You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War in the Rocks.

On the sidelines of the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, we hosted a party party and at that party I sat down with

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plum for a podcast. It was a

live recording and we had a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Assistant Secretary of Defense John Plumb, thank you so much for joining us for this very

special live recording of the War on the's podcast. Well, thanks very much, Ryan. Happy to be here.

First question I have is, how did they let a Navy guy write the space commercialization strategy.

So you need to understand it was a submariner,

and submarines have a lot of similarities to space, right?

There's a hostile external environment, and at least in the case of the man missions, you got to keep the people safe inside the people tube, and that's true in space, it's true at submarines, so I think it's pretty natural.

Were you a little burned up when the Space Force didn't choose Navy ranks?

I'm still actually a little ticked off about that.

I have mentioned that to the chief of Space Operations.

He doesn't seem to care because of course he was Air Force, but clearly they made a mistake.

All right, well it's not like it's irreversible, I think.

You know, we can always fix that one.

So probably the, I would say, the most important effort you've worked on in this position

has just come out, this new strategy. Tell us why we needed new strategy.

Tell us why we needed this strategy.

What was missing before?

There's all these strategies that come out

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