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.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Dan Caldwell.
He is the Executive Director of Concerned Veterans for America, and they have a new ad campaign, well, a new campaign, on bringing America's troops home from Afghanistan.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
I'm doing fantastic.
Thanks for having me on.
So let me play a little bit of this for the people here, man, and see what they think.
I won't do the whole thing.
It's a short TV spot.
For 18 years, we've been at war.
Our brothers and sisters in uniform, sons and husbands, wives and daughters, fighting a mismanaged war in Afghanistan that our leaders haven't told the truth about.
We've lost over 2,000 American troops, spent over a trillion of your tax dollars.
When will it end?
Over 60% of veterans like me think it's time to get out of Afghanistan.
Tell Washington.
Well, I guess I did play the whole thing, didn't I?
It's time to bring our troops home.
This is great.
And endlesswars.com, it ends with there, and then you guys' site is cv4a.org, Concerned Veterans for America, cv4a.org.
So that's great, and I guess, I've seen it on the internet, I haven't been watching too much TV, but you guys are running those, what, on the TV news channels during impeachment and stuff like that?
Yeah.
So the ads are running on cable news.
They're running on television in four areas, three states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and then on cable in the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia area, and then nationally, we're running it on digital platforms, so Facebook primarily, but also on Twitter and Instagram.
Great.
So what kind of response are you getting?
It's been fantastic so far.
We've already had over 10,000 people taking action through either going to the website or online to contact their members of Congress in the White House, urging them to support an end to the war in Afghanistan, and that's a great response for the ad only being up four or five days at this point, and the ad's going to run digitally for at least another couple months, so we think we're going to get a huge number of people contacting their members of Congress's office, and as somebody who used to work in a congressional office, I can tell you that when an office is getting more than 40 or 50 emails in one day on an issue, they start to pay attention, and we think that when you get offices, especially members of Congress and on the House side, and then in the Senate as well, when they're getting upwards of 1,000 emails on an issue, they really start to pay attention and start to feel the pressure.
Well, yeah, that's certainly good to hear, and it seems important that you guys, well, how long has this group been around?
Well, Conserve Actions for America has been around since 2012.
We have been focused on three core issues.
Early on, we were primarily focused on two things, reining in our national debt and then reforming and fixing the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Reforming and fixing the VA is probably what we were most well-known for prior to getting involved more in foreign policy over the past couple of years, and we were really big drivers behind the reforms that gave veterans more freedom and more control over their health care through the VA, and now we've really ramped up on the foreign policy front because being honest, foreign policy impacts those two issues, the debt and the VA.
A number of veterans in our country, the type of veterans we have, the number of injured and disabled vets is determined by our foreign policy, and while it's not the only driver of our national debt, obviously you have the entitlement state as well.
We've spent over $6 trillion on endless wars in the Middle East that haven't made us safer, and that undoubtedly has contributed to our national debt growing to more than $23 trillion.
So all these issues are interrelated and really are, especially the debt and VA, are driven in large part by our foreign policy.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the thing about that too is that obviously you're sincere conservatives who take those positions, you know, all three of them together, but at the same time, those first two really helped to establish y'all's identity, and as you're known in the media as this conservative veterans group, by focusing on the national debt, which is usually not a Democrat-leaning issue, and by focusing on the kind of reforms that you guys have pushed in health care, where, hey, if you want out from under the VA, here's a single payer card, which I'm not really for that, but it's better than, it's a step better than the VA, I'd suppose, anyway.
But that really helps establish y'all's position on the right.
So if it had been just a strategy, it would have been a brilliant strategy for establishing y'all's identity as a conservative group, which is a huge force multiplier, essentially, in military speak, for your message against the war.
Because I think, you know, a liberal veterans group is presumed to be anti-war, but it's sort of like, well, I guess they were kind of tough guy fighters, but now they're liberals or something like that.
That's not my take.
I'm an armchair psychologist of the public at large, you know.
But I think when you guys are conservative veterans, and like in your background, a Marine Corps veteran of Iraq War II, and when you take these conservative stands on things like the debt and VA care and that kind of thing, then it really helps to amplify the power of your message that we're sick and tired of these wars.
In other words, you haven't moved left on anything.
You're just anti-war now, that's all.
But otherwise, you're still the same guy you were when you joined up the Marine Corps kind of idea.
And I think that's what people really want to hear.
Yeah.
And, you know, we have also, you know, really gone out of our way to build a broader coalition or to work with a variety of different groups on this issue.
And I think that the interesting thing that's developing in the veteran community is this really trans-partisan movement to end the wars.
And, you know, some people might call us conservative, some people might call us libertarian or classical liberal.
I mean, I'm honestly fine with either, all those descriptions.
But you have groups like on the left, like VoteVets, who we've battled with intensely over the years.
And now we're working, you know, really hand in glove on this issue.
You have a new group, I think they've been on your show a few times, and I'm excited about Bring Our Troops Home, Dan McKnight and Kyra Lindholm are doing great stuff.
And then you have other groups on the left, like Common Defense as well.
And we would all probably disagree on things like gun rights or on issues around domestic spending.
But when we get in a room and start talking about foreign policy, just really spontaneously, we start saying the same things.
So there really isn't, interestingly, right now, like there maybe was 10, 15 years ago, a group of veterans, either on the right or left, that's saying, you know, we need to keep fighting these wars.
We need to keep, you know, stay the course, some of the rhetoric that you heard a lot 10, 15 years ago.
It doesn't exist.
The main veteran service organizations, like the American Legion and VFW, which in the past, I think you could say were maybe more hawkish, they're silent.
They're not weighing in.
So really, the only vocal voices in the veteran community, aside from some individuals and, you know, some retired generals and whatnot, are calling for more restraint, are calling for a more prudential use of military force abroad.
And I think that's something amazing that's happened.
And while, you know, Concerned Veterans for America, I think, is, you know, playing a big role in this movement.
We aren't the only ones.
And there's a lot of credit that deserves to go around.
Well, yeah, you're certainly right.
There are a lot of great groups.
And Bring Our Troops Home is doing a lot of great work.
But I think, you know, and you can see it in the news coverage of you guys' group.
They say Koch-backed.
David's dead now, but Charles Koch.
And people may not know, especially, you know, liberals who have heard of the Kochs may not know that actually, they're pretty good on foreign policy and always have been.
Look at the foreign policy department at the Cato Institute that they've supported all these years, and that kind of thing.
They're not the, they haven't been the very best of us.
But they've been pretty good all this time.
So there's no surprise there.
And I think there's been there's been some misconceptions around, you know, especially Charles Koch and David Koch around, like, you know, what their foreign policy beliefs were.
And, you know, one thing I tell people, and this has been written about in some books about Charles Koch, is that one of the first political ads that Charles Koch paid for was not on things like taxes or deregulation, things that, you know, the Koch network, which we, you know, call the Stand Together community now, is known for.
One of the first ads he paid for in the Wichita Eagle out in Kansas was actually an ad to end the Vietnam War.
And so for over 50 years, he's advocated for a more restrained foreign policy.
David Koch, when he ran for, you know, president and libertarian ticket in 1980, ran on a more restrained foreign policy.
And over the last five years, or six years now especially, we've really ramped up our foreign policy efforts on the university side, on the think tank side, and now really on the advocacy side.
So it's a full spectrum campaign for the entire community of organizations.
And really is one of our top priorities now, along with, you know, our traditional issue set around, you know, regulation and spending and criminal justice reform and things like that.
So there's a lot of exciting things going on, and we're really, I think, happy to be ramping up at a key moment in American history around, you know, foreign policy.
Yeah.
And, you know, by the way, the Kochs actually bankrolled the entire anti-draft movement in the 70s and helped get conscription abolished in America.
Well, not completely, you know, the Selective Service is still there, but there hadn't been conscription since the 70s.
And they were a huge part of that back then.
But you know, it's good that they're identified as, you know, these conservative Republicans, because it's the irony that's interesting, right?
For the people who don't already get it, that, well, why would you have a bunch of conservative Republicans and war veterans be anti-war?
They must have a good reason, right?
It's not because they just got lost in the tie-dye, man.
It must have been something important that they figured out or something like that.
Hopefully, you know, break the conversation open a little bit wider for those who are used to supporting these foreign policies to come around and admit that, you know, things haven't quite worked out the way I had expected.
Yeah.
Yeah, and again, kind of going back to labels, I think that, you know, most of Charles's, you know, work and stuff is prior to, I think, the Obama administration would have been classified as more libertarian or classically liberal.
And you know, a lot of people, again, assumed because we took certain issues or, excuse me, certain stances on certain issues that they put us in the conservative Republican box.
But, you know, kind of going back to this discussion about that's happening in a way that I don't think has happened since the early 90s, there is a real discussion of what is now a conservative foreign policy, because what was perceived as a conservative foreign policy, which is really a neoconservative foreign policy under, you know, President Bush was a failure.
And, you know, President Obama with, you know, obviously, folks would disagree with this, especially those that they're more hardcore neoconservatives, in many ways, just continue that foreign policy.
And Trump, however, imperfectly is really only represented is really the first one that's done a true break from that, especially in the post Cold War era.
You know, that that primacy is neoconservative foreign policy, however, you want to describe it.
And so that that creates an opportunity now to say, OK, this is actually what a conservative foreign policy should look like.
This is what a foreign policy for progressives should look like.
And many of them actually, and for the most part, except for things I'd say around economic development, things like that, there's a lot of shared principles, there's a lot of shared beliefs around restraint and military force about what happens when you go, you know, go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
And so there's a lot of exciting opportunities right now and a lot of people's mental models around what's conservative and what's not in regards to foreign policy are changing.
And that's a good thing.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
You don't want to avoid that label.
You want to own it.
And you get to say what a conservative foreign policy is.
Stop doing stuff.
How about start conserving less world revolution and more paying down the debt?
That sounds like conservative foreign policy to me.
So that's and that's what's really getting the attention.
That's what creates room for people like Matt Getz and, you know, other Republicans in Congress now to say that, you know what, I think actually my people want to hear antiwar positions.
They want me to vote in antiwar ways rather than the presumption that conservative Republicans turn out to support Hawks every time, no matter what, which is unfortunately the previous common understanding.
Right.
And, you know, interestingly, Matt Gates, if you were to ask me when he first came into office in January 2017, is this guy going to be, you know, probably one of the top five pro restraint foreign policy champions in the House of Representatives said no way.
But but that's where we're at.
I mean, I think him and Tom Massey are the most consistent advocates for a restrained foreign policy in the Republican Party right now in the House.
And, you know, he he is and here's the interesting thing.
Just like Walter Jones from North Carolina, he is doing it from a heavily military district.
You hear a lot of members claim that they have the most veterans or most members of the military in their district.
Matt Gates is right when he said is it is, you know, the district with the highest military and veterans presence in the country.
And he is he's advocating for less war abroad, restraint and defense spending and reigning in executive war powers.
And Walter Jones represented Camp Lejeune, where I spent some time in the Marine Corps, heavily military district.
And despite the fact he had a lot of folks try and take him out over the years because of his beliefs around foreign policy, especially after the Iraq war, he still maintained high levels of support in that community because, you know, kind of going back to what I discussed earlier, you know, veterans and military families are tired of these endless wars.
And it's not because they're pacifists or they're they're inherently anti-war.
It's that I think first and foremost, they're seeing that they just simply aren't making us safer.
And then, of course, it's putting incredible strain on these communities, you know, deploying two, three, four times, much less in a lot of special operations units, 10, 15 times now.
It's inevitably going to wear down the toughest and most durable individuals and family units over time.
And it's it's having a tremendous impact in these communities.
So those are becoming quickly the loudest voices for a more restrained foreign policy, something I think a lot of folks 10, 15 years ago wouldn't have guessed would happen.
Yeah, it's funny to hear people talk about, you know, our Navy is overstretched.
It's like, well, you know what?
They've been flying sorties since 1991 over there.
Maybe we could just tone down on the use of their equipment a little bit.
And maybe that would help spare it a little bit longer shelf life instead of just shoveling more money at it.
You brought up a very important point that I don't think it's discussed enough.
You know, the despite the record levels of defense spending over the past 18 years, you had a little bit of a dip with sequestration.
But even then, you still had a higher, you know, higher than average levels of defense spending in the post Cold War era.
Yes, we weren't reaching like the 6% level of GDP that we were reaching, you know, in the tail end of the Cold War or 9% like during the Vietnam War.
But still, it was a massive investment and often higher when adjusted for inflation because our economy's grown than what you've seen in the past.
But despite that, our Navy shrunk under George W. Bush by about 60,000 sailors.
Our Air Force, we had to retire in part because the F-35, but in part because of the dynamic you identified.
We had to retire 500 tactical aircraft sooner.
Our B-1 bombers and B-52 fleets, critical assets that if, you know, God forbid we get in a conflict with China are going to be key.
You know, they have between oftentimes 5% to 15% radius levels because they're being used over and over again to blow up huts in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria.
You know, we're dropping million-dollar bombs on thousand-dollar huts with insurgents with maybe $500 worth of gear.
And so, those assets have been overused.
They've taken money away from replacement programs.
And we really have a military that in a lot of different areas, particularly with great power conflict and deterrence, is less effective.
Now, I'm not somebody that believes that, you know, we should be overly hawkish towards China.
But, you know, if you're looking at a national security challenge in the world, you really do have to look to China.
And if we're going to have a military, it should be geared towards that great power conflict and dealing with those threats.
But we're still in a counterinsurgency mindset, even if there's fewer levels of troops in some of these conflict zones.
Yeah.
See, I don't know, man.
And that's really threatening our national defense.
You put it like that.
It makes me think poor Afghans, but I'd rather keep killing them for nothing than get into a war with China.
I mean, what do we have to fight with them about, whether their entire East Coast belongs to us or not?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, ideally want to get out of Afghanistan.
I don't want a war with China again.
I think that a lot of folks, there's an incentive now to turn China into what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
But there's key differences in particular.
Their economies, for better and for worse, are very integrated.
We're very dependent on each other.
We have levels of trade that we never had with the Chinese.
And I think that our focus should be on not provoking them or unnecessarily getting in a war, but like, you know, treating them both as a partner and as a potential adversary.
And that's, you know, that's what I think that the military really in the case of China should be more viewed as a deterrence, as an aggressive force kind of trying to start another war of China, another, you know, war on the Asian continent.
But, you know, we do hear that narrative more and more that, yeah, we got to wrap up these terror wars because it's time to focus back on Russia and China again, which is really not the right answer.
We need to leave Asia to the Asians and just be, you know, have a Swiss foreign policy and not have it, you know, have to choose between these choices, these kind of false choices, which are really in a way, right, they're arguments between the government departments.
The Navy wants to focus on China.
The army wants to focus on Russia.
The special operations command wants to focus on terrorists.
And it's all just rent seeking, job holding, has nothing to do with defending this country whatsoever.
None of it does.
I mean, I think, yeah, there's definitely, it's interesting.
The different factions in the military and what they want their focuses to be.
I think that a lot of people in this, and I didn't serve in the special operations community, but we have people in CVA that did.
I think a lot of folks in the special operations community are starting to realize that, okay, we've been overextended these past 17 years, and we've been asked to do things that we shouldn't be doing.
But there still wants to be a focus, I think, on the counterterrorism front, which, you know, I think that's always a capability we want to have.
But we also need to recognize that, especially in the Middle East, a lot of these individual groups like ISIS that have been perceived to be a threat to us are really more of a threat locally first, before they are internationally to a lot of different actors in the region.
So that kind of brings up an important concept that a lot of folks miss is that, look, whether it's the Taliban in Afghanistan, whether it's al-Qaeda central in Pakistan, or ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there are five or six other different local actors or nation states that ISIS poses a bigger threat to than us.
And they have an interest in keeping them tamped down and defeating them.
So let them take the lead.
Let them deal with it before we even consider or talk about it.
And one of those countries, honestly, is Russia.
They have a huge problem with fighters flowing from the Caucasus region into Syria.
So they have a bigger interest in what happens in Syria than us.
So let them deal with it.
Let them deal with a threat that is a bigger threat at the moment to them than it ever, frankly, was to us.
And so the military, I think, overall, needs to start embracing that mindset.
Unfortunately, you have a foreign policy establishment here in DC that really isn't doing that.
And that's a big part of the problem and what we're trying to counteract, in part with this ad campaign and these coalitions that we're building.
Yeah, it's funny.
I think people think of Jack Nicholson talking about, you know, I stand on that wall to protect you.
But wait, where's the wall?
It's in the Herat?
You know, it's somewhere over in Central Asia or in Eastern Europe.
It's a defensive note about a very foreign legion in practice.
So I'm sorry to wrap up here at the end.
But again, tell us if you could about y'all's efforts on Capitol Hill and what you guys are doing.
You know, I read in the post that you guys have spent quite a bit of money supporting certain candidates.
I wonder, is there like a real litmus test that they better be good on all seven of the wars or else?
Or how does that work?
What do you guys do?
Well, we do a number of different activities, you know, focused on changing the discussion among policymakers on foreign policy.
And not all of it, in fact, very little of it is very overtly political.
We have a team here in Washington, D.C. that goes around Capitol Hill and educates members on our positions.
It tries to connect them back to why our foreign policy isn't working.
And so we do hundreds of meetings every year on these issues on Capitol Hill with members from both parties.
But I think that we're most effective on Capitol Hill when we're backed up by a grassroots army.
And so most of Concerned Veterans for America's staff is actually spread across the country, meeting with people in local communities, educating them, and then turning in the activists that can either educate other citizens or they themselves as, you know, individual constituents of a particular member of Congress can go lobby them to support a better foreign policy.
So it's really, you know, use a military term, a combined arms effort.
We have the television ads that we've discussed today.
We have our people on Capitol Hill putting, you know, putting information in these members hand that help counters a lot of the bad information they've got from different groups that want to keep our foreign policy status quo.
And then we're applying grassroots pressure on these members to change their ways.
And then if a lot of members, you know, if certain members aren't going to change their position on these issues, we have other entities, you know, particularly a PAC that's separate from Concerned Veterans for America that can, if they alternate the decision, hold these members accountable on a political level.
And so we look at a whole host of issues when we decide to engage in a particular race through the PAC, you know, not just foreign policy, but also spending and VA reform.
And we're looking to elevate more members that are willing to do the right thing on this issue.
And also, too, recognizing that members can change.
Like we talked about Walter Jones.
Walter Jones, for the first part of his career, was a big advocate of a more interventionist foreign policy.
And then he changed.
I think he changed out of principle, not because of any pressure, but he demonstrated that members can change.
So we want to see more people coming around to our point of view, not just simply defeating everybody or electing new folks.
You know, we recognize it's more realistic to get members that are already there to change their point of view than just replace everybody that has been bad in the past on these issues.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, that's good thinking.
And, you know, especially, again, from the position that you guys are in, it's the very best one to argue the point of view that you're taking.
So I wish you the best of luck.
And I think, you know, in this year, especially well, look back to the conservative thing.
Obviously, there's two very competing narratives here.
Conservatives either hate and fear Muslims and like kicking their butts all day, or they used to think that, but that ain't it.
Now they're sick and tired of the wars and they want to come home.
And it has to really be understood overall in the culture that there's been a change from one to the other, you know, and it has to be led by conservative war vets of this century like yourself making that case.
So, you know, I think you probably realize, but I'm just kind of trying to reinforce to you just how much power and influence you have potentially in order to make changes, you know, far beyond what you might think just because of the position that you guys are coming from with this.
So, you know, anyway, I sure am glad that you're there and I hope that your voice gets louder and louder.
Well, I appreciate everything you do, Scott, on this issue.
And again, you know, we aren't doing this alone.
There's a lot of great groups out there.
It really is truly a team coalition effort and it spans the right and the left.
And we're playing an important role, but we can't do it without a lot of help from folks like you.
And again, bring our troops home and our friends on the left with, you know, vote vets and whatnot.
And that's ultimately what's going to change things is that transpartisan pressure, us working in our respective lanes and elevating a diverse set of voices.
And I think critically with kind of the current environment, these traditional conservative voices that maybe in the past have been perceived as interventionists, elevating more of them that have come around on this is critical.
You're absolutely right on that.
And I appreciate everything that, again, you've been doing and whatnot to help kind of change this narrative.
Right on.
All right.
Well, thank you again, Dan.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you, Scott.
You have a good day.
All right, you guys, that is Dan Caldwell.
He is the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America.
The website is cv4a.org, cv4a.org.
And check out their new ad campaign.
We got a blog entry about it at Antiwar.com and at the Libertarian Institute.
Concerned Veterans for America launched campaign to bring our troops home.
Help make that viral.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
Thank you.
