India.
Now you are in a room with 30 American admirals and generals, and you say, how many of you have had combat experience? Every hand in the room will go up, every single one.
That is not to our credit. China is probably doing it right building this huge economy, lifting a billion people out of poverty, dominating Asia, and they have done it without getting in a war.
For better or for worse, we have seen war.
Larry Bernstein:
Critical in this process is weeding out.
Admiral James Stavridis:
It is totally critical. We got rid of those who were not capable. That is an especially important aspect of our ability to fight.
That is why Xi is very hesitant about attacking Taiwan. He has no idea whether his military can conquer that island or not. Xi is a smart, strategic, long-term thinker. He is watching his little brother Vladimir Putin flailing in Ukraine. If that had been the US military, we would have swept across Ukraine in 10 days. Two and a half years later, Putin has a million dead, wounded, and left the country to avoid the draft. That is a mission failure on the part of the Russia military.
They are four times the size of Ukraine. Their armed forces were 10 times the size of the Ukrainians, yet they have been fought to a standstill by the Ukrainians with help from us. As Xi watches that, he thinks, I wonder how bad my generals and admirals are, and he just does not know.
In combat, you sweep away that interwar ineffective leadership clique, and you find out who the war fighters are. In the Pacific, we ended up with Bill Halsey, Ray Spruance, Chester Nimitz, maybe the greatest admiral in history. We found the right admirals to prosecute that war, and we took apart the Japanese imperial forces, and they were damn good because of our leadership, our experience, industrial base, and sheer scale of America.
One of the lessons from the book, and you asked this question a very perceptive one earlier about why is it important to focus on these junior officers? Because they are the ones who become the senior admirals. And as we follow the exploits of the character in The Restless Wave, and there will be five novels in this series, it'll follow on through the Korean War, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. Experience matters and those young junior officers are the senior officers of 20 and 30 years from now. It is important to tell their story.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast worth a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about?
Admiral James Stavridis:
Three things I am very optimistic about. One is the role of India. They are a vibrant democracy. 900 million people voted in the last Indian election. It is a continental sized power, sits astride the Indian Ocean, and the degree to which we pull India to stand against these authoritarian states.
Secondly, technology is deeply optimistic. As I look at the broad sweep of technology, everything from fusion reaction that provides unlimited energy, batteries that can store massive amounts, biotechnology and the changes in lifespan and productivity that comes with it.
Third I am optimistic about women as they come into the workplace, not just here in America, but in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, all those feminine sensibilities their work ethic and productivity.
Toward the end of this century, I see India as a positive force, technology will have changed us in positive ways, and women will be in important positions. Martin Luther King used to say the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice that gives me hope.
Larry Bernstein:
Thank you, Admiral.
Admiral James Stavridis:
What a pleasure.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Admiral Stavridis for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was Trump’s Foreign Policy. Our speaker was Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton. We heard from John about what he expects the next administration’s foreign policy will be and why Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before Trump even takes the oath of office.
I would like to make a plug for next week’s podcast with Craig Symonds who is a Professor at Annapolis in Naval History. We will be discussing his new biography of Chester Nimitz who was the Commander of the Pacific Fleet during World War 2. You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Trump’s Foreign Policy, here.
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