10/9/20 Daniel Davis on the Failures of American Foreign Policy Since the Gulf War

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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Okay, guys, on the line, I've got retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis.
Of course, he's from Defense Priorities, and he writes a lot of great stuff, and you first became familiar with him back in the year 2012.
Matthew Ho, of course, was the great heroic whistleblower before the Obama surge of 2009, the summer of 2009, said, don't do it, it ain't going to work, it's really bad, I quit, I resign, here's the public letter in the post, hold your horses.
They didn't listen.
They did the big, terrible, horrible, failed surge and killed a lot of people for nothing.
Then in 2012, Colonel Davis came out, Lieutenant Colonel Davis came out and said, yep, you should have listened to Matthew Ho because here's where we're at after three years, and David Petraeus is up there lying and saying there's light at the end of the tunnel and everything's fine, and it's not, and here's the truth, and he wrote in the Armed Forces Journal and then to the U.S. Senate, I guess it was, and it went out in the post just like Matthew Ho's stuff had done three years before.
That was sort of the anti-war side of the brackets on Obama's failed surge, and of course the war has puttered along in its post-surge phase ever since then, and only proving everything that Davis said then right, but anyway, the real point is so that you know that about him, he also was in Iraq War I in the big, famous tank battle under the command of McMaster and McGregor, we're going to talk about that, and he was in Iraq and went to Afghanistan twice in the terror war years, the second one when he came out as a heroic whistleblower, and now he's got a new book, Eleventh Hour in 2020 America, How America's Foreign Policy Got Jacked Up and How the Next Administration Can Fix It.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm doing really good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I'm really happy to have you on the show here, and great book.
This is so interesting, and I love the whole first-person kind of journalist, no, journaling kind of perspective here, in a sense, of the way you saw all of this and how it played out and how they got everything wrong, so especially starting with Iraq War I, the big tank battle, the now-famous McMaster and McGregor were your commanders, captain and major, in charge of, I forget which all brigade and battalion and all that, I'll let you describe it, and then you guys were the central figures in the great battle of 73 Easting, which, if I remember it right, was the biggest and most decisive tank battle of Iraq War I.
Is that correct?
That is correct, yeah.
So tell us that story, man, the whole thing.
Go ahead.
I go back to that in the book, even though the situation is talking about, or the book itself is referring to the current situation we face, and I spend the majority of the time talking about things since 9-11, I have to go back to there because that's kind of where some of the seeds for our disaster, if that's the right word, start.
And also, my intention, and I'm glad you said it that way, it makes me feel good that it was received the way that I intended it to, which was to put the reader in a frame, in a position to where they can understand on a personal level how we got here and exactly why this thing is falling apart and what we can do to fix it.
Because too often times, these things are just abstract, and people know very little about them.
They may know there was a desert storm, but they don't know much about it.
They may know there was a surge in Iraq and a surge in Afghanistan, but it doesn't really mean anything.
It's just words.
But when you can put it in first-hand terms, when you can basically take the reader along the journey from the beginning all the way through the wars and up to the current situation, you know, I think it becomes much more clear why we're in such trouble, and then that also makes it clear why we need to make some real changes.
And so that's why I started in Desert Storm, and just the way God set things up, it was just really amazing that some of the three guys that were in the middle of the fighting, and I mean at the very tip of the spear and in one spot, have, you know, subsequently gone on to take a, you know, play a role in some significant ways in the United States, and I had a good observation of that.
But you know, the thing about McMaster, I'll just say, as I've written several pieces and another one here in the last two weeks, I think, you know, I think that he really kind of went down a wrong path and has been, in a certain measure, part of the contributing factor to keeping us in these forever wars, but it didn't start that way, and as I describe in the book, in fact, the vast majority of my descriptions of him in the book are, you know, outstanding and, you know, highly illuminative, because as a troop commander, as a ground troop fighter, he was absolutely outstanding, and that just kind of shows you that sometimes you can be great at the point of battle, but not so great as the guy who's, you know, trying to head up national security strategy, which he did under the president.
But the whole point of the Desert Storm piece is to show you that, you know, we had actually a pretty good plan.
We had a good strategy or foreign policy.
It was based on reality of the world that existed at that time, and because it was handled in a relatively positive and effective manner by various administrations, when the time came and we needed a strong military to be able to fight a strong battle, we were able to do that and succeeded really well.
We have lost a lot of that, and in part because of that, ironically, because of the success we have, that's where the seeds really started of thinking that, hey, we can, we are really the masters of the universe and we can do whatever we want to do.
So we'll start experimenting with different things and trying to just create our own ways.
And at the same time, we're going to continue to pretend like the world that existed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s still existed, because that's what gave you the fundamentals for continuing on with, you know, the militaristic state, I suppose you will, because that's what in part was needed to offset the genuine threat from the USSR posed against Western civilization.
But that no longer exists.
And then as we, as I track going all the way through Iraq, you know, from 9-11 through Afghanistan, one, the second Iraq war, and then in the latter stages, as you talked about of the the Obama surge in Afghanistan up through today, we see that it just has, it started on a bad path in 1992, basically, and is still on that downward trend.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, tell us the story of this battle, because not just for war movies sake, but because it is interesting the way it played out.
And of course, you know, I was in just ninth grade at the time, although I was really paying attention.
I bet almost everybody else in my class doesn't know it.
You know, half of what I knew about it even at the time.
And of course, there are a lot of people, you know, including listening now who weren't even born yet at the time.
This is all ancient history, like the Korean War to me or something like that.
So, you know, and as far as you're defining, you know, the success of it, that's within the narrow term, you know, the military terms of a limited and accomplishable mission, which was accomplished, which does make rational sense if you exclude a lot of other things, you know.
But just in that narrow sense, I hear what you mean about that.
This war at least, you know, supposedly worked, except it left such a bad aftermath in so many ways.
But surely comparatively speaking, but then I guess your real point is like you're saying that it was too easy and you were the one of the ones in the right at the hard part.
But overall, it was so easy that it was, you know, basically all these generals at the Pentagon were high on it and lost their perspective about, you know, what it really took to, you know, have an army that was effective and when they should use it and when they should refuse to and that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that's a really good point there, because there are certainly many things about the net, the strategy, the national strategy behind that war that, you know, is certainly open for debate that, you know, should we have done that?
Should we have gone to war?
That's those are certainly discussable things.
I am talking in a narrow sense here about once the mission was given purely in military terms, it was far more effective than anything we've done before, partially because or actually mainly because President Bush, you know, the 19th or the 41st president gave us a clearly defined objective, attainable military mission.
We were supposed to achieve the UN mandate to force Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait.
That's it.
It was not to defeat Saddam Hussein.
It was not to bring democracy to the region.
It was to militarily force them out of out of Kuwait and restore basically the status quo antebellum.
And that is precisely what we did.
So we went in there with a very good military plan that was designed to, you know, to go through their their initial barriers of defense, to go through the more difficult infantry divisions that were further in depth, and then finally to the Republican Guard that was kind of at the northern part of Kuwait, which was their the bulk of their defenses.
And then we forced them, we either destroyed them or forced them to go back across the border into their own country.
And then once that was accomplished, we got Saddam to start a ceasefire.
And then Bush redeployed immediately all of our troops.
I was all the troops were basically out of there within five months after the ceasefire was signed.
And, you know, if we had ended the war there, we might have been in a better situation.
But instead, we didn't.
We kept going on doing that.
I didn't put this in the book, but it does kind of connect the dots between where I did go and where I did later is, you know, we kept this no fly zones going on.
We kept these helping to the Kurds up into the north, etc.
So we kept on going on there and then we put all these sanctions on and all this and you know how that went.
And that really just kind of perpetuated the conflict and almost set the stage for future conflict, which, of course, is what happened in 2003.
Yeah.
Well, and in 2001, it was, you know, the single greatest motivating factor for Al Qaeda to turn against the United States was the permanent presence of American air power in Saudi Arabia for use against the Iraqis.
They said it plain and over and over.
They blew up the Kobar towers over it and killed 19 American airmen, which Bill Clinton blamed on Hezbollah and Iran at the time, because that's what the Saudis wanted.
Instead of recognizing that, boy, we got some right wing radicals in this country that really want us the hell off their soil, huh?
And so, yeah, we might have learned the lesson then.
For America, and we just don't know.
We only do what we want to do.
It doesn't matter what makes sense for good or evil.
When Reagan suffered the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and I think it was 1983.
Yeah.
He was, many people then were saying the same thing, saying, we've got to go escalate.
We have to go punish all these people.
He thought about it for a while and then said, you know what, no, we're not going to do it.
I'm just going to withdraw and get them out of there.
And a lot of people said, oh, he's weak and all this.
But look what didn't happen.
All the things everybody claimed did not materialize.
There wasn't this huge terrorist hotbed that exploded.
Nothing happened.
And we didn't lose any more troops.
We didn't spend any more money.
And we were not even in the Middle East all the way up and through until we introduced our troops back in, in the Bush administration, which we didn't need to do.
And we prospered as a result of that.
And I think there's a big lesson to learn there.
Yep.
And even back to Bin Laden, that he cited American intervention in Beirut as when he first decided the Americans would always be his enemy.
And that was why CIA support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 80s never bought him off because he always considered us the enemy because of the battleship New Jersey bomb in Beirut and, and whatever support for the Israelis there.
And so that was one of the things that turned that deadly enemy against us way back then when, and you know what, I don't know if you've ever read this, Danny.
But in Ron Paul's book, a foreign policy of freedom, it's a collection of his speeches.
Well, he was in Congress back then.
And there's a group of speeches in a row, Reagan, don't go to Beirut.
We got no business in Beirut.
And then to Reagan, now that you're in Beirut, please get us the hell out of there before anything worse happens.
You don't want to do that.
And then they're going to try to get you to escalate it and be horrible.
And then three, see, I told you something bad was going to happen.
Now our guys got bombed and now I'm telling you, don't escalate.
Get the hell out.
Please.
I'm begging you.
And then the next one after that, finally, good job, Reagan.
You finally listened to reason and pulled all the troops out where they never should have been.
It's just, attention world, listen to Ron Paul, please.
He's already thought this through better than you, you know?
I did not.
I want to go back and read all that.
That's interesting to know.
Yeah, man.
It's all right there.
It's the slowest motion train wreck, seeing it through his eyes like, oh man, this is not going to be good.
Never had to do it at all.
And why would we be helping the Israelis in Lebanon anyway?
They are the worst actors in that whole situation.
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But anyway, back to the point.
Tell this story about McMaster and McGregor because this is interesting.
This guy, McMaster's your captain, McGregor's the major, which means he's the one actually in charge of the tanks on the ground as you guys are rolling into Kuwait and you roll upon this giant armored division of Iraqis and blow them all to hell and it was the most difficult fighting of the war, but also it was way too easy.
Talk more about that.
Could you please?
Yeah.
So, McGregor was the operations officer of the 2nd Squadron, 2nd U.S. Cavalry, which was our parent organization.
McMaster was the troop commander for Eagle Troop to ACR, it's what's called Armored Cavalry Regiment.
And so we had actually trained a lot in Europe before Saddam even invaded Kuwait and doing all kinds of different scenarios, most of which were against Russian or Soviet tank forces and how we would respond if they attacked, how we would do counterattacks, how would we defense, how would we maneuver across hundreds of kilometers of even open German countryside, et cetera.
So we actually had a lot of practical, physical experience in how to maneuver and fight against a really good armored enemy.
Now, when we went to Iraq, you may recall, even in your ninth grade year there, before the battle had gone, the media narrative was, oh my God, this is the elite Republican Guard we're talking about here.
They're battle-hardened after eight years of the war in the Iran-Iraq War, and man, we're going to go in attacking this and we're probably going to have at least 10% casualties, especially among the first troops to hit because these guys have thousands of tanks, thousands of artillery pieces, and my gosh, this is going to be a bloody mess.
Well, that's what it might look like on paper because they did have thousands of tanks, thousands of artillery pieces, et cetera.
But what they didn't discuss, but what McGregor possibly uniquely told us, because he was telling us this from the beginning, nothing ever surprised him because he was a study of both military history as well as contemporary situations, and he told us before we ever deployed that, look, these guys may have a lot of stuff, but it's old equipment.
Intelligence shows us that they don't know how to maintain it very good.
They're terrible shots.
They're just not very good.
So the safest place you can be on any battlefield is in an American tank heading directly toward the gun tube of any enemy vehicle because you're going to win that fight.
Our equipment is better.
Our technology is better.
Our air force is better.
All of those kinds of things gave us all this opportunity or advantage, and we were extremely well-trained, highly disciplined, and a cohesive unit like you could imagine.
And so when it came time to actually put that into action in February of 1991, I mean, I'm just telling you, you know me as much as anybody, I'm not for war.
I think it should be, we should not do it unless it's absolutely forced on us because it's so destructive.
But I'm telling you, when I got into that fight, there was nothing I wanted to do more than to actually go in and engage.
Once they said, this is what you're going to do, we were hungry for battle.
Just admitting that to you.
And when we, because we knew we had the advantages, we literally hungered for closing with the enemy and destroying them.
That's pretty much the way it turned out is, is that McGregor knew that McMaster was the best scrapper, the ground fighter of any of the commanders he had.
So as we're maneuvering forward through hundreds of kilometers of now Iraqi, Kuwaiti desert to find where these guys were, because we didn't know where they were at exactly.
We had a pretty good idea, but you know, in the open desert, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where they are.
And he had McMaster in the trail, actually, of, there was four tank heavy companies involved in the squadron, and he had McMaster in the rear so that he wanted somebody else to actually make the initial contact and then use McMaster later on.
Well, when it came time, when intelligence told us we were getting close to enemy combat, now he moved McMaster into the front because he wanted him to be able to make the initial contact.
Now, our normal way of operating is that we had helicopter scouts that went about eight kilometers to 10 kilometers, that's about five or six miles, in front of our lead scouts and tanks so that they could tell from the air and give us plenty of advance warning so that we would be able to maneuver out of contact with the enemy and be able to have all the advantages.
Well, as it turned out, there was this humongous, just biblical sandstorm, the kind that you see on some of these mummy movies that just came flying out of nowhere, and you couldn't hardly see, you know, 10 feet in front of your tank.
So the helicopter scouts were grounded.
So now then, we're only going to be able to see what we could see, you know, through thermals or opticals or with your bare eyes, which was really hard because of the sand blowing in them.
But we came up to this point where some of our scouts said they saw something in their thermals, but they weren't sure what it was.
And so I actually got into one of the scout vehicles because part of my job was to know what enemy vehicles look like based on their thermal outline.
And I thought, oh my gosh, that's a whole line of enemy tanks that are dug in.
And so I raced back to my vehicle, called in to McMaster, and I said, hey, let me call some artillery on this.
And he said, yes, sure, go ahead.
But in the meantime, he started maneuvering in that direction with the tanks.
And now, because tanks have the best armor, he moved the tanks in front of the scouts so that he can move on those vehicles that were up there.
And before I could get my artillery mission called in, he had advanced too far, so we actually had to cancel it.
But McMaster now, then he's looking hard for him, but he can't see him because even though it's relatively flat, there's still some slight undulating terrain where it's a slight hill and then it goes down and whatever.
Well, one of those little hills, he came up and then when his tank treads came down on the backside of it, he was face to face with, he could see eight enemy tanks dug in, gun tubes pointing in our direction.
And without any hesitation, all that training we'd done in Germany came flying back into place and he immediately engaged three tanks.
Within about six seconds, three tanks were in fire.
And then mean, simultaneous with engaging those, he's also given instruction to the other tanks, four on his left, four on his right, telling them what to do.
And so they started engaging.
Within about 15 seconds, maybe less than that, all eight tanks were on fire.
And then everybody just started flying through them.
We just went through the middle of the rest of their defenses.
It turned out to be an entire battalion, part of an advanced brigade of the, of what was called the Taliban Division, the Iraqi Taliban called it of the Republican Guards.
And we just went through there and it was just insane because I was, I was, my vehicle was physically between the leftmost tank and the rightmost scout vehicle from what was called Red Platoon, 1st Platoon.
And so I'm just spraying everything in front of me with the, with my M60 machine gun, which compared to the tanks of Bradley's is almost like a pea shooter.
And, you know, you got Bradley's on the left firing 25 millimeter chain guns, tow missiles.
The tanks are firing 50 caliber machine guns and their tank main guns, stuff's blowing up all over the place.
The Iraqis are firing back in the other direction.
There's infantrymen everywhere.
I mean, it is, it is complete chaos.
Like you can't imagine, except that it was, it was basically battle drills for us because we knew exactly what to do without even having specific instructions.
And we did everything we, like we were trained to do and everything McGregor had told us before came to pass in that they were terrible shots.
It was, I think at least two rounds had been fired at McMaster, but they were short.
They hit the ground and just threw dirt up onto his tank.
They didn't hit him.
Some of our other scouts, even though they're old tanks, they would still go through a Bradley fighting vehicle, but they missed.
They fired and they didn't hit, there was this one, I didn't, I don't think I put this in there, but it was a really interesting vignette that one of my friends, a lieutenant, was standing with his scanner and he, and he saw suddenly his sights was on a tank and the gun tube was right facing towards him and it fired, it missed and hit the ground and blew up.
Now in, in American tank, it's a, it's a human being, it's in there loading rounds.
And so when you fire one, you can just tell the guy, load another one and as fast as you can pull the trigger, you can fire again, about three seconds for a well-trained crew.
The Iraqi tanks, the Soviet tanks is what they had.
They have an auto loader, so they don't have that other crewman in the turret.
Well, what that means is it takes about 10 seconds to reload a round after you fired.
So he knew he had about 10 seconds before they could fire again.
So he brought up his tow launcher, aimed it, fired, and it's much slower than it takes.
So about five or six seconds before it could hit.
And he just had to hope that guy couldn't get his tank round reloaded before he did, because it was whoever could fire the first was going to win.
And it turned out to be my friend because the other tank exploded in a hail of explosions and sparks.
And that was, that was kind of indicative of how the whole fight had gone.
Many Iraqis were firing their, you know, infantrymen were firing their AK-47s, which of course is just like throwing pebbles at a tank, it just bounces right off.
And I really honestly felt pity for those guys because they were fighting hard, but it was completely futile.
And eventually we went through all this stuff and got on where the title of the battle came from, the 7-3 Easting, which is a map grid point.
We had gone through and wiped out all of the enemies that was in the area before us.
And then we kind of reestablished a new forward position for which the rest of the squadron and the rest of the regiment could come up on line and then get ready to go continue forward.
But that turned out to be the end of our fight because before we could get into another battle, the war was over.
But I can just tell you that was about six hours of intense activity and 23 minutes of just adrenaline rushing in craziness.
Now, were you under General McCaffrey at that point or he was in charge of a different sector?
No, he was in charge of a different area.
Okay.
So I'm glad to know that you weren't involved in a massacre on Highway 88.
No, no, we were not.
That was quite far from where we were at.
Cool.
All right.
Well, yeah, McCaffrey, he's a bastard.
Anyway, so now part of this, as you said, was there just came this incredible overconfidence and there was not just because of the ease of the battle and all the laser guided bombs and y'all's great success out in the desert in your tanks and with your training in your Abrams's, but also the fall of the Soviet Union.
And really, Nixon had went and shook hands with Mao back in 74.
So they were still, you know, holding the red flag, but our Cold War against them was over.
And so there's nobody to fight.
You know, there's it's a world full of no enemies anywhere.
And so really, if they just maintain their Abrams tanks and stayed home, everything would have just been fine.
But instead.
Well, yeah.
And I do.
I cover that part.
Actually, that's I pick that narrative up in the book if because the the Cold War did come to an end.
I mean, we hadn't even gotten completely back to Germany from the from the desert before the Soviet Union collapsed.
And you know, the whole.
And by the way, I'm sorry.
Could you I'm sorry to interrupt, but could you please describe what that looked like watching the USSR's Red Army pack up and leave all of Eastern Europe behind and retreat back behind a border just a couple hundred miles from Moscow there like that?
Oh, yeah.
It was it was it was just I mean, we didn't never even imagined it before, before on August the 1st, 1990, the day before Saddam invaded Kuwait.
We were at the what's called the Grafenwoehr Training Center getting ready for a large exercise to where we were, you know, again, doing what we did oftentimes, which is prepare for a Soviet style invasion.
And at that point, nobody had any idea at all that there was any possible that the that the Soviet Union was going to collapse.
They still had somewhere around 50000 tanks.
They had missiles.
They had air power.
They had naval power.
I mean, they had what is, I think, three million men under arms at that point in the Warsaw Pact.
And I mean, that was a real, genuine, formidable force that could at any time, you know, launch a war out there that could go nuclear.
And we all understood that.
And to then see that that entire monstrosity just disintegrate was just unbelievable.
And then, you know, I was actually pretty impressed with the with the Bush foreign policy team and how they negotiated a lot of that stuff initially, because, you know, at first there was Soviet tanks and Russian, even some in Eastern Germany.
We knew that from beginning.
We were always prepared to to physically fight those those troops there.
And when it came to an end, you know, there was a lot of talk that at first they would stay there.
But then Bush and Gorbachev and some of those other people were able to negotiate, no, we're actually going to withdraw them from here.
And of course, you know, we promised not to go any further in NATO and we would not move one troop beyond where they currently were.
And so they agreed to do that and move it back.
Had we done that, had we had we just followed through and said, OK, great, the whole the whole purpose for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has just disintegrated.
So the only reason NATO was formed was because of Russia and the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
They're now gone.
So that would seem to tell you that there's no more need to have a temporary military alliance, which is what alliances are supposed to be.
And so we can actually turn our attention to doing other things and to, you know, to modernize and retool our military, because now there's really no potential enemy that could fight us.
So this is a perfect time, you know, to take the risk necessary to modernize and change whatever to adapt to what's about to come without the need of having to be ready on a moment's notice to fight.
And it was also the absolute perfect time to reach out to our former enemies and say, OK, let's reconcile.
We'll help you, just like we did with the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II, and say, hey, we're going to help you recover.
And so maybe it's too far to say we'll ever be friends, but, hey, we can be cooperative.
We can actually get along and, you know, do business together and, you know, that kind of thing.
That was possible.
And instead, we wanted to, like, press our advantage.
And then, as you know, everything fell apart after that.
We started advancing NATO and going back and all the things we promised and moved all the way up basically to the Russian border, pretty close to it.
And you know, now we have the mess we have today, which never needed to happen.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, Bush at this time, really based on you guys' victory out there, this is when he's declaring, or I guess the presumed one, it started before you all hit the ground.
But this was the declaration of the new world order, because even then in 1990 and going into 91, the Soviet Union wasn't gone yet.
But the Cold War was over and they had lifted, the wall had began coming down and the people started fleeing across the border into Austria from, I think, Hungary in the end of 1988.
And we're not all machine gun to death and we're allowed to escape.
Right.
So that was the beginning of it.
So it was, you know, it was during that transition period that they were doing this.
But then so Bush declared the new world order, which, you know, aside from the conspiracy theory stuff about a world government that takes over the USA, what he really meant was that the USA is in charge of enforcing the world law.
And by the way, we write the world law and there's no limit to what we can write world law about or what conflicts we can intervene in.
And they started intervening in civil wars kind of right away instead of just wars between states where they're claiming to defend the weaker one that was illegally invaded.
Like in the case of Kuwait, they go on to Bosnia, go on to split it, help splitting off Kosovo from Serbia, all of this, because there's no one to stop them.
And this is, you know, Bill Clinton, who compared to George W. Bush, you know, only killed about half as many people.
But, you know, the arrogance there was really just driving the whole policy.
I think when you write about in the book, the future combat systems and this essentially a cult or just a set of religious beliefs ingrained inside the leadership of the Pentagon.
And I don't know which branches are most responsible for this, if it's the Army or the Air Force or what, but essentially pretending that 1990s tech is 2030 tech.
And we're going to essentially, you know, make it where one tank can take out a whole brigade or or whatever, you know, the skewed math is so that in any way, just basically turning everything upside down based on who's making money and who's, you know, part of the new fad.
Yeah.
Now, I don't have enough personal knowledge to be able to say with any confidence the motivations behind some of these guys like, you know, some people accuse many people up there of this was all just a big racket intentionally to make money.
I mean, human nature that you can almost assume that's the case with some.
I don't think it was the case with all.
I think the majority actually wanted to do good things, but they were.
Well, look, institutionally, you got to stay in business.
So you know what I mean?
You got to find something to do.
It may not be in the most cynical way, but they admit that when they pulled out of Afghanistan after the surge in Afghanistan, they said, well, I guess we're going to Africa because we got to find something to occupy our time, essentially.
Yeah.
And of course, that's, you know, human nature is you don't want to get rid of things that are working, etc.
You're just afraid of that.
But the truth is, that's why we're there.
We're supposed to have a national defense to keep from fighting wars, not to use it to look for wars to go fight.
And that's one of our biggest failures, that we just don't seem to be willing to grasp that because we could have done that.
And this whole FCF stuff could have been successful, except that part of this hubris that was born with the ease of our victory in Desert Storm spilled into this.
Because now then, we think we can, as you just said it very eloquently a minute ago, we thought we could do anything we wanted and nobody could say anything about it.
So we start designing this just basically Hollywood movie type script for what we want the combat to be like in the future, and then just pretended it was just because we wanted it to be.
So they start physically designing force structure.
They start building plans for changing the entire military.
And none of this stuff worked, Scott, none of it worked, or at least not the important parts of it.
Things they were trying to design, they didn't work.
And instead of just saying, oh, crap, that didn't work, let's try something different, which would seem to be natural, instead, they hid the results and continued to do something they knew wasn't working in the thoughts that I think that their intent was, well, we'll figure this out later.
But if we admit, and I know this actually, this I do know, have first-hand or second-hand knowledge that this is what was said by some of the senior leaders, if we tell Congress about this and they see it's a failure, they may cut our funding and we may never get there.
So we got to just basically tell them what they want to hear so they keep the money coming and then we'll fix it later.
It'll always be later, but we got to keep the money rolling.
And that's exactly what they succeeded in doing all up until 2009, when Gates finally said, yeah, y'all, forget it.
You're done.
We're cutting this.
The program's ended.
And we wasted a decade of time up to that point where we could have been advancing our stuff and instead did zero.
We wasted $20 billion.
And unfortunately, we did not learn a lesson, because in the now 11 years since that time, we have just had three more attempts at modernization programs and all of them have been canceled.
Not one of them has actually produced a vehicle, because we just can't fathom just doing something that makes sense and settling for something that'll work at the moment instead of seeking bullheadedly for something that will never materialize, which is what we've done.
So now then, from 1999 until today, more than 20 years, we still have nothing new that we didn't have in Desert Storm.
Can you imagine that?
The main vehicles we have right now for fighting a ground war are the same ones I took into Desert Storm in 1991.
And now what was the name?
I can't remember right now.
There was the name of that vehicle.
It was Gates that finally killed it.
This artillery piece.
Oh, the Crusader.
Yeah.
So this was a big part of it, right?
And by the time of Gates, Gates is like, this thing is a piece of junk.
We're better off with what we had in 1991.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's that.
There was also a helicopter that didn't make it.
There was all these ground vehicles.
And you say, yeah, they wanted to deploy a new tank that would have much lighter armor.
But don't worry, because it'll have the internet or something, right?
Yeah.
That was the thing.
They had this.
They said, we want to be able to deploy division in 96 hours.
I don't know why they thought that was a necessity, but that's what they wanted.
And of course, we had direct experience with Desert Storm that it takes about a month to get a division deployed overseas because of how heavy the tanks are and all this other stuff.
So they said they wanted something that was about one third, no, one quarter, about one quarter the weight.
It was 19 tons, was the original plan, so that they could fit it on a plane so that they could get it to fly it out.
Well, you have a 19 ton vehicle.
There's no armor on the planet that you can defend like you could the M1 tank.
So it could defeat any enemy vehicle or tank round or whatever.
This thing couldn't defeat anything.
It was like the Bradley.
Even an old T-55 could have taken it out.
It's just like with the F-35 now, they go, look, it's true that the thing can't fight, but don't worry.
It will never have to.
You won't have to.
Yeah, that's exactly what it was, because we have perfect situational awareness.
We have all these interconnected link devices, et cetera.
So we'll know everything and we can fire from out of contact.
We don't have to see them to fire.
Well, that'd be great if it was true, but it's not true because even their every exercise show they don't have the ability to have the bandwidth necessary to go around, you know, to go over hills, to stand up to enemy blinding, et cetera, you know, jamming situations.
We don't have the vehicle, the ability to do that.
And instead we continue to go through.
So if they hadn't have been canceled, they would have fielded a troop that could not have survived Desert Storm.
We couldn't have survived to get to bad Iraqi troops if they had succeeded.
Thank God they didn't.
But it still has left us, you know, still with 1980s technology in now heading into 2020s, which is just insane.
Well, except the thing is, again, though, what good is the army for anyway, other than, you know, essentially killing local militiamen in their neighborhood who don't like being occupied?
Again, we don't have any enemies to fight.
The Russians aren't invading Eastern Europe.
And even if they were, Eastern Europe is not America's eastern frontier.
It was a stretch in the 40s when they said that France was, I think.
But to say that Latvia is America's eastern frontier is a ridiculous joke.
And so, but and Russia ain't coming anyway.
And everybody knows that.
And as you talk about in your book, and we're skipping ahead here, but China's entire policy, the dangerous threat, is called by the Americans, I don't know what the Chinese call it.
The Americans call it anti-access area denial.
In other words, purely defensive.
And so who the hell cares?
And meanwhile, there's no other power on the planet.
All the Europeans are our friends.
There are no powers in Africa.
There are no powers in South America.
There are no other powers in Asia.
Japan is certainly not arming up to threaten us.
And so that's it.
We could have world peace just by default if we stop fighting.
That is exactly right.
That's one of the points I'm trying to bring out in this is that there is no power or group of powers that is planning or even has the capacity to attack the United States, meaning if we don't attack them, we're not going to have it.
Why in God's name would I want to impale myself on China's A2AD, which I know could do severe harm to us, but they can't attack us with it.
So why throw myself into it?
It makes no sense at all.
Yeah.
I mean, well, take like the hypothetical.
Could we pick a fight with India?
Hey, India, what you looking at?
And start pushing them in the chest and threatening them and surfacing our submarines off of their coast and putting sanctions on them and telling them, hey, believe me, you can find plenty of excuses if you're an American imperialist looking for excuses to accuse the Indian government of acting unjustly in this or that place.
And you think we might be able to pick a fight with them and make an enemy out of them and then pretend that every time that they build a ship that it's directly a threat to North America?
You know, it's easy.
They could start it tomorrow.
We have a new policy.
We're going to pretend that the Indians are the bad guys next.
And God help me.
I know that we're going to be quoting this 10 years from now.
Well, I really hope we don't, because that would be that would just be disaster if we did.
Because as you pointed out, no one has the capacity, the power or the will or the intent of even the desire to attack the United States because they know how powerful we are.
And if we go to their front yard, if we go into their backyard and attack them, they are going to respond and we will get hurt.
Why would we need to do that?
Yeah.
And, you know, even as far as China, everybody's afraid of China's growing power and all that.
But we're talking about a 3000 year old civilization.
What do I know?
I'm ignorant.
Maybe it's four or something by now.
And we already know that they already have their borders and they're not an expansionist power.
They built a great wall to keep everybody else out.
Everybody else is a foreign devil who ought to be left to their own hell.
And all that kind of thing is always been their kind of very chauvinist point of view.
And I'll take it.
That's the kind of isolationism I can get behind.
And what kind of fools would they be to say, yeah, no, what we're going to do is now that the Americans are weakened from blowing their whole wad in the sands of Iraq for no reason whatsoever.
Now we are going to adopt the policy of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump of driving our empire into the ground in the in record time for no good reason at all.
And what possible how high could they be to make a decision to copy us after what we've just demonstrated to the whole world in front of everybody in broad daylight here?
And everything they have been saying is the opposite of that.
They are looking to to have influence in their region, which is not at all unreasonable given their size and their capabilities.
But they're not looking to militarily conquer anyone.
They want to do business with everyone.
And yeah, they do want to have, you know, policies to their advantage.
They do put pressure on people.
They do things we don't like.
Roger got all that.
There's ways we could deal with that, you know, to make sure there's fair trade and make sure that we outcompete them and all that.
But that's stuff you do on the economic realm, on the diplomatic realm, not on the battlefield.
You don't have to do this on the battlefield.
And all you can do is lose.
There's nothing to gain.
But the other way, there is plenty to gain.
And I just it's just hard for me to understand.
Well, it's not hard for me to understand, because there's so much money involved in doing it the stupid way, as long as no, they don't get hurt.
They're fine with that, because there's a lot of money to be made.
That's just a fact.
Yeah.
Well, here's something that's come up on the show a few times.
I'm not sure if I've raised this with you.
And I'm sorry, I didn't get to finish the book, but I read about three quarters of it.
I'm not sure if this is in there or not.
But this is something that's, you know, really a thing.
I brought this up to Chas Freeman, and he was like, yeah, this is really a thing, which really bothers me.
And the thing is this, that they talk about war with China and war with Russia on such a regular basis and plan for it and game for it and theorize about it and all the different branches and all the different think tanks and all the different, you know, whatever, in and out of government, all the experts.
And they always talk about it as though nukes don't exist.
They all talk about it as though Russia or China don't have nukes.
And if we do have a war with them, it'll be just like a Lockheed sales video about all this cool hardware that we have.
And then, but we don't have to worry about the fact that Beijing could nuke Washington, D.C. off the face of the earth and New York City and L.A. and San Francisco and Denver and Dallas and Austin and whatever they want.
They got people.
Oh, yeah.
Well, we got more nukes than them.
They got 300.
And that's enough to wipe our civilization off the face of the earth in an afternoon.
And they know that.
And I thought, Danny, that we knew that.
But pretend like that ain't right.
We, they, the military, they I'm really right about this, right, that they entertain the idea of here's how we'll defend Taiwan or whatever, as though there is no H-bomb in play.
Right.
I mean, honestly, that that's a good analogy, because it's not far different from the situation in 1962 when all of the chiefs of staff of the military services were unified in their recommendation to President Kennedy that we should attack the Russians on Cuba and that we should use nuclear weapons and we should actually prepare to use nuclear weapons against Russia.
Actually, they said they thought we could we could win that engagement, which is lunacy.
And you know, you'd think that we finally should have learned that because we know what the H-bomb can do.
But now that it's like they're just unwilling to recognize that, look, one nuclear weapon hitting anywhere in America is could cause 10, 12 million casualties on the spot.
They don't have to have, you know, 5,000 of them, five or six would just obliterate wildlife as we know it here.
So don't do anything that might prompt that.
And of course, this is, this is something I have talked about.
There's a similar dynamic, the same dynamic in Europe, this idea that we need to have all these large ground forces to prevent, you know, a Hitler like swamp across east to west is crazy, because do you think that Paris would ever sit passively by if Russian tanks were rolling, you know, west and they have nuclear weapons?
Of course, they're going to use them.
So Russia knows that.
They're not stupid.
Putin is bloodthirsty, but he's not stupid.
He's not going to take his forces to a place of annihilation.
He's not going to do that.
And that's what the deterrent value of nuclear weapons does.
But we want to pretend that's not the case and that we're actually preparing for tank armies to go flooding across the West and spend all the money that we're doing.
And it just, it makes no sense because it's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so there's an interview of Oliver Stone with Putin and there are a few different ones.
And I actually, I have the book of it, but I still haven't had a chance to watch the series or read the book of the full interview set.
But I did see a clip of it where Oliver Stone says to Putin, well, look, Putin, I mean, you know what's going on here.
This is all just a racket for the military industrial complex.
You know, they're putting anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic and radars in the Czech Republic and the rest of this.
But you know, they're really not going to nuke you in a first strike or anything.
They're just, you know, wasting money because that's their job.
And Putin says, look, I know that, you know, that's all true.
But look at the position you're putting me in.
I mean, obviously I have to take this seriously.
If you're going to build up the ability to knock down any retaliatory strike from my country, then I have to build up my forces to deprive you of that advantage.
Don't I?
What am I supposed to do?
Not that?
And it's like, you know, they say that this guy's a fanatic, but he sounds always very reasonable and monotone about this stuff.
Just he talks about, listen, if our American partners are going to ring us with anti-missile missiles, we have to build up, you know, he still calls us his friends as he's saying, you guys putting a knife to my throat.
I have to arm up.
I have no choice, you know, and and you know, this is the most important thing I ever heard Pat Buchanan saying.
He's smart on a lot of stuff, but he said to me on this show, I think it was certainly an article somewhere that, you know, the what America did was they used to draw the line as you were talking about your station there during this time, they used to draw the line at the Elbe River halfway across Germany.
And of course, you know, West Berlin that was wholly in East Germany.
But anyway, that's the asterisk.
But for the most part, you know, it was the Elbe River.
Now they move the border twelve hundred miles, the border of the West, right of the Western Alliance.
They've moved that all the way up to the line, all the way to the Baltic states, right on Russia's border and including, of course, Poland and perennially threatening to bring Ukraine in as well.
I'm sorry, I've never looked at it that way.
That's a really great way to look at it.
Yeah.
And so in other words, though, you know, Stalin kept all this land after the war because this was his security cushion because he'd been invaded by the Germans twice.
And never mind that anymore.
We're not going to have that.
So we're going to occupy all of Eastern Europe.
So if you are going to fight Russia, you have to fight through all them first before you get to us was why.
And then with the Soviet Union, all that fell apart.
As you mentioned, you know, the promise was we won't extend one inch east.
And instead they took the advantage of the opportunity to expand and send all the way to Russia.
And in the 90s, you know, they talked about bringing Russia into NATO and saying this is an anti-Russia.
This is all just for security and peace and cooperation.
And the bigger the alliance, the less likely that any members of the alliance will ever fight each other.
Right.
That makes sense.
So come on, guys, it'll be fine.
The Russians saw it correctly.
If you look at the war in Serbia in 99, especially that this is an anti-Russian alliance and that this is, you know, they'll never, of course, be partners in the thing.
It's all, again, a knife at their throat.
And so what are they supposed to do about this?
And then, you know, George Bush getting out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and starting all of this ball rolling on the Cold War in the 21st century is completely unnecessary.
You don't have to like Putin to just be a grown up and look at it from his point of view for a minute.
You have to admit, you know, that you might not want Bill Clinton to be in charge of your national security policy or George W. Bush, George Bush's son, to be the one making these calls.
And yet that's what we've had.
And that's how we got into this mess.
So it's not a matter of blaming America.
It's a matter of blaming these boobs, you know.
Individuals, yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Because and I think I make this point pretty clear throughout the book and certainly in my other writings, is I'm all for a strong national defense.
I'm not at all for, you know, let's disarm and just hope everything works out fine.
Anything crazy like that at all.
But just having a standard, good, solid ability to project power, our nuclear deterrent, can keep us safe from any external aggression and can open up enormous opportunities for us to have economic development all over the place.
Our overall security will be far lessened, or the risk to our security will be far lessened.
And we can enjoy some freedom, some peace, the likes of which we haven't in decades.
And all of it can be done if you have a good foreign policy.
That's really the thrust of the whole book.
I lay all this stuff to set the groundwork to say we could have a really good foreign policy, keep us really safe, and expand our economic opportunities and lower the threats to our country.
It will just have sane foreign policies.
Right.
And, you know, I just had this conversation or part of this same conversation with this guy from the Quincy Institute, William Smith, who wrote this thing about republic or empire and how these models are the enemies of each other and you can't have it both ways and all that.
Yeah.
I think that's a good way to say it.
I think about this all the time because, you know, Ron Paul actually ran for president in 1988.
So somewhere out there, there's an alternative dimension, I guess, according to the astrophysicists or whatever, where at the end of the Cold War, we had a total non-interventionist Republican in charge who oversaw the complete dismantlement of the American empire and then did two great terms and then Harry Brown won after him.
And then so we had instead of Bill Clinton and George Bush preaching free markets and democracy as they're slaughtering civilians by the hundreds of thousands in unprovoked wars, then, well, Afghanistan was mostly unprovoked, but you've got to read the book.
You know, they offered to surrender the guy to negotiate anyway.
The instead of all that, the counterfactual there would if and Ron Paul and Harry Brown both were so great at this.
Harry Brown had the Statue of Liberty speech where and this is what he would have said if he was the president was, look, we are working on perfecting our republic.
And that means maximizing individual freedom and justice in the Bill of Rights and everybody for all our people.
And we admonish you rest of the world to do the same, too.
And yet, but without, you know, a blood soaked shirt, without being a hypocrite, without meaning corrupt crony corporatism and government contracts and corruption when he says free markets.
Without meaning overthrowing your government and replacing it with a pliant dictatorship as the definition of democracy, which is, you know, what they really meant when they said all of this great libertarian stuff over the last 30 years.
But if it had just been people who really believed in what these guys were preaching, then just think of how much different the world will be.
People are appalled right now, of course, by all the totalitarianism in China and all of the, you know, the high tech 1984 type, you know, social tracking and all this stuff of the people by the central state there and all that.
Well, what if America could have said to China, man, you guys should be reading Rothbard this whole time and not have been hypocrites about it, but really meant it that like, yeah, individual freedom and economic freedom.
These are the same things.
And you guys need to work this out.
And and, you know, it wouldn't be paradise.
I'm not talking about utopia or some kind of, you know, you know, final end to human problems or whatever like that.
But just on the margin, just think of how much better things could have been if we had just actually lived by our declaration of independence this whole time instead of just talking about it.
Well, that's that's what frightens me and what was ultimately the motivation to write this book.
And I do mention this, I believe, in the foreword to the to the book is that I fear that we're going to not learn any of these lessons and we're eventually going to get to a position where we think we can control everything and we think we can do what we want, but we won't be able to.
Like, we may impale ourselves on that Chinese A2AD.
We may spark a war against Russia with these stupid activities in Syria or with these numerous, you know, operations in the air and on the ground in near Russia.
And we may get in a war and we go into a place where we can be harmed.
And now then we can really, really suffer because of it.
And that would be such as such a tragedy, because we could have, as you have really elucidated very well here, several points.
We could have a very safe country, a really prosperous thing and freedoms like nobody's business with very little fear of any kind of external aggression.
And instead, I fear that we're going to stumble into a war we should never have fought.
And the consequences are just impossible to predict, but they will be bad.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you know, Ron Paul, when he was first running for president or not first, but in 08, when he was running for president as a Republican, he did an interview with the Washington Post.
They hated this.
They're the best people for him to say this to.
He goes, come on, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
You know, but it's because he's taking on the entire premise that defending this country means holding the whole world down so it doesn't come at us.
You know, that is he rejects that premise and they can't see the world any other way than that.
You know.
Yeah.
But he's right.
If really the Constitution only said that the government can provide security for the middle part of North America and not the whole rest of the world, then, yeah, that's right.
A couple of good submarines and a couple of good infantry divisions, you know, led by General Davis here just in case we need them.
But we never do keep them training at Fort whatever the hell for one day that never comes.
And then it's not like Mexico is about to build a giant empire with Brazil and invade the rest of the South American countries.
And it's a good thing that we are preventing that absolutely impossible occurrence from happening.
You know what I mean?
There are just there's no scenarios where what war breaks out between France and Germany over what?
You know, the whole thing is bogus.
Germany and Japan fight over what an old grudge, but not any new actual interest.
And if that was true, we're preventing that.
I don't know, man.
It seems like, if anything, we would be the, you know, perverse incentive in that equation and probably making things worse.
Yep.
And that's, you know, when you put it like this, when if like we could get, I don't know, like 60, 70 million Americans to actually listen to this show and can hear all this stuff, you know, it sounds so reasonable and so logical and rational that most Americans, I think, if they were, you know, illuminated to think in these terms, they would go, well, that makes complete sense.
Right.
You know, I don't I don't want to go to war.
So I don't.
Yeah.
Let's let's do that.
And I think that they would.
But instead, all of the corporate media, I mean, Washington Post, New York Times, Fox News, CNN, all of them, left or right, it doesn't make any difference.
They all always throw one side or another to this, oh, my gosh, we can't let that happen situation, whatever it is.
And it's always towards we need we need more military.
And no one ever thinks this way.
And it certainly doesn't get much airtime.
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Hey, let me ask you this.
You ever spend time worrying that Obama's policy in Syria has only really begun to blow back in the form of the Islamic State, which existed for three years but now is gone?
But don't we have thousands of new Al Qaeda and ISIS guys in the world now?
And in some small number of them really becoming dedicated international jihadist killers.
Enough to really threaten another major problem here, or at least in Europe.
Yeah, I worry about that a lot, because I mean, just look, a lot of the that original 2004 insurgency that exploded in Iraq, much of that was was driven by people who had experience in the Mujahideen deal, which we funded a lot of, you know, with these fighters against the Soviet Union in the 80s.
And that was pretty small.
Yeah, that was relatively small.
But now imagine the now almost two decades of this stuff that we have going on all over the world where they have actually had a chance to actually become experts, subject matter experts in the thousands, all over the tens of thousands, all over the all over the world.
And I do worry, even if we put into this effect, even if Trump was listening to your show, and he read the book and he says, you know what, we're going to verbatim put that foreign policy into play.
And it's some brilliant thing that stuff is out there and you can't stop it.
And that that's going to have potential to blow back against us in any number of ways for decades, almost certainly.
So we do need to maintain, you know, really vigilant self-defense no matter what.
But the longer we go, the greater the threat of that.
Yeah.
And that's the real story.
I mean, there has been not one real correction here that's been beneficial.
I mean, I guess you could say that Iraq war three to destroy their entire caliphate that Obama built for them, that Bush and Obama built for them.
You know, that was blowing that up.
I mean, they killed a lot of innocent people.
I'm not saying that, but I guess you could qualify that in the general sense that, you know, that did diminish their power somewhat.
But it also is just kind of like flattening the curve and just spreading them out for a longer period of time and making things worse.
And, you know, there are plenty of people who called it all along what treason that Syria policy was of supporting.
I mean, because you talked about how the jihadists from Iraq were two on the Sunni insurgency, like the worst part of the Sunni insurgency came from the Afghan war, like Zarqawi and some of his confederates there, that then it was the guys from Iraq war two who came home to Libya and Syria, where then Obama took their side in the insurgencies there.
And you want to talk about treason.
This is a guy who framed Donald Trump for treason with Russia when he took the side of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Libya and in Syria.
And as you're saying, we're still going to pay for it.
When I went around my little trip around the world there of all the nation states where we don't really have any enemies in the world.
That's the one real threat that still exists out there.
And it's because we're the dominant power in the Middle East still.
But why?
As our president admits, we got no reason to be there at all except Israel.
Otherwise, we had no reason to be there at all for, you know, the American people's security whatsoever.
And our presence over there provokes these guys to fight us.
I'm not trying to justify fighting them.
But like you're saying, everything we do against them pretty much just makes matters worse.
And half the stuff our government does is deliberately taking their side of things when it's not blowing back accidentally.
So but it's going to continue.
I guess I'm trying to get through here.
I'm sorry, Dana, is that it's going to continue to serve as an excuse for intervention from now on.
And, you know, I mentioned the Khobar Towers there, where they blame that on Iran.
But that was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did that.
And they blamed it on Iran.
And, you know, there was that great stories, Phil Giraldi and the American conservative back in 2005, where, you know, it was word had gone out at the Pentagon.
If there's any major terrorist attack in the United States, you know, it would presumably obviously be a bin Laden night that they're going to blame it on Iran and use that as the excuse to attack Iran, even though they clearly had nothing to do with it.
There's Al Qaeda and ISIS attacks against Iran all the time.
But anyway.
So, I mean, that's the whole thing about it.
Right.
As long as you've got these bin Laden night kooks willing to blow themselves up in somebody's airport or whatever it is, somebody's ballgame, then they're going to be able to use that as an excuse.
It's a transmission belt of excuses to fight from America to its sometimes mercenary Mujahideen and back again.
You know?
Yeah.
Hey, I'm going to have to bug out here shortly.
I'm almost out of time here.
All right, cool.
I actually am, too.
But so I guess we'll we'll end with we didn't get a chance because of all of my talking to talk all about your time really in Iraq and Afghanistan and the lessons you learned there.
But that's just all the more reason for people to read this great book.
It really is great from a very informed first person point of view here about how all this has played out since the end of the Cold War.
It's 11th hour in 2020 America.
And you guys will love it.
And I sure have.
And I'm going to finish it tonight.
Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't get to finish the whole thing before this.
But anyways, thank you very much, Danny.
Appreciate it.
Talk to you.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
OK, guys, I decided I was just call Daniel Davis back the next day, Saturday here and follow up since I finished the book and I liked it so much and there's so much to talk about here.
So here's part two of our interview about Danny Davis's new book, The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.
Again, welcome back.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm doing so good.
Glad to be here, Scott.
All right.
Good deal.
So listen, you talk in the book about how, you know, look, I'm anti-war, although, yeah, my job is being in the army and killing people and stuff like that.
So that's a little bit contradictory, but it's only when it's really necessary and not this other stuff which you're criticizing so thoroughly and effectively.
But I wonder if in your mind you have really moved, not necessarily left or right, but moved to a more non interventionist position from previous hawkishness or to you, you really hold the same standard that you always held.
Yeah.
When you thought you were defending Western Europe from the Soviets or whatever it is, it's just there are no Soviets now.
There has been no change whatsoever.
And I will unequivocally tell you, I don't in any way consider myself anti-war at all.
I don't.
I consider myself strongly anti-stupid war.
And the only kind of war that is valid and the reason I joined the military in the first place and was proud to serve when I did is because if someone attacks our country and you know, it's an unauthorized, illegal, unprovoked attack, like a Pearl Harbor kind of thing, you know, something like that, then I'm all about defending our country and our people, the people that are in it.
And so I will not hesitate in the future if something like that did happen and we needed to defend our country, I'd be the first one to get back in line.
But I am 100 percent opposed to any of these foolish wars that don't even have anything to do with our national security, actually make our security worse and sacrifice the lives of our people, cause the deaths of other people in other countries unnecessarily.
I'm 100 percent opposed to that.
Yeah, well, you know, here's part of the problem, too.
And, you know, a lot of times we talk about the war on terrorism just in the 21st century, or maybe we would go back to Jimmy Carter or, you know, the coup against the Shah and all the dominoes that have fallen.
I mean, the coup for the Shah against Mossadegh and all the the dominoes that have fallen since 53 and all those things.
But really, it's the entire post World War Two so-called world order that we're talking about here, right?
Because the United Nations and the world law and the edicts of the Security Council, they really don't mean a thing without somebody to back them up.
And that somebody is us.
So when they, you know, they built all of this structure of this international law, depending on how you look at it, mostly look as a fig leaf for American empire, you know, justification building for it.
But, you know, they built this thing that it's really hard for them to back out of.
Right.
They even put U.N. headquarters in New York City instead of anywhere in the old world.
It's here.
And so that makes.
Really, the U.S. army, the world army, and it obligates America in a way to this policy of global hegemony, as they call it.
If we're not there to to dominate everyone else and keep the peace, then surely all war will break out.
And that's sometimes they say that in reference to American power.
Sometimes they say that in reference to the U.N.'s kind of world law.
But they mean both at the same time, really.
Right.
These things go together.
So that's really the question is whether we're abandoning.
Well, you can agree or not.
I don't know.
To me, it seems like that's really the question.
What?
Not just ending the stupid war on terrorism from recent days, but abandoning the entire notion that the American Republic is in charge of global security.
It's just not.
Our Constitution doesn't give them the power to do that.
And it's all mostly, you know, in virtually every case counterproductive to American security, not just in the, you know, screwing around in Afghanistan, but all this stuff from Korea on.
What do you think about all that?
Yeah, you know, the Constitution established the armed forces for the sole purpose of defending our country.
And for a long time, mostly that's what it was.
But then we started getting a little bit of field.
And when we started getting a little bit cocky and capable, you know, we started expanding in some other places in South America, et cetera, and south of the border here.
But as you say, really, in my research, you can really point to World War II.
The end of World War II is the inflection point to where we really started thinking that we're like in charge of everything and we want to be in charge of everything.
And, you know, you had, you know, obviously the drop of the nuclear bomb, you know, in 1945.
And then with the elevation of General Eisenhower to president, you know, he had seen firsthand the the cost of war.
So he he wanted to stay out of overt war.
And actually, by today's standards, he was you would almost call him an isolationist because he didn't go to the aid of Hungary and some of these others who got overrun by the Soviet Union.
He got us out of the Korean War.
You know, he shut that deal off, et cetera.
But he did start to do some things with the special forces.
He kind of started some of this, you know, these coup plottings and these overthrows that we did behind the scenes.
And JFK, he started souring on it late, but he kind of went along with the case at first.
But then after he died, you know, then you had LBJ just kind of went crazy.
Nixon went crazy after that.
And really, there's even though other people have not been as crazy, there's so many things going on almost as a matter of course, behind the scenes where we keep doing these covert actions and coups and assassinations and everything, always claiming that this is to the benefit of our country, always claiming that if we don't, you know, much worse is going to happen.
And, you know, we could potentially go to war and, you know, we have to do this to defend a war.
And then you get this mentality, which I think is now deeply, deeply ingrained that we, quote, have to do this.
If we don't, that's another quote, if we don't, then fill in the blank and there's all these dark things that are going to just suddenly happen.
And I think that an actual analysis, an unemotional analysis, shows that that is a bunch of crap.
And that's about the nicest word that I can say about it, because most countries, in fact, I would say all countries at the moment, they want to improve themselves.
They want to take care of their people.
They want to consolidate their power.
They want to minimize the threats to their country.
And they're all doing various things that they can within their power to do it, whether that's Iran, whether that's Saudi Arabia, whether that's Russia, whether that's China, whether that's Germany, whether it's France, Turkey, all of those countries, you know, in the Middle East, every one of them, everybody's doing what they can to try to benefit their country and to try to keep themselves safe.
Right.
And that operates within a relatively benign band of things that could be problematic or beneficial, depending on your perspective.
But what they don't do, nobody has this idea that they're going to be Hitler of the 21st century and that they're going to they're just looking for a way, boy, if I can just find a little bit of weakness here, I'm going to conquer Western Europe.
I'm going to conquer all of Asia, all these kinds of things.
That's what we claim is the case.
But there's no evidence to support that at all.
We do see China saying, hey, I want to defend myself because the United States is, you know, taking action all over the place.
So I'm going to have this great defensive capability, the A2AD, I think we talked about last time.
You've got Russia saying, hey, I'm going to move forward.
And part of the justification that they use for going into the eastern part of Ukraine and to, you know, being involved with Belarus, et cetera, moving troops up closer to their borders because they see us, you know, encroaching closer and closer to their border with our Navy, you know, in the Barents and the Black Sea with our troops all up along their actual border with other countries, et cetera.
So all those things are in response to what we're doing here.
But you don't see offensive capability.
You don't see an offensive desire to, you know, conquer even Central Europe, much less Western Europe, et cetera.
So you said it really good in our previous conversation, and I think it's worth repeating here that if we just acknowledge the reality that exists, there is so much opportunity for us to have a far more peaceful world and a far lower risk to our security and a far greater opportunity for financial and economic advancement, you know, via trade and whatnot else with the rest of the world.
Those are things that's what reality is.
And instead, we're living in this twisted fantasy that says, oh, my God, we have to always do all these military things or everyone will attack us, which is just insane.
It's just not borne out by the facts.
And somehow we've got to change that mentality.
Yeah.
You know, the only real territorial expansion type things going on, or I don't know the only, but the major ones of recent times is because of America.
Right.
Barack Obama's support for Turkey in their support for the Islamic State in Syria and its rise and even takeover of Western Iraq.
And they did expand their border a few miles into Kurdish territory in Syria.
But even at the height of the Islamic State, when Baghdadi was almost wholly reliant on Erdogan, he didn't.
Erdogan didn't say, all right, ha ha, sucker, thanks for getting rid of the Shia for me and then move his forces in and expand the Turkish caliphate and reestablish the Ottoman Empire in Mosul or whatever.
He didn't even try to do that.
He could have done that.
Baghdadi had gotten everybody out of the way for him.
He could have said, ha ha, look at me.
I'm in Mosul.
And he didn't even try.
So there's nobody really.
And that was with American, you know, backing, letting him get away with whatever bloody murder he wanted.
And so there's more, more truth to that than, you know, I was actually in Iraq after I'd retired.
I went back and was basically as a journalist, went to the front lines in the Mosul area, actually got right up to the edge of Mosul where the front line of ISIS was and whatever.
And I remember when you're talking about in the summer of 2014 or 2015, as I believed when I was there.
Yeah.
It was 2015.
And I was taken by my guides from Erbil where I'd landed all the way up to the forward Kurdish Peshmerga positions where their commanding general on the ground was up there.
And we went by this one military base.
And I say, wait, that's what is that?
Because that's not our base right there.
And they go, oh, no, that's the Turkish base.
That's the Turkish armor.
They have gotten all the way up here.
So they had, you know, to, quote, defend their interest up there.
But they had armor that deep into Iraq.
And if they wanted to, I mean, there's nothing the Peshmerga didn't have any tanks or at least not anything to talk about.
If they wanted to, they could have done that then.
But they didn't because that's not what their objectives are.
So I think it just reinforces your position.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it.
And none of that would have happened at all if Obama had just read the riot act to all the allies that I don't care what you want.
We hate Al Qaeda more than everything.
So shut up.
And that policy would have never happened at all.
And instead he said, yeah, here here's my CIA.
Use it to do whatever you want.
So, yeah, because the fact is and you know, this is this almost is accepted without any critical analysis or pushback.
And it should have some because Obama was wrong.
We did not need to go back into Iraq in 2014.
We did not need to go back into Syria in 2015 to try and help, you know, get rid of ISIS and whatnot.
ISIS was a threat to Damascus.
It was a threat to to Baghdad.
It was a threat to, you know, to Turkey, to Istanbul.
Those are the people that needed to deal with it.
We never needed to deal with it because they were not a threat to us.
Even if they didn't like us, even if they hate us, they don't have the wherewithal and the ability to strike America from that area because we have so many other tools in place since 9-11 to prevent that from happening without any troops on the ground anywhere.
But Obama did.
He sent the troops in there.
Then, you know, Trump just continued on.
He said, all right, now we're going to go until we have their caliphate removed or whatever.
And, you know, people say, great, they did.
But now we have to stay again.
And again, that phrase, we have to.
No, we don't.
We didn't need to go in.
We don't need to stay now.
We need to get out because there's no threat to our security.
Those people have to deal with it who do face some threat from them, but they can handle it and they must handle it.
Yep.
Yeah, you're totally right.
I'm glad you point that out because, you know, the argument was, well, geez, you know, now they create the whole Islamic State, an entire Bin Laden state in western Iraq and eastern Syria.
Now we got to go and do that.
But even then, at the time, they were completely surrounded by enemies.
And the Saudis became terrified of them once they shared a border with them in western Iraq there.
And, you know, I don't know exactly what Erdogan's doing at any given time, but everyone else, as you just said, in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iraqi Shia and the Iranians, the Jordanians and the Assad government in Damascus were all enemies.
And and the Islamic State guys were crazy.
They were determined to bite off more than they could chew.
Like, for example, picking a fight with the Syrian Kurds when they could have gone right past them.
You know, I mean, they didn't have to.
You know, anyway, and and, you know, this is important.
You write about this in the book, the safe haven myth.
And you write about it in terms of Afghanistan that, you know, they say that, boo hoo, we can never leave because if we do, then Al-Qaeda will have the magic portal to Boston Logan Airport and do another 9-11 attack.
And they never explain that.
They might as well be citing astrology.
We'll see if, you know, Jupiter's in the fourth phase of Saturn, blah, blah, blah.
They never have a cause and effect because it doesn't make any sense.
You know, you're as far away as you could get from anywhere when you're in Afghanistan, for God's sake.
But but it's also true because of Iraq and they cite Iraq.
See, what happened in Iraq was Obama pulled out and it never mind that it was the Iraqis that Bush put in power that kicked Bush out.
And Obama only lived up to their edict.
And that was what it was.
They said, don't let the door hit you in the ass.
So he pulled out, which he didn't fight that hard to stay, which fine.
But if he hadn't have backed Al-Qaeda in Syria for four years leading up to the Islamic State, well, three years leading up to the Islamic State seizing all of eastern Syria in 2013 and then rolling into Mosul in 2014, then it wouldn't have been a problem.
And instead, they always leave out the part of the high treason where they gave bin Laden Jr.his own country.
You know, they just act like it happened out of the ether somehow.
And then we had to go and stop it, which, you know, and this is actually the more important point is the one you're making about how even at the height of the Islamic State, we still didn't even have to fight them then.
And if that's true, then that means we don't have to do any of this stuff.
And here's one of the things I do point out in some detail in the book is that the whole idea that is so popular here, especially among the right, that ISIS arose because Obama, you know, left prematurely from Iraq.
That's almost like an article of faith.
Problem is, it does not stand up to the least amount of examination on what actually happened.
The fact is, as much as I complain and argue about what Petraeus actually accomplished in the Iraqi surge, it is and I've never hesitated giving him credit for he did recognize what was going on, lower the risk to our troops.
He did dramatically lower our casualty rate and allowed us to finally get to a position where we could we could withdraw.
But the point that he even said at the time was this was to give the Iraqis political breathing space to get their house in order so that they can stand.
Well, what Maliki, Prime Minister Maliki, did with that breathing space was use it to exploit all of his political enemies.
And he purged all of these Sunnis and several others and some of the Kurds even from the military and replaced them with political syncopants and people who gave him a lot of money, the people who bought positions in like core commanders, division commanders, you know, major positions, brigade commanders, et cetera.
So that when when the ISIS came in there, the first big movement that they had was when they they rolled in into near Mosul with what was supposed to have been a skirmish.
They were supposed to be a hit and run thing with about a thousand guys.
And then they were going to hit hit back out because there was several, I want to say, one hundred and fifty thousand or so Iraqi troops in there.
So they had no intention to like take Mosul with just a thousand guys.
But what they found out was when they got in there, the these political appointees and commander positions left town, I mean, physically left town.
And when the Iraqi troops saw that their commanders literally abandoned them, then they just melted away and threw their weapons down and ran.
And then ISIS took advantage of that.
That's not because Obama didn't have American troops on the ground.
They wouldn't have been able to stop that either.
What happened was because the Iraqis were responsible for their own demise.
And that's never going to change until they change with the way they do business.
That's going to be an ever present threat.
And if you don't have the American background, so if you know that you don't have our backstop to have your back, if you jack it up again, your motivation to not mess it up is a lot higher than it would be otherwise.
And Maliki knew that and he turned out to be right.
Right.
Well, and it was America that made it this way.
I mean, the thing is, the Sunnis, when they were the ruling minority, they needed foreign support so they could be the ruling minority, whether it was the Turks or the Brits or the Americans to prop them up once.
And this is goes to Maliki kicking Bush out.
Thanks for winning the war for us.
Now get the hell out because they're the super majority and they didn't need us.
And then the thing is, they didn't need the Sunnis either because they had all the oil down in Basra and under their control up in Kirkuk.
And so all the Sunnis in Mosul and Fallujah, who cares what happens to them?
And so it was America and it was Petraeus's surge, really, that deprived Maliki of the very last reasons he ever could have had to compromise with the Sunnis by handing him a total victory over the Sunni minority.
And so, you know, and he was, as you say, the very wrong SOB to hand that power to because he was absolutely the worst kind of Shiite chauvinist against, you know, not just the former Baathists and the former oppressors, but all of the Sunni Arab minority.
And yeah, look, he's no different than like a generation, two generations of different leaders throughout that part of the Middle East.
I mean, they change sides as often as anything else.
And, you know, the changing of the seasons almost.
And that's never changed.
It's probably never going to change.
We can't alter that dynamic.
We can't alter those centuries of culture out of a preference.
And we don't need to because it has nothing to do with our security, which is enabled in other ways that is in our direct control to keep our country safe.
That's what we need to focus on, not try to do the impossible.
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Well, I want to talk about more about Russia and China and North Korea.
And also you have these great sections on the alleged threats of today.
But I want to talk again, you know, just like back in the days, because I've interviewed you about this stuff before, but you really write the best take on your experience in Afghanistan.
And I want to talk with you about that.
In fact, oh, first I wanted to ask you, though, about your time in Iraq.
You basically, unless I messed up and skipped a section, you essentially skip over Iraq War II in the book.
At one point you mentioned that you never saw a bullet fired in there and you were stationed for a little while and had to withdraw early for medical reason or something like that.
But that's the only mention of Iraq War II in the book.
Am I right?
Of your experience?
My job there and I just I mean, I could have written more on it, but it didn't directly support a lot of my contentions, which was there is some relevance to it.
But I was a military trainer.
So I had a small team of Americans that embedded ourselves with an Iraqi border battalion on the border between Iraq and Iran.
And we were supposed to train them up, you know, to make them capable of defending their borders against Iran, et cetera.
But the fact is, you know, there was no desire on their part to learn from it.
So they had very limited skills, very limited capabilities and didn't care about having any more.
And after a few months, the commander, we finally got along well enough in our relationship that he just admitted to me, he said, look, I'm ordered to host you.
You're ordered to be here to train me.
So I'm doing what I'm ordered to.
You're doing what you're ordered to.
But we don't really think we need it.
And we're just doing it because here have some more tea, you know, and that just told you all you didn't know.
And that was that was repeated through so many of my peers who also had teams that various other different battalions, police battalions, army battalions, other border battalions.
That was pretty consistent.
I don't know that it's ever changed.
I bet it hasn't.
And what year is that right now?
That was 2009, late 2008, 2009 is when I was in the program.
But, you know, that just shows you that they don't really care.
So this is more about the wanting us, you know, coming up with a reason to the Americans, because to the American press, especially sounds very, you know, honorable.
It sounds very capable that we're helping them defend their country.
We're helping train them up so they can bear the brunt of the battle and all this kind of stuff, which is hogwash, because, look, the Iranians weren't going to launch a cross-border attack into Baghdad.
So there was really nothing that needed to be done.
You just need some guys there to, you know, just to watch across the border to keep them from stealing stuff or whatever.
But, you know, Iran's not going to attack into Iraq again.
We saw how disastrous that was in the 80s.
And they're certainly not going to do that.
Why the hell would they do that when Bush is in the middle of installing their best friends in power?
They're building a joint condominium in Baghdad together, whether Bush is talking to them or not.
I mean.
Yeah, we definitely we definitely made it easier for Iran to have influence in Baghdad.
Yeah, I mean, it was the Supreme.
And, you know, I guess I was just lucky because I was reading Antiwar.com and got to help everybody who wasn't and didn't know this stuff.
But, you know, the Supreme Islamic Council, I mean, Raimondo had written about them in like 1999 that, look, the CIA tried to bribe this group of Shiite dissidents and they said, no, thank you.
We don't want your stinking American pig money because we work for the Iranians and we can't wait to take over Iraq for them.
This is like two or three, four years before the war or something like that.
Anyway, my memory's fuzzy, but it was certainly way in advance.
It was like two years before the war or something like that.
The Supreme Islamic Council, look out for them.
He also, just after the war, there was one called Iraqi Pandora and he's like, check out this guy, Abdulaziz al-Hakim.
He might be one to watch.
Yeah, well, he's the Ayatollah's cat's paw and Bush is his cat's paw.
That's the way this works.
OK, there you go.
Which makes you what?
You know, sorry, buddy.
But that was the way that one played out.
OK, but now so now tell me about Afghanistan.
You went to Afghanistan twice, right?
Right, yeah, 2005, six and 2010, 11.
OK, so talk about five and six first, because that doesn't get as much coverage in the book.
But you were stationed where during that time?
Yeah, I was in Kabul for the most part.
I split out my job was to be the liaison officer between the Combined Forces Command Afghanistan and CENTCOM.
And so I actually split time between Kabul, the CENTCOM forward headquarters in Qatar and CENTCOM main headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
So I kind of went between those two during that period of time.
So I'm interested what Afghanistan looked like to you then.
Yeah.
So, OK, this this is I believe I do mention this in the book, but this gets to, you know, exposing one of the other common themes that a lot of the right uses to why we have to stay there is that, you know, the reason why we failed in Afghanistan is because Bush, quote, took his eye off the ball, end quote.
Right.
And went into Iraq and, you know, otherwise we would have had Iraq or Afghanistan wrapped up.
That's what all the Democrats say, especially.
Yeah.
Everybody says that because that's that's just, you know, accepted reality.
There's no truth to it because the fact is, by the summer of 2002, the Taliban had been eradicated.
I don't mean defeated.
I mean, wiped from the face of the earth.
There was no Taliban, no military, no government, nothing.
It simply didn't exist in any form.
The people that weren't killed just disappeared into the countryside and went back to their lives that they had before 1996.
I think it was when they first started up.
But what we find out is that after the summer of 2002 or so, these these people in what was the Northern Alliance that we supported, that was part of that civil war that was going on in October 2001 when we started this mess, you know, we took their side over the Taliban, obviously.
Well, once they had been put into power by our actions, instead of just like saying, OK, now let's just rebuild the country, they, you know, like so many people do in this part of the country over centuries now, then that they have the power, then they are going to seek retribution.
So they went on his pogrom and were wiping out Taliban everywhere they could find.
They were hunting them down and just slaughtering them, you know, to seek revenge for their defeat.
You know, the fact that they had been almost defeated back before we got in there.
And of course, all that did is drive Taliban underground and then give them reason to start fighting back.
Well, by 2005, OK, so this is two years into the Iraq war.
Things were still so calm in Afghanistan that I once took a truck ride from, well, actually I took a helicopter ride from Kabul up to near Mazar-e-Sharif, which is up in the north.
And then we just got in a pickup truck with a bunch of other people and we went driving across the countryside to to dedicate the opening of a new police station, recruiting station that we had we had built.
And after it was over, we drove into the town of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Nobody had any body armor on at all.
I had a soft cap on, you know, not even that.
All I had was a pistol on my side.
Didn't even have a rifle.
We were allowed to go into the bazaar in uniform and everything.
And we were having a good time, you know, beating mingling with the people there.
We were invited by the imam into the famous Blue Mosque that's up there.
It's, you know, centuries old landmark.
And, you know, we were just not allowed to go into the inner courtyard, but we were allowed to walk into it and take pictures and stuff.
A totally benign situation that was as of, let's see, I guess that was actually in March of 2006 is when that that particular event took place.
So even as late as that, this country was so benign.
But what we did was we started we turned it into a nation building process.
And then we just kept sending in a few more thousand.
Would you have said the same thing about 2005 and 2006?
Or that was really just up north or even then?
Yeah, no, it was, there was, we, we had, because part of my job was actually to watch the daily situation up where I would report on the number of, uh, of attacks and casualties and whatever.
And so there was just little, I mean, just a little sporadic stops on the map here and there on these things.
Sometimes there was none at all, anywhere.
And this is when it was really just getting going again, right?
It's 2005.
It was just before that.
I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was again, this is late to, I'm sorry, early 2006.
And it was still that benign that I could just stroll around the country with no concerns whatsoever.
It wasn't until about a six or eight months after that, the things started getting worse.
And then what we, then we started this fatal process of every time the, the number of attacks, you know, inched up, we would inch up the number of troops.
And then that would inch up again, the attacks.
And we would, you know, again, inch up until it turned into like five and 10,000 inches, more troops.
And it was as predictable as it could possibly be, which is why I wrote that one report in 2009, now three years after the fact there, that you could see even then, every time you ramp up the number of troops, all you do is ramp up the number of targets.
So now that there's more things for the Taliban to fight against, there's more motivation for them to recruit more people, more motivation for people to come from either Pakistan or elsewhere in Afghanistan, and it was just this stupid cycle that you kept expanding into areas and they kept expanding their fight.
So of course, you know, that you can never, ever win that fight because it's militarily unwinnable and we just blinded ourselves to that.
And this is the one place where I do have very critical commendation or commending, I'm sorry, condemning a lot of these generals who should have known better, they should have been able to see the exact same thing I did.
They saw the same reports that I did.
I gave them a lot of the reports, but yet instead of coming to the obvious military conclusion, this could not be won militarily and they just perpetuated the myth and kept asking for more money and more troops and more time and they, they deserve some condemnation for that.
Yeah.
Well, and that was the thing of it, right?
We're now on the 18th general in charge of the war.
And so for any one of them, it would have been career suicide to, you know, say the whole thing is a bust and what we ought to do is give up rather than double down, especially when the consequences are certainly going to be somebody else's fault.
And though we'll be back Stateside by then.
Well, you don't even have to correct, characterize it as giving up.
What you have to do is say, this makes no sense.
This is not helping our country.
We need to shut this thing down, you know, seal off these bad investments.
If you want to use business terms, seal these bad investments off and this, get this thing closed down in our troops out of there so that we no longer have this perpetual bleed of troops and money and start getting back to the nature of defending our country against threats where they do exist.
That's what should have happened.
And that would be a positive thing, but no one was willing to do it.
No one.
Yeah.
And then, you know, it's funny cause, um, well, not to get too far off on this, but, you know, McChrystal of course was right when he talked about the insurgent math and that every time you kill an insurgent, which is essentially means a local militia man, it's not like the Taliban are from outer space.
They are the men of Southern Afghanistan and Eastern Afghanistan.
And, uh, when you kill one of them, you create 10 more.
And especially cause these are tight clans and tribes and families and things that, um, you know, it does like quite literally you get 10 more.
And so his solution was flood the country with troops, but then show heroic restraint while you're getting shot at and all this goofy when the, obviously the lesson is you can't win the hearts and minds of people you're trying to conquer.
It's one or the other.
It can't be both.
And if you're not willing to go in and kill them all, which we have no cause to do anyway, then you can't really fight them at all.
Well, they don't want to cooperate clearly, you know?
So, so I saw exactly the manifestation of these, these theories that you're talking about, that McChrystal put into place and Petraeus continued after he took over and you see on the ground that, cause I've talked to a lot of the people, I went out on these patrols, I've talked to the Afghan people, I've talked to the Afghan troops, uh, and obviously I talked to the American troops and all these different places.
And I saw so many places, the same dynamic play out, which was that while any given organization or troop is there, uh, any company is in a, in a, in a given location, whether that was Kandahar, uh, Kunar or some of these other places.
Uh, you know, we were very well liked by the local population cause we always, we have some great men and women in uniform and I, and I have my hats off to them because, you know, they're not the ones in charge of doing this, but whenever they're there, they will do their, they will bend over backwards to help people.
And they, and I saw so much of that, you know, there was some bad people that, you know, actually, you know, did some war crimes and those were usually identified and they were punished, but I'm talking like the vast, vast majority were great people and wanted to help.
However, the people there, they knew that the, we were there on a, you know, somewhere between the six, nine to 12 month rotation depended on army Marines and where it was, and then we would leave.
And then they knew that there was a time clock already in cause Obama said it before that we were going to leave at a certain time and as you pointed out, the Taliban is primarily though, not exclusively from there, they're in there either from their own province or they're from elsewhere in Afghanistan, but they're not going anywhere.
And everyone knows they're not going anywhere.
So there is no chance, no chance for you to get these people to turn against the Taliban toward your side of the government.
When they know that the minute you leave, you're going to be vulnerable and they'll be killed.
And many, many times that's exactly what did happen because the Taliban were completely ruthless and they didn't care about killing anybody.
They'd kill women, children, whatever, and they were ruthless about it.
And matter of fact about it.
And the people understood that.
So that's why they did whatever they could to, you know, to not get in trouble for not supporting us, but, you know, not doing anything they didn't have to.
So that when we left and we did in every one of those cases, because we're nowhere in the countryside anymore, we're just in the big hubs.
So everything they were afraid of happened with no exceptions.
And now then they're just having to try to just again exist and get along with whatever the dynamic is.
No one should have been confused on that.
McChrystal should never have been confused on that point.
And yet he either was or he just pretended like in his mind, well, that won't happen because we'll make them turn before.
And so then by the time we leave, the Taliban will have been defeated, even though there's no evidence to support that that was a realistic possibility.
That's what happened.
Yeah.
Now, so in your book, you mentioned that when your story came out, the big whistleblowing story in 2012, February 2012 in The New York Times and all that, you were interviewed on PBS.
And I went back and I watched that.
And, you know, I guess she's just doing her job, but she's trying hard to defend the honor of the state, that isn't it just the case that these generals all mean well?
And aren't you crossing the line, Colonel Davis, to suggest that these men are deliberately being dishonest in dealing with the American people and the Congress and in explaining what's going on with the war over there?
And so, yeah, you explain.
So I'd like to give you a chance to explain it.
Why?
Why it is you're so sure that they knew enough of what you knew that it was impossible that they believe what they were saying.
Yeah, there was a mixed bag.
In fact, I'll tell you more than I told her that day.
It was a mixed bag.
Let me say right up front, there were some generals I saw which were as incensed as I was about what was going on and actually within their ability to control things in their zone actually did try to do the right thing.
So I definitely don't say that they're all bad.
So I'm grateful for that.
But there were a few in particular, and Petraeus, of course, as I've said routinely, as was the leader of the pack, that he knew the reality.
He had the specific details.
He got these daily briefings where all of these things in classified environment were explained every single day.
So he knew what was really going on and then conveyed the opposite to the American people, knowing for sure that it wasn't true.
He conveyed the opposite.
And you can say, as some actually did who worked for him in some of some of these classified environments that I personally talked to, that he kind of convinced his own self that the obvious reality wasn't reality, but because his name was David Petraeus, he could change it.
And then even though it would be this way for everyone else, it wouldn't be this way for him.
So his arrogance may have played a role in that.
But there was one particular general, and I won't I won't use his name for various reasons, but this guy was in charge of an operation that sent troops into a certain part of Afghanistan, very near the Pakistan border.
And he ordered this large scale air assault operation, which resulted in a lot of American casualties, killed and wounded.
And he portrayed that to the media as, oh, this is a tragic thing.
It was terrible.
But, you know, gosh, they did accomplish so many good things.
And this part of Afghanistan is now much safer than it was before.
And we've made some great gains.
And America is now safer because of this and all that, which just when I heard him, I mean, I'm like, there's no way that's true.
But that's just the patriotic crap that I hear from so many generals justifying American dead.
But when I found out the classified stuff behind that, and then I know what he knows, I was just infuriated because he he conveyed to somebody else something that he knew for a fact was not true.
And then when I did more digging, did some history into the operation, I was even more livid.
This was actually one of the things that prompted me to make my public statement and take the risk, because just less than a year before that, in the exact same area, there had been an operation, a very similar air assault operation with, you know, helicopters and a bunch of inserting people into a fight.
And it was supposed to be a joint American Afghan military operation against the Taliban.
And they went in there and when the fighting started in that first instance, the minute the bullet started firing, the Afghans took off and ran and they just hid in the back and waited until the thing was over, leaving us to do all the fighting.
We had some casualties there, you know, and obviously the guys were infuriated.
But, you know, this is their soldiers.
That's what they do.
So they won the battle.
Then they set up the Afghan people there, the troops, in a great position.
They said, all right, we've cleared this area of Taliban.
We've now brought in some temporary or some like, well, I guess it's kind of temporary forward positions.
We said, here's your, here's basically your base and your bunker.
We outfitted, we equipped it, we put a gear in there.
We gave them, you know, ability to use thermals and a bunch of other stuff that they didn't have before so that they could, you know, hold the area that we left.
Then once all that was established, then we left.
Well, it wasn't any time after that that rumors started circulating among the people that the Taliban were going to come back.
And because we weren't there, the Afghan military were afraid that they would not be able to stand up.
So they just abandoned it.
They just left.
And then the Taliban just walked right back in and it was as though nothing had ever happened.
So the mission was pointless from the first time.
And so now then, less than a year later, you're going to send in another group of Americans and Afghans.
This time, you're not even going to pretend you're going to hold the spot.
You just went in because you heard there were some people there.
So you had a big firefight.
We killed, what, like 10 times more Taliban than we lost.
But that doesn't matter because there's no end to them.
No matter how many you kill, there's always one or two to replace every single one.
And that's exactly what happened.
So we went in there, we lost a bunch of people.
We killed a bunch of Taliban.
We left.
And within weeks, the Taliban had come back and it was as though we had never been there again.
So this general is telling America and all the survivors of this attack that, oh, they did this great thing and it was so worthwhile and whatnot.
None of it was true at that time.
And obviously, we left and it was literally as though we've never been there.
So why are those Americans dead today?
Both of those iterations, those guys, a lot of whom had their limbs blown off, they'll suffer for the rest of their lives.
For what?
Why do we sacrifice the bodies of our troops for the ego of a general or to try to make things look a certain way?
And those families have been permanently wrecked.
Every one of them that happened to have been wrecked and for nothing.
And I just was incensed that we had leaders that would do that.
And that's what drove me to make the February announcement.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I'm glad you mentioned that.
I mean, I got to first say, you know, emphasize what you're talking about, about the people killed on the other side and and recognize that they go through the very same thing.
But you write in the book about these two particular soldiers that were killed in an IED attack.
I'm pretty sure it was.
And how you had just met them.
And this was later on, right?
This is, you know, search era.
And, you know, the thing of it is, you know, we talk about twenty four hundred something dead and this kind of deal.
But however many tens of thousands injured, nobody really knows, I guess.
But.
You know, Stalin said about statistics, it's all, you know, it doesn't matter as much as hearing the story of just one person and what's going on with that.
But you take a minute to talk about these two guys that you met and then who died very shortly after that in the book.
You want to tell that story here?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was in in Kandahar province.
And it was that I met him actually.
And I believe it was June.
I'm pretty sure it was the month of June in 2011.
And the the mission for the unit that had gone down there was to clear out a building complex that had been the scene of a big battle the day before the Taliban had occupied.
And they went in and drove them out and had a big fight.
Five of them were wounded and five Americans were wounded in an IED attack, ground IEDs.
And so we went I went back with the patrol the next day that was designed to clear the thing out, to get rid of all the other IEDs that may have been left, booby traps, et cetera, and and establish that as the new forward position, because the idea was they were going to continue to move through the zone, their district, you know, until they had it completely eradicated of Taliban.
That was the idea.
And so I went down there with them and it was just this suffocatingly hot day.
It was 116 degrees that day.
No breeze.
You know, I'm wearing 80 pounds of gear.
All of them, everybody who goes out on that thing is with your body armor, your weapon, your ammunition, all that kind of stuff.
So it was just really, really hot and tiring.
And again, it was supposed to be a joint mission.
So it was Afghan and military, U.S. military.
It was supposed to jointly conduct this patrol.
They were supposed to lead it, et cetera.
When we got there, the Afghan guys went immediately to one of the courtyards of one of the bombed out buildings in the shade and just went to bed, just took a nap, didn't even attempt to help it do anything.
So when the Americans did what they normally do and they didn't before arresting anything, they immediately went to work to clear out the other mines that were in the area, get rid of booby traps, set up defensive positions, clear fields of fire, you know, basically make it a small fortress, you know, so that we could defend it against any counterattack that may come, et cetera.
All the normal things that disciplined soldiers do.
And in the process of that, I remember I was kind of sitting in the where the little platoon headquarters area had been set up there.
And the staff sergeant that was in charge of the enlisted guy that was in charge of the patrol was just telling me about what they do, what their history had been, what they had done previously, et cetera.
And then I can't remember what it was that got his attention, but he said, you see that guy over there?
And there's this one kid who had who was taking a break with some water and had poured it on his head.
And I think they had actually taken a break for lunch or something like that.
He said he and this other fellow here, one was a black guy, one was a white kid.
And he said, these guys are just two of my real stars.
He goes, one of them had been in trouble for something earlier in his career and had been demoted and had every opportunity to sulk and to be mad about it.
But he just bucked himself up and he said, no, I'm going to make good for that.
I'm going to do better for myself.
And he said he had become the model soldier.
He said he was great.
He was a great teammate.
He was a great friend, great trooper, a real strength on their unit.
And these two particular guys, they just happened to be sitting there at the moment.
He said, these guys are just rock stars out there.
I couldn't be prouder of them, et cetera.
And it was about six weeks later.
I was back in my headquarters in Bagram and I went into the chow hall, the mess facility.
And they always had the Stars and Stripes newspaper on a little stand right in front.
So as you're getting your food, you can get the paper and see whatever you got that day.
And I see this big, huge headline on the front.
It's something like, I think it said, they're all dead or no one survived.
Or something to that effect, you know, in big, huge block letters.
And so that obviously got my attention.
And I looked at the dateline on it and I saw that it was from an area where I had been.
I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
I was there just, you know, last month or a month before last.
And so the more I started looking in there, then I realized, oh man, that was the unit that I went out with.
And then I read further and found out that those two guys had both been, were part of the, there was five men in one MRAP armored vehicle that had gone over a massive landmine and all five had been killed inside.
No one survived.
And when I saw that those two guys, especially because I knew them, because I had met them, I had talked to them briefly.
I'd heard their stories.
It just affected me like, I can't believe it.
That first mission I told you about earlier, where we sent troops into that area by Pakistan and they died for nothing, angered me.
This one was the tipping point.
This tipped me over the top because I saw the profound waste and I could only imagine the anger and the animosity and the pain that was going to be inflicted on the parents of these two kids, you know, and all their brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and all that that they left behind, because they were both very young.
And that just, I said, they died for nothing.
This whole operation is for nothing.
Because again, just like in the first one I mentioned, after a while, we're going to withdraw from there.
And that's exactly what happened.
And again, it was as though we'd never been there.
So yet again, we sacrificed the lives of Americans.
Only this time, I had met them.
So it was personal for me.
And I finally, ultimately, that solidified it.
Like I said, I don't consider myself any kind of, you know, brave person or, oh, you risk your career for this or whatever, because I'll just be honest with you, that sealed it to the point to where my soul, my spirit would not allow me to sleep one more night without doing whatever I could to expose the truth and to possibly prevent this from happening.
Even though many of my friends said, look, dude, I got it.
I understand this too, but you're not going to make anything happen.
Nothing's going to change here because you do this.
You're just going to get in trouble and the war's going to go on like it was before.
And even though I consciously acknowledge that was 95 percent probable, it didn't matter because even if that was the case, my conscience would not allow me to sleep one more night without doing whatever I could to at least expose it.
Yeah.
Well, look, you did make a big difference.
You obviously made a huge splash and a huge difference in the media at the time when you came forward with this thing.
Certainly the history of the debate inside the government in July of 2011 about whether they were sticking with the surge and sending more troops or whether Obama was going to hold them to the timetable that they promised and begin that withdrawal, that you had a big part in, if not directly in those discussions, although I wouldn't doubt it, but you had a big part in the entire context and atmosphere in which that discussion was taking place.
And Obama actually did face them down and said, no, you guys promised 18 months, 18 months.
Of course, we're still there.
He promised he'd have the war over by 2014.
So forget that.
Yeah.
But at least on ending the surge, no, you played your part as well as you could have.
And I think clearly you did get results there.
But on the desk of those two guys, you know, I think what you say there about, yeah, but this makes it personal because I met these two guys.
You know, I think for me and I hope for the audience, this makes it personal that we're talking about two guys because when you say 2,400, you know, it sounds like a low number of soldiers that died, right?
Because like Walter Block says, compared to what?
And people go, well, compared to Normandy or compared to Vietnam or compared to North Africa or whatever it is.
Well, listen, you know what?
How about 2,400 compared to not 2,400 dead?
How about compared to that?
How about, as you put it, these two families still having their sons?
You know, all of this is crazy.
And think about and we don't even know how many Afghans have died.
They say tens of thousands, but you know, it's hundreds have died in this thing over 20 years.
No one can even count most of them.
And so all that grief, you know, to the thousandth power for them, too.
You know, they got to deal with all the exact same stuff.
And in a lot of cases, much worse because, you know, your son signs up for the Eagle Scouts.
That's one thing.
Your son signs up for the infantry.
You know, he's taking a risk, but you're going about your business and the infantry bombs your house and kills your wife.
Those are just the breaks for happening to live in Afghanistan.
Yeah, you know, that's a different gamble that they made just happen to be happening to be from somewhere.
Yeah.
And, you know, and I'll also I'll also point out that it's it's not much less, if any, less disturbing and troubling to my soul that, you know, across the board in America, it's almost no consideration given to the loss of the Afghan people.
And I'm not talking about what the Taliban did.
That's beyond anyone's control.
They are brutal, did a lot of stuff.
But I mean, if you take even the lowest number of acknowledged civilian casualties that we've caused to include, you know, bombing hospitals, bombing wedding parties, wiping out 10 kids in a forest, picking up wood that we thought was actually Taliban because they were looking through thermals.
You know, every one of those are barbaric.
And there's hundreds, like I said, at the lowest number that people don't bat an eye at that.
They don't think anything about it.
It's like, yeah, well, OK, anyway, moving on.
And it's like, no, no one gets to move on who suffered that.
And why are we OK with so many absolutely outright innocent people being killed that shouldn't have been killed?
And that's a problem to me on its own merits.
Yeah.
You know, I'm glad you mentioned about the boys collecting firewood.
I mentioned that in my book.
I tried to, you know, not beat everybody over the head with a million of those, but to show enough of those that these aren't just abstractions.
Right.
This is just like the two guys in the infantry that you met there that got blown up.
These are somebody's people.
And in fact, you know, the thing about that, I thought about that, the eight boys, that's me and all my friends in my neighborhood.
Yeah.
Right.
So that would be, you know, we're all out playing guns in the woods and we get bombed by an enemy drone.
And then I'm picturing my mom and all the different moms of all us boys in the neighborhood.
And that's the life they got to live from now on, that all the boys got bombed one day back in 2008, you know.
But yeah, so that's not just another thing that happened, right?
If that happens in your neighborhood, that's yeah, it's different.
And then they say, though, Danny, but yeah, no, that's what we're preventing, right?
Taliban drones taking out our suburbs and killing our boys.
Yeah, the Taliban can't even get from one district to another in their own country.
They sure aren't going to come here.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
But I'm afraid of that, though.
So is that good enough?
No.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, so yeah.
All right.
So we talked about the casualties thing, and I'm glad we did because that part does get glossed over.
And those lives do become just digits on a page or on a screen.
And that's, you know, it's not a fair representation.
You know, you know, trying to account for what's lost there.
But now, so I guess I got to give you a minute to talk about Michelle Flournoy.
She comes up in the book a couple of times.
And if Joe Biden wins the upcoming election, she's going to be the secretary of defense, they say.
Former she was Obama's secretary of defense for policy and implemented the surge.
And so why don't you talk a little bit about her and her testimony and her role in this war as far as from your point of view?
Yeah, I'm basing this off of what she said and what I imagine she knew, because in her position, she should have had access to, you know, all the intelligence that I did and probably more because, you know, being as high ranking as she was.
The fact is, the immutable fact is that she characterized these things in concert, in a duet with David Petraeus, that things were on the path that they should be on.
They're on improving, we're on the right azimuth, all of these things, you know, to give greater weight to the fiction that things were improving and should be continued on, continue to be supported, funded and all those kinds of things.
And, you know, you just look at the stuff she said, you know, since then in the position she's taken, which has just been a repetition of the things she said in the past.
And so you don't want that to be your secretary of defense.
Someone who is either, was either fooled, because there's at least that possibility that the military only gave her the intelligence that they wanted to, only gave her the briefings that told her what they wanted her to hear so that she faithfully repeated what was said.
And there's probably a lot of truth to that, because that definitely has happened in some cases, but I know it for a fact.
Or she's just not able to come up to the right observation, because even if you had been duped, even if you had been given the wrong information, when they keep telling you things are going good, and you see the casualty rates go up, you see that this never gets better.
You see that year after year, the situation worsens.
You see that even, you know, in the last few years that the Taliban have control over more territory than at any point since 2001.
At some point, you've got to say, you know what, these people are telling me a bunch of bogus stuff, because it ain't lining up with observed reality.
But it doesn't seem that that has been the case.
It seems that she's maintained a pretty consistent viewpoint in that.
And so that's why, even though I give some credence to the possibility that she was duped, over time, she should have been able to come to the right information and the right assessment of what actually happened there and stopped believing the BS that she was being told.
Yeah.
And so whatever the reason was, she was part of the problem, and she was part of this machine that tricked or fooled the American people into thinking something that wasn't true.
Yep.
And, you know, by the way, it's worth mentioning, too, that the Center for New American Security that she founded with John Nagel and the rest of these COIN guys back in 2008, they founded it in order to be essentially Hillary's National Security Council and Defense Department in waiting.
And then, you know, their major project, their founding project was authoring not just the surge, but the American campaign to force Obama to accept the surge.
You know, once Hillary obviously beat Hillary in the primaries and won the election, it became all about him.
But they were originally created to be, you know, for Hillary for that purpose, just for that purpose.
In fact, this was going to be their thing.
The surge worked in Iraq, you know, never mind who it worked for.
But anyway, the surge worked in Iraq.
So we got to do it again in Afghanistan.
And it was like the latest fad.
So to wrap this thing up here, because I don't want to keep you too long and I want to leave, you know, some room for imagination and people want to read this book because it really is great.
The 11th hour in 2020 America.
How our foreign policy got jacked up and how to fix it.
And it's available to Amazon right now, everybody.
But so to end here, you know, we already kind of talked about a lot of the big picture stuff but I wanted to pick up this one thing that you wrote about China, which I think is probably, you know, it may have been this way for a very long time.
I'm not sure when the turning point was, but maybe the news story here is the realization, kind of the acceptance on our governments, you know, on their level that our Navy is obsolete and that we can't use it except to threaten, you know, unarmed heathens in their, you know, backward tribal areas.
But when it comes to, I mean that facetiously, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but when it comes to dealing with the Chinese, you know, they ran this article a few weeks ago about how, oh, you know what, though?
We don't need the Navy because we got B1s.
And so we're just going to threaten the Chinese with B1s because we got these great, you know, long range bombers and they're great.
And so don't worry about that.
But, you know, smuggled into that whole article is that our fleet is completely useless.
And all those ships are are massive floating would-be tombs in the event of a serious war.
So how, and you kind of refer to that too in here a little bit.
They're like, yep, they got some pretty good missiles.
Well, that's about everything, isn't it?
Pretty good missiles.
Yeah.
See, here's what they do have.
The Chinese, we'll talk about that first.
They do have very capable, modern ability to defend their shores and defend their region against direct attack from the United States.
They have ballistic missiles.
They have really good cyber capabilities.
They have anti-satellite capabilities.
They have good anti-air capabilities.
And they have pretty strong anti-ship capabilities within their, within a certain number of miles off their shores and from areas around where, you know, they operate.
And so if you impale yourselves on this defense, it's called A2AD, anti-access area denial.
If you are foolish enough to throw your military forces into their strengths, they can impose a substantial cost on us, substantial, and can sink a number of ships and knock about a bunch of airplanes out of the sky.
But if you don't attack them, they have almost no ability to launch an attack against us.
If they get away from their shores where they don't have lines of communication, they don't have their ground-based, you know, ships and missile forces and all that kind of stuff and airfields to launch attacks, if they don't have all those advantages, then all the advantages and all the strengths come to us, and we would just obliterate anything that did, should they go away from their shores and try to attack us away from the shore.
So as long as we just say, hey, you're never going to be able to attack our people or our allies without paying a profound price, and we're going to win.
And we can say that and be very confident that that's how it would happen.
But if we are foolish, and if we say, hey, we're going to keep poking you in the face in your backyard, in your front yard, we're going to keep, you know, pushing right up against your red lines on Taiwan, and we're going to make it increasingly likely that we're going to defend Taiwan, even though that's not a threat to us, then we have the real possibility of stumbling into a war that should never be fought, and that we may not win in the local area.
And that's heretical to say for any American today, because the only idea that Americans think is we would win every military engagement against China and Russia, it may cost more.
And if we're not smart, it may cost us more than it should.
But of course, we're going to win every fight.
That's just how we're Americans.
That's what we do.
But I'm telling you, it is not guaranteed that we would win that war.
It's possible that we could lose the battle and then be faced with either escalating to nuclear war, or withdrawing and accepting a battlefield defeat.
And either of those are bad.
One is much worse than the other, of course, because now then you're talking millions dead, and God only knows what could happen after that point, hopefully never get to there.
But the fact that we're even playing around with that area, with that possibility, should be profoundly important to every American.
This is probably the biggest concern I have in the book, aside from these smaller things that have cost us a lot in terms of 2,400 dead and all that you just mentioned.
I mean, this could literally just hatchet our security, because if we lost in the South China Sea, for example, or even were deeply wounded, even if we did eventually won, the cost to us could be so profound, because these ships and stuff that we have now, they take like a decade to build.
Anything you lose now, you've lost it for a long, long time before it can be replaced, because it's so complicated and expensive.
And all that time, now then our deterrent is weakened everywhere else.
And so we should never risk the security of our own nation by foolishly, potentially poking another enemy into attacking us that doesn't need to.
And that's what we're risking right now.
Well, and it seems like these aircraft carriers are such a strategic liability.
Again, you can threaten Iran with them.
Oh, we're sending three carriers to the Gulf.
How do you like that?
Okay, fine.
And I'm not so sure they're safe from Iranian sea skimming missiles, frankly, many of which they got from the Chinese.
But the thing is, you lose a carrier, that's what, like 7,000 or 10,000 sailors, something like that?
What does any president do in a situation like that?
If not resort to nukes, it's going to be full scale carpet bombing of somebody's capital city or something, right?
That's what I would expect.
Not that I would justify that.
I'm just saying.
Yeah.
But see, we can't, because they have the ability to return the favor, unlike Iraq or Iran or any of those other people, those hapless people that have no defenses and the ability to strike us.
They do.
So they could hit Guam, they could hit, hell, they could hit San Francisco if they wanted to.
They could hit DC, right?
They could hit DC.
Yeah.
The Chinese.
They could, yeah.
Yeah.
I think everything is within their ICBM capabilities.
And it is just a height of foolishness.
Whether China or Russia, I mean, I could almost make the same argument in regards to Russia.
Russia's not going to attack us.
They can't.
But we can provoke them into a track if we do too many things, like keep running up into physical contact with them in Syria, or all of these operations we have in the Baltics and the Barents Sea, and then all up in Poland and Bulgaria and some of these other places that are right up next to the Russian border.
Those don't prevent Russia from doing anything.
All they do is increase the chances that we stumble into a war and get our ass handed to us.
And that should never, ever happen.
Yeah.
And, you know, maybe you could verify this.
I know that you're an army guy.
I'm not sure how much this falls under your expertise.
But I've read before that the two major revolutions in Chinese military affairs that changed them from this, as you describe it in this book, this completely ramshackle force that could barely defend their own borders that essentially had no power at all beyond, you know, existing as an internal security force for the dictatorship, essentially, which was handy, you know, because they didn't really have any foreign enemies anyway, so it was okay.
But the only thing that really changed that and their emphasis on building up their naval defenses and all of that, especially was watching Iraq War One.
It was blowback from Iraq War One and all the hype, which was obviously highly embellished about America's ability to use laser designators to fly missiles down chimneys at a moment's notice and all of this kind of thing in windows and all of that.
And they realized, boy, we better do something now that the Americans have demonstrated to us just how good their stuff is.
We better, you know, get a move on there.
And then the next major shift was when they were doing some minor exercises, but not really threatening to invade Taiwan in 1997.
And Clinton went and sailed the Seventh Fleet through there and said, yeah, no, you don't, and did a big show of force and I guess some exercises with the Taiwanese and this kind of thing.
And so and then it was just blowback from that, where they could have just left well enough alone, it was fine.
And instead, they overreacted.
And then the Chinese have overreacted to that.
And then, you know, who knows what other, you know, major turning points there have been in their policies and strategic thinking and whatever since then.
But I had read before that those were two major turning points when those are two major things that never had to happen at all.
And if we never threatened at all, you know, you write in the book that our government has this imagination, they can just say anything, do anything to anyone and that the other side has to just stand there and won't react and won't have their own opinions and their own behaviors and their own red lines that they will refuse to allow to be crossed.
And it's just crazy.
It ain't true.
Yeah, those those two things were I think it was 96 is when Clinton sell those.
See, you got me, man.
I defer to you on that for sure.
Yeah, I mean, you may be right, but I think it was 96.
But but for sure, that event 100% was the catalyzing event.
The Desert Storm issue just got their attention because that wasn't directed against them, of course.
But they're saying, OK, well, that's the state of modern warfare.
So it makes sense.
I mean, it's rational for anyone to say, OK, well, this is the state of warfare.
How are we going to be able to maintain ability to engage in that should it be thrust upon us?
So, you know, all this time, so all this stuff, they they analyzed, you know, every aspect of that war.
They have just analyzed every single detail of all these military operations that we've had, all these, you know, whether it was FCS or some of the ground combat vehicle or all the things that have followed on from that, you know, they pay in extraordinary detail attention to all of these things.
And then they're able to come up with countermeasures.
And so they do all kinds of, you know, private think tank operations, these computer simulations.
And the thing is, we don't have that kind of knowledge about how they might operate.
We can see, we can observe their operations at sea and we can imagine things, but we don't know for sure what they can really do because they don't show us everything.
They see everything that we actually do.
And so they have had a long time to try to come up with ways to defeat our strengths, whether it's the satellite stuff, it's our ability to strike from a distance, you know, whether it's the ships going through the Straits of Hormuz, etc.
I mean, they've had decades to really come up with good ways to defeat us.
And we are operating much different than we did in 1991, frankly, on almost any sphere.
We're slightly elevated in several areas, but we don't know how they would fight.
And that could give them an advantage, even aside from the ones I just mentioned about being in their front yard, if we fight over Taiwan.
And that's something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.
That's the last thing I put in the book.
I think I call it the epilogue, where, you know, there's always the chance that they have some capability, they have some new weapon system, some new way of using technology that we haven't even conceived of, that we would only discover to our horror if we were actually engaged, and we may not be able to recover from it in time.
And we have to keep a healthy amount of hubris and humility in understanding, you know, that that's the entire possibility.
And don't just, you know, haphazardly operate under the assumption that it's still 1991.
And that we can just, you know, have our way with anyone because, you know, we're America, etc.
Because that's, that's a classic way of stumbling into a disaster.
And that's something we need to give a lot more thought to in the future.
Yeah, you know, that's Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam is called Perils of Dominance.
And the theory is that this is kind of the key to the whole war was that America was too powerful and knew it.
And they had so much more power than Russia and China combined, even.
And they just thought that we can do whatever we want.
And no one can stand against us.
They weren't afraid of dominoes so much as just flexing over confidence, and, and asking the wrong questions, and getting the bad answers for them and then making bad decisions based on that, you know, when the reality was that even these, you know, shoeless peasants have their red lines that they will not give into, you know, just like anybody else.
And so yeah, that's anyway.
Alright, listen, so there's more in the book, DPRK, and Iran and Russia and, and all of the great first person stories and point of view about Iraq war one and Afghanistan and the, the, the whole story of your whistleblowing and telling the truth about the war to the people in 2012.
And, you know, trying to call an end to the war then and it's a great introduction to all your great work.
And I hope you keep doing great work at defense priorities for a long time.
And I hope to see you at this event.
Oh, I should just go ahead and tack this on.
If anybody made it through this whole interview, they might, they might be interested to know that I will be giving a talk with bring our troops home.us.
And that's Dan McKnight and Danny Sherson and myself are going to be giving speeches at get this Smedley Butler's grave.
And this is on Monday, October the 19th.
So coming up here pretty soon.
And I got too many things to talk about.
I got to figure out how to whittle it down, but it should, should be very interesting.
And I hope that you can be there too.
I hope I can.
And so, yeah.
And, and I want to, I guess we'll end it here because this is another over another hour here for a second one.
So good time to end it, but everyone, please go and check this out.
It's on amazon.com right now.
It's called 11th hour in 2020 America, how America's foreign policy got jacked up and how the next administration can fix it by Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, U.S. Army retired.
Thank you again, sir.
Appreciate it.
Always my pleasure.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I appreciate it.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.