This is John Batchelor, conversation with my good friend, Captain Jerry Hendrix, the United States Navy retired

aviator about the submarine fleet. In the event of warfare with China in the Western Pacific. The submarine fleet is what we can

count on to get through and do the fighting. It is not now ready. It is inadequate for the contest that's coming. Why? Because of shipyards and

dry docks, because of maintenance, because the Navy is not invested enough in building new boats fast enough because

Jerry describes this all in a great deal of detail.

Right now he's just talking about what that war is going to look like and

now we have to get there with our boats. Captain Jerry Hendricks, United States Navy

retired, aviator. More of this tonight, much more. That is correct. So the idea that

somehow a seventh fleet was going to sort of its carrier and that we would take all the

carriers from the West Coast and we would cross the Pacific and come to

Taiwan's aid or the Philippines aid, you know, that's not going to happen the way that we would think

about it in a movie. The first thing that has to get in and sort of knock down China's defenses is going to be

submarines and they're going to need to get in there and take torpedoes to take out Chinese

People's Liberation Army Navy vessels and take their missiles to be able to

launch against Chinese surface-to-air missile sites or radar sites and so that our

aircraft, whether they're fifth generation or sixth generation or even fourth generation

Hornets for them to be able to get in there the submarines have to get there first to

knock these things down and we simply don't have enough and again going

back to what we said previously the the ones that we do have, we are unable to maintain them. So we have two dynamic tensions here, John. We're not able to build new submarines fast enough, and we are not able to maintain the boats that we already

have in the fleet at a high state of readiness.

This will be a challenge to us in some sort of a global crisis.