No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Learning War, Winning in the Age of AI: Lessons in Adaptive Strategy with Trent Hone
What can today's organizations learn from the US Navy's approach to innovation during the rapid technological changes of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s? Trent Hone reveals how naval leadership created a remarkably effective learning system during this era of transformation.
The Navy's secret wasn't centralized control—it was distributed experimentation coupled with systematic assessment. Junior officers were encouraged to test new approaches with radar, aircraft, and fire control systems, while the organization built mechanisms to evaluate results and incorporate successful tactics into doctrine. This systematic approach to innovation allowed the Navy to adapt quickly to changing circumstances while capitalizing on the creativity of its personnel.
As Hone explains, this balance shifted during WWII when standardization became more important. The post-war Navy continued innovating but in a more centralized, top-down manner. Today's Navy could benefit from recapturing elements of that earlier, more distributed innovation system—particularly when facing technological revolutions in AI, software, and uncrewed systems.
The conversation explores leadership lessons from iconic naval commanders like Nimitz and Spruance, who maintained multiple paths to victory rather than fixating on single approaches. Their close working relationship created tacit understanding that made complex operations flow more smoothly—a lesson for any organization navigating uncertainty. Nimitz's cross-functional organization of his Pacific command stands in contrast to MacArthur's more traditional hierarchical approach, showing how organizational structure impacts adaptability.
Whether you're leading a tech company navigating AI or a military organization facing emerging threats, this discussion offers valuable insights on building adaptive organizations through systematic innovation, team cohesion, and maintaining strategic optionality in complex environments. Join us for this fascinating exploration of how naval history illuminates the challenges of innovation in today's rapidly changing world.
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March 25, 2025
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
All right, trent, it's great to see you. Man, it's been a while about five years since we met in person last, and then I got to tell you a quick story. Last night I was at dinner with a bunch of retirees from my neighborhood. We do it about once a month. The Marine retired Marine Corps officer next to me starts talking about the parallels between what's happening now in AI and what happened in the 30s and 40s with the introduction of radar and the capabilities we had at fighting at night with the US Navy. You brought up your book.
Trent Hone:Nice.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah yeah, Really cool Small world, but I want to get your thoughts on this. What can people take away from your earlier book Learning War and its parallels, if any, to what's happening now today with AI?
Mark McGrath:and its parallels, if any, to what's happening now today with AI. Oh, I think quite a bit, because one of the things that I stress in that book that the US Navy was good at doing was exploring how best to use new technologies and integrate them into tactics, doctrine, force structure, and the approach that they took, I think, was creative and effective. The idea was that we can't do this in a centralized way. Things are moving too fast. Also, we don't want to restrict the initiative of subordinates, lower level officers. We want to encourage the inventiveness and creativity of the more junior officers in the Navy, and so we're going to let them experiment. And we're going to let them try these things out and see what works and see what doesn't, and we're going to couple that to an assessment mechanism, right.
Mark McGrath:So it's not just experimentation for experimentation sake. I mean, that can be valuable to a certain extent, but if you don't have a way to assess and evaluate and then capture lessons, it's for naught, right, the lesson will be embedded in the heads of that officer or that ship's crew and then, when they leave or they rotate to go somewhere else, it's gone. So you got to find a way to build off of it, to capture it and capitalize on it, and the Navy was good at doing that. It was systemic about it, it wasn't just a few people, it was a pattern, and I think today we need to do the same kinds of things with AI, with software, with uncrewed systems. Yeah, it's the same sort of stuff, because I mean, just look at what we can see A lot of us see it in social media and on the internet. Look at what the Ukrainians are doing with drones Absolutely Fascinating stuff and you know, I've seen stuff on there where I've been like, you know, I wish I'd thought of that. That's really-.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Oh yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you said a key word in there. You said the Navy. At one point we were really good at innovation. What happened and can you tell us? I believe naval officers still engage with you asking you what do we do? Right?
Mark McGrath:Oh yeah, yeah. Well, let me go back a little bit before I answer that question. Sure, I think it's valuable to say there are time periods where the technology is changing rapidly. We can see that in history. One time period is the one you alluded to, like the 20s, 30s, 40s. Radar is new toward the tail end of that timeframe, but aircraft are relatively new throughout that, and that was the basis of experimentation. Also, increasingly effective fire control systems over the course of that time as well, which is something that I think aren't as visible to people. Just because they're not as visible, they don't see them.
Mark McGrath:But earlier, at the dawn of the 20th century, you've got a lot of new technologies too. You got new platforms. The destroyer was a new platform. It's got these torpedoes on it. It's high speed, it can travel across the oceans. How do we use it? How do we coordinate groups of destroyers together? Submarine was new in that time. How do we use those?
Mark McGrath:So prior to World War I, the Navy was doing this in a less systemic way. It was experimenting, it was exploring. A lot of it was individually driven and then it became harnessed in a more systemic approach after World War I, early 1920s. And then what happens is the Navy has this learning system, this learning mechanism, and World War II happens and it's used advantageously over the course of the conflict. But also the Navy's growing an extremely rapid rate and there's not the same degree of patience. Allowing officers to experiment pre-war is one thing, right, it's peacetime. The consequences of a failed experiment are well, maybe you don't advance as far or maybe you have to retire a little bit earlier. But the institution, the Navy, unlikely that anybody dies World War II. You're learning via combat and so if people are applying the wrong lessons or experimenting too much, there's too much variability. That can be really disadvantageous. And so there is a move to, once effective patterns are figured out for the technologies that exist at the time, to make things more centralized. You can really see this with the increasing standardization of training regimes.
Mark McGrath:As new ships enter the fleet Early on, say, 1940, there's a lot of flexibility. The captain, the executive officer and other senior members of the ship. They'll get together and figure out how are we going to arrange things? What's the damage control drill like? They have a lot of flexibility by the time you get to, say, 1944. And we can see this from not just the procedures that were introduced, but also from surviving records. There are training commands that say this is how you do it. This is how you set up your CIC. This is the layout you want. This is how you organize your damage control bill for a ship of this type. We'll give it to you. Yeah, you've got to tweak it and modify it, maybe a little bit for specifics of your situation, but there's a lot less flexibility.
Mark McGrath:So that happened. Officers who were part of the community during the World War II timeframe some of them still had this creative energy and this willingness to experiment in a more systematic way. The Navy does some very good things in the immediate post-war period, but it begins to taper off because there's been this increasing level of standardization imposed more centrally and less exploration allowed at the edges. Now we've covered a lot in your first two questions, man. No, no, no. So we get more standardization.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'm kind of curious when you get into more standardization, does that mean so we're moving from exploration to exploitation in?
Mark McGrath:a sense, yeah, quite a bit, is that?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:stifle innovation. Is that what you're getting at, or some thoughts on that?
Mark McGrath:I don't think. I think stifling is probably the wrong word. That sounds too heavy, that sounds like you know we're not innovating at all. I think instead the process becomes different. The process of innovation becomes more centralized and less experimental in terms of distributed experimentation, because what you see in the 20s and 30s is a lot of parallel experimentation After World War II. The Navy is still innovating, still embracing new technology, still understands it has to be a very technology-heavy institution, but it's more centralized, it's more managed from the top down.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay, we'll stay on the topic of the Navy for a little bit. That's my background and that's what your books are about. Basically, when we look at where the Navy is today as compared to 80, 90 years ago, it's been that long. It's been a long time. What are our leaders getting wrong today? And maybe you can apply that to organizations as well.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I'm a little hesitant to speculate on what they're doing wrong today, just because I mean, there's what I can see that is publicly available, right, and that's one face, that's one view. And then there's you know, what are they doing in more classified forums? What are they? What steps are they taking in other areas? And so I have a blinkered view and I think everybody needs to accept that caveat.
Mark McGrath:One of the things that I am concerned about is whether or not the kinds of learning and innovation that they're trying to encourage because they are trying to encourage it is systemic enough. So I talked earlier that there was a system that the Navy had in the 20s and 30s, right. So it's not just we're going to allow people to experiment, we're going to evaluate those and then we're going to have an improvement mechanism that assesses these experiments and figures out what new ideas should get folded into tactics and doctrine. And I think now they try that, but it's not quite as systemic. Right, there have been attempts to recreate the fleet problems.
Mark McGrath:The fleet problems were these large, contested exercises from the 20s and 30s, very open-ended. They still happen, but they don't happen in a way. Or they were for a while, but they don't happen in a way that I think is as systemic. You know where you're, you know feeding the lessons from one into the next one. You're using that to to update procedures, tactics, doctrine and the like. It seems a little bit more scripted. It seems a little bit more constrained. I could be wrong about that. Again, this is what I feel like I see, or this is what I see from the outside, so there may be more details on the inside.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I want some clarification on this Experimentation you brought up in the 20s, 30s and 40s. It's kind of distributed, it's I would say it's isolated. But today, when we're coaching organizations, we're asking them to experiment in a distributed nature. What is that team going to do? Don't tell them what they're going to do. Have them tell us what they're going to experiment on. Is that the type of context or atmosphere you're trying to create today or you want to try to create? Does that sound right?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think so, if I'm reading you right. Yes, so another example of today. There's been a lot of experimentation with uncrewed systems, which I think is great, but I think a lot of it has been focused and centralized on if I remember the number right, task Force 59. Right, so they're doing a lot of that work. Well, that's you know, in CENTCOM, where things are of a certain condition and the environment is of a certain way. What about, like, the far North? What about in the Pacific? What about the littorals around the Philippines and some of the other islands? Might uncrewed systems operate a little bit differently in those environments? Might we want to use different uncrewed systems in those environments. How do we figure that out? How could we make that experimentation more broad base, so that lessons that are contextual but also a broader set of lessons, start to emerge?
Mark McGrath:But getting back more specifically to your question, yeah, I think this experimentation can be driven well if we think of it as akin to mission command. Right, if you're going to do mission command, you give an objective. You don't tell the subordinate unit how to achieve that objective. You leave that up to them. You try to empower and trigger their creativity. I think it's the same kind of thing when we're talking about this sort of experimentation. You put a goal out there or an objective, and you see how they can meet it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:What kind of tools do you need to provide those folks that are out there at the front end or the tip of the spear in the context? What do they need to have? And I'm going to be a little bit more specific here in a second.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We have David Marquet writing about turning the ship around Dunbar number within a submarine mission command, able to do things that he needs to get done there. Highly trained personnel. Submarineers happen to be well-trained, doctrine process-driven. They can get some amazing things done. Not everybody is trained like that right. So when you think about an organization taking what Dave Marquet did Cap Marquet did and applying it to an organization, you're forgetting about one important thing, and that's the interactions of the people that you're working with. Do they know how to work together as teams? And I'll make that argument every single day that that's one of the advantages he has that organizations don't have. So kind of leading you in this direction, tell me, what do we need in your mind and from your research, what do leaders need to provide to their people to help them innovate in this novel space?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and thanks for the additional detail, because I think a team or an understanding of how and when to collaborate is very important to that. One of the things that I've noticed that is really important is being clear about sort of the lines of effort, which isn't exactly lines of authority, but it may overlap with that. So in some ways military establishments may have this a little bit easier because they're usually pretty clear on that, but a lot of times it can also get muddied. You can have dual headed individuals, you can have sort of confused lines of authority. But that's one thing that I think is really important, because you can't just say if you're going to use this mission, command approach or establish an objective and then empower people to go meet it, you can't be confused about well, whose objective is that? And you also can introduce a lot of problems if you say, okay, well, your objective, team, team one, your objective is half of that. Team two, your objective is the second third of that, and team three you have something else to do to make it work. So that group, that team or whoever the organization is that you're empowering, needs to have a line of sight to the objective. They need to feel like they can get to it.
Mark McGrath:And if they don't, if that's obscured, a lot of this won't happen, because they'll take it as far as they can, they'll take it up to the organizational or the authority boundary and then that's it. They won't achieve the objective. And so to me, I think that's one of the most important things to do is to figure out what do we want to achieve, and are we organized right to achieve it? And are we organized right to experiment while achieving it? And if those things aren't the case, then this becomes really, really difficult. It can get mired in organizational. Well, these are the negatives when we talk about organizational bureaucracy. Right, because you're trying to cross these lines of authority and reporting and it just becomes a morass.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's great insights. And then, going back to the lessons from World War II and the 1930s, did you identify anything? Within the team dynamics you had these sailors that are coming from all parts of the world, diverse, cognitively diverse, kids that are operating these machines that are brand new or new. Then what else was required to enable that novelty back then?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, there are a couple of important ingredients that they have that I think are really key. One, the officer corps is relatively small. I mean, we're still talking about the Navy same organization, same institution but it's smaller, then right, and most of them, if not all of them, have gone through Annapolis and so they have some shared context and shared history and they can rely on that. They've seen each other before, so there's a familiarity that exists. That's really important. Another thing that's important about that is the organizational silos in the Navy at that time were a bit more fluid than they are now. Right, like you know, you're an aviator, that's what you are, brown shoe yeah exactly.
Mark McGrath:You're a brown shoe, you're not. You're not a SWO, you're not a black shoe, you're not a bubble head. You know and and you were proud of that fact, right. But some of these officers back then could skirt between these communities. You see some who have been dual qualified and back then could skirt between these communities. You see some who have been dual qualified and so there's greater ability to transfer from one to the other and they see themselves a lot of them as Naval officers first, who have expertise in one or more of these areas.
Mark McGrath:But there's a different identity than what the service has encouraged today. Today is not necessarily a problem, it's just different, right. So that's an important context too, because they're thinking sort of whole Navy holistically. The other thing that I think is important, particularly as we get into the 1930s, is the Navy can be very cheesy about enlisted sailors. Who's coming into the Navy? Well, there's a depression, so lots of people are looking for jobs and we're picking the people who we think have the best aptitude. So you get a lot of sailors who are good with mechanical implements. You know they've worked on a farm and tweaked their tractor, so they know how to relate to machinery a lot of them, and that means that they can do some of this experimentation, especially if it's, like you know, reconfiguring wiring or adjusting details of the machinery on the ship to, you know, maybe tweak some more efficiency out of the out of the engineering plant. They're comfortable with those things and and they can, they can do that, so so, there's ingredients?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:no, there's. So the ingredients that we've talked about are actually group triggers to flow. So flow is really about innovation and novelty. Let me just cover some of these real fast and see if they resonate with you. Shared goals We've talked about that. We didn't talk about blending egos, but that's really about creating psychological safety. You know, reduce, removing rank, flattening the organization the best you can. Equal participation a little bit. That was covered in the last minute.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Familiarity you clearly articulated that Open communication, close listening and, of course, the external environment, shared risk and high consequences. So, right there, those are triggers that we need to actually achieve flow and achieve any type of novelty, and it wasn't planned that you were going to talk about that, but I want to thank you for that. It's just really cool to see how these things overlap. There are many ways to explain what happened in the past, but at the end of the day, that's where we find some coherence in all this. Everything seems to be merging towards something that makes sense for organizations. So, hey, I want to introduce you to Mark McGrath. Moose is here. Moose is a Marine, a big brain up in New York. I'd like you to meet Trent Hone. So, mark, just join us a few minutes late.
Trent Hone:Yeah, I was struck. Yeah, I'm very familiar with your work and I wanted to tag on to what Ponch was saying. If we go back to World War II, one of the books that I like, that I recommend a lot, is Unrestricted Warfare by James DeRose, and it talks about that cadre of officers that basically had to rebrand submarines, and I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that, because while there were the majority officers that did go to Annapolis and they had those bonds between what company they were in or what sport they played or whatever, there still kind of was an old guard of tech and engineering and technology. They needed pirates, they needed buccaneers, and that's who Mush, morton and Richard O'Kane and, by the way, I think Richard O'Kane crossed over from surface to subs too. That kind of innovation seemed to turn the tide with guys like Flucky and others. So I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on those.
Mark McGrath:Oh yeah, the submarine story is, I think, a good example of how, if the feedback loops aren't right, some of this innovative process doesn't work. So let's sort of go back to most of the interwar period. And you can't do it. You're not going to be able to sink merchant ships without warning. That's just not acceptable. The Germans did that in World War I. We don't want to do that either. But what's fascinating in some of the documentation from the US Navy is that you get sub-officers talking about Japan as an island nation, japan has lots of commerce and Japan could be really vulnerable to an unrestricted submarine campaign, and then very quickly they'll say but that's illegal, so we can't talk about that. And so it's almost like there's this wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing going on. But the problem is because that sort of fight is considered to be illegal.
Mark McGrath:What the subs do in the interwar period is they train to attack, uh, a naval formation that is generally very well screened and protected, and you can see records of this in the fleet problems. They don't do it at night, they do it during the day. At night it's considered to be too dangerous, and during the day they're forced to make submerged attacks and submerged approaches. They're trying to hide from anti-submarine patrols not just surface ships but also aircraft that are trying to find them, and so they're driven to these conservative tactics that are going to be horrible when it comes to trying to attack a convoy or an independent merchant ship, and so they have to unlearn that. But it's these artificialities of the feedback loop.
Mark McGrath:We're doing these exercises rather than engaging how we actually think we might fight that drive, that kind of behavior. So if we're going to have feedback loops, we're going to try to foster innovation. I think you have to be very clear about where are we going and what are the future conditions likely to be like and how do we evaluate success. And the Navy subforce doesn't do that well in the interwar period. But because of this backdrop, this illegality, and they have to pivot right away. And what I think is fascinating is how quick the Navy says all right, we're, we're going to introduce unrestricted warfare, right? It's like hours after Pearl Harbor, you know. So the plans are there. Um, so somebody should have acknowledged like this is how we're going to fight, so this is how we should prepare.
Trent Hone:What's interesting about those guys too is and I can't not recommend this book enough because the I'm biased I'm a Marine that served in the Pacific many years later on a lot of these islands that were taken and of course I have a deep love for that and the submarine story continues to always be one of my favorites because of this sort of radical approach that these guys took and the great risks that they took.
Trent Hone:Radical approach that these guys took and the great risks that they took and I want to get your sense of, like, the institutional risk that was allowed because mush Morton innovated and lost his life. Rick Dick O'Kane, who got the medal of honor, was taken prisoner because his, because his sub was was sunk, because these guys were so successful, taking considerable risk. It was a high risk, high reward type scenario. What were some of the institutional views that? I mean? They let these guys kind of go off the off the chain, so to speak. But I'm sure that there had to be a take somewhere, like an, an official take on the level of risk that these guys were taking, because I guess when we think of the fleet that you know we were in in my time and in Pontius' time you know it's the opposite. It was like completely, almost completely, risk averse.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, well, I think, if you want to think about it institutionally, a lot of this gets into Admiral Nimitz's approach, you know, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, also of the Pacific Ocean Area's theater, because a lot of these submarines roll up to him and one of the things that he did very quickly upon assuming command is reorganize the fleet and he breaks the submarines out. Previously the submarines, if I remember right, were part of the scouting force and he takes the submarines and makes them report directly to him. Now he's a former submarine, is in charge of them later in the war and that's so that Nimitz can keep an eye on this. He likes to get close to the things that he felt were important and going to be decisive and it's clear that he recognizes that submarines are going to be that way. So he stays close to them and he tries to. There's the whole.
Mark McGrath:We haven't gotten into the whole story about the torpedoes yet but for listeners who may not be aware, initially US submarine torpedoes are disastrous. They don't work very well and numerous iterations have to be gone through to fix the problems with them. Nimitz stays close to that and acts as a voice toward the Bureau of Ordnance which is responsible for producing those torpedoes, to say, look, this is what the captains are seeing in the field. They're not performing, and this is why they're not performing. And so he's saying that to the Bureau of Ordnance. And then he's telling the subcaptains look, you can disable the defective magnetic exploders, just revert to contact exploders, because we think those will work better, even though you know, meanwhile the bureau of ordinance will try to work things out. So he's part of the mix there.
Mark McGrath:If we think about it from like an institutional standpoint, that is saying, yeah, we want to take risks, yes, we want to be aggressive, we want to have success with this. And I think you can see I mean I spend time in my nimitz book talking about his aggressiveness, his sort of view of risk. It's very much a. You know, we shouldn't view risk negatively. We should view risk as opportunity. We're going to take risks, the enemy is going to take risks. We should take better risks or earlier risks or you know, however you want to define that to gain advantage.
Trent Hone:Because if you don't, you know, if you're not at that edge, you won't get the advantage. It's kind of tying it back to another thing. When you mentioned Lockwood and Nimitz in the same realm, and then I think of Spruance and Richmond, kelly Turner, kind of going back to how we're talking about officers with deep relationships and collaborative relationships. It should be noted that these four guys are all buried next to each other, together at Golden Gate National Cemetery. I mean, what kind of a bond, organizationally, do you have to have from a leadership standpoint, from a leadership quality standpoint, to achieve what they were able to achieve, which, you know, anybody can go on Google Earth and look at the Pacific Ocean covers, you know, 25% of the world, right? I mean, that kind of camaraderie, that kind of connection, you know, cannot be replicated in other organizations, such that, you know, maybe not the extreme of all four being buried to each other, buried next to each other in a living agreement. But you know. But what kind of bonds do you think are possible in organizations today?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think, ponch, this gets back to your point about flow and about some of this tacit understanding that you need to accumulate. One of the arguments that I make in Mastering Arctic command is that the early stages of the central Pacific offensive, which kicks off in November 1943, you know it's led by Admiral Spruance, who you mentioned One of the reasons that flows so smoothly for the next couple of months up until, you know, june of of 1944, is because Admiral Spruance and Admiral Nimitz have spent a lot of time together getting very familiar with each other, understanding the context of this offensive and how they're going to have to operate. Spruance, listeners may know, was commanding one of the task forces at the Battle of Midway. After that he comes ashore and serves as Nimitz's chief of staff. So the two of them are together on a daily basis. Even more frequently than that because they're rooming in the same house, and so they go on walks together, they exercise together, they're going through plans together, they're in all the same meetings every day, and through all that there becomes this mutual understanding of how do we need to act, what kinds of decisions should we make under certain circumstances.
Mark McGrath:And I like to liken it to a, a sports team, because this is something that I can draw on from my own experience. You know, I was on some some teams where we got very good at understanding each other. You know, you practice a lot together, you begin to understand the habits, the moves of your teammates and you can anticipate what they're going to do. Like there's an emerging situation on the field and you're like Joe's going to cut to the right. I know he's going that way and so you know you kick the ball over there and he turns and the ball's on its way and he gets it right. Just that's the, the. That's the kind of thing that you learn to anticipate, so you don't have to communicate everything. It smooths flow, it makes these things easier, and so that's. That's one example, I think. I think turner is different. Uh, I mean, yeah, he's buried with those guys and he works with all those guys, but he's a bit of a harder edge. Uh, he had to deal with Marines?
Trent Hone:Yes, he did, and they didn't all go to.
Mark McGrath:Annapolis. But yeah, lockwood, spruance and Nimitz all seem to have a I mean, I don't want to say a similar disposition, because there's obviously Nimitz is more aggressive than Spruance. That's not something that I think comes through a lot of the secondary literature, but it's true. If you look at how they're interacting, nimitz is more of a pusher than Spruance. That's not something that I think comes through a lot of the secondary literature, but it's true if you look at how they're interacting, nimitz is more of a pusher than Spruance is, but they get along really well.
Trent Hone:How much of that transcended down to the wardroom level. How tight were wardrooms back then relative to today? Now I get it, there was a war going on and it was an existential war for the United States. But you know, when you, when you assess, like wardroom culture, what do you think are the major differences between then and now?
Mark McGrath:That's a great question, because one of the things that doesn't survive in a lot of the records I mean you can get it in like oral histories and things, but those are, you know, the experience of one individual point in time and uh, it's hard therefore to relate that to today.
Mark McGrath:The exception that I have for that actually gets back to Nimitz, because he was the commanding officer of cruiser Augusta when it was the flagship of the Asiatic fleet and he was very deliberate about using the wardroom as an educational opportunity.
Mark McGrath:So Augusta is there sailing around in the Philippines and China and he would bring officials and dignitaries and other people on board to talk to the wardroom. So we're going to have the ambassador from Great Britain here to talk to the ward room, give them information about the situation here, their perspective, et cetera. We're going to have a representative from the US State Department, we're going to have an officer from the British Asiatic Fleet to come and talk to us about what's going on, to come and talk to us about what's going on, and all to try to give those officers more context about the environment that they were in there in Asia, the US place in it, and so that they could think not just about what are we doing now on the ship, what do we have to do tomorrow, but like, how does the United States fit into the world situation, and I thought that was really interesting. There were a number of officers who were part of that group that commented on that.
Trent Hone:So like a wardroom was, like a PME venue, yeah yeah, and at the same time, double padding is, you know, pme, but also like Einheit, like mutual trust, tightening, like tightening the trust amongst the officers and camaraderie.
Mark McGrath:Now, not everybody goes to be, you know, sink pack, so this may be very exceptional. Nimitz's environment may not have been typical, so I don't want to say that, like you know, all the ships of the fleet were doing that. I think that would be erroneous. But there is an example, and I think I haven't been in many ward rooms lately, but I do think that there are ships that try to do something similar, at least pockets of officers who are trying to like upskill everybody around them whatever way they can.
Trent Hone:I would tell you that. So, as a Marine, you know, I spent time on LSDs and we would, as officers, we'd eat in the ward room and out in the fleet, those wardrooms for us anyway, we're all kind of eat as you go, come in and out, like. But I was on a destroyer as a midshipman and that destroyer had, with the exception of officers that were on watch or whatever, they had sit down times for meals and they sat down and they I think I think it was dinner was, if I remember correctly, breakfast and lunch are kind of as you go. I think it was dinner was, if I remember correctly, breakfast and lunch are kind of as you go, but underway dinner was something that we all sat down together as and it was a totally different climate.
Trent Hone:Now, granted, a Spruance class was a little smaller, a tighter wardroom than an LSD, which also adds to the compounding of all these extra Marine officers that you don't have, but it was kind of a noticeable trade anyway. But I did. I will tell you this from a ground standpoint in australia, the rural australian army, they had an officer's mess where they did all dine together and and in those, in those dining sessions, you know, they're talking and um, so that was a different cultural experience, because that that doesn't exist in the fleet anymore, not not in the marine corps, like it did so that's yeah, I think that's, that's underestimated.
Mark McGrath:Uh, I mean, you know you could say, oh, we're just all getting together to have dinner together. But I mean I just people can probably relate from their family experiences, right. Like like, if you make it a set thing to, everybody in the family comes and sits down at dinner, like that's different than if you just sort of like you know, come as you go or grab whatever food as you go and buy.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, you can't bring your iPhone to dinner now, right, that's important. You don't want to-.
Mark McGrath:Well, right, I mean, I'm talking about not having your phone there sitting down talking.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, Interacting with other people having a conversation, things that are not happening like they used to yeah, yeah, and I don't think it much matters what you're talking about.
Mark McGrath:As long as you're talking All right, cause you are you will gravitate to the things that are, you know, important or of interest. And I think invariably some of that stuff on a destroyer is going to be like well, you know how are we going to, how are we going to work together? Or what's the new exercise coming up? You know how are we going to approach that. Or we have an inspection. How are we going to make sure everything is? Is ship shape for the pun?
Trent Hone:When you think about guys like Nimitz and Spruance, I mean these were, these were men of like high character, you know, impeccable leadership. But one thing that's unique about both of them they never wrote an autobiography or a memoir and there's like a lot of Merck you know, like. So you know what? What were the sources, the firsthand sources that you really would get? Was it dispatches or was it journals that you could? Or did they keep diaries? Because to my knowledge, none of those have been published. They must be in archives.
Mark McGrath:There are a whole series of letters that Nimitz wrote back home, and an anthology of them was just released by the Naval History and Heritage Command, and what's unfortunate about them is some of the ones from the most tense period, like the latter half of 1942, basically, he's gone Deliberately. I forget whether they were burned or somehow otherwise destroyed by his wife, because one of the things that Nimitz was really conscious of is what goes back to psychological safety, something that you mentioned, ponch. We want to have an environment where you can air it out behind closed doors, but then, in the public face, we're going to be unified. We're not going to present the dirty laundry or our disagreements to the press or to other things, because he was really affected by some incidents that he saw as a young officer, where those controversies in the US Navy after the Spanish-American War did get aired, and it's like I'm not doing that, I don't want to be part of that. So those were useful though, but there are letters to his wife, and she tried to eliminate anything that was controversial.
Mark McGrath:Some things that were really valuable is the National Archives has preserved most of the plans and orders, so you can get a sense of how they were framing operations and sometimes those were plans that were written but not issued, so you can see how they would iterate over time and refine a plan. There are joint staff studies which are prior to a plan for an operation. You know what are we going to need to do? So sort of like the forward looking conceptualization.
Mark McGrath:There is something called the Gray Book, which is a running estimate that Nimitz and his staff maintained through the course of the war and that has dispatches back and forth. So messages it's not all the messages, but it's a select set and then along with it just a daily summary, like you know, what happened today. Some of those summaries are pretty lengthy Oops if there's a lot going on but some are a lot more brief. So that was really useful because it's like this is, you know, this is the run of the war, what else? I spent a lot of time looking at action reports what really happened, or at least as best as the people who are writing it up after the fact could tell. And let's see what are some of the other.
Trent Hone:It seems like Spruance is so underrated as a naval commander and almost he's an afterthought. Now the class of ships doesn't exist anymore, so people hardly ever talk about him. Yeah, yeah.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, you know he doesn't get that fifth star, which is, you know, I don't think, entirely fair given the level of his contribution compared to some of the others who achieved that rank. And yeah, he's very modest, right, like you say, he doesn't write an autobiography, doesn't write a memoir, goes back to the Naval War College, is happy being its president, that's what he was content to do but know asymmetric guerrilla tactics.
Trent Hone:And I was listening to a brief by recently deceased General Alfred Gray, who's the one who brought John Boyd into the Marine Corps and was instrumental behind that, and in one of these lectures this was the lecture maybe was about 10 years ago plus or minus and he talked about former Commandant Robert Barrow and he said General Barrow was fighting in World War II, he was fighting in the guerrilla operations in China which I had never heard of. So I looked it up and I find this whole thing and it's called like the Sino-American Cooperative Organization I think was what it was called and it was led by an admiral named Milton Miles who wrote a book called the different kind of war, and it's another like part of the war that nobody ever talks about. Yet with everything going on with china today, it's actually something that people should take a, should take a look at. What are your thoughts on on that end of the pacific war that nobody ever talks about?
Mark McGrath:the rice paddy navy is the is the sort of the nickname, and they had a pennant too, what was like the what the heck pennant, or something like that. Anyway, there's a particular flag associated with that organization. I think that's really important to look at, not just for the reasons that you say, but because there was an assumption that the Navy's leadership, admiral Nimitz, but then also Admiral Ernest King, who's the commander in chief in Washington felt that to defeat Japan, they were likely going to have to use the soldiers from China. Right, I think the pre-war concept is largely it's going to be a war, japan versus the United States, one-on-one, and in that construct we can blockade Japan and force them to surrender through threat of starvation and starving off their commerce, but with all the additional players in the conflict, I think they felt that it was going to be. It was likely that they would have to defeat or isolate the Japanese army on the Asian mainland, and that's going to require China to be a key player. And so one of the things that I think is valuable but that doesn't get a sufficient amount of attention, and in the book that I'm working on now, which is going to be a study of Admiral King, I'm looking at some of that. I'm looking at some of that.
Mark McGrath:There's a lot of drive to reopen the Burma road so that there would be an overland route to resupply China from Burma or from Eastern India, and the combined chiefs of staff, the US Joint Chiefs and the British chiefs, disagree on the feasibility of such an operation or when to mount it, and so what the Navy turns to is well, we've got to seize Taiwan, or then it was called Formosa, or a base on mainland China, and that's Operation Causeway.
Mark McGrath:It is never mounted because Luzon is seized instead and there's not enough equipment to make the operation worthwhile.
Mark McGrath:But this idea that there's got to be these guerrilla operations to sort of make China ready or get things disrupted enough in terms of the Japanese capability that a landing could succeed and then there was an anticipation that they would move up the coast of China, not unlike General MacArthur moved up the coast of New Guinea, that is, naval power would allow a sort of a mobility that Japanese forces on the land couldn't match, and so their concentrations could be isolated, cut off from ports and slowly defeated and or starved, and then that would allow an opportunity not just to defeat the Japanese army but then bring Japan and its home islands to its knees.
Mark McGrath:Now, obviously, the war unfolds very differently than that, but this is a concept that they had and I think if we step back from that, we could look at this as a way in which the United States military leadership is entertaining options right. So one way to defeat Japan is to defeat their army on the mainland. Another way to defeat Japan is well, leave that alone and we'll isolate the home islands and drop atomic bombs and convince the Soviet Union to get into the war. So there are different victory mechanisms that are being maintained and explored through the war, and I think that's a really valuable way to think about it, because I wouldn't call it asymmetric necessarily, but you can keep those alive through asymmetric mechanisms, like the unit that you mentioned, the guerrilla forces in China, like the unit that you mentioned the guerrilla forces in China.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's a great recap, or synopsis, of the importance of optionality in anything right, yeah. I think a lot of organizations don't understand that they get so fixated on one desired path that they actually end up failing as a result no-transcript, They'll pin everything on it.
Trent Hone:Well, Nimitz did this or MacArthur did that, and it doesn't account for the complexity of massive organizations, and I'll run this one by. I mean, I think that we, as naval people, have an edge over military thinkers that are not Naval, because whether you're crashing a, doing a controlled crash onto a ship or you're, you're getting a Marine artillery ashore, you have to factor in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the ocean. It never, it's always, it's always part of our it's always part of our decision that our Air Force brethren. They're landing on, you know, five miles of tarmac, or you know our Hilton, yeah right.
Trent Hone:Yeah, army guys that live in brick buildings, that they don't have to factor in the sea is, really, when you think of guys like uh nimitz and you think of, you know, spruance and um, and you know even the, the richmond, kelly, turner and then all the marine commanders, you know they, they had a deep respect and understanding, uh, especially the guys that were coming for the naval academy, right, because they could all do celestial navigation, they could all do things that you know. They had a deep understanding of that constant being, that constant presence of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity of the sea. And I feel like that's a massive advantage for for naval thinkers.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But that's my bias well, trent doesn't know anything about complexity.
Mark McGrath:So, um yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no no no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no, no, no no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Trent's pretty sharp on complexity.
Trent Hone:I just want to point that out, though, because I think that that is a physical I think it's the most present physical factor on the globe is the ocean. And then, when you think of the Pacific, when you think of that being a quarter of the world, the calculation and the thought process behind all that unpredictable constant movement. I think it gives us an advantage in some respects, but that again, that's my bias.
Mark McGrath:I think it, I think it does and I think in some ways, it might have been more visible at that time, you know, 80 years ago, uh, when some of these events were were happening, because, uh, the I can, I can see it like the, the U S army officers in the Pacific or elsewhere. They, they are, they're much more linear in terms of their thought, they're not, as it's not as option-based, their approach to planning, their approach to executing these operations, and the Marines and the Naval officers seem to be a lot more opportunistic. Now, this is not true in all cases, of course, but just as a general theme. Now, this is not true in all cases, of course, but just as a general theme, and I've noted that, in like some of the early MacArthur campaign plans, they're very linear. You know, this is General MacArthur in the Southwest.
Trent Hone:You think he?
Mark McGrath:adapted. He did. Yeah, he did, but it takes Nimitz pulling him along, because MacArthur's ego is extremely potent, right, right, and he couldn't stand to think that his um place in the sun was going to get eclipsed here. And Nimitz started to advance so rapidly across the central Pacific, he was like, oh gosh, I've got to get. I've got to make it across New Guinea faster and get back to the Philippines, otherwise, you know, I might not have a major role in the war.
Mark McGrath:And, uh, it just it works out for him that around you know, I might not have a major role in the war and it just, it works out for him that around, you know, while he's feeling that pressure, the uh australians, one of the divisions, uh, in his command, finds a japanese army code book. They tried to destroy it by burying it in a river. Didn't work, it was too wet to turn it on. You need to light. Light it on fire so that gets recovered, dried out. And then, all of a sudden, macarthur has insight into the Japanese army's dispositions, you know, in the area that he's, that he's going to be moving into, and so he can attack where they're weak and move much more quickly.
Trent Hone:Well, the Navy, I mean the Navy got him out of Corregidor, the Navy got him, got him ashore in Leyte, the Navy got him ashore in Leyte, the Navy got him in Inchon.
Mark McGrath:I mean I think he finally woke up to the reality that, hey, maybe these naval guys are onto something. Yeah, I think he did, although he went through a lot of naval commanders before he could get there?
Trent Hone:Yeah, but you know it's interesting about his brother. I learned this later, but his brother was an Annapolis grad and his brother was a captain. He died of appendicitis and his belief was that if my brother lived, it was Arthur MacArthur, the whatever number, because they were all Arthur MacArthur's. Yeah, he said, had my brother not died of appendicitis he would have been the one with the fifth star. But yeah, he was a naval commander. Yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You know we have the MacArthur Center here. I've only been there once.
Trent Hone:Oh, it's phenomenal.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's pretty amazing here in actually Virginia. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Trent Hone:I think he gets. Do you think I'll ask you this, trent? Do you think that MacArthur because, like I'm pretty strongly you know my upbringing, until I decided to go the naval route, my father's a retired West Pointer and MacArthur and duty on her country, speech and all that was a big part of being his kid. But I've always thought that he gets an unfair shake, that he's reduced to like this tyrant that wanted to nuke the Chinese. And when you start to dig in now I agree with you. He had a huge ego, he was extremely arrogant, but at the same time I really did think that at some level he actually did get it. Some level he actually did get it because, as you say, I mean he, he learned, he was able to flexibly, flexibly adapt and understand that, uh, uh, maybe these Naval guys were onto something, but I think that over time he was able to adapt his mindset and a lot of the, a lot of his opposition were not.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, he is able to adapt, I and I do think he deserves a lot of credit for the successes that occur in his area in in world War II and less conversant with his time in Korea. But he does adapt, he does learn. I do think that his approach to organizing his command is very traditional army and therefore very different from Nimitz. So one of the lenses with which I come at it is to put a modern spin on it. Nimitz's leadership, not just in terms of personal leadership but how he's going to organize, feels more, or is more, I would say, complexity informed compared to MacArthur. So one specific example Nimitz takes a very sort of navalist point of view.
Mark McGrath:We're going to organize cross-functional task forces to accomplish certain things and we're going to install a commander of the task force. It doesn't matter what service they are, but they're going to be able to command all the units that are assigned to that, regardless of whether they're part of the Army or the Army Air Force, and Marines or the Navy or whatever. So Spruance's Fifth Fleet is that way, the Central Pacific Force is that way. Macarthur takes jointness up to his general headquarters level. So he's got an Army Air Commander, he's got an Army Land Commander, he's got a naval commander and so jointness is sort of something that he manages rather than delegating, and I think that that creates a little bit less flexibility, a little bit less optionality. It works out okay. I mean, his command does well. He chooses subordinates who work effectively with him. But I don't think it's stressed in some of the ways that Nimitz's command was particularly early in the war.
Trent Hone:One of our earliest guests was Charlie Protzman and he came to tell us the story about when MacArthur was the regent of Japan for six years before the Korean conflict started, that he brought in all of these uh speaking, I guess, to his adaptability and his, his ability to, to reorient, of, of fusing Eastern thinking with Western uh business practices to sort of create the, the, the Japanese miracle that creates the Toyota production system and everything. And, um, yeah, he was, he was pretty prescient in a lot of things that he doesn't get credit for.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, I mean. Well, like anybody, he's, he's, you know he's a complex figure. You try to reduce him to just an ego, or or, you know, just a, a warmonger, and that's, that's a disservice, it's the doesn't, doesn't.
Trent Hone:Give you everything yeah, that's, that's our I think that's our predisposition as americans, right, we like to pin something on a person, right? Yeah, they blame somebody, one of my greatest. I'd love to get your take on this, because I think that your work has added a lot of stuff that these miss, like the Samuel Elliott Morrison volume. Set, the 15 volume. It's one of my prized possessions and you can read it now and it's very readable. It's quick, but it's also too, and you can read it now and it's very readable. It's quick, but it's also, too, you can see what's left out. I mean, you can see that there's a lot of the complexity stuff.
Trent Hone:But with your book on Nimitz, what do you think are the biggest sort of vitamins and kind of additions to the EB Potter book? You know, because the Potter book was the definitive Nimitz book, because Nimitz never wrote an autobiography, never wrote a memoir, what do you think that you filled in that helps color the story of Nimitz? What's your biggest takeaway from that?
Mark McGrath:Because the Potter book is so well known, yeah, I think the Potter book does a great job at describing Nimitz as a person and relating parts of his early career to his wartime leadership, and what I tried to do was focus more like okay, let's just look at the war and let's look at how his headquarters organizes and how he commands no-transcript, like.
Mark McGrath:Nimitz's staff structure and how it evolved, I think is really fascinating and valuable for us now, because it gets into some of the things you know, ponch. Going back to your flow comment, you know, though, that organization was deliberately cross-functional and put the right kind of leadership in the right kinds of places. Like one of the things that I make a point of is the head of the logistical division of that joint staff. He's an army officer. I kind of love how Nimitz played this, because so that army officer, brigadier General Levy, comes to the Pacific, tours the Pacific he's a logistical expert and he presents this list Like here's all the flaws, here's all the things that you've got to do better, nimitz. And Nimitz knew that he was going to be able to take that guy into his organization, and so he's like that sounds great. We do need to fix all those things.
Trent Hone:And guess what Levy. It's your job Now you got to do it. This is kind of a. I'm a historian by undergrad so as an amateur I want to air this out with you. But I think it's also too about the cultural adaptability and flow and things. I think the other I've I've posited or wondered about, the other thing that the Naval forces, the United States, so Navy and Marine Corps, have an advantage of is that we've been intervening in the far East for for hundreds. It almost you know the entire history of our, of our, of our country. Do you think that we've gained? I cause this is what I feel. I feel that we've pulled enough out of there, just from exposure, that we do have some intermingled Eastern thinking, even a guy like MacArthur that spent his entire career in the Far East. The culture of the naval forces has had a being so exposed to the east that maybe others might be exposed to that's a really, that's a really interesting idea.
Mark McGrath:I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, I mean, you certainly see evidence. You know there were um, you know they would call them china hands, right. So there there were uh sailors, but also naval officers, who were, like you know, wanted to be part of the Asiatic fleet, got very comfortable with things there and adapting to the lifestyle. Now, that would be very different from you know, if any of the three of us went to live there today. I think you know much, much older time period, different kinds of assumptions in terms of how someone from the United States would relate to people, uh, from that part of the world. But I do think that uh, certainly amongst some individuals, and I I'd be hesitant to extrapolate that too far, but yeah, there is. There is a um, uh, I don't know exactly what to call it a receptivity or, uh, an expansion of the frame, just because of what you're exposed to.
Trent Hone:Yeah, you think of, like, the big stations in Yokosuka and you think of Subic Bay and you think of Sasebo, but not even that. You can go back further. You go back to the Boxer Rebellion and you go back even further. You go into the Korean intervention in the 1870s and other things.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I want to build on that. So, trent, you met Sonia Blignol several years ago down in Quantico. I just had a conversation with her today and this connects back to navigation and the Polynesian navigation wayfinding right. There are no maps. So have you looked into any of that yet, or see the connection?
Mark McGrath:This connects back to what Mark's talking about. So I used I think it's Hutchins is the name of the author cognition in the wild, um, which talks about that. It talks about different forms of navigation, compares, uh, what I'll call Western forms, uh, which you know lead us to like latitude and longitude, with, uh, polynesian or Micronesian forms and, uh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a. The book is sort of an exploration of, like, how do we make sense of things, not just how do we navigate, but but how do we conceptualize the world? Uh, and that was really useful because it gave me insights into how to think about or write about the combat information center and in its emergence. And I think that there's a lot of value in that wayfinding concept because, we see it, I've got a book, another book on wayfinding, that talks about it.
Mark McGrath:It uses three different examples, if I remember right, but it talks about that navigation in the Pacific. It also talks about how Native American Eskimos will navigate in the far North. You know, if you've got basically ice sheets and, uh, the sun, you know how do you find your way, how do you find your way around, and the. There was a third example I can't remember it off the top of my head, but it was interesting because there are oh, I know what it was. It was in Australia. Uh, it was Aboriginal people in Australia, and how did they find their way?
Mark McGrath:So you've got all these sort of different wayfinding type mechanisms that exist and there are just all deeply contextual, like if you look at how the Polynesians and the Micronesians would navigate, they're very sensitive to the waves. One of the books I forget exactly which one it was described how a navigator would like lay down on his or her back on the boat and just by the way that the waves would move the boat, they would get a sense of where they might be. And yeah, I mean you're shaking your head. I can't imagine that either. Right, like, how would you know, like, what part of the sea you're in based?
Mark McGrath:on like how the boat moves your body, but like, if you've done it enough, I guess, well, I guess whales can do it yeah, yeah, we're. You know, we can get very attuned to very subtle things if that's what your mind is conditioned to pay attention to and I have to ask you why did you, why did you use the word attuned there?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:and the reason for is the conversation I had to get with sonja again and any reason behind that.
Mark McGrath:It seemed like the right word because I'm trying to think about focus, sensitivity. But also, if I were going to try to do that, I would be using 90% of my brain power to try to figure out the waves and such, and I don't think if you've been schooled in that tradition you would do the same thing. I think it would be more. It wouldn't require the level of attention, and so that's part of also what I mean to attune like you're trained but you can pay attention to it in a way that is easy.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Requires less energy from the brain. Yeah, requires less energy from the brain.
Mark McGrath:Yes, that's what I mean. Okay, no, yeah. Requires less energy from the brain.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yes, that's what I mean. Okay, no, uh, fascinating, and and this, this was again not planned this is something that moose connected or triggered triggered this thought because I just had the conversation with Sonia this morning about this very thing and we actually got into sacred geometry and a bunch of other things completely off topic today, but I know that you met Sonia and I think the uh, the topic of uh navigating the Pacific is is, uh is something that you may want to talk to her about. It's pretty pretty amazing. Yeah, this has been fascinating. Uh, I know, uh, uh, it's been 2019, november I think since we last connected. Uh, don Vandergriff is there. Yeah, it's been a while. Um, and nothing's changed in the world, by the way.
Mark McGrath:It's the same old world, same old stuff.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, it's been amazing. So I just want to kind of see what's going on in your world. You got a new book coming out. Potentially You're doing a lot of work, even with our Navy still right. I mean you got Navy leaders that are calling you up?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I was down in Norfolk what was that? March I think and I was in San Diego in October. So, yeah, trying to help them understand some of the things they did well before, and maybe that can be a stepping stone to what they can do in the future.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Here's what you did. Here's what I learned from the Navy.
Mark McGrath:Here's what you can learn from the Navy. Well here's I alluded before we got, before we kicked off. I alluded to this so when I was in Norfolk is for this junior surface warfare officer symposium. So you have people there who had been doing stuff in the Red Sea. So you know they've, they've been at the at the sharp edge of things. But I want to give them some sense of what the Navy had done before.
Mark McGrath:And then I assumed that they would probably all know about the fleet problems of the twenties and thirties, and so it was like you know fleet problems and just wanted to gauge the room, like, okay, so raise your hand, if you've heard of the fleet problems. Nobody's hand went up. So it's, it's just, it's something that's been, it's too far back, it's lost in time, it's not a thing that they're, that they're concerned about. So there's value in the kinds of. That made me feel well. First I was like, okay, now I have to explain them. I wasn't anticipating having to do that, uh. But then second, uh, there's, there's value in the, in the kind of perspective that I try to bring to them, because I think some of this just isn't understood or isn't being taught.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Wow, Well, hey, I think we'll do a couple things here. Moose, do you have anything? Any parting thoughts?
Trent Hone:I have something I want to ask.
Mark McGrath:Trent offline.
Trent Hone:The only other historical topic that I didn't check off my list was Kemp Talley, the Cruise of the Lani Kai, which was a Naval Institute book that I read, and it was basically like a sailboat dispatched I think he had some kind of a murky background like OSS or something to basically sail around the Philippines and basically look for trouble in December of 1941.
Mark McGrath:Cruise of the Lani Kai.
Trent Hone:Oh, oh yeah I'm not familiar with that. Yeah, kemp tolly, he was an admiral. They have a bus of them at annapolis. There's a bust, um, and I should qualify too. I was naval rotc, not an annapolis grad, but uh, but I I do know that there was a bust of him, uh, and he got some award from Bill Clinton in before Putin, yeltsin for his work. So again, you know, draw your own conclusions. But like the book was the cruise of the Lonnie Kai and it was, it was a Naval Institute book that basically he led a, led a crew around the Philippines to basically seek to engage the Japanese or something. That was the pre-Pearl Harbor conspiracy. But the reality is what the stuff actually occurred, I think, after December 7th, yeah.
Mark McGrath:Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, there was a strong guerrilla contingent in the Philippines, and I would not at all surprised that US officers thought about that, because they had to fight against Philippine gorillas some 40 years before. So there was knowledge of how, uh, that kind of a uh I'll call it an insurgency uh could be maintained.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, trent, how can our listeners learn more about what you're doing? Uh, do you have a website? Uh, what books should they be buying from you? I do.
Mark McGrath:I do have a website. I do a good job at keeping up to date with regard to the speaking events that I have, but I don't do a good job of posting on there, but I also try to put articles and things when they appear. So that's just my name, with no spaces trenhonecom, so that's one way to find them. Uh, my books are uh available through the Naval Institute. I I published through them.
Mark McGrath:Uh, there's learning war, which we've talked about, mastering the art of command. There is a uh uh fighting in the dark, which was, uh an anthology of uh I've got, I was one of the editors and I also have a chapter in there, but that's about the evolution of night combat from the perspective of different navies through the 20th century, like the Russian Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and, of course, the US Navy. Let's see. And, yeah, there's another book coming out, but I don't owe that to the Naval Institute until January. So that's still in progress. Things are on track, but it will probably appear if things continue. Let's see. Next year is 2026. So probably early 2027.
Trent Hone:Learning War is my second favorite Naval Institute book.
Mark McGrath:Uh-oh, what's the first?
Trent Hone:Hunt for Red October. Oh, yeah, yeah, you can't go wrong with that I love that book my dad had a first edition and he was a West pointer.
Mark McGrath:He's like here you could have it.
Trent Hone:I have the original first edition hunt for red October Naval Institute press. That's awesome, yeah, and I'm a I've been a member since again ROTC days. But yeah, your work is phenomenal, Thank you.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, thanks for joining us, Trent. Like I said, it's been too long six years since we last connected in person. Yeah, man, the little COVID thing going on between then and now, but we're not too far from each other. We'll connect again, I'm sure, and you and I got to spend some time doing some complexity work with the U S Navy. Uh, 2020, I think it was 2019. I can't remember when that was last, but, uh, it's always a pleasure to work with you and and uh hear from you. So thanks for being on the show.
Trent Hone:Uh, we'll get this out as soon as possible. All right, awesome, stay. Stay with us, yep.
