11/09/15 – Mark Perry – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Alright, so, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Good interviews lined up for you today.
First up, it's Mark Perry, writing again here for Politico Magazine.
That's Politico.com slash magazine.
It's Inside the Pentagon's Fight Over Russia.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you?
Good to be here, as always.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And very interesting article that you have, I guess to oversimplify, but not too much.
You got two very prominent generals inside the Pentagon who have very different plans for how to prepare American forces for war with Russia in Eastern Europe, you know, should that day ever come or anything like that.
Is that about right?
That's about right.
One of them, Doug McGregor, holds that we are not prepared and that given the current setup in the Army, we would probably be overwhelmed in a straight-up fight with Russia, at least initially.
And the second, General H.R. McMaster, holds that we're plenty prepared, but if we're going to do anything beyond fighting, we better increase the Army budget and increase the number of soldiers in our military.
All right.
Now, I guess this is kind of silly, but is anybody questioning the necessity of any of this when obviously it's NATO expansion and provocations like the coup d'etat in Kiev and the, you know, complete disruption of the Middle East, including support for the Mujahideen against Russia's ally Assad in Syria over the last four years?
I mean, these are the policies that they carry out.
So they know good and well that they're the ones that have provoked whatever Russian response, not that it justifies whatever Russia does or anything, but they know that they're the aggressor here.
It's not like the Warsaw Pact is on the march.
It's NATO that's on the march in Russian territory or former Russian territory.
Well, thankfully, there are plenty of naysayers in Washington, policymakers who think that we can come to an accommodation with the Russians that we have been provocative, that we don't need a big military, that we're overspending as it is.
And you hear this all the time.
It's much more prominent now, I think, in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos than it was even a few short years ago.
There are plenty of skeptics out there who think that the military consistently exaggerates the threat from any number of potential adversaries, but particularly Russia, that we exaggerate the threat from the Russians, that they are not a threat, and that we're plenty prepared to meet any contingency now without any increase in any defense budget.
Well, I'm glad to hear you say that.
I read articles like that in the National Interest and that kind of thing, but it seems like at least TV would have us believe that the consensus is aggressive, Russia must be rolled back, preempted, stood up to.
Well, I think you're right.
I think that this is the real difference between the mainstream media and what you and I might read or watch.
You know, we outspend any other competitor by a factor of four, and by the next ten competitors by a factor of ten.
I think that part of the agenda here is that when the military says that we need to meet every contingency and that we're not prepared, that there's real threats out there.
What they're really aiming for is to break sequestration.
The long-term kind of corralling of the budget that means ultimately less money for defense and more money for other programs.
That's really the focus of their worries, not Russia, not ISIS.
We have budget constraints that put them under pressure to streamline and to be more competent.
That's all for the good, I think.
Yeah, man, you know, I really should have saved this.
Maybe I can go back and find it, but there was a quote not long ago.
Jeez, this could have even been in some of your writing now that I think about it.
But anyway, one of these very prominent generals, it may have even been Ray Odierno or one of them, had said to the Congress, oh, look, yeah, no, I mean, don't get us wrong, we can protect America fine no matter what, but if you want us to be able to deploy far away for years on end, well, we're going to need some more money and more equipment and more troops.
And, you know, usually they don't put it quite that simple, but it rang very true the way they said it.
It's exactly right.
And my answer to that is fine.
We won't ask you to deploy anywhere else.
That's what I'm saying.
You know, it's OK with us.
You don't want to go into Syria?
Fine.
Stay out.
You don't want to go back into Iraq?
Fine.
Stay out.
You don't want to fight Russia in the Baltic countries?
Fine with us.
Let's not do that.
And let's abolish the Northern Command while we're at it.
We don't want them to have anything to do, really.
And while we're at it, listen, if Russia wants to go spend a trillion dollars in Iraq, I've heard, and I've heard this directly from military officers, senior level, very quietly, who say, listen, if the Russians want to make the same mistakes we did and ruin their economy and overextend their military by deploying in Syria, let them do it.
It's a catastrophe.
These are conflicts that don't have an immediate solution.
They're not amenable to the outside force.
We're not going to solve their problems by deploying the 101st Airborne, so let's not do it.
All right.
So when people talk about, well, so we got a plan for what are we going to do if we have a war with Russia over the Baltics, which are, of course, NATO members.
We're sworn to protect them in war if the Russians ever try to take them.
You know, we all hear the cliche, right?
Oh, come on.
They got plans for attack in Canada and plans for attack in Japan again.
And there's always a plan on the shelf for everything, even if they're not even contemplating it.
But so like on a scale of one to 10, where does this fall on the level of innocuous war plan for war plan's sake versus something that they're really worried about and considering and believe that maybe they'll have to do at some point in the not too distant future here?
Well, the senior military officer told me that the most likely conflict we're going to have outside of the Middle East will probably be against Russia somewhere on the eastern borders of NATO.
That said, I think the likelihood of that from Russia's perspective is almost negligible.
It is true that they could give us a tough time in the early days of a war.
But our force, especially our air force, is so overwhelming.
Our firepower is so dominant that I really doubt Russia wants that kind of a fight.
And I doubt we want it either.
Now, are we planning?
Sure, we're planning, because as you say, we plan for everything.
But does that mean it's going to happen?
I think we live in an age where, you know, post-Cold War, we get to pick and choose our conflicts.
And my point of view, and I think, really, you don't hear this from the military, but it's true, they would rather not take on a big fight any time in the near future.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate that.
I hope that they talk that way to their civilian, you know, leadership, rather than, yes, sir, can do, sort of an attitude, which is probably just as likely.
Well, I mean, you're right.
It all depends on leadership.
Well, but now, what about this, Mark?
I mean, I guess, you know, I miss, I was there for the tail end of the Cold War.
I grew up in the Reagan years, or I was a kid in the Reagan years, really.
But it always just kind of went without saying, if we ever had a real war with Russia, it would be a nuclear war to the bitter end.
It would probably end up being a nuclear war, at least.
That's the one option that we really can't have on the table, and it would be a catastrophic one.
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There is also a broad base of support inside the Pentagon for the current president's foreign policy, for the non-interventionist part of his foreign policy.
And there's also a great deal of skepticism, I might add, since it's election season, towards Hillary Clinton, who's often described by some senior Pentagon officers as a cruise missile liberal.
I think that we're seeing in this a real discomfort with the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions and a realization that they were too costly, were not politically thought through, and that they had a very negative impact on the military.
I find very little appetite in the military right now for any kind of military intervention.
Alright, well, so I guess in that sense, you know, training up to fight Russia, the war that never comes after all these years, you know, in the Soviet days and now, is sort of their way of making money, staying in business, but not having to actually really do anything.
So in a sense, I appreciate that, except that, of course, they're playing with the biggest matches of all, the H-bombs here.
So it's not exactly nothing.
But anyway, if you could, please go ahead and get into, you know, these two generals and their competing plans for what ought to be done if it really does come down to a ground war in Eastern Europe to, say, for example, protect Latvia from Soviet or from Russian attack.
Well, these are two generals who have very different and contrasting views of what the U.S. Army should look like.
On the one hand, Colonel Doug McGregor thinks that our units, our basic Army units are not strong enough, are not standalone enough, do not sustain themselves enough, do not have the logistical capabilities of taking on a peer competitor like Russia, that we need to change the basic formations in the military.
On the other side, General H.R. McMaster, who's actually a brilliant author and historical thinker, believes that what we have now will do just fine, but it's probably not big enough, and that we're going to need to plus up our formations and make them more lethal.
I think at the heart of this debate, frankly, are two competing foreign policy decisions that have to be made.
It's whether we're going to go lighter and better and more lethal, or whether we're going to stay the same.
It's very hard to get the military to change, and McGregor is asking a lot in his reform plan for how you model an Army.
But there's a growing perception in Washington that what we have in the Army is probably not adequate enough, it's not light enough, it's too armor-heavy, it can't get there fast enough, it's too dependent on logistics, too top-heavy in headquarters, and that there's going to have to be change.
Well, that really works in our favor a lot of times, right?
Like in Syria, where Obama says, well, guys, what about a safe zone?
They go, well, Mr. President, we could do it, but we have to bring the entire Army with us to do it.
And then that's the poison pill.
He says, well, no then.
Well, that's right.
We saw this in the Iraq debate, about invading Iraq, where Rumsfeld wanted to go lighter and lighter and lighter, and we couldn't do it.
We ended up with 148,000 troops, which is enough to defeat Saddam's Army.
But lo and behold, somebody in their wisdom among the neocons said, well, we're going to transform the Middle East, we're going to stay there, we're going to occupy, we're going to redo Iraq, and that takes a lot more than 148,000 troops.
So the real question here is, what do we want a military for?
Do we want a military that's capable of fighting and defeating our aggressors, or do we want a military that's capable of fighting and defeating our aggressors and then staying on after we broke the China to repair it?
If we really want a nation-build, then our Army's too small.
But if we really want a large Army, frankly, we're going to bankrupt ourselves.
So it's a real, it's a real debate here in Washington.
Well, and now, so what about, I think, you know, part of the criticism of, on the, you know, which this is narrower than the foreign policy question, but part of the criticism of the capability of the current brigade structure, et cetera, by the McGregor guys, it seems to be, I forget, you know, I wouldn't directly kind of quote out your article here, but I sort of got the impression that part of the argument is that they've sort of built this Army for show in a way, like the implication is sort of F35 economics here, where how useful is this thing really going to be when it comes down to it is not the overriding question.
The overriding question has a lot more to do with money and power and politics and promotions and ribbons and these kinds of things.
And so I just wonder, you know, when it comes down to it, obviously America has ultimately more money and power for the long haul and that kind of thing.
But I wonder whose tanks actually, you know, would probably win out in a battle if they really had to fight in Latvia.
Are the Americans as big and bad as they think they are?
Has that sold themselves as being?
My sense is that if it came down to a fight, there is no question who would prevail.
We have an incredible preponderance of force.
You take a look at Russia's fighter jets, the Su-34 and Su-35, they're fine, they're good.
They're top of the line.
But they can't compare with ours.
Our engineering, our aerodynamics, our aeronautics are just so much better than anything that Russia or China can put in the field.
It boggles my mind to hear military officers say, well, you know, we'd get beaten.
Maybe we'd get beaten initially.
Maybe we'd get set back on our heels.
But given enough time and enough focus, our military really doesn't have a competitor.
And once you understand that, I think it's easier to take your time and try to get the military right, to structure it right.
We are entering a new era.
We do need to get it right.
But we don't need 630,000 troops in the U.S. Army, just don't.
And we don't need to bankrupt our country in doing it.
Now a guy in my position, sitting on the telephone and not in uniform, considering going on and on about the military-industrial complex, and it's going to be, it's going to sound like a cliché, but it's not a cliché.
It's true.
You know, we often build weapons we don't need, and too many of them for too long, and it takes too much, and we just don't need it.
What we need is a much better focus, a lighter, more lethal military to meet our needs, and not 600,000 troops sitting in some Middle Eastern country trying to build a nation.
Just doesn't work.
Yeah, well, and part of the danger of having one that's not light, but it's heavy and hopefully too heavy to use for transient reasons, if they do use it, boy, do you get a 10-year occupation and 4,500 dead out of it and a giant disaster.
So lesson learned there.
We're kind of, we're in trouble, we're really in trouble either way without a fundamental rethinking of American foreign policy by everyone, a kind of recognition like Ron Paul said that, you know, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
We don't need any of this really at all unless our policy is rule the world, but if our policy is protect the people of the middle part of North America, you know, we hardly need an army at all.
All we need is a tiny and decent navy and maybe some air power, and that's about it.
But I think that we do need to focus, I agree with you, but I think that we need to focus on, you know, real national security interests.
No more world wars in Europe, keep the sea lanes open, keep trade free, and protect the homeland.
That's, those are the keys, and expeditionary imperial deployments to wherever, it's going to be next month.
Back to Iraq or back to Syria, it's just not something that's in our interest.
And I'm not alone in saying this, this has been said by Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, year after year after year after year, their acolytes and their disciples have been saying it again and again and again, it's time for us to listen.
Yep, got that right.
Alright, well listen, thanks very much again for coming back on the show, Mark, I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, thanks a lot.
Alright you guys, that's Mark Perry, writing again for Politico magazine, politico.com slash magazine, the piece is Inside the Pentagon's Fight Over Russia.
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