The State Of It
David Murrin decodes major historical events to forecast global change in today's world. David is interviewed by Winston Murrin on the current state of the world politically, economically and militarily (while having a few generational debates along the way). The State Of It covers financial markets, geopolitics, the military and global future trends. David has authored three books: Breaking the Code of History, Lions Led by Lions and Now or Never The Global Forecaster UK Strategic Defence Review 2020. He also writes a blog on his website www.davidmurrin.co.uk.
The State Of It
Rulers of the Waves: The Past, Present, and Future of Global Navies
Horatio and David discuss the past, present and possible future of maritime power. David talks about how and why the Britain rose to dominate the waves in the 18th and 19th centuries, the pivotal lessons from that naval strategy, and the subsequent decline of Western naval supremacy.
Horatio also takes the conversation onto the present and future. Discussing the critical maritime power shift, driven by China’s shipbuilding capabilities. Pivoting also towards modern technologies such as quantum tech and drones and how they might impact navies and modern warfare. Thus pressing the west to overcome the sea blindness that we are currently experiencing before it gets too late to regain a foot in global sea power.
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Welcome back to the State of It Podcast where we are recording remotely this time, and I am back here with my dad.
SPEAKER_00:I'm really well, H. Looking forward to our conversation and uh looking at that early morning face of a student who's got out of bed hours earlier than he's used to.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, you've got to do the stuff that's important, I guess. Today we're gonna be talking about the uh the rulers of the waves, the past, the present, and the future. Um, once the British Empire ruled a quarter of the world and its navy ruled the waves, today the oceans are completely contested by new generations of powers. How did we get here and what's next? We're gonna talk about the past, present, and the future of maritime. The first thing is gonna be about the past, about British power. Like what allowed Britain to dominate the seas in the 18th and 19th century?
SPEAKER_00:So basically, the the fundamental reason why Britain became a sea power is it's an island with a very, very long coastline, and I'd say a high ratio of coastline to internal volume. So the majority of the populations, like the Dutch, were close to or connected to the sea. And that involved trading, it involved fishing, and then involved the ability to defend yourselves against marauders. And from that we saw warships develop. The first race galleons appeared with the uh Elizabethan era, which gave Britain the ability to fend off the Spanish Armada with their larger, more clumbersome ships, which were like castles on the sea. And then from there, once we developed these USPs, we started to move around the world. And one of the qualities that was really interesting is sailing around the British Isles is really challenging. The winds, the currents, the coastline, the rocks. It meant that we had to be very, very proficient sailors to use our coastlines effectively. Unlike the Spanish and the Portuguese that could just go off their coastline, pick up currents and go to Latin America. It was a much more complicated endeavor to operate on the sea with Britain's mercantile and military forces. And so I think from that we have this groundwork. And then basically, after the civil war, um a next key step with the English Civil War with Cromwell and the Roundheads versus the Royalists, we basically had the new model navy. And history talks about the new model army, but the new model navy was really the beginning of British maritime power. And what do we do with it? We go out and challenge the hegemon of its time, which was Holland, and we fought a series of wars at sea, which were inconclusive very often, where big long lines of the origins of ships like the Victory, earlier versions of it, fought side by side, broadside to broadside, with undecisive actions in many occasions. And in the end, that war was ended because of William Orange coming over at behest of the Navy, funnily enough, that shipped him across the Atlantic to make sure that the Catholic monarchy was removed and replaced with a Protestant monarchy. And so the relationship between Navy, Protestantism, democracy, and meritocracy was anchored in that moment. And from there the Navy just got stronger. Our mercantile fleet traveled the world, and as it traveled the world, it militarized its trade routes, and ultimately we built a very large battle fleet, which came into being, interestingly enough, post the 1700s, which is when the Sun King of France essentially had the biggest navy and the biggest army when he was fighting the Spanish. And he could have used that navy very differently. But France was the duality between land and sea power. So it didn't really understand how to use sea power, whereas Britain didn't have land power because its population was small, but it had sea power, and it really learned to use that in the Seven Years' War around the 1750s, where Britain beat France, took possessions in India, and in fact it became pretty much the de facto global maritime power then, which was then finally confirmed in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. And why did we do that? How did we move to that state? The next question is having created the economic means to defend our trade routes, we understood how to then use trade and maritime power to take land states. But another element came in, and that was the industrialization of Britain. And we led in that revolution. And in that revolution, Portsmouth Dockyard was the most advanced industrial complex in the world. And that enabled us to build more ships and basically make them bigger and larger than any of our competition, including France. And the net result of that was domination of the seas in the Napoleonic Wars and domination in Trafalgar, and prior to that the Nile. And the net result was we then ruled the oceans. And once we ruled the oceans, we became the first global hegemony. Now it's very interesting because actually Rome was a maritime hegemony across the Mediterranean, and it used the Mediterranean as its main trade route and communication route and a navy to protect it. So it was in fact the first model maritime hegemony in a region. And Britain became the global version of that. And it ruled the oceans, it went through various transitions, it led the transition, or it fought off, in effect, the German transition when it rose and it wanted to build a navy to compete with ours. And once again, we had like the forefront of innovation with the dreadnought. We built that in less than a year in Portsmouth, which is incredible. All big gunship, steam turbines, like revolutionary ship that meant every single investment from that moment had been invalidated. And for a British Empire, that was the two-power rule, the ability to be any two navies at the same time. And we had to start all over again, which is what gave Germany the chance in the dreadnought race from 1906 onwards to try and match our dreadnought dreadnought building, they couldn't match the cruisers that dominated the world's sea lanes. And that ultimately resulted in Britain staying ahead and winning definitively at the Battle of Jutland. And with that affirmation of British naval power, we were able to, in effect, starve Germany into submission and great innovations on the battlefront in 1918, which manifested in Amiens, which led to the winning of the First World War. And that then continued until the beginning of the Second World War. Britain was still viewed as the queen of the seas, although there were rising challenges, which we'll talk about next in the transition.
SPEAKER_01:What lessons can we learn? What lessons can we learn today about the British naval strategy?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's a really good question. So, first of all, we were a maritime culture. And that meant the sea was fundamentally important to the state, and our politicians understood its importance and understood where it was vulnerable and where you had to push back to opposition. And we control choke points like the Channel, for example. So in the Napoleonic Wars, the French couldn't really escape because it was going upwind from Portsmouth, Portsmouth less so, but certainly Plymouth. So the fleets and Alderney were set to go and block at Cherbourg, and our warship sat off breast for two years and didn't come back to the shores to blockade the French. So we understood choke points and we understood like taking hold of our enemy and holding it in place where he couldn't get to sea, its crews couldn't practice, and when they came to sea, there were no match for us. So we understood that. We also very lateralized, and I make this argument that sea power and the sea creates lateral thought processes. And with those lateral thought processes, essentially you end up with an adaptive mindset that's brilliant when it comes to going to sea. And land powers like Russia will never emulate that because they're linear and they're unable to basically respond to the adaptive needs of the sea. So we were naturally more lateral than the other societies, and therefore we were more able to adapt and use our natural genetic pool of lateralization. And I would argue that the maritime version of the Navy, with all its sails of Nelson's era, was the most lateralized naval military construct generationally in history. So that was really important. And then and that also rolled into shipbuilding, which is critical because if you want to be a hedgeman, you need to have dominant shipbuilding capabilities. And for the Nelson's Navy, that came with the Industrial Revolution. They were building blocks and ropes and all sorts of things with steam power. And that gave us power to be the biggest Navy. And that continued all the way through, I would say, to the beginning of the First World War, where we still had an industrial base that compete with Germany. America had a big industrial base that had grown since the civil war, but wasn't really navalizing at that stage. So we were able to hold the German challenge off, and industrialization was key.
SPEAKER_01:And why did the British Navy lose power? As you said, we're going to talk about this now. Um, why did the we did lose power and what can we take from that and apply today so we can regain our power?
SPEAKER_00:It's a great question. So there is a there is a piece I just missed out, which is all dominant hegemons have a weapon system coupled with a series of decisive, unique tactics that gives them domination on the battlefield, whether it's land and sea. So for the Royal Navy, it was these large warships that were brilliantly sailed in tactics that were decisive, like Nelson's line breaking strategy at Trafalgar, or going one side of the line at the Battle of the Nile. The ships themselves actually, in this case, were no different from the French ships, give or take a small mount. It was how they were used and the tactics involved that gave Nelson his dominance. Through the 1900s, it was about scale, and Britain just built more ships than the competitors, and the result of that is essentially they could help they could hold off the competition. But then something happened, and this is a fascinating lesson. When when Germany tried to challenge Britain for uh its arms race prior to the First World War, it started innovating, and it innovated in various ways. It had better steel because they had a chemical industry that was in advance of us, so they made tougher steel. And so for a given inch of armor, you ended up with so much more protection. They had better explosives because they had better chemical industries. So for a smaller caliber gun, you get the same effect from a shell firing as a bigger caliber raw naval gun. But the Royal Navy was still highly innovative. We created submarines like Holland Boat, we were creating the dreadnought. We were the first to use centralized firepower for main weaponry, which meant all of the guns were targeted by one system and landed on a target simultaneously and straddled the shot, which he could then adjust. But we were also quite rigid, and the first rigidity, I think, came in with the German Admiral Speer believed in torpedoes. And Jellico believed in gunpowder. So when you go and look at what happened at the Battle of Um Jutland, the first thing that happened is that it was a trap. The Germans thought they could lure out the main British battle fleet, uh, and the battlecruiser fleet could destroy the battlecruisers and even their odds. And Jellico was drawn into the track by um the Germans, and then Jellicoe reversed course. And if he hadn't had four very modern battlecruisers, which are really like battleships, going as fast as battlecruisers, with the equivalent protection of the battleships of his time, he would have been destroyed because they fired a rearguard action. But he drew the Germans into the main fleet commanded by Jellicoe. And when Jellico saw the fleet, he started to deploy his ships from column to line. And as they came out the mist, they opened fire and the Germans turned in this hail of shot. They did a 180 turn simultaneously, called a battle turn, that they couldn't be replicated in the Royal Navy, so they were dumbfounded what had happened and disappeared into the mist. And then Spear did something really bizarre. He turned around and came back again. And Jellicoe anticipated where, but this time he had his whole battle line aligned. And they came into an absolute, like tumultuous fire, which was so damaging. It's not really truly recorded in the books. It's what put the Germans out of action for the war. And the way they protected themselves was by sending their destroyers out in front firing torpedoes. And Jellicoe had a very simple decision. You either go into the torpedoes where you'll lose some of your ships, you keep broadside on, which you lose one-third of your ships, or you turn tail and you go the other way, and the torpedoes run out of juice in effect and fall harmlessly away. There's a great story of HMS Thunderer with four propellers and the sailors watching this torpedo tracked by the propeller wake, moving up the transom, slowly closing the distance, almost about to hit the thunderer until it ran out of fuel. And he was pillowed for that because he wasn't bold and decisive, but he understood the mathematics. So there was an example where we didn't adapt battle turns, we didn't adapt torpedoes to our battle strategy, and it almost gave the Germans an edge. And that's the beginning of the innovative cycle imploding. We developed the first seaplane carrier, HMS Arc Royal. Oh, and we developed aircraft carriers, but we didn't make them as central as Japan did or America, which had to fight in the Pacific where distance was everything. So we were slower to make aircraft carriers our central weapon system. And we still believe the battleship had relevance, and indeed we sent the Renown and the Rapal and the Prince of Wales down into the Singapore, and it ended up going forward without air power being sunk very quickly because we didn't appreciate that air power dominating battleships. And that's very typical where hegemon has become powerful because of the battleship, holds onto it for too long, and newer systems adopt weapon systems that overwhelm it. And that's the key. We failed with our industrial base, although we built almost as many warships in some ways as the Americans. They had far more double the carriers we did by the end of the war. Our industrial base and shipbuilding was less than the Americans, and they developed technologies that basically dwarfed ours by numbers, not by technology.
SPEAKER_01:And looking into more modern fleets, not just Britain, how has the rest of the West managed to keep fleets if they have? I mean, have they keep kept powerful fleets?
SPEAKER_00:Are we uh Well let's go to the let's go to the it's a great question, but let's go to the bit in between, the Cold War. So the Cold War, the where we've been talking about was Pax Britannia, the peace of Britain run and ruled by the Navy on the oceans. And Pax America, which wasn't quite as peaceful because it went through a Cold War, was basically America's dominance of the oceans. And they used two vehicles to do that. One is bigger and bigger carriers, and more of them than anyone else, and the ability to protect those carriers with escorts, and they developed nuclear submarines, like Britain did, but on a scale that really dominated the oceans. And the nuclear submarine, the SSN, was basically the hunter-killer of the oceans, impossible to find, could go anywhere, threatened everything, could go up into the bastions where the Russians kept their missile submarines, and the Cold Wars fought with these SSNs over war, and the over war was carrier power. And such that up until the end of the Cold War, a president will always, if there's a crisis, say, where's our carrier? Which carrier is going where? And it would appear off the coast of whatever country and be able to dominate them completely. They were incredible power projection processes. But during that period, and especially near the end, American shipbuilding started to wane. And since the Cold War, American shipbuilding has fallen into disrepair compared to where it was. And that's really where we're seeing the big power change, because in the West, we build fewer ships, we're less capable of doing it, America especially. The shipyards hardly function. There are delays. The systems they build are very capable, they're very expensive, they're always overtime and overpriced, which for a nation caught by a debt bubble and basically debt limitations is brutal when you're trying to maintain maritime hegemony. And there's something else too. The system like Britain has become more rigid and less adaptive to the threats. And so this includes Europe that have basically neglected naval power. And the core to that is Britain. Britain, even in the Cold War, it dominated anti-submarine capabilities as it developed them in the Second World War, fighting the convoy war. And essentially, our greatest threat was basically the submarine fleet of the northern Russian nation. Based out of Mamansk on the Kolo Peninsula, their submarines were prolific and dangerous, not just because they could launch torpedoes against ships, but because they increasingly carried cruise missiles that could destroy carrier groups and hit and attack land targets. And British ships like the Type 23 was effectively the most capable anti-submarine platform above the oceans. And below the oceans, the nuclear submarines of America and Britain were the best hunter-killers of Russian submarines. So the combination of the two maintained the Cold War dominance as Russia tried to create an asymmetric challenge against the West. And they did that through submarines. They did not have a naval tradition, but they learned how to use those submarines and in ways that were deeply threatening. And then, of course, we had the post-Cold War period. And that's where everything has really gone wrong. There are three elements to it. America has forgotten it's a sea power. And I don't just mean, you know, what does that mean? It means at its highest levels of leadership and nation, it has failed to recognize that sea power is the basis of its empire because it doesn't recognize it was ever an empire, which it was. And there's neglect that went with that. There's also, and Britain has been the same, by the way, ever since we joined NATO, we lost, we really lost the understanding, and we, you know, we merged the the Admiralty that was the preservation of maritime power for Britain, we merged into the MOD, which was a disaster, where it got suffused with the other services, which actually, although important, didn't have equal strategic importance to the maintenance of maritime control. So for Britain, there was that element. For America, there was becoming increasingly sea-blind. And there was also something else that happened, and that is when China basically was brought into the world trading system in the early 2000s with this incredible belief by the liberals that if we give them a capital economy, they'll become a democracy like us. And by the way, if we invest in them, they have very cheap labor, a lot of manpower, and therefore low inflation. We will subdue the inflation in the West and live in an inflation-free environment by exporting manufacturing to China. And of course, the Chinese wanted that. They seduced the West into doing it. And they did so because they wanted to build the biggest industrial complex in the world. And part of that complex was shipbuilding. And of course, they, like South Korea and to a lesser extent Japan, all the ships are really, you know, predominant shipbuilding capability has now centered in China. And they did, you know, commercial building, they built a mercantile fleet. And notably Britain's maritime power was commensurate with a large mercantile fleet. And so was America's, because they could build a lot post-war. And that's exactly what the Chinese have done, built masses of merchant ships. In the same yards, they create dual construction methods where they can build warships cheaply. So they've started to emulate the designs of American ships, having stolen a lot of their technology, but they can build them at the most staggering rate. And now we're seeing a situation where they're trying multiple designs. And if a design works or doesn't work, they just leave it and build another one because they can build so many ships. They built the first purpose-built dual-tower drone ship, which is very similar to um, looking looks like a smaller version of the Prince of Wales or the Queen Elizabeth. And essentially it's even got an emails, which is an electronic catapult because it's meant to fire smaller drones. There's not a single ship like that in the West. There's rumors that they were trying to convert their conventional diesel electric and air-independent submarines, and they were slicing a compartment apart and putting a small nuclear reactor in so it wouldn't just drive the submarine, it would recharge the battery system so they could remain afloat indefinitely, which meant you could have 64 SSKs, as they're called, converted to longer endurance and go way out into the Third Island training Pacific. A very quick, clever solution. But most of all, they've created other revolutions which have disempowered the key mechanism of American power. They've created weapons of asymmetric challenge that America has been very slow to respond to.
SPEAKER_01:And you're talking about modern technology that China's uh implementing into their fleet. If the West, I mean mainly, you know, America and Britain and NATO and so on, um if we use the same ideas and technology and implemented them into our navy, could we still be competitive? Or is it too late?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we have a scale problem, but let's just look at technology. The first problem we've got is the Chinese have created um access area denial systems that mean like the first system they developed was a DF-26, which is a ballistic missile which used to carry a nuclear weapon, and they created a warhead, a conventional warhead and targeting system that could find a carrier and kill a carrier. Now, one missile isn't going to kill a carrier because it's escorted by GES class and trichondro class um warships that basically carry the um the Geosystem and can fire systems like um the SM3, which is an exothermic kill vehicle, as in killing a ballistic missile in the outer atmosphere, or the SM-6, which is a terminal intercept missile out to about 250 miles. And there are certain numbers of saturation. So it becomes a numbers game. And basically, if you fired a carrier, normally had three escort ships that could deal with 28 incoming missiles at once. So you fired more than 14 at once, rather, more than 50 missiles, two of them would hit the carrier. That was the mathematics of it. And in 2018, when it came out, I started writing this is the Chinese system of asymmetry challenge that was similar to the aircraft carrier deposing battleship power for the British Empire. And now this system is basically deposing American carrier power by it's stopping them from operating inside what's called the Third Island chain or the second and not even getting close to China because the combat range of their aircraft is about 600 miles. So anything further than 600 miles, they can't attack it. And when they get close, they get hit by these missiles. That was the beginning of the erosion of American maritime power in the Western Pacific. And it's only accelerated with more of those missiles and DF-17s, which have hypersonic glide vehicles, which go so fast and skip around that we have no defense against them. So they pushed, in effect, America metaphorically away from the Western Pacific into a position when it can't really support Taiwan without great loss, and the whole of the Western Pacific is up for grabs. That's a massive shift. And there's another element too, which is the concept of transparent oceans, which is a military change taking place where the sensor density in the ocean is potentially becoming so great that submarines that were once silent and could not be detected are detected, especially in choke points in the islands as they come through them or even in the deep oceans as the sensor net increases. So just as we went into the First and Second World War with weapon systems that were dominant at the beginning and then became initially irrelevant at the end, some of these systems like carriers and submarines are going to find themselves very challenged in the war ahead. And China is doing as much as it can to unpick those Western dominances. How do we change that? That's your question. Well, I think all warfare is between offense and defense. And so right now, Chinese offense destroys American defense. But if we could get high-powered lasers onto carriers to have nuclear reactors with unlimited power and you know, unlimited magazine capability, that could be one solution. And it's certainly probably the most probable solution to solve the problem ahead.
SPEAKER_01:How far are lasers off being being serviceable? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, 50 kilowatt lasers like Dragonfire or both the Americans have a one and the and the Chinese have one and the Israelis have one, are small lasers that can burn a drone with a dwell time, which is why how long you stick the spot on the target to transmit the energy. A few seconds, and it burns it out. But that's not enough power to get through a fast-moving missile where your dwell time should be microseconds. And we're talking about megawatt plus lasers. And that's where the big arms race is, and where America needs to husband its carriers and not lose them in initial stages of any conflict. It takes them 10 years to build one, and they need to keep them safe in such a way as that their defensive armaments change, and then suddenly the game's afoot again. They can penetrate the access area denial bubble of the Chinese and attack the targets. And at the same time, they're building drone systems like Stingray that can go double the distance and refuel conventional aeroplanes. It won't be long before both of them are armed and refueling themselves and going thousands of miles. So there are counters to this. And in the subsea, it's difficult to make our submarines quieter and difficult to basically make them invulnerable to things like quantum gravity techniques and quantum magnetometers.
SPEAKER_01:Can you talk about quantum gravity techniques? Because that's just sounds like a term that a lot of people may not know anything about.
SPEAKER_00:All right, let's let's go wind back a bit. Because all of these phases of naval power also had revolutions in science. So the Industrial Revolution accelerated British maritime dominance. American dominance came because they created another level industrialization, replication. They could make the same engine exactly the same every single time, and they could literally interchange the parts. They could make liberty ships in five days with techniques which no one dreamt about. So they took industrialization to a new level. The next level of industrialization is going to be robotic, and the DARP factories of China, for example, are already doing it, which is enough to send shivers down any of our spikes. But the quantum revolution is one that's happening right in front of us. It's the subject that I studied at physics that used to blow our minds, and it was all about the quantum mechanics of how the world was a quantum universe. And I remember at the time, which is back in the 80s, we thought it was a wonderful theoretical construct that was difficult to get our heads around. And here we are now with quantum engineering in front of us. We're seeing quantum computers. We're seeing quantum entanglement, which is two photons entangled, one sent to the other side, which means you can monitor communications and see whether they've been interdicted. We're using quantum computers to essentially think like the human brain. In fact, we've been to understand the human brain is a quantum computer, and it had little things called microtubules and waveguides, which means our brains are essentially quantum computers, and we're building systems that think like us, which makes them far more relevant to the universe and its understanding. And then we're developing quantum centers using these super sensitive entangled particles. We can detect magnetic fluctuations that we couldn't dream of. We could put you two miles down the road and see your mass change as you ate a banana. And that technology is accelerating, which means you can detect the mass of a submarine deep under the oceans. So that's a new revolution that's happening, and the Chinese are right on the cutting edge of that. They've they've chosen quantum communications because they know that every every world war is won by the West because they broke the codes of their enemies, and this will make unbreakable codes. They're using quantum AI and computers to do other things like battlefield control. So the one of the great revolutions is quantum mechanics, quantum engineering, and that's also linked into an accelerated AI scenario too.
SPEAKER_01:Right, and we've talked about um modern weapon systems. What about if the West implements a modern shipbuilding system like China's been using, you know, like with robotics, AI, digitalization, all that stuff. If we implemented it, you know, as soon as we can, someone brings it up, if we implement it, could we still be competitive and make a large-scale fleet?
SPEAKER_00:This is one of my favorite Hail Marys, right? This is what we've got to do. At the moment, the Japanese and the Korean yards are even better than the Chinese yards. The shipbuilding techniques and their automation levels are off the planet. So we have two allies that we can utilize two ways. One is we can use their utilized their shipyards right now to build warships. And after all, the Japanese build an equivalent of a GS class warship to the Americans, similar technology, and they build them on time in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. So why America wouldn't outsource the building of a GS class destroyer to the Japanese is madness. The Australians, for example, are buying an off the shelf Mugami frigate, which is a stealthy frigate, very sophisticated, because they just can't make them fast enough themselves. So you utilize their current building capabilities. That's just part one of it. The other part is you get them to bring all their technologies to the West, into America, into Europe, and accelerate our shipbuilding, you encourage their investment, and you need to do it so that we have indigenous shipbuilding, A, for our economies to benefit from the defense investment, but B because, as I've written about time and time again, Japan and South Korea won't survive the first onslaughts of basically the Chinese expansion. So suddenly, if you become dependent on the shipyards, you're nailed because you can't do it yourself. So I think that dual action, and Trump is for the moment going to Asia, and one of the key topics is to speak to South Korea and get South Korean investment into American shipyards off the order of 150 billion, which is what is needed. And there's a great deal of issue that's gone with the fact that Trump has ordered some Finnish icebreakers because they couldn't be made at home, and the battle for the Arctic is accelerating, and America's icebreaker fleet is very limited. So it's got to be a combination of both. There isn't one solution or the other, but really, and the same for Britain. We have just managed to do a deal with Norway for our type 26 frigates. Now, Norway had no other choice but to choose the best ASW platform available because Norway's main threat is Russian submarines. They're right near the Kola peninsula bases. But they've taken five, and we're meant to have eight. That's 13. And the Navy needs double that to really operate. So we need to build more, and we need bigger shipbuilding facilities, and we need to invest in them in the UK. And we need to break away from this idea that shipbuilding is about people and jobs, and we need to automate them because then they can work 24 hours a day, then they can work in different places. So our survival depends on robotic automization and scale. I think we can do that, but the whole world is available for that. It's Europe, it's America. Even Latin America might be encouraged to do it if we lose the Pacific and we're facing an expansive China. So it's not lost, but we do need to wake up.
SPEAKER_01:What is this battle of the Arctic you mentioned?
SPEAKER_00:So the Arctic obviously was never really considered a viable seaway before climate change. And one of the things that happened is that climate change has changed the ice flows such that ships can now travel through the Arctic. They can go up, you know, to the east of China and Russia, they go through the Barents Sea, round the top, past Russia, through in through the North Sea, and it shortens their journey time by a massive amount. It's the opening seaway. And there's in fact a container ship that just did it in record time in the past couple of weeks. And I was asked by a journalist what they what I thought about. And they think, well, it's the opening of a seaway, which is long overdue. The Russians have been militarizing their bases on the Arctic routes, and they have large numbers of icebreakers and interests in the Arctic because one of their key areas is a basin where they keep all their missile boats protected so their second strike capability is immune. But the Chinese are now moving into that space alongside their Russian allies. And the biggest issue, if you can send a merchant ship round the top, you can send a navy round the top. And I, the biggest thing that I warn against is that in the North Atlantic, we've had a number of battles for the Atlantic. The first was the First World War against the U-boats and the convoys, which ultimately solved the problem. We had the same problem in the Second World War with an even bigger-scale convoy war taking place from the American coast all the way across the Atlantic. And technologies and convoying and aircraft shut down the U-boats. We had a very similar Cold War battle with the Soviet Union. And in the Soviet Union, our main frontline was the Greenland, Iceland, Faroes Gap, because all the submarines had to come through that gap. And we put a system called Solstice on the deck that could sense these submarines coming and probably further north, but we never admitted to it, which allowed us to know when the submarines were coming and allocate SSNs to tail them across the Atlantic. In fact, right at the end of the Cold War, there was a famous breakout when a group of victors and Sierras broke through and weren't tailed the first time in a Cold War when it happened. That battle is now taking place and is even more significant because the Russian fleet still is a threat and needs to be blocked. But I think the real issue is those Chinese ships are going to be built in the shipyards, will one day transit through the Arctic and come out and try to fight out in the Northern Atlantic as they bring their ships into our Atlantic. And that will be the next big battle to be fought. And we need to be prepared for that with all the associated sensors and technologies to make sure they can't get through those relatively narrow seaways out into the Atlantic and not only interdict our maritime trade, but start to interdict and affect the countries that use those trade routes as Britain did to build an empire.
SPEAKER_01:Sorry. And I want to talk a little bit more about um the future in the last couple uh bits of the podcast. And uh I want to ask how will drones slash modern technologies affect the power of aircraft carriers? Are they still significant in naval warfare or are they just allowed to strike for a long range? But now with myself and drones, that we can do that anyways without needing an aircraft carrier.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the the aircraft carrier becomes smaller with with drones, and there are things like the XPAC, which is actually a vertical takeoff, so it may not need, you know, there's possibilities you could be launching air power from the back of a frigate or destroyer instead of a helicopter. So there's definitely that element coming on on track. But you know, in terms of creating large mass of drones that penetrate a long way into target space, and mass is going to be critical to saturate defenses, carriers still have capability and they're important as long as they can be defended. So what we're really seeing also is the Western world is sort of bankrupt in terms of its debt. So it's going into this war really handicapped. It can't suddenly unleash the debt tap, with the exception of Germany, to buy lots of weapons to beat the enemy. So what it's going to require is a high-lo mix, sophisticated weapons and less sophisticated weapons in mass. And drones represent that. I mean, look at what the Ukrainians have done. They've beaten the much stronger and more powerful traditional Russian Navy in the Black Sea, and using drones, they pummel them and push them back. So there is a real warning against that. Although I think the techniques in modern navies would counter that same technology very effectively. The helicopters with missiles, short-range weapon systems. I don't think the lessons from that war are quite the ones that dictate the next weapon's choices. But we obviously are going to see more and more missiles and drones seeking to saturate incoming, you know, incoming defenses. And that's where lasers coming in, for example, like Dragonfly on British warships. I think also electromagnetic pulse weapons, which fire huge bursts of microwave radiation and then can drop swarms, as long as they're not hardened against EMPs, is the next important area. And I think actually guns are still important. Systems like Sky Ranger that have a piece of ammunition that goes down the barrel, it's programmed when to open out according to a radar, are going to have a place they're cheap. They can destroy the cheap drone process because you don't want to use expensive missiles. So we're going to have a mix of all sorts of things in our defensive shields. But the density is going to have to increase. And a good example is destroyers, if you look at them in the first Second World War, had a very limited anti-aircraft armament. By the end of it, they were absolute porcupines of secondary defense systems. And that's what we're going to see on our ships. Lots and more close-in defense systems and medium-range defense systems against these swarms of systems coming in, coupled with an offensive capability to try and hit the enemy before they launch their systems. Well, yeah, I mean you could argue that drones are going to create cheaper and cheaper systems. So the threshold of doing that and creating lethal systems is definitely lower. But I think one of the things is if you take a beam weapon, a beam weapon needs to probably work with a big power source, and there are not many nuclear-powered surface ships like the carriers that can then really use those and become absolutely invulnerable to attack. So I think this defense offense is going to swing a lot. But you're right about look what's that, look what the Houthis have done. Houthis have closed the Red Sea. It's really important this because I talked about the hegemonic weapon of challenge with the Chinese and how it had changed American hegemonic power and finished it forever. History books are all right. But the real reality comes in the Houthis who've managed to stop the Red Sea and the flow of traffic through the Red Sea with relatively cheap ballistic missiles, with optical sensors, and you know, they're difficult to counter. We use our expensive missiles in doing so. It's been hugely successful. That's a good example how a small organization or relatively apparently threadbare organization can hold a maritime hegemony at risk. So, yeah, we're seeing a lot of those asymmetries, and we're awaiting some kind of weapon system like lasers that redresses the balance for bigger powers that first introduce them over the smaller powers that can apply leverage now.
SPEAKER_01:What countries could these smaller powers be? Because we know India is a rising power. Um other countries that are.
SPEAKER_00:India has it is aware that its biggest regional threat beyond Pakistan, which, you know, by the way, is a conflict which seems to be ever more escalating around Afghanistan. Those two are just bruising for a battle. But their rigor, their strategic construct for China is to control the Indian Ocean. And for a long time they've had a 320-ship plan to build a navy that can interdict any Chinese merchantile traffic that goes to and from the Red, you know, the Gulf to the Straits of Malacca. And they work hard on that because that's like severing the lifeline of China, creating leverage. And the Chinese, meanwhile, have been building a fleet ideally to contain the Third Island chain, but their next step will be to control the Indian Ocean and battle the Indians. So India is definitely an expansive navy. We're seeing the navies of the Latin American countries expand, normally because they buy our old ships, but they are definitely not getting bigger. So that's an area of note. Um, the Iranians know small drone ships, challenges that go with that, but not uh conventional navy. Although they did convert a big merchantman into a drone ship to be irritating and go into the oceans and potentially launch drones from nowhere. That's not really a case. Uh the Russians are limited by resource and uh their shipbuilding capability, but they are building excellent submarines. Their Yasin class submarine is as good as a Trafalgar class boat and very, very quiet. And the Boreola, which is their SSB and carrying nuclear weapons, is super quiet. And there's a version of that being built meant to carry the Poison nuclear drone, which is a 70-foot-long torpedo with a nuclear power plant that goes across the oceans, probably quite noisily, I suspect, and then delivers a two-megaton warhead to somewhere like New York and a tsunami that's radioactive, engulfs it. I think it's far more a terror weapon than it is actually a real weapon, because that torpedo will be very, very noisy. And so the only thing is, noisy. Because its reactor won't be able to be insulated from such a small hull, and reactor noise is one of the quickest ways to pick up a target. But what it does do is travel deep, and the argument is it's deeper than any Western torpedo can interdict it. But once it gets up onto the continental shelf of America, of course that changes. So all of it, it's just like the nuclear weapon that um Putin tested, which is a cruise missile that can go on forever with a nuclear power plant. It's going to fly low, it's not very stealthy, it's still susceptible essentially to cruise missile interception. It'll just come from angles like Latin America or places that America currently doesn't have defenses, but it will install those. So none of these are decisive, but they're you know do show an intention to be highly challenging to the West.
SPEAKER_01:And um what question uh what lessons, if any, from history can we use to guide our strategy right now? That's my last question.
SPEAKER_00:It's a great question. So let's say for America, they need to wake up, that they are a sea power that forgot they were a sea power, and they need to fix that. I think they are waking up, but I think they need to move faster than they are. And the same goes for Britain. Britain's fundamental role in NATO is not to provide a land army, because you know, Germany and Poland and the continent can do that. Our main role is to protect our airspace and the airspace around us and to protect the Northern Atlantic, and we have failed. We've left our Navy in a dilapidated state. Our warships are few and in poor maintenance, and the weapon systems are in disregard, and we in Britain need to realise we are a sea power with the NATO and responsibility of protecting the Northern Atlantic, and we really need to wake up to that. And in that process, we need to accelerate our shipbuilding, build more type, you know, 45-stroke, the new 83s, which are missile protectors. We need to build missile defenses for Britain so then we can operate a defensive mechanism onshore and offshore, and we also need to build our submarine fleet. So Britain needs to put maritime power first. And one of the things I really argue is maritime power is very different from land power. When you have a big army, it just sits there and you spend lots of money and maintain it. And that was how the Soviet Union's demise was accelerated. A huge standing land army, and it was running out of revenues as the commodity cycle decreased. But navies are really different. Navies protect trade routes, trade routes do trade, and trade brings economic power, which was the basis of the British Empire, which why this little country dominated the world because it created a massive trading network protected by the Navy. And of course, with the Navy and the leverage, you do more trade. So I would argue that actually sea power is an instrument of it of economic expansion, not only in building the ships, creating mercantile shipbuilding and warshipbuilding, but also in this idea that essentially you control trade routes and trade relationships as a result of it, which bring resource back to the country. So I would strongly urge Britain to wake up and find its roots as a sea power and eradicate the sea blindness that's all over the place and realize that our future and our security comes from the sea.
SPEAKER_01:A little bonus question to end the podcast that uh we forgot to I forgot to add in. I don't know why we said we, I can't think that I'd add. Um The question is what do you think is China's global grand strategy for maritime power?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question, it's why we've got to answer it. Um so its strategy starts with the dominance of shipbuilding. So it's built dominant shipbuilding capability. It's now building ships of contemporary capabilities to essentially America and the West. And its strategy is to initially replicate the Japanese expansion curve, which takes it all the way down to Australia. Only this time it chooses or plans, I believe, to be successful at the Battle of the Coral Sea and control Australia and New Zealand and control the whole third of the island chain. That means that essentially America is evicted from that zone, and then once it's evicted, it will consolidate its resource chains with continental Eurasia and its maritime chains with the third island chain, and it will build thousands and thousands of warships. And at some moment, those ships will then start to come out. They will go east and west, they will start to control the Indian Ocean first, because that controls the secure route to the Middle East and the East African coast. They'll start to expand to impinge on the eastern Pacific and the and the coastline of America, and at some stage they'll see to come up round through the Antarctic route and down through um the north part of the Atlantic, the Iceland Faroes Gap, to control the North and South Atlantic. And they will replicate the same sea power process that Britain used essentially to build its maritime power and that America just quietly took the baton from at the end of the war. And that's their plan.
SPEAKER_01:And we'll add on in the end, assuming the West knows about the maritime power, which we should, um do you think this threat quickly is gonna wake up to the Western the West? Or are we just gonna keep ignoring it like we have?
SPEAKER_00:We are in a state of extinction dissonance. So for example, I started warning in 2018 about anti-ship ballistic missiles destroying carrier power. Finally, in 2024, officially, like people at Hexeth actually said something about it. So that's six years from threat to reality, belatedly responding to it. Uh, in the case of shipbuilding, I've been warning for an equal time where the shipbuilding power is and the threats from it, and now America is truly waking up to it. So we've got to the stage where the threat is so clear that no one can deny it. I think the issue now is that everyday politicians, I don't think Labour have a skibby-doo, and I think that the general public therefore don't understand how urgent this threat and dangerous this threat is, and how we need to make it a point of national urgency to change the power balance. Because although Russia is a threat to us, China is an even greater strategic threat. It supports Russia's war in Ukraine, it is feeding it with armaments, but most importantly, it's going to facilitate a global maritime war which will decide the fate of the world, freedom or not. So we do need to wake up to this sea blindness and how our livelihood and security are dependent on our ability to secure the seas around us and around the globe.
SPEAKER_01:One more thing that I'd quite like to mention. We've been given quite a good question that was put through to us from the website from a listener of ours. We'll try our best to answer it in the next podcast. Sadly, we don't have time today to answer it. But if you have any questions and we think they're worth answering, which they probably are because we have very intelligent listeners, please put them on the website and we'll do our best to answer them. And that's everything I've got for this podcast today.
SPEAKER_00:Really cool questions. Hopefully, Winnie will listen to this somewhere, somewhere afloat on a warship.
SPEAKER_01:And hopefully everyone can listen to this and go to the website and check out www.davidmarin.couk. Go look at the Mari Nations insights, they're very interesting. That's what a lot of the podcast is based on. Not talking about the stuff that's mentioned in there too much. So it's still new content. And you can also go check out the Instagram Morrowin Rawl, where there's a lot of new content and short snippets that are quite entertaining.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, H. And I'll just add that you know, this this basis of the synopsis and articulation of H's brilliant questions on what is a critical issue have essentially um all been dealt in detail across the Moro Nation spectrum. If you're interested in sea power, it's one of our key themes because it is so critical to hegemonic power, Britain and America, and the future of the West. So I urge you to really get submerge into this product this whole area and learn more about it because our future really does depend on it. And H, thanks for some brilliant questions there.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, lad. It's been a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00:As always, myself.
SPEAKER_01:See you soon. David Marin is the author of Breaking the Code of History, in which he presents a unified theory of civilizational dynamics. He is one of the world's most precedent and respected geopolitical forecasters. Drawing on decades of multidisciplinary expertise, David has a dedicated global following, particularly in the Anglosphere, spanning on the finance sector, including hedge funds and investment professionals. As well as military circles and private strategic advisory networks, he provides a deep strategic insight across five critical domains. The rise and fall of empires and war cycles, macro investing and economic cycles, politics and cultural dynamics, constructive and deconstructive patterns in human behavior, warfare, past, present, and future strategic tactics and weapons. This framework applies historical cycles to contemporary geopolitical shifts, delivering actionable foresight for leaders navigating an increasingly volatile world with an unparalleled track record for anticipating global inflection points. David's models have become essential tools for investors, corporate strategists, and national security professionals. He has also authored Lions Led by Lions, rewriting our understanding of the REF's victory in 1918. Now and Never in 2020 warns Britain to re-arm or face war. Red lightning on how China wins World War III, his analysis not only highlights future risks, but provides clear, forward looking strategies for managing and exploiting emerging opportunities and navigating uncertain times.
