This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Batchew with Captain Jerry Hendricks, United States Navy

retired aviator, the author most recently of, to provide and maintain a Navy, why naval

primacy is America's first best strategy. In the Atlantic Monthly, now on the stands, Jerry's written, America's

future is at sea. And controversially and excitingly, he makes the very careful point that

C-Powers is Costco. Sea Powers is Kmart. Sea Powers is Amazon. How so, Captain Hendrix?

Well, John, if you really think about the big box stores that have increasingly dominated our economy, whether it's Walmart that sort of led the way,

our Lowe's, Home Depot, or BJ's Hellsale Club, or Costco, these are all based upon

big box commerce. So all those

vast container ships loaded with hundreds of containers that come from Asia or for Africa or even

our European allies, those all come to us and make it to these big box stores via the

seat. I mean, 90% of our trade by value, 80% by volume, all comes by sea. And so we all

depend on the sea. The sea is part and parcel of our modern economy. And yet for far too

long now, we've just assumed that this is a natural state that is a condition,

this idea of the free sea with free trade, is a natural condition of the world, when in fact,

that's a relatively new phenomenon up until the end of World War II.

In fact, the seas were contested, and no one would have built a large ship like the great-sized ocean liners or the huge super tankers or the huge container ships that we have today.

No one would have built those in the past when the sea was contested because no one could have afforded to put that much value into one asset and set it upon the world's oceans in a place where it could either be sunk

by an enemy power or hijacked by a pirate. And so what we see in the modern economy,

and the tremendous exponential growth in the modern economy that we've seen since 1945,

has largely been guaranteed, in fact,

by the United States Navy, which has cleared the seas of trouble and established this new

condition of the free sea. It was a dream that we once had as mankind, but it's a dream that's

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