This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel. I'm visiting with two authors, James Finnell and Bradley Thayer. Their new book is embracing Communist China, America's greatest strategic failure. Failure is important here because admitting failure is a challenge for everyone, but especially

as I learned from Jim and Brad, the U.S. Navy.

Jim, I come to you because you're a veteran of intelligence gathering at the U.S. Navy and analysis,

strategic analysis, and in what is to be done about the Chinese

Communist Party's aggression against Taiwan, against the Western Pacific, against the United States

for world supremacy. The first thing is to admit failure. Let's be specific. The intelligence

community at the Navy to admit failure.

Are they ready to do that? Have they started walking in that direction, Jim? Good evening.

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 get 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, which I had 35 years ago, and you don't admit to

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