Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Winslow T. Wheeler.
And he worked in the U.S. Senate as an aide to different Democratic and Republican senators, as well as at the GAO.
You should write a book all about just the GAO.
I'm interested in that.
I know it sounds boring, but I bet it's actually really exciting, especially on national security issues.
31 years there.
I guess I didn't know that.
I sure knew that you're good at what you do, Winslow.
After he left the Senate in 2002, he ran the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, which was at POGO, the Project on Government Oversight.
And he's written this very important piece.
It's a real deep dive, extra long for the American conservative online here.
Oh, maybe this was actually a magazine article that made it to the web here, too.
Those Porky Pentagon earmarks never really went away.
Welcome back to the show, Winslow.
How are you, sir?
Great.
How are you?
It's good to be with you.
I'm doing great and very happy to talk to you again.
Been a little while here.
And this is a very informative article here that you've written, as I say, in-depth investigation, really, into at least some aspects of the financing of the national security state and the Pentagon here, and the kickbacks through the Congress.
That was really the congressional angle on the military-industrial-congressional complex.
So what did you find?
Well, there's lots of phony baloney stuff out there, typical of both parties on Capitol Hill.
They've been pretending that they stopped putting earmarks in bills, in one case, defense bills.
And all that pork spending that they did in past years is a thing of the past.
That's—what's the right way of saying it?
That's bovine scatology.
Actually, there are more earmarks, more pork in defense bills than ever before.
What's going on is that the earmarks they're now putting into defense bills fuzz up what the money is for, and therefore don't qualify for the congressionally written definition of earmarks.
But if you look at the bills, they have hundreds of things called congressional special interest items.
In the last defense bill for fiscal year 2019, there are 679 of them, and they cost $19.3 billion, more than twice as much as they cost back in the battle days when people were complaining about the earmarks.
So the process has gotten worse, not better.
And one more thing that's an important element to this nasty system is how they pay for it.
They don't add money to the bill.
They cut other programs.
The programs they cut are primarily in the military payroll for paying troops and their pay increases, and even more so in what's called the operation and maintenance budget, which is a huge budget, but very importantly, pays for things like training, weapons maintenance, spare parts, military exercises, all the things that you need to have a military that can operate skillfully and effectively and do it for more than a day or two before they run out of spare parts.
And so they're really raiding the heart and core of military spending for the people and for military readiness to pay for their $19 billion worth of added pork projects back in members, states, and districts.
And of course, they always make sure the contractors know that everybody's getting the money.
And the contractors, of course, make sure the members of Congress know that they donate to their campaign as a way of expressing their undying gratitude for this kind of activity.
Right.
Is there really any such thing as Congress is trying to appropriate more money than the military even wants?
And how does it, how does that happen that they can't coordinate where you even have the Pentagon begging off the kinds of increases and corruption that the Congress is trying to foist on them?
Well, for example, in this 2019 DOD appropriations bill, they provided about a billion dollars less than President Trump requested.
But if you look at the details, about that $19.3 billion of that was spent on things not requested by the Pentagon, but goodies added by members of Congress.
And so it's a mixed bag.
Congress and the Pentagon worked together on pumping up the political justification for higher defense budgets.
And that's what, for example, President Trump requested in 2019.
But when you look at the details at the end state, what they've done is taken a couple score billion dollars away from the important parts of the military budget to this stuff they add for the contractors back home in their states and districts.
It's a political process and it demonstrates what qualifies as normal congressional behavior.
We shouldn't think of this as just this nasty pork activity going on in the defense budget.
This is typical congressional behavior in all kinds of regimes.
What we've got is a system that is basically deceptive because they're pretending they're not earmarking, but they're actually doing more of it.
It's dishonest because they're raiding important parts of the military budget to pay for this stuff.
And it's venal because they make sure that the contractors work closely with them to make these additions to the bill that contractors and members of Congress want.
And then, of course, the contractors make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations to the individual members of reelection campaigns.
It's a seamless system and it's a fundamentally corrupt system.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here.
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And it really seems like, it's funny just kind of scanning through your article here as we're talking, I'm reminded of all the quote marks.
And this is, of course, something that the military on any subject, they have their own language, all their new speak and all their weird acronyms and all their different things.
But it really is just a matter of them making up some new term and then just transferring the money to some new account and just inventing new terms around whatever they want.
That's actually really the key to this, is just making up a new language for the exact same activity and then going on just as before.
Correct.
The behavior is the same.
They just applied some different terminology to things so they can pretend they're not doing it.
And in point of fact, the behavior is actually not the same.
It's worse than it was before.
It's really the overall total lends itself to this.
It's always going to be this way as long as we're talking about, as William S. Lynn put it, the greatest honeypot in world history.
There you go.
That's a lot of money up for grabs every year, isn't it?
It'll continue until somebody puts a stop to it.
And on Capitol Hill, there's certainly nobody willing to do that.
The Pentagon is happy with it because it basically gets most of what it wants.
And of course, the White House, in President Trump's case, is fairly oblivious to all of this.
What he is most interested in is these bright light indicators such as his defense budget going up or down.
Up is good.
Down is bad.
And it's a system that makes everybody happy.
Yeah.
And it really is too bad, too, because you can see where sometimes he muses that this is all a giant waste of money.
He even said, I guess, in a tweet a few weeks ago, that maybe I ought to sit down with the Russians and the Chinese and have a big conference and call off the arms race.
This is crazy, the amount of money we're spending.
But then, nah, politics says, go ahead and spend more and spend more and spend more so that no one can accuse you of ever being weak on this.
And so just keep up with that.
But it's sort of just occasionally when the president is musing, he says things like, maybe it doesn't have to be this way at all.
Well, in terms of dollars spent, we're way above what Ronald Reagan spent during his peak in defense spending back in 1985.
We're spending more now on the Pentagon than we ever have since the end of World War II.
And the output we're getting is very strange.
It's a smaller military in terms of the equipment we have.
The equipment that we do have is, on average, older than ever before.
And because they've been raiding accounts to pay for maintenance and spare parts and so on, the material condition of the hardware is as bad as it's ever been.
And training levels, for example, for combat pilots is lower than it's ever been.
We have this counterintuitive situation of a larger amount of spending for the Pentagon, a historic high, that has resulted in historic lows in terms of inventory, material condition, and military readiness of the people.
It's the worst of both worlds.
I'm reminded of Trump's speech when he was still a candidate.
He gave that talk at the National Interest Foundation there, where he was introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad, now the ambassador to Afghanistan, or the special envoy on that negotiation, whichever it is.
Anyway, and he begins that speech by saying, America is overextended.
We have military obligations and expenses.
We have to rebuild our military knowledge.
But we are overextended all around the world for the amount of money that we're making.
We just can't afford it.
And that's why we need a stronger economy, so that we can afford to be overextended all around the world.
And we'll just be extended, not over, and it'll be fine, essentially, was the point of his talk.
So it just goes to show how, at least in his head, he could be nudged either way on these issues.
But obviously, as you're describing, the institutional interests carry, that the status quo, or worse, remains.
Status quo is a hard thing to change.
And it's certainly true that even if President Trump were serious about rebuilding the military, what he's doing now is making things worse, not better.
But he doesn't pay attention to that kind of thing.
His eye is on much more crude, politically driven indicators of what's good and what's bad.
And he has no interest in looking any further into it.
Yeah, which is really a shame, because if you could believe for a moment that he's actually very smart, and he's playing a long con here, and that he has to spend extraordinary amounts of money on the military in the first couple of few years of his administration, so that later he can say that we're so impregnably strong now, that now is the time that we could completely retrench, because I already took care of that, and even the generals had to admit how great it was, that kind of thing.
And sometimes he kind of leans that way, but it sure doesn't feel like there's a plan behind it.
There's zero evidence of there being any such plan in his head, or anybody else's in Washington.
Just as I was saying, sometimes he muses the other way.
They're like, boy, this is getting out of control.
But then it doesn't amount to anything.
Well, anyway, listen, I appreciate your time on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Winslow.
And I really appreciate the great work that you've done on this.
It's a real deep dive.
And a very interesting one about the procurement, all this money, and all these earmarks, and all this corruption here.
And you name names, too, which is also a lot of fun.
There you go.
Thank you again very much for your time.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it very much.
All right, you guys, that's Winslow T. Wheeler.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine.
And before he was at the Government Accounting Office, or Government Accountability Office, and then he ran the Straus Military Reform Program over there at POGO for a while.
Again, at TAC, those porky Pentagon earmarks never really went away.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either myself, at Birdarkist, or Car, at CarCampIt on Twitter, and we'll be happy to help.
We look forward to seeing you in there.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com, slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
