11/02/15 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
As I promised, all Coburn's on the show today.
In half an hour, I'll play the interview I recorded Friday afternoon with Patrick about the Turkish elections and the war with the Islamic State and all this and that.
But first, up right now, live, is his brother Andrew Coburn, author of Kill Chain, about the drone wars and before that, Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, and a whole lot of other books besides that.
And I mentioned to you earlier, and I like mentioning this all the time, that the first real serious political book I read when I was in 10th grade was Out of Control About Iran-Contra by Andrew's wife, Leslie, which really helped inform my point of view a lot as a young kid.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Hey, great to be with you.
I'm doing fine.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And so, man, I'm really sorry, I'm looking at the Amazon page now, and I could get, I actually just ordered the book The Threat Inside the Soviet Military Machine.
They got them for a penny.
Yeah, good bargain, good deal.
Very good deal.
I mean, believe me, I know it was 20 bucks and worth every penny back in the 1980s, but that was when it came out.
When, what year was it?
83?
82, 82.
Oh, 82 even.
Yeah, it says 83 here, but so yeah, very early on in the Reagan presidency here.
And so anyway, I got an email from a guy that said he had just read this, and he wanted me to interview you about it.
I wish I'd gotten on the ball and ordered the book right then, but so I haven't read it.
But I did just read all the reviews of it on Amazon.com, and I like the one where the guy says, I read this book and rolled on the floor laughing.
It is so very believable.
That's good.
I like that.
He wasn't laughing at you, he was laughing because he believed you.
He thought you were right.
So now, in 1982, I was just a little kid.
I was in first grade.
But I remember, yeah, it was brinksmanship, and it was the Reagan years, and detente was off, and the Cold War was back on.
And more or less the way I learned it was that their empire was as powerful as ours, and that we were going to be a permanent standoff for the foreseeable future.
And I don't know whether you outright predicted the complete demise of their system in this book or not.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did, but you sure seem to be seeing right through all the propaganda, the conventional wisdom, as I was exposed to it at the time, all the way through, huh?
Well, that's right.
I mean, actually, you've got one thing slightly wrong.
We weren't told that their empire was equal to ours.
We were told that it was maybe stronger.
And that unless we spent ourselves into bankruptcy in a hurry, they would be all over us.
And we'd be under a communist system before you could turn around.
In fact, there was a, do you remember a movie called Red Dawn?
Actually, it was pretty good, about the Russians invading the U.S.
Oh, yeah, I loved it when I was a kid.
It was a great film, great film.
But that was the general, that was the official ethos.
I mean, when it started, it really got going in the mid-70s.
I mean, it had been going forever since about 1948, but it really ratcheted up in the mid-70s.
Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, as the Vietnam War ended and there was somewhere, the military-industrial complex had to find some other way to justify its enormous income.
So that's when they started ratcheting up the Soviet threat.
And we were told that the Soviets could actually do a first strike, could actually win a nuclear war with the first strike, unless we spent an incredible amount of money having a mobile ICBM, the MX, which was going to drive up and down the interstates, this ICBM.
There were all sorts of other things.
And I set out in, I thought this is kind of ridiculous, you know, that Russia is, you know, many estimable aspects to it, but it was a poor country, poor compared to the U.S.
And how come we're told on the one hand that communism doesn't work?
You know, it's a hopeless system and it'll never work.
On the other hand, it somehow has produced this incredible military machine where they have, in Ronald Reagan's immortal words, more missiles, bigger missiles, better missiles than we have.
I remember him saying that.
And that their planes work better and their soldiers are taller and stronger and everything else is better unless we, you know, really strive harder and pay much more, give much more money to Lockheed and people like that.
So I set out to look out, you know, to see what was really going on.
And at that time, there was a huge influx of Russian immigrants into New York where I was living at the time.
And I started talking to them.
And they'd all, it's left a part of this deal in the 70s, they'd let a lot of people, a lot of Jewish Russians or Jewish Soviets out around in the 70s.
And a lot of them, they all had to say they were going to Israel.
But the moment they got out, most of them wanted to come to New York very reasonably.
And so I started interviewing them.
Of course, all the males had been in the army, conscription in Russia, a little recognized fact over here at the time.
So I started talking about their military experiences.
And they all said to a man, man, it's a complete shambles.
You know, nothing works.
We were trained, hardly trained at all.
Everyone's drunk all the time.
All the weapons break down all the time.
You know, it was more or less as you might expect.
Yeah.
My father-in-law was in the Red Army in Afghanistan.
No kidding.
No kidding.
What did he say?
Well, they have one pair of boots to share among everybody.
They're freezing their asses off and mostly sitting around getting high and doing nothing.
There you go.
There you go.
I mean, for instance, there was a plane they had called the MiG-25, which was made up of this wonder plane that would, you know, just fly us into the ground.
I mean, it was going to be the cutting edge of the communist menace.
And then a Soviet Red Army, Red Air Force pilot defected.
Victor Belenko, he was called.
And he landed in Japan with this plane.
It turned out to be very inconvenient because it turned out this plane was pretty much of a dog.
And, you know, it ran out of gas almost immediately.
It couldn't maneuver.
It was hopeless in so many ways.
But the thing I liked, he reported, which I had in the book, which is that the hydraulics, you know, along with the gasoline it used, it used alcohol as sort of a pure alcohol, I think in the hydraulics.
And so that meant that every MiG-25 base stank of gasoline, of jet fuel, because they drain off the alcohol to drink.
But to keep the book straight, if you used, you know, X amount of alcohol, you had to have used Y amount of jet fuel.
So to keep the book straight, they just poured the jet fuel into the ditch.
That's what the whole base stank of jet fuel, because they'd been drinking all the...
That was just one example among hundreds I came across.
My favorite one, which got a lot of play here at the time, was the automatic loader on the main gun of the T-72 tank.
And, you know, this was in vogue.
The Soviets are so far ahead of us.
Man, we have to load the shells into our tank guns by hand.
They have an automatic loader that does it automatically, which therefore, you know, sounds like a better...
And what I found out was that they had an unfortunate habit of loading the shell, loading not just the shell, or sometimes the shell, and sometimes the gunner's arm into the gun.
So you had a lot of one-armed T-72 gunners in the Red Army Armored Division.
So I mean, it was...
Anyway, the thing was, what I was...
The whole point of this exercise was not to denigrate the Soviet Union, but to point out how we were being fed lies.
I mean, the military knew all this perfectly well.
This was no...
I mean, I got most of my stuff, you know, from the military here.
Sure.
Yeah, the bomber gap and the missile gap.
And this is the whole history of the whole Cold War is some made-up gap or another, just to cash welfare checks for millionaires.
That's all.
Right.
Exactly right.
It was all a lie.
And it was a lie.
And I also found, by the way, that the Soviet military, meanwhile, was telling lies about us.
So it was two...
It's got the image of these two sort of fat drunks propping each other up.
And the one big mistake, the huge error I made in my thinking...
I did kind of say this couldn't last, you know, how decrepit their system was.
But the big mistake I made in my thinking was, well, once the Soviet Union goes away, if this all...
You know, if the Soviet...
If they collapse, then this, you know, the scam won't work here anymore.
And that's where I was dead wrong.
Saddam will fill in fine.
South American drug dealers, whatever you got.
David Koresh.
Or even no one at all.
Because they, you know, when they ran out of frets for the time being before Al-Qaeda appeared, they were talking about...
Pablo Escobar, yeah.
Hey, wait, hold it right there.
Hold it right there, Andrew.
We'll be right back after this.
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It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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All right, I'm in the middle of talking with Andrew Coburn.
He is the author of the new book, Kill Chain, about the drone wars and before that, Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, which is so great.
You got to read that book, man.
Anyway, we're talking about this one that he wrote way back in the 1980s, in the early 1980s, 1982.
You can get it for a penny right now, guys.
They got 63 of them used, 34 in paperback and in hardback, 34 paperback for a penny right now, guys, at amazon.com.
The threat inside the Soviet military machine and what a complete piece of junk it was.
So at the break, I just made up the last part.
So at the break, we were talking about, I'm sorry, I was stepping all over you as we were going out to break there, Andrew.
You were trying to say something, making fun of the lack of an American enemy for the military industrial complex after the unexpected by them disillusion of the Soviet Union and how they were trying to make do before Osama bin Laden there.
Right, right.
You mentioned people like Pablo Escobar.
Quite right.
I mean, I remember the phrase, the jargon phrase that crept in was asymmetric, non-peer competitor, non-peer competitor.
And that meant, you know, the island of Grenada.
Well, Grenada was earlier.
But that meant some, you know, some jerk on a street corner.
Yeah, or Manuel Noriega for a minute.
And then, of course, Saddam Hussein made the perfect whipping boy for all of what Americans consider peacetime through the 1990s.
But sure as hell wasn't for the people of Iraq then.
Well, that's right.
He was a big threat.
At the same time, he was, thanks to us, the country was starving to death.
You know, now we've got, well, now, I mean, the happy days are here again, though, because we've got we've got the Russian threat back, sort of.
I mean, you know, if you listen to the way that you should really should listen to what the generals are saying, like Dunford, this new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he's very scary.
He wants to send heavy weapons to Ukraine.
You know, they're amping up, they're sending more troops to Europe.
And he I mean, I've been told that, you know, suddenly the military has turned a lot more aggressive, you know, in Washington, demanding greater say in policy, of course, more money.
And just generally throwing a weight around in a way they haven't done hadn't been doing recently.
Yeah, well, in fact, going back, I guess I probably interviewed you about this at the time you had a blog at Harper's Magazine about the sheer joy.
There's no point in hiding it.
There's no secret dark, smoky room where the secret society conspires.
It's just a meeting of lobbyists of arms dealers saying three cheers for the new Cold War.
All right, guys.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, they're so happy.
The champagne corks apart.
Yeah, I did.
We were talking about this before, where someone, a source of mine who was at a meeting of defense contractor lobbyists, and I asked him what the mood was, and he called it, he said, borderline euphoric.
Yeah, there you go.
And so, yeah, Ukraine's looking good.
Now we got, you know, now, I mean, did you see this piece in the story about, you know, Obama sending special forces troops to Syria?
Sure.
And the Times, New York Times, in its article on this, sort of halfway down, it said this could pose problems if they bomb US troops.
Well, the American soldiers are meant to be miles away, I mean, in theory, you know, on the ISIS front, but here it sounds like they'll be with, you know, the moderate CIA-backed rebels, as it's called, you know, that the Russians are bombing.
Yeah, that's working directly with the al-Nusra front that's still sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Exactly so, exactly so.
Yeah, no threat, right?
There's no threat of, nobody ever thought the Russians were going to be bombing Syrian Kurdistan.
So, yeah, it sounds exactly like that must be what the Times was alluding to there.
Well, yeah, this was kind of interesting.
No one told us that.
But there you go.
Yeah, no, it's, I'd say, you know, things are looking good for the military-industrial complex, which is a concept people used to use more often.
As the, you know, this budget deal that was just announced with great fanfare and acclaim in the press, you know, that's a lot more money for them.
Less money for old folks on Social Security and Medicare, but hey, someone's got to pay for all this.
Well, it's always a trillion a year.
Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute and the guys at Mother Jones and the National Priorities Project, all of those, at least, and I'm sure there are more, have added it all up.
And when you include the money for the nukes and everything else, it's easily a trillion dollars a year for the cost of- Yeah, and you really ought to add in the VA, too.
Yeah, right.
Well, yeah, I think that's in there, including the cost of the VA, yeah.
Yeah, a trillion a year is about right.
Winslow Wheeler, I think, of the- Sure, yeah, there's another one.
He did it first, I think, yeah.
Yeah, and of course, it can fluctuate within maybe a couple of ten billion dollars, and then we get to hear him cry out loud about how it's the weakest army we've had since before World War I or whatever.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
Exactly so.
I mean, this outrageous thing that's going on where they're trying to eliminate the one airplane the Air Force has that is actually of some military use, the A-10.
Right.
And they want to do that because it'll save $4 billion a year.
I mean, that's what they spend on their executive jets.
Yeah, and then so they'll have more of an excuse for needing the F-35.
Well, now that we don't have the A-10 anymore, how are we supposed to provide any ground support at all?
You've got to give us more F-35s.
I get the F-35.
We're really off the races now with the new bomber, the B-3, which they were just announcing the contract for, even though it doesn't exist.
It hasn't been built.
There's no prototype.
We don't know what it looks like.
It's all secret.
And yet they're already committed to spending $80 billion, which, you know, multiply that by 10.
You know, and they're going to immediately start shoving out the contracts before the thing is even properly designed, because they want to get so many congressional districts sort of tied into this that it'll be impossible ever to cancel.
Right.
Now, but hang on here, Andrew.
Let me play devil's PR man here for a second.
Um, obviously everybody knows that NATO expansion and America's nefarious role in Syria and all this is, uh, that, that the Russians, I'm not justifying anything they're doing, but they are clearly reacting to the American empire here.
But let's go back to the 1980s for a second, because back then there really was a USSR and it really did control, you know, it was the hugest country in pure landmass, uh, in world history, of course, a massive empire occupying all of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
And, uh, all the criticisms, uh, of your book on Amazon say, yeah, but you're missing the point, Andrew Coburn.
And the point is that even if their tanks were pieces of crap, they had so many of them.
One guy says they considered their, their troops to be as expendable as ammunition, the way American, uh, our side looks in ammunition.
So it wasn't a fair fight when it came to the numbers and, or the way that they would be used.
And so, um, you know, and in fact, I'll add one more thing to that.
I know a guy used to make nukes for the U S government.
And what he told me was back then that they thought that, man, you could have however many thousands of tanks pouring through the folder gap and America would never be able to stop them without nukes.
They, they could conquer all the Western Europe and it was, it was nuclear fusion, keeping them at bay.
That was why he woke up in the morning and went and did his job to protect freedom from him.
He believed it.
And he's no dummy.
He knows how to make nukes.
So, uh, you know, maybe there was more of a threat there.
Uh, then I disagree.
First of all, we know now that they, you know, they had no intention of pouring through the filter gap or anywhere else.
Uh, I didn't talk about, I didn't talk about intentions in the book cause that was always the argument I pointed out.
In fact, that, you know, those tank, huge tank numbers were mostly a myth.
I mean, they had a lot of tanks, but most of them didn't work so good.
And quite a lot of them didn't work at all.
Um, you know, they talked about the incredible number of, uh, Soviet army divisions that, you know, a hundred, I've, you know, it's been, Hey, it's been a long time.
It's been 35 years since I wrote this stuff, but, uh, uh, you know, that they had hundreds of divisions and we had practically no one, you know, a miserable 50, I can't remember what it was, 15 or 20 divisions or something.
Um, but upon having, you know, they had, but they had category one, their divisions were broken down into three categories, one, two, and three.
And it turned out that category three divisions basically were a flag and an outhouse, which, uh, you know, in the event of total war, they'd be mobilized and put into action.
But that was going to take months and months.
A category two divisions weren't much better.
And category one divisions, despite all they were cracked up to be, you know, even we found I mean, I, what I said was, I said, look, they aren't what they're cracked up to be.
First of all, there aren't as many of them as people say.
Secondly, they're all under strength.
And thirdly, they're not really that well-trained.
I mean, and we thought that was confirmed when the wall came down and you could actually go and visit, you know, the cracked unit of all, which was the 20th Guards Army was still, it was the crack division stationed in, uh, stationed in East Germany, outside Berlin.
And they were all busy selling their belt buckles and caps to buy food.
So this was, this was the, the great, you know, knife that was poised at the throat of Western Europe.
Really?
Not really.
So yeah, that people still, that was the old, you know, the fallback argument for the military industrial complex.
Once you show that the planes and tanks weren't so great, they'd say, oh, but there's so many of them.
But, you know, you had to look at really was there so many and then so many of what, you know, um, so I, you know, I, I rested my case then it's still resting.
I see.
All right.
Yep.
I'll buy that.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry.
I kept you over time and I got to let you go so I can start your brother's interview on time here in just one second.
But thank you very much for your time again on the show, Andrew.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
You're welcome.
Take care.
All right.
So that is Andrew Coburn.
He wrote Kill Chain and a whole mess of other great books, uh, including the threat inside the Soviet military machine back in 1982.
We'll be right back.
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