I'm John Bachelors. This is the new John Bachelors show represented by CBS News Radio.

And it's a great pleasure to welcome a long time colleague, friend, and informant of matters to do with the United States Navy.

Captain Jerry Hendrix, U.S. Navy Aviator retired, who is the author of a new book to provide and maintain a Navy subtitle.

Why Naval Primacy is America's first best strategy?

Jerry, congratulations for the book. And we begin with our conversation with Threat.

You have asked, and the 65th Secretary of the Navy, John Layman, has generously remarked upon your book as a forward.

And in it, Mr. Layman uses this historical analogy to explain the present challenge for the U.S. Navy to do with the Pacific Ocean.

He says that it is wise to think of the Western Pacific, that would be East Asia, that would be the People's Republic of China.

The Western Pacific as the inner German border, referring to the 20th century.

What does that mean, Jerry? How does that explain the threat and the challenge for the U.S. Navy in the 21st century? Good evening to you.

Good evening, John. And thank you again for having me on. It's great to join you in your new venue here.

I think what Secretary Layman is talking about there, and he contextualizes within his, as you said, very, very kind forward to the book.

Is he's talking both strategically and geographically. So the inner German border during the Cold War was where the battle of ideas in so many ways was being played out.

And we can remember the idea of the Berlin Wall, and we can also remember the fixation with the full-degap as an area of high vulnerability for the Western Alliance against the Warsaw Pact nations.

That was where the competition would be played out if it went to war, but it was also where the competition was being played out in the Cold War peacetime environment in sort of a arena of ideas.

The idea of Western democracies and capitalism going up against the eastern communist countries and their particular form of economic coercion.

And so when we pivot and we look at our current competition specifically, Vista V, China, then the Western Pacific becomes the place where those battle of ideas, the idea of the central controlled economy, the idea of the central authoritarian state, which the Chinese are promoting both in their own country as well as trying to get the subservience of all the other nations, the Western Pacific to bow to them and their wishes.

But it also would be the location of where a war would play out if it went to that place.

So wars are determined in so many ways by both the capabilities and capacity of the opposing sides, but wars are also dependent upon the geography.

And so the Western Pacific has some very specific geography that will funnel and create points of conflict that we can sort of recognize and anticipate.

So I think Secretary Layman has correctly identified that the Western Pacific is the area of competition for the future and he is right to put our lens upon that.

A civilian such as myself might think to this problem, hey, it's the ocean.

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