Lt. Gen. Sklenka on Staying in the Fight
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name's Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. This episode is brought to you by OneBrief, which is transforming the future of the military staff.

Work seamlessly across teams and tech stacks on plans. Send PowerPoint packing. Go from five hours to 45 minutes with OneBrief. Learn more at warontherocks.com slash OneBrief. That's O-N-E-B-R-I-E-F. In this episode, I was joined by Lieutenant General Stephen D. Sklenka of the U.S. Marine Corps. He's the Deputy Commander of Installations and Logistics, and before that, he was Deputy Commander of Indo-Pacific Command. Enjoy the show. Thanks for joining the show.

What made you decide to become a Marine? It legitimately was a calling. I was raised a Catholic, and if you're familiar with the priest calling, at a young age when I was a kid, I decided I wanted to go to the United States Naval Academy and I wanted to be a Marine. My parents even have a letter that I wrote to my congressman when I was 10 years old, and the congressman wrote back,

essentially saying, "You're a little bit young for this, but good luck in the future," type thing. - Saying you wanted to be in the Marine Corps. - I said, "I want to go to the Naval Academy, and I wanted to be a Marine." - Do you remember what captivated you about the Marine Corps when you were younger? Did your family have a history of service? Was it just a movie, a story, something you saw? - That's a great question. - Probably hard to remember if it was before you were 10. - Yeah, I had some Marines in the family, I think like great uncles that fought in World War II. I didn't really know them growing up. I did live across the street where I was born,

From a Naval Academy graduate, he was a captain of one of the first nuclear submarines. That may have piqued my interest. I know I also, from my earliest memories of seeing the Iwo Jima Memorial,

That statue to me says America more than just about anything else I've ever seen. It says America. And I fast forward to when I was a senior at the Naval Academy. At that point, I had designated as a Marine and I had the great honor of being able to escort during the afternoon, Felix de Velden, the guy who actually sculpted the Uojima Memorial. Wow. And it was great to meet that guy. He's a Frenchman who, you know, his English was really good, obviously, but, and I tell him what an inspiration that is.

And every time that I drive by it here in Arlington, even just talking about it now, the hair on the back of my neck stands up because that is the symbol of America to me. My memory on this might be rusty, but I learned this through friends at the Naval Academy, or maybe it was on one of my visits there. But there's a senior Marine on faculty, right, who's a colonel. Is that right? Do you remember who that person was when you were at the Academy? Yeah, it was Colonel John Ripley, one of the absolute legends of our Corps. For those at home who don't know about him, tell us about him. Navy Cross recipient. The bridge over, I think, Dong Hall is what it was.

And under just unbelievable enemy fire, essentially did hand over hand underneath a bridge, set up explosives while he's getting shot at, but he had to blow this bridge in order to help save, I believe at the time he was an advisor and he was saving the South Vietnamese military unit.

And successfully was able to stop an NVA onslaught. But just pure heroism. And when you go to the Naval Academy, you go into Memorial Hall, there's a diorama of him underneath that bridge. It's just, it's an amazing story. Must have been pretty powerful to be there as a plebe where there was this living legend there. You know, I also had the great opportunity. Admiral Stockdale would come and talk to us. And for those who don't know, I mean, he was the senior American POW in Vietnam. And

It's funny. He was an incredible warfighter, obviously, but he spoke to us more about the philosophical aspect of leadership. And he talks his story when he was at Stanford. He was sent to Stanford to learn, essentially, international relations. But as he tells the story, he stumbled into a philosophy professor's office. And the next thing you knew, he'd been reading about Stoicism, and the professor had given him Epictetus' book. And he just became fascinated. And he said it was his study of philosophy that enabled him to...

not just survive and endure those years of captivity, but to thrive in it.

As he was parachuting down, I mean, the big famous quote is, you know, he says, I've now entered the world of Epictetus. And he wasn't talking about ancient Greece. He was more talking about the world of Stoicism as what's going to get him through it. It was just, in my view, he was one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. So you graduate the Naval Academy. They send you to basic school. Initially start off as a supply officer, went off, and then I had an account for about eight months. And they sent me off to be a logistics officer for an organization and I'm staying as a logistics officer. But

I went off to six Marines, participated in Operation Just Cause as a lieutenant, then came back. What was that like? What was your role in that? Look, I have fours gumped my way through life. And this was just yet another one of those instances where I went down there really just to inventory equipment. And I ended up being, I don't want to say stuck down there, but when I was down there, that's when Just Cause kicked off. After that one, I did a deployment around South America, again, with part of a reinforced rifle company. And then I came back from that, went to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War.

Finished that, finished my tour out at six Marines and then PCS to transfer to Camp Pendleton. And, you know, within a year we were in Somalia. What was it like playing a role in sustaining the Gulf War as a Marine? That was my first introduction to force deployment, DP&E, the force deployment plan execution that we do, and also maritime prepositioning force.

What it really conveyed to me is the importance of planning and making sure that if you're going to employ forces, an old mentor of mine told me this before, those who plan to employ forces

You need to also make sure you're planning for the deployment of those forces. And it's more than just sending a whole bunch of stuff over. You need to have a plan for how that stuff arrives and what particular order and the rationale behind that. Whether you're doing it by air, whether depending on how you load a ship a certain way, the idea is to be able to, especially in the Marine Corps, the idea...

is to, we call it force closure, close that force out, which means have it put back together fully as quickly as possible, but not just put back together ready to employ. Who was the best boss that you had in the Marine Corps who was not a general or flag officer? Mike Dana is top of that list. Why is Mike Dana at the top of that list? Tomorrow is my 30th wedding anniversary. I was his executive officer as a first lieutenant, and he was my company commander in Mogadishu.

He was a sore bearer in that wedding 30 years ago. He has stayed like a big brother. He helped guide me through areas. God knows the guy has counseled me and mentored me and advised me and helped me along the way. And even in retirement, he is still helping me. And it is all out of genuine altruism.

And to this day, he works at a company that my daughter coincidentally works at. And my daughter is his executive assistant. So he can't get away from the Sklenkas. He's got a mentor, yet another one, but he's a great leader. I think about Lieutenant Colonel Bill Clark. I think about Colonel Pete James, Dewey Malden, our regimental commander, 7th Marines, Chuck Hudson. And the ones that I mentioned also, we learned a lot of what we learned from guys like Pete James, another great one. He was our commander in

Somalia, landing support battalion. I've never met a man who tactical logistics as well as him. He wasn't one of my committee. He was a peer of mine, but I think he's probably the best tactical logisticians I've ever known. Mike Stroud, who happens to be my daughter's godfather. John Broadmeadow, he was a really important person

for me for how to build a team and just had a genuine empathy with him that I thought really caused people to be inspired by his leadership. What does it mean to be a great tactical logistician? Explain it to someone who doesn't know logistics from a hole in the wall. I'll tell you, I

I guess would be having that combination of vision, knowing what organizations need in order to sustain their ability to execute their missions, knowing as much about what that organization does

And I'll give you an example. Knowing infantry tactics as well as any of the infantry officers so that you can anticipate. I mean, that's probably one of the best things, Trace, that you need to have, I think, is be able to anticipate requirements. Don't wait for people to tell you what they need. And then being collaborative because you're going to have to source from all kinds of different folks and having the ability to pull a bunch of disparate elements together into one cohesive team.

And now that guy, Mike Stratt, he's the Commandant of Midshipmen Tired Marine at the Merchant Marine Academy. How does the Marine Corps, and explain this especially to non-military listeners, we have a lot of military listeners, but especially to our non-military listeners, how does the Marine Corps approach logistics differently from the Army? Not in good versus bad, but just very different kinds of forces. Well, for one, I think that traditionally the Marine Corps tends to view itself as a much more expeditionary force and less of a permanent force and more of a temporary one.

We go in smaller because we are smaller. We don't have large logistics organizations in the manner that the Army does. I think that traditionally the Army, and it has served them exceptionally well, and I'll tell you this right now, I don't know of any service that has better all-around logisticians than the United States Army. They know that business really well. But it's much more, I think, about for the Marine Corps, it's about coming in as light as possible

And as quickly as possible and closing the force as quickly as possible. The Army, I think, has the ability to build much larger organizations. That takes some time, but they also know that they have a different purpose than what the Marine Corps has. Before we get to your current role, your last role was a very senior officer.

joint leadership role in INDOPACOM. How did you get selected for that? And tell us about that role and what you were dealing with. Yeah, it's another case me forced, got my way through life. Look, I was the J-5 at INDOPACOM from 19 to 21. And Admiral Davidson was the commander of INDOPACOM at the time. Admiral Aquilino was his successor, but he also had the great opportunity to work with Admiral Aquilino when he was commanding PAC Fleet at the same time I was the J-5.

Those two gentlemen, they decided that they were going to ask me to fleet up. And I could tell you, you know, we talk about great leaders. Both of them are great leaders. I learned a great deal from Admiral Davidson. I think when I finished my time as his J-5, I should have gotten some kind of advanced degree like, you know, from the Kennedy School. And Admiral Aquilino, one of the best leaders I've ever come across, any service. And nobody knows joint war fighting like that man knows it.

And so I was afforded an extraordinary opportunity to not just focus on logistics, but to truly understand for those five years, the two years as the J-5 and the three years as the DCOM, as the deputy commander, to really understand what joint war fighting is. And I learned it from two of its best practitioners, Admiral Davidson and Admiral Aquilino. I'll forever be grateful for that opportunity.

No, it has made me a much better logistician because I'm able to, I think, see the world through the joint lens, which, and in the end, that's how we fight. Goldwater Nichols identified us as a joint force in 86, or we pushed that point as a joint force. But

But we have increasingly fought as a joint force. And the days of fighting as individual services, I can't see us going back to that. This is a pretty perilous time in many ways in terms of US-China relations. Without speaking to policy, of course, there were a lot of tensions over Taiwan, this ever-increasing pace of military exercises that start, in my opinion at least, looking a lot more like rehearsals than just exercise. I mean, exercises are in rehearsals to an extent, but this started looking at

much more at scale that you would do it rather than just sort of going through the motions. And then of course, China pressing our allies, the Philippines over the Spratlys and a lot of other big things going on. How do you as DCOM keep track of all these different things that are going on in such a large area of responsibility against such a capable and massive potential adversary? Yeah. Any good organization is a product of its people. We had phenomenal, phenomenal,

operations officers, starting with when I got there, Webb Kaler, Admiral Webb Kaler, who's now the commander of Pacific Fleet, with John Wade in there. Pat Hannafin is in there now. We had great intelligence officers in both Mike Studeman and Tommy Hannershet. You won't find two people who know the Chinese better than those two men. Tom spent, I want to say, 12 out of 16 years either in Beijing or Taipei in various out-of-shay billets.

We had phenomenal J6s and the J4s and J1, J8. It's just the team itself. We had a great strategic focus group that was focused on what the Chinese were doing. So it was a collaboration of really strong commitment and

great analyses from all of them that came together. And I'll tell you, Admiral Davidson and Admiral Aquilino, when I was at DCOM, Admiral Aquilino really drove all that. He was the orchestra conductor at this point. And really, if you want to know what's going on in OPECOM, go down to their operations and intelligence updates. It's in the Joint Operations Center that we do every day. That's when you really see the full orchestra coming together. I also wanted to mention, there were great J-5s that came after me, Chris McPhillips,

Jay Bargeron, just doing great work there. And of course, during the last few months as a deputy commander, I was really fortunate to work for Admiral Papparo. He's a true visionary and a strategist strategist. He's got this natural ability to seamlessly link all the elements of national influence into significant operational actions that all directly impact our overarching national strategy. Sometimes I wonder, I don't know if you can answer this, but you're obviously looking at the threat capital letters across a really broad scope of issues. But

But you just talked about the people on the stellar Indo-PACOM team. How much are you looking at the specific team facing you down? By that, I mean your equivalents, whoever they are in the PLA at that same level. The entire time that I was there, except for my first maybe two years, I didn't talk to counterparts in the PLA. And it's not that I didn't want to. They were not authorized to talk to me. I did a military maritime consultation agreement, MMCA, meeting my first year as the J-5. And after that, the Chinese decided that they didn't want to talk to us for any...

it was policy issues, I guess, but it's not from lack of wanting to talk to them. I can tell you also that neither Admiral Davidson nor Admiral Aquilino were able to talk to their counterparts and they were trying, but the Chinese were not, were not. Yeah, mil-mil relationships were a fraud issue, but you want to understand these people too because you might be fighting a war against them. And so the best way to do that is reestablish

Read. Because the Chinese put a lot of things on the internet. Got their military strategy that they put out there. You've got people who have been there before, again, like Mike Studeman and Tom Hendershed, who know how these guys operate. Yeah, they're a pretty robust system of professional journals. And the party itself publishes tons of reports and documents that actually have meaning. They're not just random pieces of paperwork. Yeah. And of course, our intel. And if you're in any of those positions and you are not studying your craft every single day, then you're doing the organization, the nation's disservice. You have to study that stuff.

harder than at any university that you've attended. I'm going to take a quick break from my conversation with the good general for a short chat with Grant Demery, the founder and CEO of OneBrief, a truly exciting company. Grant, it's great to have you on the show again to tell us about what is happening with OneBrief. My understanding is, is you're betting really big on AI, but I want to start with how that relates to your conception of the future of the military staff and where that's heading. Yeah. Okay. So the overall goal for the company is to build the future of the military staff. The

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So we've got a couple of things we're trying to improve about these staffs. And one of them is speed that comes from really heavy automations. We're going to spend about 40 million in the next year on our AI efforts. I think the future of the staff really is the most important thing happening in defense tech because it scales very nicely where if you change any military staff with software, you can actually change all of them at once, which means you've got this really long leverage.

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O-N-E-B-R-I-E-F. And now back to the show. Your understanding of tactical and now at this point, of course, strategic logistics and of the Indo-PACOM AOR must be why General Smith asked you to take on your current role, which is probably, in my opinion at least,

One of the most important roles in the Marine Corps, because getting to the fight and staying in the fight depends on the things that are in your portfolio. But first, before we get to those issues, what is it like going from being a senior force employer to a force generator? Now you've sort of seen both sides of the table. There's an inherent tension between the two.

Yeah. And for our listeners that don't understand the sort of terminology there, what I mean is the geographic combatant commands, they use the forces and the services create and generate the forces. Yeah. You know, it's funny you talk about the tension. I think that could be a self-generated thing. I came into this job with the fundamental or at least with the understanding that fundamental responsibility of a service headquarters, at least since Goldwater Nichols in 1986, that fundamental responsibility of a service headquarters to provide security.

forces that optimize the warfighting capability and effectiveness of the combatant commanders. That's it. Everything else is ancillary to that. Now, there's a lot that goes into that. Everything from getting the right stuff, recruiting the right people, retaining your people, making sure you've got the force doc or your service doctrines aligned. But ultimately, all of that should be serving the ends to ensure that we're optimizing the warfighting capabilities and effectiveness of those combatant commanders. I felt that when I was in a combatant command. I certainly understand that and feel that.

in the service headquarters. And that's the mentality I brought with me. So what's the challenge facing you now? Where are you trying to reorient or maybe not reorient, but change the Marine Corps to be able to do that maybe it's not currently able to do or hasn't been able to do? Not that it's like you just arrived and are changing everything. Of course, this is all part of a

vision that started under Neller and took the pace under Berger and is continuing under General Smith. Yeah. Look, I was really fortunate in coming in behind a great guy, 10th General Ted Banta, really had the organization humming. When I got there, I put out, I call them three enduring priorities. They are my North Star for as long as I'm privileged to be in this position. They're the three things. I deliberately did not number them because they're not in a, I want to prioritize one over the other, but those three enduring priorities are

One, I wanted to deliver, accelerate that delivery and really make sure I'm delivering the Commandant's Barracks 2030 plan. Other ones were, I want to accelerate the delivery of logistics capabilities for force design. And then I want to really institutionalize what I believe INL's role is going to be in a joint fight. And that has multiple pieces in it. Everything from how our bases are going to be used. I believe now, nowadays in modern warfare, bases are no longer these

administrative garrison sanctuaries. They're going to be as much a part of a fight as any division, wing, or MLG. Whereas we'll be fighting from many of these bases and be inevitable that we'll be fighting for some of these bases, you know? And by fighting, I'm not talking about just kinetically. I'm talking about the non-kinetic fights such as cyber attacks that will be just as devastating to the force and our ability to conduct sustainment as any kinetic strike will be.

And I want to also make sure that, and you hit on this earlier, that we are optimizing the educational opportunities for both our military and civilian logisticians in the Marine Corps regarding joint warfare, you know, so that they're in this. But, you know, the barracks piece is not just a quality of life thing, Ryan. I truly believe that one of the reasons I really do support force design is I believe that if you're going to be relevant in a modern fight, you have got to have a modernized force.

General Neller, General Berg, General Smith committed to delivering that modernized force and keeping us relevant and to make sure that we prevail. Part of that modernization action is modernizing barracks, I believe. These Marines and sailors who live in those barracks need a place to rest, refit, and be ready for either training or

or fight the next day. And training happens in the barracks too, of course. Yeah, absolutely. I want to make sure that we are delivering and accelerating the delivery of logistics capabilities for force design to include making sure we have the right framework, the right organizational construct for our logistics forces, because that again enables us to deliver Marine forces to those combatant commands to give them their optimized fighting capabilities from a Marine end. And then,

Like I was saying earlier, on day one of a fight, what is the service headquarters role? At least from the logistics end, what is INL's role on day one of the fight and working through that and understanding? We're not controlling forces. We're not directing forces out there. We are not necessarily even directly sustaining forces tactically. But what I've got to make sure is that those Marine Forces Command units

And our MEFs in particular, Marine Expeditionary Forces, who are going to be the real war fighter out there, I got to make sure that they have the ability to sustain the fight that they're operating. And that brings me to the next question pretty naturally. How does the stand-in force sustain itself? These are Marines that are going to be operating mostly in pretty small units, and they might end up kind of cut off. They're going to be close into the adversary, getting in the adversary's face.

denying the adversary's ability to move, to maneuver, to fight. But how are they themselves going to be sustained? How are we figuring that out? I'm not trying to break it down into too much simplicity, but you're talking about supply and distribution. And in the Pacific, when you just look at a map, that place is massive. And you've got multiple challenges associated with it. It's the intra-theater surface lift, I believe, is a challenge right now that I believe we're getting after with LSM and with our bridging solution that we're looking at.

I believe also we can help with the strategic lift and even some of the operational lift with pre-positioning. And pre-positioning, I believe, has three main elements to it. We, of course, know about the maritime pre-positioning.

the ships that are out there floating with capabilities. You've got ground-based prepositioning, which increasingly enables us to put the right capability in the right location. So visualizing what this fight would look like or what a fight would look like and trying to predict as much as possible which forces would be using that. That's how you figure out your packages. And then the third piece, which is often overlooked, I think, when we talk prepositioning, is contracting. Because in the end, prepositioning is not stuff.

Pre-positioning is about posturing capability that the warfighter can use. And that's where the contracting piece comes in.

Those who believe that all contracts will go away because no civilians are going to want to be part of any fight, I disagree. I think that if we pay them, they'll work. You don't mean contracts. You're not talking about the big five here. You're talking about people in theater, right? That's right. Absolutely, that's what I'm talking about. Basically, not quite, but living off the land, living off the resources that are available in the AOR or as much as you can. That's part of the equation, but it's also understanding how all that stuff fits together to make a whole. You talk about the whole of being greater than the sum of the parts.

What I didn't even talk about also is thinking about what capabilities some of our friends may have that they'd be willing to

share with or partner with. We talk about what allies, certain allies or certain partners would offer. I will say though, that I think it's important to understand that I consider those as additive. It's not, and I speak pejoratively against any ally or partner. What I'm doing is respecting their sovereignty. The decision to go into conflict is a sovereign decision and we cannot take for granted and think and presume that any nation is going to necessarily fight alongside of us. What are your views on these swarming

and unmanned technologies and their applicability to sustainment and logistics? Well, one, I think that any opportunity that you can use an autonomous system to enable sustainment is a good move because it removes a human being from the prospect of entering directly into conflict. There's great potential out there. We just need to understand when you're talking about sustainment of large organizations, that requires...

equipment that can in many cases carry a lot of stuff. So I guess what I'm saying is

I like the idea of modularity. And I think that's one of the areas where our CD&I guys down in Quantico have really been good about developing small, medium, and large. And I'm oversimplifying platforms to facilitate distribution out there in flying, airborne ones, and also in surface. Where do you see, with your experience as deputy commander in OPECOM, now in your role running all installations and logistics for the Marine Corps, you have a pretty good idea of how

lethality is delivered from different sides of the table. What's your framework for how that works and how you see logistics and sustainment fitting into that? Yeah. One, again, it's just on my credit to working for Admiral Aquilino. He identified and I adjusted with him what I call the three main capabilities that any joint force needs in order to prevail in a fight. Blind, see, and kill. Those are the things I want to do to the adversary.

Blinding him, we're talking about counter C5ISRT. Essentially what that is, it's denying the ability of your adversary to see you, to sense you. You're taking away their sensors. You're blinding them from, even if it's just temporarily, you're denying them the ability to know that you are there. And it allows you to operate in what is normally contested spaces. You're doing it in certain periods.

I think the phrase has been pulsed operations. You know, you're in there for a pulse, for a period, then you have to move on. But essentially what you're doing is it's enabling you to blind your adversary from seeing you and execute some offensive functions or even, you know, I guess some defensive as well, but many offensive functions in that period where you've denied your adversary the ability to dissent you. The C part is your ability to provide essentially the, what we call a COP. COP is the, you know, the acronym Common Operating Picture.

That enables you and all of the forces, all of the friendly forces around you, as well as your higher headquarters and subordinate organizations, and even select allies and maybe even select partners to see the disposition of all of your forces as well as the adversary forces. But it goes beyond that also. It's also a point, click, and kill where you can put a cursor over a particular icon.

and destroy that on the spot. That leads into the third part, the kill, which is giving all those same forces that you have operating out there the ability to at least access this joint fires network that enables you to deliver effects, kinetic or non-kinetic effects, against your adversary.

All three of those things, that's the blind seat kill piece, are tied together by the sustainment of those capabilities. And that's where the logistics piece comes in. I know you're a voracious reader. Share with us some of the books that you've had on your mind lately or big ones that made an influence on you throughout your career. One of my all-time favorites is called The Soul Battle by Victor Davis Hanson. He takes three commanders, Epimenides, Theban, that destroy what was thought to be the unbeatable Spartans, Sherman,

who led the Union Army against what was at the time considered to have a Confederacy with supposedly better leaders, and Patton, who, of course, led the American forces against the Nazis. The point that

that I think Hanson is addressing in here is it's one thing to put your spirit as a commander into your force. But when you put the soul of your force or provide your force with the soul, I mean, you enable that force to do what really was unthinkable. And the thread that he puts in there is that only true democratic forces have the ability to have a soul. At least that's what I took out of it.

It really was a great lesson. I'd gone growing up, learned about Sherman, learned about Patton. I'd never heard of Epaminidus before, but he was this Theban farmer that just came in. And the Thebans were a democratic society, and they went up against the authoritarian regime of the Spartans and soundly defeated them. The Democratic Union Army took care of the Confederacy Army. And of course, we know what Patton did to the Germans. I think that We Were Soldiers Once and Young made a big impression on me when I was a company commander at Atlantic Support Battalion.

I'd never written the author of a book before, and I hadn't since, but I was a captain, and I wrote General Moore, just saying, hey, this book really moved me. I liked how every single soldier that he writes about in that book, he doesn't just give their name. He gives a little piece of information about them, where they're from or how old they were. You could tell how much he cared for his guys. And I wrote him, and then I'd moved him to Quantico from California for amphibious warfare school. Nine months later, I get this letter in the mail with three stars in the return address, and he says...

Dear Captain Sklenka, I'm paraphrasing, but essentially it was, I just received your letter. Thank you for it. I shared it with Joe Galloway and I've got to bring him out to the basic school to give a lecture in the mid-90s when I was an instructor. It was fantastic. And then I think Admiral Stockdale's thoughts of a philosophical fighter pilot, which is a compendium of his speeches and writings are phenomenal. I got one. I'll show you. I actually have two that you might. One, you might've heard this one. Oh yeah. Ben's. My friend, Ben Buchanan. That's right. And Andrew's book, The New Fire.

Phenomenal. And this guy is from your King's College. I haven't read this one. Cary Brown's Why Taiwan Matters. I should read this. Yeah, I just started Why Taiwan Matters. I'll tell you, Ben Buchanan's New Fire is fantastic. Yeah, this is, I totally agree. For the listeners at home, I think this is the best book. If you read one book on the intersection of

National Security and AI, it should be this book, Buchanan and Embry's New Fire. I'll tell you, in the theater, I think Alliance Adrift is probably the best book I've read about the US-Japan alliance. It was written

late 90s, but it's just as relevant today. I think Ambassador Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the United States, his book on Xi Jinping, as well as Alfred Chan's book about Xi Jinping, those two are fantastic. Rush Doshi's The Long Game is definitely one of the best I've read, as well as Susan Shirk. She wrote a fantastic one that was overreach, I believe that was called. But the Alliance Adrift that I was mentioning earlier, Yoichi Funabashi, great book about the US-Japan alliance. I think

- Anything by Dr. Lawrence Friedman. - Yeah, dear friend, he's the best. - Yeah, I think, I'm also, look, I'm a fan of Annie Jacobson, "The Pentagon's Brain: The Story of DARPA," and her book, "Nuclear War Scenario,"

Holy cow. That book, Nuclear War Scenario, I think every American should read. That really is a fantastic piece. A friend of mine, Mike Green, Dr. Michael Green, he wrote by more than Providence, it's Grand Strategy, History of American or Grand Strategy and American Power in Asia Pacific. And then I think The Mirror Test by Kale Weston, for me, is probably the best book about the desert wars. Kale, State Department guy, seven straight years in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he wasn't in higher headquarters levels. He was down with the troops in many of these areas.

I think if you want to understand a joint fight victory on the Potomac. Yeah. That was a great one about Goldwater Nichols. Yeah. Jim Locker. That is well worth reading. The desire to know and why your future depends on it. Ian Leslie wrote that. I like that because it reminds you as we get older, we tend to get less curious. And if anything, you need to become more curious as you get older. Well, this list definitely shows us that you are curious. So thank you so much for joining the show.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. Don't forget to check out our membership program at warontherocks.com slash membership. And of course, check out our sponsors and supporters of this episode, One Brief at warontherocks.com slash one brief. Stay safe and stay healthy.