All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
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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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great journalist William M. Arkin, and he's got a new book coming out here, The Generals Have No Clothes, The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars.
Oh, it's out.
It's the 13th.
I already ordered my copy.
It's on the way.
And, boy, based on this article, I sure cannot wait to read it.
The article is at Newsweek, Why America Can't End Its Forever Wars.
Welcome back to the show, William.
How you doing?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
You know, this article is really something else.
I can't wait to read this book.
Boy, do you go through and explain the sort of the architecture of, they call it the forever war now, I don't know, the war on terrorism, and how it's implemented and how it was just too big to be turned off at this point.
Is that the deal?
It's the self-licking ice cream cone problem?
Well, maybe not too big, but certainly an architecture that has made itself permanent and also made itself quite autonomous and invisible.
So when we think about Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops, you know, the troops really are referring to the boots on the ground, the people who are there in country really wasting their time because they're not fighting anymore.
They're certainly not fighting at the level that would be required if indeed their mission was to defeat the Taliban or to eradicate Al-Qaeda, the actual missions that we went in to do in 2001.
But what we've created in that two decades since 9-11 is this network, this large scale global network that really doesn't any longer depend upon those boots on the ground.
In terms of people, it's much more oriented towards special operations and CIA and contractors, and boots are minimized as much as possible.
And then in terms of capability, it's much more focused on drones and airplanes, most of which fly from outside of the actual country where the operations take place.
And so you have these large military headquarters in the Gulf region, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Bahrain, and you have these even larger military support hubs in the United States.
For the Middle East, they're located in Tampa, Florida, and in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and then of course in the D.C. metropolitan area.
So for every one troop, for every one trigger puller, for every one soldier that's on the ground in a place like Afghanistan, there are literally hundreds of people backing them up that are outside Afghanistan, who are collecting the intelligence, who are running the networks, who are moving the information, who are doing the targeting work, et cetera.
And we already know that despite President Biden's announcement that the last troops will be withdrawn from the country by 9-11 this year, that they're looking for the ways in which they can continue to conduct the counterterrorism mission and continue to be able to kill from the sky from places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which are adjacent to Afghanistan, or even more secretly from inside Pakistan, or from the countries like Kuwait and Qatar and the UAE, where operations are already originating.
So this perpetual war machine, which has been created, which really required a lot of innovations and a lot of maturity in terms of becoming what it is today, is able to operate in Afghanistan as much as it is able to operate in Niger and Africa or Somalia or Yemen.
And so that's why we find ourselves today with so few troops on the ground in these countries and yet still the ability to bomb and kill on a regular basis.
Now, are we talking about mostly drone strikes or an equal number of night raids by special operations forces, or what exactly are we talking about overall in terms of the form of the missions, really?
We are mostly talking about aerial raids, so not just drones, also airplanes and proxy.
This is an important part of what's going on now.
I mean, in Africa, as an example, there are about 18,000 local special operations and soldiers that are working on behalf of the United States, a completely unaccounted system.
I mean, even the countries where we are operating in Africa conducting active counterterrorism missions is somewhat secret.
You'd have to be a very close observer to know all of the countries where we currently have operations.
So it's a combination of CIA, very black, unacknowledged strikes and killings, special operations that, what are called both the tier one and the tier two level, tier one meaning it's national forces where they're black and not acknowledged, and tier two is sort of your regular special forces that are operating on behalf of these national missions.
And then it's drones and airplanes that are conducting strikes, gunships as well, that are operating in support of those very few troops on the ground.
So again, for every one person who's pulling a trigger on the ground, there are probably 10 people in their own unit who are supporting them.
And then for those 10 people that might be at the edge, at the forward area of operations, there are literally tens of thousands behind them that are doing the intelligence, the communications, the imagery interpretation, the forensics, the targeting, et cetera.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, you can hear the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian leader of the Quds Force in Iraq by Donald Trump in 2000, it was early 2020, right?
And how, oh, there was no question about whether the trigger could be pulled and whether it would work.
It was just whether the president would give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
But everything's already in place.
They can do this.
They finally perfected the system, I guess, for at least as far as getting the bombs dropped on who they're trying to drop them on.
Well, again, and so we have to recognize that this has been a two decade effort, that there are some capabilities like precision drones and satellite guided bombs and ubiquitous internet presence, meaning that even those special operations troops in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan or in the middle of nowhere in Africa have access to information that they never had access to before because the United States has built this global communications network.
So when we talk about what has become routine, it's important to remind ourselves that these are capabilities where the United States has built up this over the last two decades.
Drones, you know, lethal drones didn't even exist on 9-11.
I know that people think that predator drones were out there killing, but they weren't.
They were merely reconnaissance assets.
So the ability first to put a weapon on a predator drone and then a reaper drone, which was even faster and higher flying with a greater payload, you know, didn't happen really until the end of the Bush administration.
And so that's what Obama inherited.
And so that's why there was such a significant increase in drone strikes during the Obama administration, was that the system hadn't really matured until about 2008.
And then by the time Donald Trump came into office, it wasn't really even a question anymore as to whether this choreography could be put together.
It was really just a question of, well, tell us who you want to kill.
We'll track them with all these means, going back to Fort Meade, going back to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, going back to all these reach back hubs in the United States.
We'll listen in on their communications.
We'll track them literally from the sky.
And so they watched General Soleimani come from Syria on an airplane, you know, literally get on the airplane in Damascus, land at Baghdad International Airport, get into his car, and as his car was leaving the exit road of the airport, they struck him on the exit road with a Reaper drone, shooting Hellfire missiles and joint direct attack munitions, which are satellite guided bombs.
So I mean, think about it logically.
How many people are involved in that operation?
Not one person on the ground, right?
This is all people who are sitting at their keyboards at Fort Meade in Maryland and sitting at the command center in Gutter, sitting at the translation station in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
These are people all scattered all over the world, all connected in real time communications in order to conduct this operation.
Well that that's pretty much the model that is used all throughout the world.
Wow.
And there's so much here.
So a major part of this, of course, right, is that when it's the 3rd Infantry Division rolling through Iraq, at least there's no secret about it, right?
Everybody at least understands what is happening in the larger sense.
Where here, it's all, I mean, when you talk about top tier Special Operations Command and CIA, we don't ever get to hear about this stuff unless we read it from you.
And even then, no classified details, right?
This is all very secret.
It's all very secret from the American public.
That's the most important point, Scott.
So you think that in Niger, or Mali, or in Cameroon, or in Somalia, or in Nigeria, or in Yemen, that they don't know that the United States is there killing terrorists?
Oh yeah.
No, they're on the receiving end.
It's pretty clear to them, I'm sure.
Yeah.
So we don't know.
And even during the Obama administration, when it made a twice a year report to Congress on activities overseas, it had the nerve to say, yes, we're operating in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Syria, and Somalia, and Yemen, and maybe a couple of other open countries in Africa like Niger and Nigeria.
But the other countries that we're operating in, quote, are classified.
Well, classified from whom?
I mean, classified from the American people can't know.
Because is it not known to people in Libya, or Jordan, or Burkina Faso, or Chad, or Uganda that the United States and its contractors are present there?
It is known.
And of course, obviously, the ISIS targets, the Al-Qaeda targets, the Al-Shabaab targets, they know as well that they are under attack.
So this whole system of perpetual war has also achieved this magnificent conclusion, which is that it is so oblivious to or not needing of boots on the ground that it can internally become more and more secret and opaque for the very reason that it has reduced the human element and made it more this overall machine.
So the irony is that they've kind of achieved the goal that I would say the American public demands, which is not having soldiers being killed in large numbers day after day.
And yet at the same time, they have achieved this sort of magnificent state where the number of soldiers has grown to be so small that more or less on a day-to-day basis, we never hear about it.
We never hear about anything that they do.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm out of reasons to presume the legitimacy of any of these missions.
Which enemies are there out there that they're fighting?
Is it any Sunni with a rifle who is disliked by a government that the U.S. government likes?
Is that the qualification for who gets a hellfire here, except not in Yemen or Syria where we're on the side of Al-Qaeda for now?
Well, I think there is a definite confusion as to what actually counterterrorism means today.
So as the Biden administration has just admitted and as the Pentagon has affirmed, the eradication of Al-Qaeda is no longer a mission of the United States.
The defeat of the Taliban is no longer a mission of the United States.
Even the defeat of ISIS is no longer a mission of the United States.
So we revert to going after what we call high value targets, and those high value targets in theory are the leaders and the facilitators and the major financiers, et cetera, et cetera, which requires this global pumped up intelligence system.
But when we operate in a place like Niger or Mali, or we operate in Somalia, or as you say in Yemen, when we operate on behalf of the government fighting the Houthi, you know, we're more really involved in intervention and other people's civil wars under the name of counterterrorism.
You know, there's no question, let's say in a place like Yemen, that the Houthis, the Shia factions of Yemen are getting support from Iran.
Nevertheless, this is a 900 year old or even older sect of Yemeni society with a legitimate claim on power.
And so what the United States is doing there or what the CIA is doing there is completely confused because overall, we're not necessarily reducing terrorism, improving the security of that country, creating greater stability, or reducing the amount of threat to the United States.
So I would like all of those things to be the basis for which we decide what we're going to do in these countries.
But as we've just seen with the Biden decision on Afghanistan, it's more important to them to have the theater of the withdrawal of U.S. forces and to do it on September 11th, 2021.
I mean, that's like sticking your chin out to the boxer on the other side of the ring saying come and get me.
I mean, really, they need that, that theatrical date?
It's just saying, fuck you, to those terrorists who would still wish us harm.
And I just find that to be foolish and in a way, I'm grateful that they chose the date of September 11th because it just reveals how much this is a photo op, that they don't, that they neither are really withdrawing from Afghanistan, meaning that we neither have a cessation of hostilities and an end to bombing and killing, nor do we have peace, but also at the same time that what they are doing is meant to be theater, to be consumed by the American public so that it doesn't ask more questions.
Right.
Well, I still wonder, do you think they're really going to give up the Bagram airbase or they're going to find an excuse to kick the can down the road again in another few months here?
Well, I don't think it's really a question of giving up the airbase per se, because intrinsically they're not giving up the airbase.
There are lots of non-military, non-troops in Afghanistan, including the FBI, the DEA, the State Department, people who are engaged in counterterrorism, et cetera, et cetera.
And some 7,000 contractors of whom the majority could continue to be on the ground.
Then we have, quote, no troops.
So I don't see the United States overall withdrawing from Afghanistan.
And if they in fact move combat elements to other parts of the world adjacent to Afghanistan, then they're merely doing something that's theater, while having no real ability to continue to influence what's going on vis-a-vis the Taliban or other terrorist organizations inside Afghanistan.
Now, I agree with Joe Biden when he says enough is enough, like we're never going to have a good time to withdraw from Afghanistan.
I agree with that completely.
I just want to see more truthfulness as to what it is that our actual plans are.
Do we continue to fight against al Qaeda?
Do we continue to fight against Taliban leadership?
Do we continue to fight against the Haqqani Network and ISIS-K, which is the organization that is of ISIS in Afghanistan?
Or are we just going to ignore it?
And I think the answer we all know is we're going to continue to fight.
We're just going to continue to fight in different ways.
And that's the new American way of war.
That's what we're facing.
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Well, and you have, I mean, endless reports of this.
They just keep coming out about CIA, they used to call them counterterrorism pursuit teams.
I'm not sure if they've changed that by now.
But essentially, CIA-backed death squads in Afghanistan who simply butcher civilians who are, you talk about unaccountable, and these guys are just war criminals looking for war crimes to commit.
And so they don't seem to be fighting terrorism very much, but they cause major chaos.
Well, that's your characterization, Scott.
I actually think that there has been a significant decline in civilian casualties as a result of U.S. military action.
It's just been replaced by Afghanistan special operations forces, which operate now with impunity, trained and supported by the United States.
I don't think that there are CIA assassination teams out there around the world anymore, if ever there were any.
But I think that- Well, no, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
This is a miscommunication, because you just said the same thing as me.
I'm not talking about where these guys are CIA officers, I'm talking about the CIA creates these death squads.
I was just interviewing this Australian journalist, Andrew Quilty, all about it.
And they're the same teams the CIA's been doing in Afghanistan for 20 years, right?
It's changed.
And that's more or less true.
And of course, now we have also created these teams which are more and more capable.
I mean, that's the other part, right?
So one of the reasons why militarily it can be justified that the withdrawal can take place is that we've built up an Afghan special operations force.
We've built up an Afghan clandestine force.
We've built up Afghan capabilities on the ground.
Now, will those forces persist?
Will they be able to be sustained?
Will they be eaten internally by insider threats from the Taliban?
Will they be able to fight conventionally?
Will they be able to sustain guerrilla operations over many years?
I mean, Afghanistan has not seen stability since the mid-1970s.
I just don't believe that it's going to be emerging now or be created right now.
And so this country is going to descend into chaos.
And the United States is either going to have to have the discipline to stand by and practice a little social Darwinism and say that whoever wins in Afghanistan will win or the country will fracture amongst its various ethnic groups or it will re-intervene.
And we don't know that.
We don't know that yet.
We don't know what the appetite of the Afghan people are themselves for continuing conflict.
But we are talking about generations of people in Afghanistan who have known nothing but war.
Can you elaborate more about the role of contractors in this and how many of these contractors are actual mercenaries on the ground who are being used to, in a way, skate the law versus how many are pushing pencils and just in the chain of intelligence and that kind of thing?
Well, so there is a specific kind of contractor which is referred to as, you know, the security contractors.
And it's, it's, it's about 10% or so of the total number of contractors in the Middle East are these, what used to be called Blackwater and now are, you know, much different companies providing, you know, security with guns.
And that means security of bases.
It means security of convoys.
It means security of VIPs, et cetera.
And it certainly is an important part of, of, of the presence on the ground.
But really today, the contractors who are, are the ones that are the most important in terms of the killing machine are those that are doing the translating, those who are doing the, the, the, the intelligence collection and analysis, those who are actually doing the targeting.
We have contracting contractors in Afghanistan and in almost every other country where we operate who are doing those actual military tasks.
You know, probably most of them don't carry guns and they are congregated in the bases that are more or less secured, but they are very much an intrinsic part of this overall perpetual war machine.
And so therefore the ability to collect the intelligence and continue to do the targeting will be facilitated by people who are unaccountable to the system where we only pay attention to the number of troops.
Yeah, that's really a great point.
We saw, of course, in Iraq, whenever there was a problem with the contractors, the defense department would say, take it up with the state department and vice versa.
And they ended up kind of where no court could touch them and nobody, the just department would also refer back to the defense department and this kind of thing.
And so is there any other advantage to using all these contractors other than it makes it easier to do these things without being accountable?
Well, that was the original intent of having contractors.
I mean, in the Clinton administration, when this explosion of contracting began, one of the reasons why it began was that they didn't want to increase the defense budget.
And so in order to do, to pretend that the number of soldiers in uniform and pretend that the defense budget wasn't increasing, was to shift more and more activity to civilian contractors.
That really exploded after 9-11, if for no other reason than the IT systems and this network that I described that was being created really demanded the technical skills of people that were not, those skills were not available in the military.
And then I think there was the whole language and culture question.
So, you know, the U.S. military, despite even 20 years of operating in Afghanistan and the Middle East, is miserable in terms of its ability to speak the language, understand the culture, et cetera, even though it's had dozens of programs to do this.
And so what here, I'll give you a little fact, Scott.
For every one soldier on the ground, there is a contract linguist behind them.
And in fact, the numbers are, well, it's about one to three.
So there's one linguist contractor, translator contractor, for every three soldiers on the ground, one to three.
And so this is a big part of all of whom are in the Middle East, in Africa, in Afghanistan, the number of contractors who are translators and linguists.
And they're mostly local nationals, but a lot of them are Americans who are required because they, in order to have a top secret clearance, that means in order to be involved in black special operations and the highest level intelligence, they need to be American, British or Canadian or Australian citizens.
Now, so to zoom out a little bit here, you mentioned in the piece that I like the way you say it's so little understood, so invisible and so resilient and efficient that the presidents, despite the fact that they promise to have some sort of humble foreign policy or another, however they phrase it, a little bit of hope and change or isolationism or anything, we just don't get that.
The thing rolls on and you seem to be saying really it's despite the will of the civilian leadership of the country that this organization, which is all of these agencies combined in the ways that you've described here, is just this beast of its own, this agency of its own that can't really be stopped, sounds like.
Well, it can't be stopped if we don't admit that it's there.
It certainly can't be stopped if we don't understand what it is.
And I think that now we've seen from George Bush in 2008 when he negotiated the first withdrawal agreement in Iraq through Obama, who finished the withdrawal in 2011 under a general named Lloyd Austin, to Donald Trump, who had a vociferous desire to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan, to now Joe Biden's theatrical withdrawal, that none of these four presidents really have the ability to influence the machine.
But more importantly, Scott, they don't understand the machine.
I don't think a lot of people in the U.S. military understand the machine.
And so as a result of that, until we come to grips with understanding what exactly are the resources that we're putting into this battle, I don't see how we could possibly ever end it.
And so it's this nirvana which has been created.
And let's not just blame the Pentagon.
The American public is to blame as well.
We live with this macabre bargain.
We don't have to face the question of a lot of American deaths.
And we don't have to have people coming home in coffins from the battlefield.
And we don't have to have a draft.
And we don't have to have anyone in the military disrupting our lives.
And in exchange, we give them carte blanche in terms of what they are able to do.
And so you have this, I call it efficient machine.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's producing anything that equals security, peace, or stability.
It's just that the machine itself is incredibly efficient.
It's incredibly efficient at both creating counterterrorism and also being invisible.
And until we begin to understand what that machine is, until Washington begins to understand what that machine is, I really don't see a macro solution emerging.
And it seems like the only discussions leading away from the war on terrorism and saying we have to stop this is based on the theory that we really need to focus on fighting Russia and China instead.
Do you hear a lot of that from your sources when you're investigating this stuff?
That, yeah, everybody knows we got to fight over Taiwan instead of fighting over Iran?
Well, you know, so this was a formal shift from the Pentagon in 2018.
That great power competition, which meant China and Russia, and then by extension Iran and North Korea, became the primary focus of the U.S. military.
This great power competition versus the Middle East wars rages inside the Pentagon.
I think that most people support the shift towards great power competition because it's more military in nature.
It's more, it portends greater investments in the military in the future.
It gets the military back to what's a more fundamental mission of the military away from the law enforcement and counterinsurgency and covert worlds.
But the reality is that extracting this machine from the Middle East and dismantling this machine is going to be very difficult.
And not only that, but there's a really hidden element of the ability of the United States even to operate against Russia or China or North Korea and Iran, and that is that it drives from the same infrastructure.
So it's the same global network of intelligence collection, of communications, of processing of information, et cetera, that facilitates those operations in the Black Sea, in Crimea, in the Arctic or in the South China Sea.
And that capability has been created on a global basis that makes the transition from Middle East wars to great power competition a little bit easier because we've already built up the global network to support it.
But I think what we also are seeing is a little bit of battle for the future as to what the architecture of the American military will be.
I know that there are army people out there who have dreams of more boots on the ground in Asia and in Europe to counter the Russians and the Chinese.
And in fact, the day after Biden's announcement on Afghanistan, the Pentagon said it was sending 500 more army troops to Germany.
But the truth of the matter is that ground forces, a ground war between the US and Russia or the US and China is about the most idiotic thing that one could plan for or anticipate in the future.
We now live in a world that is dominated by air power, by missiles, by cyber warfare, by space.
And the day of the importance of soldiers and big war is dissipating, if not disappearing, because those soldiers are so much more increasingly vulnerable on the ground to air power and missiles and long range capabilities that I don't think we will ever see the kind of land war that we saw in World War II again.
Never.
Well, and so what would a war with Russia look like?
You may have seen this article by Colonel Douglas MacGregor and the American conservative saying, if politics keep going the way they're going in Ukraine, we could end up in a real war with Russia, that there's a real risk of this right now.
Well, I suppose there is a real risk that there could be an outbreak of violence and hostilities between the United States and Russia, but it's not going to be the 3rd Infantry Division fighting against the 20th Guards Division of the Russian army.
You know, it's going to be a lot of cyber, a lot of missiles, a lot of air power.
It's going to be a lot of special operations forces.
It's going to be everything but the troops on the ground, because once you start fighting troops on the ground, well, first of all, you have to ask yourself, what territory is it that we are trying to defend or obtain?
And the same for the Russians.
I mean, are they actually going to march into a hostile country like the Ukraine or Poland and seek to conquer those places?
I don't think that's even Russian doctrine anymore.
You know, we now think of war as war in the gray zone, as hybrid war, as all these other kinds of wars that take place sort of beneath the level of conventional army on army conflict.
And so even if the United States were to go to war over Taiwan or were to go to war over Poland or over Ukraine, it seems to me it would be a very different kind of war than what we've seen in the past.
And now, you know, this is something that keeps coming up when we talk about great power competition and conflict.
It seems like a lot of the discussion of war with Russia and China just sort of omits the nukes.
And of course, everybody knows that all sides have them.
So as I like to say, it goes without saying, but then it goes unsaid.
And people speak as though we could fight and win or lose a war with Russia and or China, but that nobody's going to break out the H-bombs.
You don't have to even worry about that enough to mention it.
The only question is, how well will our boats do in the Black Sea or how well will our Air Force do over the Taiwan Straits, etc.?
Well, you raise an interesting question because, first of all, A, the United States still deploys nuclear weapons in Europe in six different countries, and they're there to officially serve as a deterrent, but they are actually also anticipated to be used if dire circumstances arise.
One of the features of this sort of shift in the nature of military confrontation and air, naval, space, cyber confrontation is that the numbers of ships and airplanes and bombers and even missiles is very limited.
The United States has all of 350 warships in its Navy today, and half of them are, let's say, in the Pacific and half are in the Atlantic.
So maybe there are 175 ships that are available for a war with Russia, and then a third of those ships are in repair or in shipyards or in dry dock.
And so maybe we're getting down now to somewhere around 140 ships or so.
And even of those ships, some are going to be in the Arctic, some are going to be in the North Sea, some are going to be in the Black Sea, etc.
So we're literally, if there were a full, full, full mobilization of the United States against Russia, we're talking about maybe 20 or so ships in each one of these little theater pockets.
Well, when those ships are destroyed, they're gone.
Or when our 100 bombers are eventually shot down, they're gone.
And so what happens in this kind of war, I think what we don't understand, again, about the architecture of this new kind of war is that what's left is the nukes, that we are operating at the margins of such small numbers.
Now each one of those ships and each one of those bombers, of course, is capable of doing what hundreds were capable of doing in World War II.
Nevertheless, once you lose one, you're literally losing 5% or 10% of your capability.
And the truth of the matter is that there's no backup.
There's not even a hot bomber production line in the United States anymore.
We're only producing a few dozen fighter planes a year in U.S. factories.
We only have 10 or so naval ships under construction, and none of that is going to be quickly increased.
There's no World War II type mobilization system that's prepared or ready to go.
So ironically, our modern space, cyber, air power, drone, precision missile force is more vulnerable to escalation to nuclear weapons than the old force, where at least with the old force, the implications of escalating to nuclear weapons were that a lot of American troops were going to die on battlefields.
And that in itself was one of the self-deterring elements of not using nuclear weapons in a place like Germany.
Whereas in the future, maybe the targets of nuclear weapons are going to be these large air bases and large congregations of places where these smaller numbers of offensive platforms originate from.
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I talk to a lot of real experts and former government officials and great journalists and whoever on this show a lot, and they seem to kind of come in two camps on nukes.
One camp is, nah, mutually assured destruction works, and nobody's ever going to use these things because just think of it, it's unthinkable, and everybody knows that, so don't worry about it.
And then others say that, oh no, that's not right.
To a general, a nuke is just another kind of bomb, a bigger and better one than the last one on the shelf, in fact, and if he thinks he needs to use one, he's going to reach right for it.
And this kind of taboo that, oh no, not fission or fusion, that's just in the minds of civilians back home.
Those things, those distinctions don't really matter to a battlefield commander in the midst of a real fight.
Well, I don't fall into either of those two camps, Scott.
I believe first and foremost that nobody wants to use nuclear weapons.
Nobody in the Kremlin, nobody in the White House, nobody in the Pentagon, and nobody in the Ministry of Defense in Russia.
That generation is gone, and especially the current generation that's in the militaries today, they're so oriented towards space and cyber and precision that the number of people even who are part of the nuclear infrastructure has declined to where it's a very small percentage of military leaders and military people, and very few of those nuclear specialists ever rise to the top.
Second, I would say that it's not, I don't think that nuclear weapons are going to be used in a conflict because it's a decision on somebody's part that it's going to give an advantage.
I think nuclear weapons might play a role in a conflict, just as I described a minute ago vis-a-vis Russia, because someone truly, literally makes the case that it's the best military alternative available.
Sir, we've lost 50 percent of our bombers and we can no longer undertake operations, and we need to take out their ability to attack us, and the best way to do it is with nukes.
Now, there are a lot of other capabilities available, but the United States does not really have a force of conventionally armed long-range missiles.
The United States really does not even have a force of conventionally armed air-launched missiles, unless you consider that those same bombers are the carrying platforms for those conventional weapons.
But what happens in a war, say, for instance, or let's call it more a conflict between the United States and Russia, when somebody says, yes, we could employ all of these bombers and operations against the Russians, but we need to withhold some of them as nuclear carriers because that's the deterrent.
We're showing them that we have the ability to undertake nuclear missions quickly if we need to, and that actually then reduces the number of conventional weapons that are available to both sides.
I could see this sort of frustration after days or weeks of precision attacks on air bases, which then makes it difficult to fly the bombers, on ships which are highly vulnerable to long-range attack, to where you're basically coming down to a very resource-constrained conflict.
Now, one result could be, well, then you just stop fighting because the two sides have punished each other and they will truly seek peace.
But both sides are building a new generation of nuclear weapons.
The Russians are aggressively improving their nuclear arsenal, as is the United States.
I could just as much see an argument being made with lots of screaming and yelling in the White House Situation Room about how awful this would be, where somebody says, you know, if we just use one, if we just use a small one, if we just use it in a very precise way, if we just use it against one base, it's not really opening up the entire nuclear firebreak.
I could see that some president might reluctantly agree.
I can see that happening.
You know, they say, I'm not sure if they're just projecting onto the Russians or if there really is a doctrine in this, escalate to de-escalate, if they think that if they set off one nuke, then we'll back down, but we have to prove that that's not true by having the same doctrine, that we might set off one nuke in their country and then they better know that, see, that means we're serious and they better back down.
This seems all very childish.
This doesn't seem like brilliant mathematical game theory.
It seems incredibly stupid and dangerous.
Well, you know, nuclear doctrine has gone through many different generations and iterations and each one has been a re-articulation of why we have nuclear weapons to fit with them where we are in the modern era.
And escalate to de-escalate, you know, that's sort of the early 2000s, 21st century articulation of nuclear doctrine.
But it doesn't change the reality of all of what I've said, Scott.
I'm not really a believer that nuclear doctrine is going to determine whether nuclear weapons are used or not used.
It's going to come down to, in the end, whether or not they can save the day, politically or militarily.
That's going to be the lever by which they're going to be used because both sides, regardless of whatever written doctrine they have, are well aware that once that threshold is crossed, that we might not be able to come back.
So I don't, I don't take the doctrines very seriously.
I take the capability seriously.
So I think about that stupid single base in Turkey where nuclear weapons are deployed, you know, across the Black Sea from Russia.
Or I think about the change in the way in which the United States has been operating its bombers over the last five years, or the increase in what's called agile combat employment, which means moving bombers into more and more bases quickly around Europe.
I see that as being the biggest dangers because the presence of those nuclear weapons and bombers in itself will become the battle.
And once those assets start to be destroyed, then nuclear weapons may play a bigger and bigger role.
And, you know, will the United States communicate to Russia that if you attack Incirlik airbase, you're making an attack upon our nuclear deterrent?
And so what happens to an airbase like that, the one in Turkey?
Are you not able to fly conventional missions off of that airfield because nuclear weapons are present at the base?
And if you're not, then you're giving up an enormous amount of conventional force.
Now, you know, I'm talking here kind of military strategy at a very high level.
I don't believe any of this.
I don't think the United States and Russia have any reason to go to war or to have a conflict of this size.
But I do think that the physical nature of the infrastructure, the conventional forces and the nuclear forces, and the fact that when you get to conventional and nuclear forces, they are all based somewhere, they are all geographically determined, that that in itself tells us what war is going to look like because you can't change the geography.
I guess my only worry here is, and I'm not trying to be an alarmist on the issue either, but the worry is, I think, not so much military strategy as politics and even office politics, right?
Where it makes sense for the National Security Advisor to say, I know what we should do.
We'll invite Ukraine into NATO.
That'll show them.
And then it makes sense in the room for him to say that, but it doesn't make sense for humanity for him to say that.
And then that kind of thing could escalate very quickly, right?
If the Russians say, actually, no, and if you try it, we'll invade.
And how do you like that?
Then what are we going to do?
Let them get away with that.
And now all of a sudden you have a shoving match where you didn't need to have one at all based on, you know, kind of yes, minister type politics going on, if you know what I mean.
Well, I do love the expression office politics.
I think we sometimes forget that the military is a big giant bargaining unit and it's made up of very different kinds of people and Navy officers don't think like army officers and army officers don't think like air force officers and they all hate each other.
And that's an important part of understanding the dynamics of the military.
You know, when Joe Biden chose Lloyd Austin to be the secretary of defense, another fricking retired general rather than an actual civilian, he did so I assume because he had had a lot of experience and, and face time with Austin when he was vice president.
He certainly didn't pick Lloyd Austin because Lloyd Austin has ever won a battle or won a war.
In fact, I'd go back to some Trump description and say, these generals are miserable.
They have won nothing since 9-11 and Lloyd Austin, as I pointed out before, was the very general who oversaw the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq until they had to return three years later in order to fight ISIS.
So I don't think the generals are necessarily the most brilliant people in the world and their performance is certainly never measured against the outcome, which is better security or greater stability, the very things that they say that they're operating on behalf of.
But I think that when we think about the Pentagon, when we think about the military, we have to remind ourselves that it's not a monolithic entity and that much of what we see in public, the public debate of the national security establishment is really, has nothing to do with what is actually being debated inside the Pentagon.
And it can be distorting sometimes because like, if you look at the news media today or you look at the think tanks, they're practically frothing at the mouth about Taiwan and about a conflict between the United States and China.
But when you ask people inside the Pentagon what's going on vis-a-vis China, they will tell you that we're making a real effort to actually de-link Russia and China, that Russia is in fact an adversary on all levels, whereas China is a mere competitor and we would like to demilitarize the relationship with China to bring down the level of hostility between the two countries, to find a different way of dealing with China.
And that's actually at the cutting edge of what's really going on inside the Pentagon, despite all of the threat mongering that we see in the news media and the civilian world.
And then it's funny, is there anybody, is there any particular service who thinks that no, actually we should be tilting toward Russia against China, like Henry Kissinger was advising Trump to do?
Not necessarily the tilting towards, but there's certainly a lot of people who are arguing that China is a far more existential and broad-based threat to the United States as supremacy in the world, which is to say that it has an economy and it has an increasing global reach.
And that is the true competitor of the United States.
And it's the only country that is the global competitor of the United States now and into the future.
Russia is a third world country with nuclear weapons.
And if it didn't have nuclear weapons, we would deal with it as we deal with Iran.
So I think that it's not so much that people are saying, let's put more emphasis on Russia.
It's more that people are saying, let's de-link Russia and China in terms of how we see the future.
Well, call me confirmation bias, but I'll side with the doves on each side.
Those who think that, you know, either one is the lesser threat.
They're the ones who are right.
But yeah.
Well, I would agree with you basically, Scott, and say that we unfortunately live in a world in which whether it's in coronavirus or in these theaters of warfare, that we look to the military for the solutions when in fact the true solutions lie in civilian, in the civilian world.
All right, you guys.
That is William Arkin.
His new book is called The Generals Have No Clothes, the untold story of our endless wars just out.
And you can read this great piece.
I guess this is the introduction to the book, maybe.
Why America Can't End Its Forever Wars at Newsweek.
Just great stuff.
You've got to read it.
And thank you again, William.
Thanks for having me on today, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
