All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Winslow T. Wheeler.
He is director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C.
He's the author of The Waste Rules of Defense and Military Reform, and he released a new anthology, America's Defense Meltdown, after the presidential elections to help guide the new president out of the national security mess that the Republicans and Democrats have jointly created in Washington, his bio says here.
He's worked on national security issues for members of the U.S. Senate and for the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, and he writes for counterpunch.org and for the Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Winslow.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thanks for having me on the show.
I appreciate it.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
I'm looking at your most recent piece at the Huffington Post, which I saw an email that you sent out that said that this article actually has been updated, but it's still a very interesting story.
It's the fight between the Secretary of Defense, as they call him, Robert Gates, and the Pentagon over what sorts of products they want to buy from the American arms market.
What's so important about this dispute here?
Well, my take on it is that Robert Gates, two years in a row, has put out a number of issues that he has announced to be important.
And I don't have any problem with his selection, although it's sort of a limited selection.
My problem is that when he trots out some of these issues, almost immediately he lets it be known that he's not going to defend his own position.
Last year, he said he wanted to terminate C-17 production, that's a pretty expensive transport aircraft.
And within days, he had his spokesman announce that it was okay for Congress to add still more of those airplanes to a supplemental spending bill.
This year, he announced that he had some serious doubts as to whether the Navy could afford and needed as many aircraft carrier battle groups as it had in its plan.
He complained about the military pay raises that Congress kept on raising and made more expensive.
And he complained about the high cost, high and growing cost of the defense health care system.
And there again, within days, he himself announced that he was not so crazy to think that any of those things would actually happen.
And I don't understand his approach to things to, you know, trot out some serious issues there and then say, well, don't pay any attention to what I said.
On the other hand, he has picked a few issues to stand and fight on.
Last year, he picked the F-22.
This year, he's picked the second engine for the F-35 fighter and again, the C-17.
And that fight is just beginning in Congress today.
Well, did he back down on the F-22?
Because I guess this is going back, well, let's see, somewhere, I guess we're about two years ago.
Maybe it was three, but I think it was two years ago where he was given the speeches.
I think two or three different speeches.
One of them that was to the officer core of the Air Force telling them, man, forget the F-22.
We're not fighting the Chinese.
We're bombing civilians, basically, who don't have airplanes.
We don't need a dogfight.
We need to be able to drop bombs on people on the ground.
And we need the F-35 for that, not the F-22.
Get it together.
And the Air Force was really resisting him.
There was a big fight over that.
But then I thought he won it.
No?
He did.
Last year, he fought back an amendment by Senator Saxby Chambliss to add more F-22s to the annual spending bill.
And there is a huge fight on Capitol Hill about it.
And Gates won.
And so that's done.
That's over.
Well, now, but wasn't there something about they were going to keep making them for the Israelis for a while or something, right?
No.
No?
Not even that?
There is no sales contracted.
And the U.S. production line will end after aircraft number 184 is produced.
Oh, well, that's good news, at least.
Well, there's talk about putting it back into production if the F-35, the new sort of replacement aircraft, turns out to be as big a failure as it clearly looks like it's going to be.
Putting the F-22 back into production is a bad idea.
But the F-35 is turning out to be a real disaster.
OK, now, I understand that in a way, I mean, all things being equal and the national security strategy, you know, accepted, you got people looking into the future and they go, OK, well, we got to have fighter planes that are going to be good 25, 30 years in the future.
So we got to develop something new.
But on the other hand, you know, and maybe the people in the Air Force that I've asked about this just have too much pride or whatever.
But my understanding basically is that a fleet of F-15s can kill anyone in the world from 600 miles away and nobody can stop a fleet of F-15 Eagles, period.
And so if it's just a matter of refurbishing them or whatever, fine.
But that's right or not?
Well, both the F-15 and the F-16 have been very successful aircraft.
I should point out that when they were conceived in the late 60s, the Air Force didn't want any part of them, both airplanes.
It was a group of individuals then known as the so-called fighter mafia that were behind the design for those airplanes.
You know, that was, you know, 40 years ago.
And it is correct that we need to modernize our tactical aircraft inventory.
It would be nice to have an affordable aircraft that brought a significant performance improvement over the F-15 and the F-16.
Instead, what we're getting is the F-22, which is a multiple by a factor of six over what you can buy an F-15 for these days, and is a huge disappointment in terms of performance.
It should be a far better fighter than what it is.
And we also have the F-35 to replace the F-16.
We don't know its final unit cost, but it's already a multiple of two or three of what we can buy a modern F-16 for.
And it's going to be even more than that.
And it's an even bigger performance disappointment than the F-22.
Neither of those airplanes are affordable, and they should be far better than what they are.
All right, now, so imaginary scenario, total non-nuclear war against Russia and China, the F-14s, F-18s, F-15s, F-16s we have, can or cannot whoop all of their MiGs for the next generation into the future as it stands right now?
Well, there's a number of things I'm concerned about.
Number one is how well we're training our pilots.
We don't have our pilots train as much in the air in air combat maneuvering as we used to, for example, in the so-called hollow years of the Jimmy Carter administration.
We've been going backwards on air combat training.
And the most important thing that determines whether you win or lose in a one versus one engagement has always been pilot skill, regardless of the nature of the airplane.
Yeah, experience.
Another thing to worry about is the shrinking and aging nature of our inventory.
Our defense budget has been going up significantly, especially since the later years of the Clinton administration.
But that has bought us, quite literally, an aircraft inventory that is smaller and older each year.
It's the amazing phenomenon of a smaller, older, less ready to fight force is costing us more and more money, an increasing amount of money each year.
And so there are issues to be concerned about.
On the other hand, we have a relationship with both Russia and China where, you know, that's very different from the Cold War.
And the conflict with either country is not only it's nowhere on the horizon, but it'd be an act of incredible foolishness to provoke a conventional fight with the likes of China and Russia.
I mean, China is our largest trading partner, you know, outside of this hemisphere.
And it would be an act of incredible incompetence to get into a fight with them.
Yeah, well, either of them could wipe out our entire civilization in an afternoon, just like vice versa.
So thank you for pointing that out.
I was simply going with, you know, the Air Force hypothetical for justifying airplane sales or whatever.
But I absolutely agree with you that there's no reason that, well, I don't think there's any reason for any of these wars.
Certainly, any great power war must be avoided from here on out or mankind will not survive.
That's as simple as that.
Sure.
And we had to look back and consider ourselves quite lucky to have avoided a conflict with the old Soviet Union during the Cold War.
By the way, let me go ahead and ask your opinion on this.
You seem pretty wise about all these things.
If my girlfriend was I Dream of Jeannie or something and I could just disappear all the nuclear weapons from the face of the earth like Superman 4 or whatever, I would do that.
But then again, that is, you know, mutually assured destruction seemingly has prevented great power war.
We threaten to nuke Iran every day, but that's because we know they're not making nukes and they can't fight back.
We never talk like that about the Russians or the Chinese or the Europeans or, you know, for that matter.
And they don't talk that way about each other anymore because everybody's got, you know, at least A-bombs, if not H-bombs.
And so I wonder if it's armed society is a polite society kind of thing, or you really think that, no, we got to get rid of these nukes and rely on just conventional deterrents or what?
Well, it's not a simple question.
I mean, no, it isn't.
I think it is correct that we were able to avoid a war with the Soviet Union because both of us knew that it meant a level of destruction that nobody's willing to tolerate.
And there is a body of thought that says that, you know, nuclear weapons are powerful deterrents for any form of conflict.
On the other hand, it's a laudable goal to try to get rid of these things because we're not going to be lucky forever in avoiding, you know, some fool actually using them.
If we do that, though, I think it's important to appreciate that we need to do that in the context of an evolving relationship with these other countries where we don't find ourselves in a conflict with them.
So it's not just a simple matter of, well, let's get rid of all these nukes, but let's evolve our relationship with these countries so that, you know, conflict becomes less and less likely rather than we've, you know, unleashed the dogs of war by eliminating the deterrents of nuclear weapons.
Now, you know, I don't really want to pick on this particular author because it's simply a example of basically, I guess, how everybody in Washington, D.C. thinks.
And for that matter, maybe New York City, too.
But I recently rewatched an old TED talk by Thomas Barnett, the author of the Pentagon's new map and American foreign policy after Bush, something like that anyway.
And and, you know, the basic premise that just is completely unargued throughout the whole thing is that America I mean, he doesn't even really give much credence to the to any opposing view at all.
Just sort of is an obvious fact to start from, I guess, to him that America is not an empire and that that's what's so different about American power is that after World War II, rather than picking up the European model, we decide to simply be basically, I guess, as Bill Kristol would say, benevolent global hegemons and that we're only here.
Yes, it's true.
We put bases everywhere.
And yes, it's true.
We don't want to tolerate any the rise of any near peer competitor.
But all we want is for the oceans to be safe for free trade.
And all we want is the evolving closer of these relationships.
Like you just said, we want to be best friends with the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans and people in the Middle East, South America and Africa and the whole world from here on.
And the only way to do that is to have everyone have these advanced markets, these advanced divisions of labor where everybody's relying on each other all the time.
This is how you heal relations where goods do not cross borders.
Soldiers will.
Bastiat said.
Right.
And so, you know, I favor all of the all of the globalization of private actors.
But it it seems to it really worries me, this idea that the American people basically are to be the garrison world army from here on out to enforce.
It seems like we don't have anything left except being the one world army like the birchers used to fear.
Only we're it.
It's not coming for us.
We're the ones.
Well, there's a lot in what you say that I actually do agree with.
I mean, I hold the view that a lot of these neoconservative and neoliberal international interventionists like Madeleine Albright or Richard Cheney or some of the folks that you mentioned have a pretty loony view of how the rest of the world perceive us.
You remember, you know, this is not just Richard Cheney.
This is also the Madeleine Albright view of the world where we should exercise our military might to correct the behavior of other governments that we care not to approve of.
We did that with Serbia in the Kosovo air war.
Americans don't like to remember that we did kill a few thousand Serbian civilians in that enterprise.
Well, Bill Clinton, of course, wholeheartedly supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, went on David Letterman and told everybody, don't worry, it'll only take two weeks.
It'll be a piece of cake.
And George Bush is doing the right thing here.
And it certainly turned out to be a real disaster.
And whatever you think it is, we went to war in Iraq or whether you think it's oil or democracy, we got neither.
The Chinese and the Iranians have gotten control of a lot of the oil and the form of government that we've seen to have produced in Iraq holds elections, but doesn't pass the basic test of a fundamental democracy, to me, at least, is two things, peaceful transition of power and respect for minority rights.
Both of those issues are very much in doubt in Iraq today.
Well, the thing is, too, is we're bankrupt, right?
And it seems like the reason we're bankrupt is because the only thing that we manufacture in this country anymore are weapons of destruction that are all a net loss across the board, no matter what, even if Lockheed actually gave you a good deal, which, of course, they never do.
Well, these exercises are not cheap, as I'm sure you know.
We've spent a trillion dollars in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've also spent a second trillion dollars in the defense budget, which is the additional money for the non-war parts of the Pentagon budget since 2000.
The political atmosphere since 9-11 has been to increase defense spending, not just for the wars, but in the so-called base budget.
And that's meant $2 trillion since the year 2000.
It's a meaningful part of our deficit problems.
It's not just civilian spending.
It's not just spending for bailouts for Wall Street and the stimulus package.
There's a large part of it is additional defense spending.
Well, and we all seem, especially, I guess, the neoliberal, sort of moderate Democrat pro-war type that you were describing there, the Madeleine Albright view of the world.
There seems to be a lot of real cognitive dissonance there, where on one hand, we can basically all accept that at the very least, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed by the American invasion in the last decade.
At the same time, they can call for an invasion of Sunni, Muslim, Arab, Darfur in Sudan, in North Africa, and say, yeah, let's go save the people there, as though that wouldn't just be another front in America's crusader war against Islam as it's sold to the people who are willing to come over here and kill themselves to get some of us, and sit around and still lament to this day that the real, the worst thing Bill Clinton ever did was not invade Rwanda.
That kind of thing.
I mean, I still hear people talk like that all the time, in spite of the fact that, you know, meanwhile, the headline is, Obama murders another house full of women and children in Pakistan with a robot.
Well, these are important issues.
I mean, the civilian deaths as a result of the drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan is a real problem.
You also brought up the issue of when other governments busy themselves massacring their own civilians, as in Burundi or in Darfur, what do we do about it?
I don't think we should sit on our hands either, but I think these are the kinds of issues that we need to talk seriously about and figure out ways to deal with.
Now, when you mentioned the aircraft carrier battle groups, is there, is it 12 right now?
11.
11 right now.
And now, what all is in a battle group?
How many destroyers and how many planes is that, roughly speaking?
And how many C's are there again?
There's only seven C's, right?
Four oceans?
Well, a carrier battle group consists of a central carrier, surface escorts, anywheres from three to four to six, a unknown number, probably one or two, submarine escorts.
The air wings for the carriers have been shrinking lately because even at expanding defense budgets, the tactical air power that we buy with that expanding budget has actually been shrinking and getting, on average, older.
That's the incredible phenomenon of a larger budget buying a smaller, more aging force.
That's a characteristic of the gigantic unit cost of our tactical aircraft growing faster than the budget's growing.
And an aircraft carrier battle group, all 11 aren't deployed at the same time.
They have time in port for retraining and for overhaul of the carrier itself.
And at any one time, there's a significantly less number of carriers out there.
I read a great book called Island of Shame by David Vine, all about Diego Garcia and the Chagossians who were removed by the, kidnapped basically, by the British and Americans and deported and their island home seized there in the Indian Ocean.
And I think of everything in that book, the thing that struck me the most was a quote from some general, I think in the US Air Force saying, our plan is to run the world from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.
Basically, I think in context, they were accepting that the bases in particularly in Asia are causing us problems and that people don't like having bases in their countries all the time.
How would we feel?
I don't know if Ron Paul finally got through to him or what, but so they decided that they'll just do it all through air power from Guam and Diego Garcia and with the aircraft carriers, which reminds me of the question I was going to ask, which was about ballistic missile attack on aircraft carriers.
But I guess I'll start, let's just start with the Guam and Diego Garcia thing there maybe.
Well, I haven't read that book, but I have heard about the, you know, displacement of the civilian population there.
It's the kind of things that Americans don't think about.
We should appreciate that when we put these huge facilities overseas, it has a real effect on the civilian population.
Just in today's newspaper, we read about the Japanese prime minister resigning because of the controversy over the American facilities on Okinawa.
He promised in the election campaign in Japan that he would not renew the lease for those facilities, and the Americans would eventually move out.
But in fact, he just signed a deal with the Pentagon where the facilities would essentially remain.
They're going to be moved on Okinawa, but they're not going to be moved off of Okinawa.
And for the shame of his not keeping his promise, he had the honor to resign.
But it's a huge controversy, both in Japan and especially in Okinawa, where there's frequent civilian demonstrations for the Americans to leave.
This is an issue that we don't think about here.
And sometimes we have the arrogance to think that, oh, they're all so happy to have us there.
Well, that's not always the case.
Yeah, it's sort of like Green Go, right?
Give me green and then go.
People talk like that about tourist destinations in South America.
People in the Bahamas resent the American empire patrolling their waters and seizing their boats and their bank accounts all day.
Well, they're just lucky that we go down there on vacation and spend money like, yeah, that kind of dependence breeds a lot of respect, you know, I'm sure.
And that's right.
And, you know, the thing is, too, about the the resignation of the prime minister there.
I mean, that is just really something.
I guess the Japanese can take that kind of thing too far.
But at times, but, you know, the whole personal honor and face and all that.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was any chivalry whatsoever left in Washington, D.C., and anybody ever resigned over anything?
Well, we have a different culture here in both the United Kingdom and in Japan.
There is a a honorable tradition of people resigning when they don't achieve their own promises.
We sadly don't have that culture here.
And we are very permissive with our politicians to not insist that they keep all their promises.
All right.
And then on the the lost and found question there, do you know anything about the threat of ballistic missile attack against the Navy?
Because I read this great thing by the war nerd.
I'm not sure if you've ever read him, but his other pseudonym is Gary Brecher.
I think his real name is John Dolan, and he writes.
He's written a ton of great stuff for the exile and the exiled all about every aspect or the greatest telling of the Iran-Iraq war that I've ever read, for example.
And he has an article that says that every Navy captain knows that they are completely and totally helpless from ballistic missile attack.
And it's all just a show.
And everybody gets to keep their job.
And hopefully no real war will break out where they actually have to deal with an enemy that has ballistic missiles.
But that ultimately, if the Chinese want to drop a bomb on top of the Navy's head, they don't have a way of shooting it down at all.
A cruise missile, they can try.
What do you say?
Well, yes, for a long time, the Russians and the Chinese spent a lot of time and energy and money devising systems to deal with the American surface Navy.
For a long time, they've had very high speed, low altitude cruise missiles that are a real problem for our air defense systems.
Frequently, Chinese diesel-electric submarines surface in the middle of our aircraft carrier battle groups to announce themselves.
We didn't know they were there.
When they're using their battery power, they're very hard to find, and we're not universally good at finding them.
And the Chinese have been working on a high altitude, high speed ballistic missile system with the kind of targeting and guidance systems that would be able to attack a moving target like a carrier.
These are all extremely serious problems for a surface Navy.
And with the counters we have to submarines, high speed cruise missiles, and ballistic missile systems are very problematic.
And the submariners joke that there's two kinds of ships.
There's submarines and there's targets.
And that's something that's a characteristic of future warfare at sea that we need to think seriously about.
It's a real problem.
You know, I also read something by Fred Reed where he talked about how Navy ships these days, the steel is only a few inches thick or something as compared to old World War II ships.
He says, you know, these things are not even designed for battle.
This thing can't take a single hit.
Look at it.
That's sort of right.
I mean, modern ships are not heavily armored.
Some of them even have aluminum structures above the waterline.
And so the self-defense mechanism is to try to avoid getting hit.
Aluminum?
Did you just say aluminum, sir?
Right.
Yeah.
Saves weight, right?
Well, all right.
And I'm sorry, because I'm already keeping you over time here, but this is the bottom line, I think.
All of this is just one big con job to rip off the American people.
Well, I'll put it a different way.
We are today at the highest level of spending for a Pentagon in inflation adjusted dollars since the end of World War II.
And we now have the smallest Army, Navy and Air Force we've had in that entire period of time.
And our major equipment inventories are on average older than they've ever been before.
We quite literally have a historic high level of spending that buys us a historic low level of power.
And that's something that doesn't justify even more spending.
It does justify rethinking how we do these things.
All right, everybody.
That is Winslow T. Wheeler.
He is director of the Straus Military Reform Program of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., author of the books The Wastrels of Defense and Military Reform.
You can find him at counterpunch.org and at the huffingtonpost.com.
Thank you very much for your time again on the show today, Winslow.
Thank you very much.
