Strategic signals

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 5th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up first, strategy below the surface.

Last week, President Trump reacted strongly to online jabs from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, threatening to move two nuclear submarines.

Medvedev is a key figure in Russia’s security council, and has recently mocked Trump with posts about Russia’s nuclear power. Here’s the president outside the White House:

TRUMP: He was talking about nuclear. When you talk about nuclear, we have to be prepared. And we're totally prepared.

EICHER: This comes as the U.S. increases pressure on Russia to agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine, or face new sanctions later this week.

Joining us now is Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander James Drennan. He served four years as a strategic adviser to U.S. Central Command , ending his service last year.

REICHARD: Good morning, sir.

JAMES DRENNAN: Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me, Mary.

REICHARD: I’m glad you’re here. Commander Drennan, why do you think President Trump responded to the former Russian president’s comments by promising to move nuclear submarines? Why submarines as opposed to say destroyers or aircraft carriers?

DRENNAN: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one of the inherent advantages of a submarine is that you never know quite where they are, and so by doing that, there's some strategic ambiguity, which I think is something that President Trump does very well. There's a couple pieces to it. I think choosing submarines allows him some flexibility. In terms of, it's not visible, so he can't really be fact checked. Now I'm not, of course, I'm not saying that he's bluffing, but in terms of people would, might be watching the progress of destroyers or cruisers or an aircraft carrier versus you don't know exactly where submarines are, and that's by design. Also, the fact that he even said it in the first place is noteworthy, because these kinds of movements are happening all the time. I think that's something as a key point is that naval movements are sort of always happening, and they are being shifted from one region to another. They're just happening behind the scenes or under the surface, if you will. So it's important, I think, to note that we're moving the submarines, but also that he announced that we're moving the submarines. It adds a little bit of extra, extra element of deterrence to put it that way.

REICHARD: Well, we see the political aspects of calling Russia’s bluff on willingness to use nuclear weapons if things in Ukraine go south. But how could moving these subs help the U.S. be more prepared, as President Trump says?

DRENNAN: Right, that's a good question. Anytime you have four deployed naval forces, it allows you some flexibility in your in terms of your operations. If you have operations in, for example, in the Middle East, which is sort of my area of expertise, you always, even if you have operations on land or in the air, you always want to have naval forces nearby in case of contingencies. The fact that these are nuclear submarines, it's important to distinguish between a ballistic missile submarine and a nuclear powered submarine. All of the US Navy submarines are nuclear powered. Only a fraction are ballistic missile submarines. He didn't specify. And I also think that was probably by design, with no need to and why would you so leave it to the Russians to sort of determine what he's really talking about, but it's possible, again, I'm not currently in the know, but it's possible that he's referring to fast attack nuclear powered submarines which do not carry nuclear missiles. Or he could be referring to ballistic missile submarines, which I think would be even more remarkable, because those are very closely guarded state secrets in terms of the location of those submarines.

REICHARD: Alright, from submarines to American ships, then. President Trump has called attention to building American ships. Back in March, he visited a Wisconsin shipyard where a new generation of Navy frigates are years behind schedule and way over budget, by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. has fallen behind allies and adversaries in building warships.

Commander, talk about some of the challenges facing the U.S. Navy in building and maintaining the American fleet?

DRENNAN: It’s a problem that's decades in the making, and one of the big problems that we have generation or more of a workforce that it is not ready to jump in and start building more ships, both merchant and naval. Of course, we've always, we've always built our own warships, but we haven't really been building our own merchant ships. And so when you talk about ship building, and some of the attention that he's called to it, which is a good thing, and there's the executive order that he put out sort of trying to revitalize our maritime industry. A big part of that is our merchant ship building and in our merchant fleet, and very, very little U.S. goods sail on U.S. flagged merchants. We have, over decades, sort of offloaded that outsourced it to other countries in terms of ships built in other countries, ships owned and operated by companies in other countries, and ships flagged in other countries, and a lot of that is in China, in terms of the building and the operating of the companies. And so I think President Trump and even the administration before him have started to come to realize that we've maybe put a little bit too much reliance, in terms of our maritime industry, on a potential competitor or adversary in China, under global power, for sure, and I'll just call out real quickly, the LCS, the littoral combat ship program is. Not the reason, but I would say it's one of several reasons, if you look back on where we had maybe as a Navy, got off track in terms of building a ship that really never panned out for us, and I think that contributed to some lost time and atrophy in our ability to build ships.

REICHARD: Alright, let’s talk more about China then. What do we know about China’s navy development, and how it compares to the U.S.?

DRENNAN: By the numbers, I think they have more ships in their navy than we do, but that doesn't mean that they're more powerful or more capable Navy, but it is certainly something that a lot of naval experts have been sounding the alarm bells in at least the past decade, that they are building ships at a break neck rate. They used to not be an aircraft carrier Navy, and now they are, you know, they have, they have really caught up to us in terms of capability, or at least gotten closer to us. I don't want to sit here and proclaim that they are as capable as as we are in terms of a navy, but that by the numbers, they have a lot of ships. They are moving fast. I think, as a nation, they understand the importance of the maritime and in terms of their national power, because you look at things just outside of their true Navy, there's things like the maritime militia, which is sort of a pseudo military fishing civilian fleet that does a lot of reconnaissance and other pseudo military activities in the South China Sea just occupying the territorial waters of neighboring nations. You've got the distant water fishing fleet, which is 1000s of large offshore fishing vessels that go all over the world, and they fish inside of the economic exclusion zones of countries all around the world. And I think that country it's not just naval power, it's maritime power for them, and they understand how important the sea is for their national power. So they they're looking at it from a holistic perspective, and they're moving fast.

REICHARD: James Drennan is a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy. Commander, thanks so much!

DRENNAN: Thank you.

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