This is CBS, I'm the World. I'm John Batchel.

America's future is at sea.

An essay by Captain Jerry Hendrix, United States Navy, retired aviator in the Atlantic Monthly.

The telling subhead, the nation is ceding the seas to its enemies.

It's not too late to avoid catastrophe.

What catastrophe? Let's talk specifically about a new organization called Ocas, blessed by the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the Prime Minister of

Australia. The ambition is to base attack submarines the best, the very best, out of

Fremantle, which is a naval port associated with Perth in Western Australia, to provide a security

guarantee to the Indo-Pacific, the Indian Ocean to to the west, and to the north, the very critical

first and second island chain. The threat is the Chinese, the PLA Navy, which is building

plenty of ships quickly and casting those ships out in three levels, as I understand it.

There's the warships, the Coast Guard,

and the fishing fleet. They're all the same. They're all military affairs, and they move in swarms.

They swarm around the South China Sea, they swarm around the Philippine Sea and the Sea of Japan.

Jerry, I do not need to come up with a war game. We can pretty easily see

how things could fall apart. And my understanding is that Ocas is meant to answer all of that.

How does an attack submarine, or three attack submarines, which is the ambition, answer the swarm

of the PLA Navy? And what else is necessary to avoid the catastrophe

you mentioned in your essay? Thank you, John. And so on the August deal, what we've recognized

is China really has come up a way of offsetting our advantage of the technical superiority of our Navy and for that matter, the British

Navy and the navies of the Western Allies, they have outbuilt us. So although our ships are

marginally more technically capable than those are the Chinese Navy, the fact is, is the Chinese Navy

...