This is a CBS I on the world. I'm John Bachelor,

Gordon Chang, my colleague and co-host and we're very pleased to welcome

the author and our colleague James Finel, his new book

Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure, written with his

colleague Bradley Thayer, identifies what is to be done and Jim has done us the favor of reducing

the immediate demands to five. Jim a very good evening to you thank you for

this US Navy Captain Retired Intelligence your opinion is valued

survivability number one what does that mean good evening to you

good evening John and Gordon, survivability means that, you know, there's kind of this perception that, you know, one bomb on one ship means that the ship is sunk and it's out of commission. And we know that that's just not true so it's worth

putting up front that Navy worships especially the ones today with you know have a

lot of extra work that's been put into them compared to World War II

era ships for compartmentalization and survivability, including defensive systems that go into the ships to be able to shoot down incoming

aircraft or missiles and whatnot.

So I think in that sense we need to make sure that, you know, when we talk about whether or not aircraft

carriers are survivable platform into the future that we just don't write it off

and say well they're you know kind of like what Billy Mitchell tried to do in the in the

20s by saying that air power theory was the

dominant theory at that time and he was pushing saying that the navies were going to be

obsolete because of air power.

The same kind of mindset is in place today with missile power theory,

which is to say missiles can destroy anything at sea, and I think that's overstated. I think

it's very dangerous. The missiles, I'm not down-plated, just like air power's very dangerous the missiles. I'm not down-plaining just like air power is very

...