This is, John Bachelor, conversation with Jim Finel and his colleague Bradley Thayer, their new book,

Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure, turns on failure and how difficult it is to accept failure.

And Jim describes here his experiences,

US Navy Captain Retired, Intelligence Officer for the Pacific Fleet, how difficult it is for

anyone, especially a professional military man or woman, to admit failure.

However,

James Finel, Captain James Finel, you United States Navy retired

Intelligence Officer on Embracing Communist China

America's greatest strategic failure and what is to be done.

More of this later.

Well, good evening, John and Brad.

I think the admitting failure is a very difficult thing for the system to do.

During my time in uniform when I was raising these issues about the threat from China

there was a lot of people that would, and we had documented cases of where we missed platforms or we missed a strategic development, a new weapon system.

And when somebody would say, how come we didn't find this

somebody would always stand up and say well you know we did there was this one

report that some guy wrote and so we didn't really miss it so there's this

institutional bias towards defending the institution and it's

very very difficult to say that you've admitted a mistake and so I think it's very difficult today for people to

stand up and admit it.

And in a book we talk about there's two, we give two examples of why it's important.

One of them for me is personal. If you have cancer, you have a tumor inside of you,

...