Midrats

This Sunday, join our guests Vice Admiral Bill Moran, USN, Navy Chief of Naval Personnel, and Commander Guy Snodgrass, USN, Prospective Executive Officer of Strike Fighter Squadron ONE NINE FIVE, in a discussion of the challenges in officer retention that is facing our Navy.As over a decade of major combat operations ashore winds down, economic & budgetary stresses grow on defense spending, a strategic re-alignment combined with a generational change are coming together in a perfect storm of challenges to keep the intellectual and leadership capital our Navy needs.What are those challenges? What lessons can be drawn from past retention problems, and what is different this time? What steps can be made in the short term to address this, and what longer term policies may be put in place to mitigate the systemic problems that are being looked at? Are their opportunities to be found inside these challenges?Our guests will be with us for the full hour, and the foundation of our discussion will be CDR Snodgrass's  Navy officer retention study, Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon.

The Chief of Naval Operation's Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) was established in 2012 in order to provide junior leaders with venue to identify and rapidly field emerging technologies that they see needed in the Fleet.Who is in the CRIC, how do they get there, and what are some of the projects they have been working on?Join us this Sunday for the full hour with Commander Ben Salazar, USN, Director of Innovation (N93) with CRIC, along with other members of his team.

With the new defense budget out, new QDR out, the withdraw of maneuver forces from Afghanistan, rising interest in INDO-PAC operations, and a resurgent Russia: after over a decade of COIN and land wars in Southwest and Central Asia - what is the status of the United States Marine Corps? Materially, intellectually, and culturally - is the USMC set up to move best towards the expected challenges and missions?Our guest for the full hour will be Dakota L. Wood, Lt Col, USMC (Ret.), Senior Research Fellow, Defense Programs at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy at The Heritage Foundation.Following retirement, Mr. Wood served as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.Most recently, Mr. Wood served as the Strategist for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Special Operations Command.Mr. Wood holds a Bachelor of Science in Oceanography from the U.S. Naval Academy; a Master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the College of Naval Command and Staff, U.S. Naval War College.

In concept, execution, and ability to effectively provide its part of the national defense infrastructure, has a separate Air Force served this nation well, and does it make sense to keep it a separate service.Our guest this week makes the case that the experiment in a separate US Air Force is over, and it has failed. Though we need airpower, we don't need a separate service to provide it.With us for the full hour will be Professor Robert M. Farley, PhD, author of the book being released 11 March, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force.Rob teaches defense and security courses at the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky. He blogs at InformationDissemination and LawyersGunsAndMoney.

Revisiting a show from NOV 2011, They share the hazards, smell the smells; all that is needed so that those at home may understand what their countrymen are doing in the far reaches of the world on their behalf.The best know that to tell a story, you have to be in it. Sometimes, the story catches up with them.Our guest for the full hour will be Kimberly Dozier,  foreign correspondent for CBS News Radio specializing in the Middle East from the disputed territories of Israel to the war in Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.She reported on the war in Iraq from 2003 until she was injured by a car bomb in 2006. She recently returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan as an Intelligence/Counterterrorism correspondent for the Associated Press.She is also the author of Breathing the Fire, the story of her recovery from her injuries in 2006.

What direction do we need to go for our next maritime strategy? Using he recent article, Control of the Seas, as our starting point, our guest for the full hour will be Seth Cropsey, Senior Fellow and director of Hudson Institute's Center for American Seapower.  He served in government at the Defense Department as Assistant to the SECDEF Caspar Weinberger and then as Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan & Bush administrations, where he was responsible for the Navy’s position on efforts to reorganize DoD, development of the maritime strategy, the Navy’s academic institutions, naval special operations, and burden-sharing with NATO allies. In the Bush administration, Cropsey moved to OSD to become acting assistant secretary, and then principal deputy assistant SECDEF for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict.During the period that preceded the collapse of the USSR—from 1982 to 1984—Cropsey directed the editorial policy of the Voice of America on the Solidarity movement in Poland, Soviet treatment of dissidents, and other issues. Returning to public diplomacy in 2002 as director of the US government’s International Broadcasting Bureau, Cropsey supervised the agency as successful efforts were undertaken to increase radio and television broadcasting to the Muslim world.Cropsey’s work in the private sector includes reporting for Fortune magazine & as a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and as director of the Heritage Foundation’s Asia Studies Center from 1991-94.His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Affairs, Commentary magazine, RealClear World, & others.

Nothing like some time snowed in to focus the mind.Join us this Sunday from 5-6pm as we cover the maritime angle from China to shipbuilding to Cyber with a Midrats free for all.Have a topic you wished we would cover? Well, the phone lines are open.

When you send your elected representative to Washington DC, you are not just sending one person. For each Congressman and Senator - there is a cadre of staffers that makes it happen. Bills do not sprout out of the heads of politicians - no - they are carefully crafted, often over years, by the people you see in the background on C-Span. Politicians cannot and do not read source documentation all that much, they are too busy - others do that for them and give them the Executive Summary. Who are these people, how do they work, and how what role do they play in keeping the machinery of government and policy moving? Our guest for the full hour to discuss this, the influence of milblogging upon legislation, how HR 5729 was written partially because of blogger activism, the think tank community and the relationship between the Executive Branch and the Hill and how that prevents some great ideas becoming law. And how the 501(c)(3) status's ban on non-profit's lobbying activities hurts national security decision-making - and more will be Michael Clauser. Mike is an Adjunct Fellow at the National Strategy Information Center. He served as the National Security Legislative Assistant to a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the previous Congress. He was recently identified as a "Next Generation National Security Leader" by the Center for a New American Security and as a "Nuclear Scholar" by the Project on Nuclear Issues at CSIS. Prior to working on the Hill, Mike served in the Presidential Administration of George W. Bush in the Pentagon in both OSD and on SecNav staff. He holds masters degrees from the University of Exeter in England and the Poznan University of Economics in Poland and is a graduate candidate at the U.S. Naval War College. He did his bachelors in philosophy and religion at Penn State and is a native of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

For those who don't care about Football or get all grumpy if they don't get enough of their Midrats, we're heading back to early in our second year and visit our old friend. In the small world of the Navy blogosphere, when you think of Japan, one name should immediately come to mind; Skippy-san of the blog FarEastCynic. Though most know Skippy by his "interesting" perspective on some of the "interesting" parts of life - what he also has is a good feel for the Japanese. Join EagleOne and Sal as they tap into the serious side of the Navy blogosphere's famously infamous Skippy-san to talk about the very Japenese reaction to their earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown national nightmare, and how the Navy and its relationship with the Japanese people is working through this challenge. Staying in the 13XX side of the Navy, but with a slight pivot, for the second half of the hour we will be remembering the funnier side of Naval Aviation with Bob Taylor’s to talk about his new book, "Getting Our Wings — Tales from Naval Aviation Flight School," that looks at flight training in much the same way as his previous book did with Marine Corps boot camp with "A Few Good Memories."

Lost to many whose news sources in the USA consists of the major newspapers and the standard networks, for most of the last dozen+ years, the conflict in Afghanistan has not been a USA-Centric battle; it has been a NATO run operation.When the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force has been an American 4-star, the visuals can be misleading.For most of the last decade, American forces were dominate in only one region of Afghanistan, the east. Other NATO nations from Italy/Spain in the west, Germany in the North, and Commonwealth nations and the Dutch in the south.More important than the actual numbers involved, it was the Rules of Engagement, caveats, and the fickle nature of national politics that drove what effects those forces had on the ground.The good, the bad, and the ugly of modern coalition warfare was all in view for all in Afghanistan, but outside small circles, has yet to be fully discussed.Our guest for the full hour will be Stephen Saideman.Stephen holds the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.  He has written The Ties That Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy and International Conflict and For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War (with R. William Ayres) and NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (with David Auerswald), and other work on nationalism, ethnic conflict, civil war, and civil-military relations.  Prof. Saideman spent 2001-02 on the U.S. Joint Staff working in the Strategic Planning and Policy Directorate as part of a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship.  He writes online at OpenCanada.org, Political Violence at a Glance, Duck of Minerva and his own site (saideman.blogspot.com).  He also tweets too much at @smsaideman.