For Pacifica Radio, March 28th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,400 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org, and you follow me on Twitter.
Again, I'm back at Scott Horton Show.
All right, introducing the American hero, Daniel L.
Davis.
He is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, and what makes him a hero is not that he's a combat veteran of Iraq War I, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan.
At least from my point of view, what really makes him a hero is the truth he told and the whistle he blew in 2012, when he broke ranks and testified to the Congress and wrote articles and talked to the big papers to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, quite contrary to the message we were getting from David Petraeus and the leaders of the Pentagon at that time.
And so read all about that.
But now here he is writing at 1945.
It's this very interesting new website focusing on foreign policy affairs.
It's the numbers 19 or, you know, one nine for 19 and then 45 spelled out, 1945.com.
And he has this really important two part piece here about how China could start a war against Taiwan and how an American war with China could cripple the United States, which is also the theme of this article that he wrote at BusinessInsider.com.
U.S. war with China over Taiwan would be foolish and costly.
He's also the author of the new book that just came out at the end of last year.
It's called The 11th Hour in 2020 America.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing, sir?
You know, I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Always glad to be here.
Great to talk to you again.
Now, I'm so glad that you are writing about this because there's obviously a huge buildup by the United States and by the Chinese over there.
You call it the spiral where they're reacting to us and we're reacting to them.
And everybody started it and nobody did.
And it looks to you, sir, like we're really on a path towards war with China.
Is that correct?
If we don't do something to stop the spiral, then it's entirely possible that it could end up there.
You know, there's too many people, in my view, that don't really understand the consequences and cost of an actual war.
And I think that they think too many things can be controlled.
And so they're willing to take actions that may play well, you know, domestic, politically here, make them look tough to their their constituencies, the voting public, et cetera.
And I think that they're just taking actions that, you know, are designed for one outcome, not realizing that they're playing a very, very dangerous game.
And I think that's my biggest concern is that there's too little of a recognition of what an actual war would look like.
Well, so let's just cut right to the chase here.
I thought as soon as Mao detonated an atom bomb, that meant that that was that we can never fight China.
They have atom bombs, mutually assured destruction, especially now.
We know, of course, there's no question that they have three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach out and touch any city in the middle part of North America that they chose to, which means that war is absolutely off the table, full stop, period.
What else is left to discuss or what am I missing?
Well, that used to be the case.
That's that's one of the big problems that we have with also our current problems that we have provoking lots of things with with Russia as well.
We we don't actually believe that nuclear weapons would be used.
We've it's too far removed from when nuclear weapons were used or even tested where people, you know, physically saw the destructive power of these things and had a very healthy fear of them.
That's now that's now off the table.
It's almost like ancient history now.
And too many people right now just don't have an appreciation for what one single nuclear explosion could do to an American city.
And so they're willing to play games with this.
I mean, you know, you saw in 1962 with the whole Cuban Missile Crisis, it justly terrorized and terrified the whole nation.
And in fact, much of the world and certainly in the Soviet Union as well.
And the two leaders recognized the destructive power there and they both agreed to deescalate.
Right now, I think you have too many in the United States that don't recognize the destructive power and think that they can play games and somehow not get burned.
And that is really dangerous place to be.
Yeah, it's a really funny cognitive dissonance there.
It's almost like when people make and I'm sure you're familiar with this, sir, when people make golden idols out of the infantry.
It dehumanizes them almost the same degree as if you'd call them some terrible racial epithet.
Right.
It's it takes it's the same thing here.
You could have people who, you know, I don't know exactly how bad a nuclear war would be.
Probably wouldn't happen.
Something like that.
On the other hand, you know, maybe that's the right half of your brain.
The other half of your brain knows that these things are so powerful and so destructive that no politician would dare to use one because one could be used back against him.
Right.
Not leading from behind, but getting your capital city nuked.
That's something that none of them would dare to do.
But then.
So that leads to this weird thing, just like no good health care for veterans, at least this weird situation where, you know, people entertain this idea that, you know, maybe we could fight a conventional war and both sides would just refrain from using nukes.
But we could have a lot of fun.
It would be like the best PlayStation game ever to have a full scale, conventional naval war with China.
We haven't been in something as exciting as that since World War Two, you know.
And then as long as everybody promises not to make, not to use their nukes, then, you know, maybe we could do one of those every 15 or 20 years and keep everybody's long range bomber and ship building companies in business at the expense of everybody else.
And that seems to be the thinking to me is that kind of that we know that there's H- bombs, but let's just we'll do 25 studies about what a conventional war would look like and they'll just kind of remain undiscussed.
And the assumption, I don't know what the assumption is exactly, whether they're not that big and not that bad, or it's just a sure thing that things will never go that far or what?
Yeah, I think I think that's exactly what it is.
And I've seen that in some conversations I've had with with people both in the political and the military, you know, upper upper echelons here.
That is what I think they believe that that, of course, no sane person, no insane person would ever actually resort to nuclear weapons.
So if this happens and we'll just keep the scenario there in Taiwan, if we intervene to to stop China over Taiwan, it's going to stay conventional because, you know, nobody, not even China, not the United States, wants this to go nuclear because it would be, you know, catastrophic and would mutually assure destruction, et cetera.
So they won't do that.
So they just assume that.
And now then that fear and everything is off the table.
So now then, I don't know, you know, to what extent they have the whole this could be fun thing that you just mentioned there.
But I think that they do think, yeah, we could do this.
This is something we could do.
And of course, that that feeds right into your arrogance and hubris in that.
And I know I'm the most powerful nation, so I know I could do better than them.
So if we got into a fight, we would win.
So I'm just going to do all these twenty five studies you mentioned and show how that would happen.
Or if it won't, then then I need twenty seven billion more dollars because some of these twenty five studies actually showed us losing actually a lot of them.
So now that they're like, oh, now we need more bombs, more missiles, more bases, more ships, more everything to do this, which that just feeds into what I talked about at the top of the show, this spiral that we keep going into, because I can assure you we're not going to spend twenty five or twenty seven billion additional dollars and think that China is not going to also ramp up their preparations and, you know, have a concurrent rise in their capabilities.
Yeah.
And we see this with with Russia, too.
And it makes perfect sense in this perverse, ridiculous way that nobody's going to pay you thirty thousand dollars to write a study for the Pentagon at your, you know, at your think tank about why we can never fight these guys because they have H-bombs.
And then the whole article is one paragraph long.
But if you write study after study after study about here's how we could use B-1 bombers to target their surface fleet and this and that and the other thing, you get paid all day for those.
And there's a huge incentive in just building that consensus.
And it's funny, I got to figure out a better way to string this together.
Right.
But it goes without saying.
But then it remains unsaid for so long that it becomes, you know, really dangerous and ignored.
And so they talk also about how we could fight Russia in Eastern Europe.
We'll send our tank divisions here and we'll send our bomber divisions there.
And we need we definitely need more Patriot missiles.
And as though we don't all know that the Russians have thousands of H-bombs and that if they feel like the United States of America is going to actually succeed in destroying their regime and taking them out of power, they'll use them.
That's the whole point of having H-bombs is so that people don't try to do that to you.
And of course, no one is talking about fighting Russia or China in Canada or Mexico or off of either of our shores.
All of this is about America in Eastern Europe or America off of China's coast.
Yeah, yeah, that's a that's that's a very important point to point out, because we again think that we can keep this geographically separated so that we'll never have any face any risk.
But, you know, with with proliferation of weapons and the new technologies being developed and extending ranges of stuff, I assure you, our cities are at risk, maybe even from conventional weapons.
I mean, maybe they don't want to launch a nuclear weapon.
But, you know, if we have if we engage in conflict and then we'll again keep it at the Taiwan situation, if we start knocking out, you know, Chinese ships, knocking down planes, et cetera, and especially if we use even conventional weapons on the missile bases that are on China proper, I just almost guarantee that they're going to use submarines and launch missiles, probably, if not, if not, you know, ICBMs without a nuclear top against American cities, because if we attack them, I mean, they're not going to just sit there and not attack us.
And that's why I'm so adamant that we cannot risk American territory and American civilians to this absurd thing that a fight that doesn't need to happen at all for our security.
And if somebody's shooting a three stage rocket at the American continent, we don't know if it's a nuke or not until it goes off.
And so you could bet that the guys in the White House are going to assume the worst.
Oh, no, they just launched some three stage rockets at us.
They don't like we can launch medium range missiles at them because, again, we're in their theater, not the other way around here.
But you can see the Americans saying, oh, they just launched nukes and assuming their nukes, feeling like they have to assume their nukes, I guess.
Yeah.
And that in itself right there is part of my great fear and why I say because this thing could spin around and escalate into something like that to where you have a miscalculation.
Then it gets into the situation to where, you know, the mentality we just spoke about where people say, oh, well, of course, no sane person would ever use a nuclear weapon.
But then you get into a situation like that where you have minutes to make a decision and you think, oh, my God, if I don't act now, I'll lose the chance, which is not accurate, by the way.
And I'll talk about that in just a second.
But you can see where you can get stuck in a situation where you're panicking and you make a decision to do that.
And now all of a sudden, what seemed to be irrational a minute ago seems like the natural thing to do right now.
And no one can control those emotions once actual bombs start flying around.
Right.
And, you know, it depends on which expert you ask about this, but I've heard it, you know, I guess from Daniel Ellsberg and from other experts on this, which he is a former nuclear war planner himself, that, oh, no, listen, in the mind of, say, I don't know, an army colonel, a nuke is just another bomb.
It's a bigger, better bomb from the smaller one, you know, next in line on the shelf.
And if daisy cutters won't do it and MOABs won't do it, then we go up to the next size.
And the fact that it's fission and or fusion going on is not really relevant.
The question just is, how big of a target are we trying to kill in one shot here?
And that kind of thing becomes totally reasonable to think that we would use nuclear weapons in some circumstances.
And that's why I was really concerned when the United States has been, you know, this multi-year process of of having developing a new category of tactical so-called nukes, because that almost automatically implies the mentality that you think that you can use them in a tactical situation and avoid escalation up to nuclear.
But that's it.
That's that's insane, because no, it won't.
Not any country on the planet is going to be the recipient of a tactical so-called nuke and not respond in kind or something larger.
No one.
So that's that's absurd and self-defeating.
Yeah.
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That's what they say when they're talking about the Russians.
They have this whole thing of escalate to deescalate.
We'll set off a nuke.
In fact, I've read about one of these plans where if the Russians are winning in Ukraine or whatever is the circumstance, we'll nuke Belarus.
And then that'll be a signal to Russia that you better back down because we've proven that we're willing to use a small a bomb.
And that is a signal to your psychology that we are willing to use a big H bomb.
So you better let us have the last word now and not do anything else.
And we'll call it quits here.
And then they also, I think, presume that that's the Russian strategy.
And so that's why they have to counter it with the same thing.
But who knows whether they're just projecting or what?
You know, I don't know.
I think it's all bananas.
And it's and.
Well, look, we would never react that way.
We would never get that message if someone knew something short of the United States or, you know, one of our allies said that we would never, quote, get the message and deescalate.
We would absolutely escalate.
And they're no different than we are.
They're the same kind of mentality and human psyche.
They would do the same thing.
So it's it's the height of arrogance and hubris to suggest that somebody else would back down when we never would.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So now let's get to Taiwan, because it is such a sticky situation here where, you know, for people not familiar with the history back when the communists won the Civil War in 1949, the nationalists fled to Taiwan and then the Americans protected them and prevented the communists from crossing the strait and finishing the war.
So you've had this, you know, bifurcated state here.
And Taiwan is a democracy and a capitalist country and armed to the teeth by the United States.
I don't know exactly to what degree, but I know they fly American F-16s and an AWACS and so forth, as you refer to in your articles here.
But then the idea is that we've had this strategic ambiguity ever since Nixon made his deal with Mao, where it's one China, but it should not be reunited by force.
But the idea is that one day, someday Taiwan will sort of revert to Hong Kong type status or something like that.
But I guess the threat is, and at least according to the American admirals, and it is true, I guess, that the Chinese are building up their naval forces.
I'm not certain for what all purposes you can address all that.
But the idea is that they're preparing to invade Taiwan.
And you describe in great detail what that would look like before you get to the part about how we really couldn't do anything about it that would be beneficial to the United States at all.
But so first of all, can you talk about, you know, how seriously you take that threat when the U.S. Navy says that this is what we have to prevent here?
You think it really is just a matter of maybe short or medium term future before China tries to attack Taiwan and take it over?
Yeah, I am I am much more confident in the sort of negative sense that it is a matter of time before China does use force to take Taiwan, because they have made it an absolute core part of their identity and their nationhood to eventually reunify Taiwan, to get all of it back, to basically finish the civil war that started in, whatever it was, 1920-something, I think is when that actually started.
And they have been on a multi-decade buildup to have the capacity to do that.
They have never said anything besides from day one that they are willing to use force to reunify.
And they continue to reiterate those same claims in very strong, overt language.
They're not being coy about it.
They're not dancing around the situation.
They are being very direct in saying what they will do.
And they've even said a few of the specific triggers, like if Taiwan ever overtly declares independence or if an American warship docks in a port there, they have said that means war.
And we dare not say, I wonder if they really mean that.
Let's do that and see what happens, because that would be stupid.
But I think that it is likely, likely that China will eventually do that unless Taiwan does at some point say, you know what, this is just not worth it to us.
Let's have some kind of Hong Kong type deal and see if we can turn fair any better than they did, which I also don't see, because in fact, over the last couple of decades, they've been moving in the opposite direction to where, especially as the younger generations rise up, they don't want to be part of China.
They don't have any connection culturally with the mainland Chinese.
And so that seems to be moving in the opposite direction, which is why I say I think the chances are pretty good that eventually that happens, which is why I'm so outspoken that we can't be prepared to say we want to get rid of strategic ambiguity and overtly give security guarantees to Taiwan, because then we're basically just saying we're going to sacrifice large sections of our Air Force and Navy in the hope that we can stop something from China, from our 6,000 miles away that China has at 100 miles from their border.
Right.
And as you say, also even including putting American entire cities at a time at risk in the event of a real war.
And, you know, if it's a full scale war like you talk about, they nuke us, we nuke them or whichever side does it first.
And then each side just escalates.
The Americans certainly possess enough H-bombs and the Chinese possess enough H-bombs to completely annihilate each other's civilizations off of the face of the earth.
200 H-bombs would do it, right?
That's a relatively small nuclear arsenal.
But I know the 200 most important cities in America would be the absolute end of our civilization permanently.
Yeah, I mean, you just you just couldn't do that without I mean, the United States, as we know, it would simply cease to exist and we'd be left with some rump, something else, you know, with multi decades to try to uncover that damage, which may never happen.
So it's suicidal to even contemplate that.
Yeah.
All right.
And now I keep escalating to the nukes just because, you know, everybody, they got nukes.
So that should be the end of the argument.
For some reason, it takes a half an hour.
But so you write about in your articles here and you just mentioned there where even leaving nukes out, we could lose a large part of our Air Force and Navy in the event of a war like this.
And you alluded to this earlier, too, about these multiple war games that show that the Chinese are more than capable of defending themselves or whatever, fighting their side of a war against the United States in the event of a conflict over Taiwan or anything else, I guess.
Yeah, look, it's easy to see this is not hard to figure out if you're willing to actually do a force on force comparison to see where we have our our ships, where we have our planes, where our bases are and where China has their ships, their bases, their rocket forces, et cetera.
And then you see what they would bring to bear against Taiwan, how fast that would happen.
And then what is the possibility of our response?
So just as an example, look at the preparation that we had for the last two large scale wars, which was Iraq One and Iraq Two, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In both cases, we had hundreds of thousands of troops, and it took months of direct preparation to launch those wars and to get all the ramp up enough to have ammunition, enough missiles, enough bombs, enough bullets, enough fuel, et cetera, and then have all the forces located in the same place at the right time in the right concentrations.
That takes months just by itself.
Then you have to physically get the troops there and the forces and the spare parts and all the replacement things that you would need to have a logistic pipeline to be able to maintain operations for some extended period of time.
All that would take months and months of buildup.
If you had a standing start war, which is almost certainly what China would do if they ever decide to do this, it would be foolish to do anything else.
Then, you know, from 100 miles away from their home bases, they don't have to do months of preparation.
They're basically ready within a week or two or possibly, you know, if they really wanted to get down to that.
Now then, that means we'll be called flat-footed, right?
So that means at the absolute best case, it would take 17 days to sail and to get ships from Alaska into range.
It would take three weeks from the U.S. West Coast to get into range, and that means nothing is prepared.
There's no, we don't have enough bombs.
We don't have enough anything to sustain combat.
I mean, we literally could not get there in time.
And by the way, if you have two fleets, you know, steaming across the Pacific towards China, this is not like World War II, where you could have entire aircraft carrier battle groups floating around the Pacific and neither Japan nor the United States knew where the other one was.
This, everybody has, you know, Google Earth and all kinds of other satellites to know every single step.
So they would attack the ships long before they get there with extended range ship-killing missiles.
Well, this is why the Hawks say now, that's why we got to be in theater right now.
We got to keep our battle groups on the ready at all times on their side of the ocean.
Look at what they're talking about.
This whole $27,000, I forget what it's called.
A billion.
$27 billion.
Yeah, this new Indo-Pacific initiative, defense initiative, I forget the exact name.
Even when you look at what the most that they're talking about for this $27 billion, it's a drop in the bucket.
It's like five or 6,000 additional troops and building up some capability here, none of which is even close to what you would need for a sustained combat operations against China.
I mean, not even 10%.
So that still won't get you there, even if you did that.
That would just make it easier for them to target the guys that are closer.
It's really that simple.
Okay, but, and I'm sorry, we're so short on time, but just to wrap up here, and I know you'll be able to dismiss this fairly easily.
The counterpoint is Neville Chamberlain.
What are you saying?
Give the world to China?
Yeah, I hear that all the time.
Everybody says, oh, this is 1938.
It's like Poland sacrificing Poland or Czechoslovakia.
No, it's not.
Nazi Germany had a physical border with France, was just across the English Channel from Britain.
They could roll into Poland, roll into Soviet Union.
That's impossible here because there's a 6,000 mile Pacific Ocean, which would put them at great risk.
If they even thought about steaming our direction, we could pick them off like cherry picking from thousands of miles away.
They'd never even get close to us.
So no, it's not even close to being like that.
All right, then that's it.
Listen, it's a former, retired Lieutenant Colonel of the US Army, Daniel L. Davis, the hero whistleblower of the Afghan War of 2012.
He's at Defense Priorities, and these important articles are at businessinsider.com.
US officials who are ready to fight China over Taiwan don't understand how much is at stake.
And then this two part series at 1945.com about how China could start a war with Taiwan and how America could lose it.
Thank you so much for your time, sir.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, John, that has been Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, almost 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
You know, I do about five or 10 of these a week and KPFK just gets the best one.
And all those archives are available at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
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I think you guys will enjoy it.
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See you next week.
Bye.
