TE US NAVY IS THE SECURITY O F THE EMPIRE. 3/4: Vectors: Heroes, Villains, and Heartbreak on the Bridge of the U.S. Navy by Thomas B. Modly (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Vectors-Heroes-Villains-Heartbreak-Bridge/dp/1642257036
Thomas Modly had an eclectic career in the military, academia, business, and government when he answered the call to service in 2017 and returned to the Navy where his career began. His experience, as chronicled in these pages, tells the story of Secretary Modly’s quest to advance the Department of the Navy’s preparedness for the challenges of this century. As Acting Secretary of the Navy he held fast to the mantra of “acting, not pretending,” and thus advocated aggressively for the Navy and Marine Corps’ future ― a future he believed would be defined by uncertainty and unpredictability. Every Friday he wrote a personal message to the entire Department regardless of rank. Those messages were called SECNAV Vectors. Each Vector was intended to clearly communicate his priorities and to establish a rapport with all levels of the organization. The subject of each Vector was inspired by real events that occurred in real time. As these events unfolded , the Secretary’s unyielding emphasis on being prepared for unpredictable events are proven to be prescient as the Navy found itself, unintentionally, in the center of COVID-19 crisis.
1905 RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Tom Maudley, his new book, Vectors, Heroes, |
| 0:10.2 | Villains, and Heartbreak on the Bridge of the U.S. Navy. And now we come to the most difficult |
| 0:15.8 | moments to my knowledge the United States has ever lived through. The pandemic called COVID-19. It is the winter of |
| 0:23.0 | 2020. Tom has been rewarded for all of his years of hard work with being the acting secretary |
| 0:31.3 | of the Navy in an unknown challenge of what do you do about a virus that we believe is dangerous, but we're not getting |
| 0:42.0 | good information from the People's Republic of China. |
| 0:45.1 | The important detail here are the people around Tom as acting secretary. |
| 0:49.5 | He has a great deal of powers. |
| 0:50.5 | He's a civilian. |
| 0:51.8 | And that, in our understanding, means that you have a deal of authority |
| 0:56.4 | with the uniforms. It's important to see who else he's serving with. The Secretary of Defense at |
| 1:04.7 | this time is Mark Esper. Who is he, Tom? And where does he come from? Mark Esper is a graduate of West Point, class of 86. He's a classmate, actually, of Secretary Mike Pompeo, both class of 86 guys from West Point. When I came to the Pentagon and this second time around, he was the Secretary of the Army. And he was selected to become the |
| 1:30.6 | Secretary of Defense when the original selection that President Trump had selected, Secretary |
| 1:38.3 | Shanahan, decided to withdraw his name from consideration. And so Secretary Esper was the next man up. |
| 1:46.1 | And Admiral Gilday, who is he? Where does he come from? Mike Gilday is a class of 85 from the Naval |
| 1:52.7 | Academy. And it's the consistent theme. There are a lot of people around the Pentagon during my |
| 1:58.1 | tenure who were either at West Point or at Annapolis the same time I was |
| 2:02.0 | there as a midshipman. But Mike is class of 85, so he would have been a sophomore when I was a |
| 2:08.3 | senior at the Naval Academy. He was the 10th Fleet Commander, which was the U.S. Naval Cyber Command, |
| 2:15.6 | and he had been selected to be the CNO after D'O. |
| 2:20.5 | Ron, who was the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, had to withdraw his name from consideration |
| 2:25.2 | due to a situation that had to do with him maintaining contact with a previous naval officer who had had some problems with sexual harassment. |
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