02/10/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
All right, now, on to our first guest on the show today.
It's our friend, Phil Giraldi.
Hey, Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Good to have you back on the show and good to reach you at UNZ.com, as always, here.
Trillions for defense.
America's soldiers have become too expensive to use.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean that, you know, ever since the incident of 9-11, Congress has been showering all kinds of pay and benefits on American soldiers.
They've become the hero of the moment.
And the fact is that if you look at it objectively, currently, they get paid way too much and their benefits are crazy, and these are expenses that are inevitably going to escalate over the next 20 years as we pay down on the expenses of these wars.
So I'm basically saying that, you know, Americans should recognize that we have too many soldiers and they're paid too much.
Yeah.
All right, well, now, so I like to think of myself as young, but I'm really not.
My dad was pointing out how gray my beard is getting lately.
So I sometimes, at times like that, have cause to remember that a lot of people listening are quite a bit younger than me, even, and I surely don't remember Vietnam, although I grew up surrounded by people who remembered it very well.
So I kind of have a flavor for that era a little bit, not in a hippie way, but certainly in a resentment of what the government had done during that time kind of a way.
But there are certainly people listening right now who don't have the slightest connection.
I mean, you might as well be talking about the days of Theodore Roosevelt or something if you're talking about 1968.
So can you take us back, Phil, and tell us a little bit about how it was and what exactly has changed in the way the Army operates and deals with things like, for example, pay, but more than that, when it comes to the enlisted men in the Army?
Yeah, well, of course, I mean, the Vietnam Army was largely an army of draftees.
So it was completely different than what we have now.
Essentially, you know, we had at one point almost 600,000 soldiers in Vietnam alone.
And you can only do that if soldiers are cheap.
And when I joined the Army, I was drafted into the Army actually in 1968 out of college as a private, I was making $70 a month is my recollection.
And by the time I left as a sergeant three years later, I was making a little over $300.
So we weren't paid very much.
And the idea was that, of course, most of us were temporary.
And that once we got out, we went back to our normal lives.
Now today's Army is completely different.
It's a professional Army, and it's only driven by money and benefits.
You know, you can argue that at least some of the soldiers are driven by patriotism and desire to do this and desire to do that.
But the real reason is a lot of soldiers are there because there are not a lot of good jobs in many parts of the United States.
And you go into the military, and it's very easy to get a job where you're in the military where you're not in any danger, and you're never going to be in any danger.
And after 20 years, you come out, say you go in when you're 18 out of high school, you're 38 years old, you're going to get a really nice pension for the rest of your life, full medical benefits, very cheap for the rest of your life, and a lot of other things.
And you start your second career.
And a lot of them will work for a defense contractor or something.
So it's a whole different world now.
And the world is this is a professional Army and the American people who probably grew up on John Wayne movies and this kind of thing have to kind of readjust their thinking as to what we've got here.
It's a different animal.
It's a different thing.
And it may not be exactly what we want.
Now tell me more about these pensions and if you could compare to how that would work in the private market, if somebody worked for whatever.
Well, yeah, it's it's in pensions are probably the and health care are probably the biggest issues.
The if you go into the Army, or I mean, I'm saying Army, but I mean, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, if you go in the military, after 20 years, you get basically a pension that is half of what your final earnings on active duty are.
So if you're making, say, $70,000, you're going to get $35,000 pension from that moment on.
You might be 38 years old, but you're going to be getting it from that moment on for the rest of your life, plus annual increases.
You're also going to have health care that basically is comprehensive.
It's everything.
And you're going to have that I think the current figure I saw for the cost of the guy who's covered is $400 a year.
So you have full health care benefits for $400 a year for the rest of your life.
So you know, these these don't even compare to the private sector, the private sector, you know, you might have a 401k 400, you're saying that's the premium they have to pay to be in on that.
Yeah, that's exactly what the beneficiary has to pay.
So the government is picking up the tab for the rest of it, which is huge.
We're talking about down the road, you know, trillion dollars, multiple trillion dollar bills by the time all of the people that have gone through the system since 9-11 are out at the other end.
And so it's, the expense is huge.
And you have to say, well, okay, what justifies this?
Well, soldiers can get killed.
But the fact is, most of the military, the jobs are not combat jobs.
These guys never get into combat, they talk in the military, in terms of tooth to tail ratios.
A tooth to tail ratio means the guys who are in combat jobs are supported by the tail, which is the people who are not combat jobs.
It basically is one to three, except it's not even it's not even that good, because a lot of combat units have their own support structures that are countered into the combat.
So what I'm saying is, you know, very few people in the military actually fight or are in danger.
And yet the whole military gets this huge benefit package, whereby people can retire at age 37, 38, with lots of benefits, lots of money that goes on forever.
That's amazing.
And now when you say a $70,000 salary, what rank is that?
That would be kind of a senior level sergeant, which is where you would be at if you were in for 20 years.
And then so what does the general make, or what is it?
These recent generals that have just retired that have been some scandals about, were making in excess of $200,000 as a pension.
Wow.
In excess of $200,000.
So they were making almost half a million a year while they were on the job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And also bear in mind that when you're in the military, you get your housing paid for, you get food allowance, you get a whole lot of other things that people in the private sector don't get.
So calculate that in too, that doesn't even figure into the numbers.
Yeah.
Well, this is what David Stockman means about the great deformation, where so much of the economy is so distorted.
I mean, think of everyone in the army, all their wives, all the towns grown up around the army, if we just had a simple, peaceful, commercial, constitutional republic type foreign policy.
Think of what a massive change it would be.
It would be for the better.
I mean, all this money mostly is just being wasted, of course, but you know, like the town of Killeen that is supported by Fort Hood would just, it would be nothing but a place to stop and get a taco on the way to Waco on the way to Dallas if it wasn't for Fort Hood.
You know what I mean?
So that's just one tiny little example.
When you talk about all these benefits and all this stuff, it's just, it's almost unimaginable what the economy would look like, what America would look like without this massive, basically welfare program, basic price support program for those who are not economically viable in our current system.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And basically this article, I look mostly at the soldiers themselves, but I mean, the fact is that, you know, you could expand this discussion sideways up and down, you know, we have $5 billion aircraft carriers under construction all the time that are easily attackable by ground-based missiles that don't cost anything.
Yeah.
What a great place to pick this conversation up on the other side.
Do nothing floating fortress straight out of 1984.
We'll be right back with Phil Trawley in just a second.
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All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
Scott Horton show on the phone with Phil Giraldi.
Hey, Phil.
I just realized I didn't really introduce you very well.
Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism officer and he also writes for the American conservative magazine and unz.com, U N Z unz.com.
And so yeah, where we were leaving off, you were talking about the, all the new super carriers being built.
You could have said submarines too.
And that's a reminds me of straight out of 1984, which I hope everybody's really read and not just own a copy of.
The part where O'Brien, the torturer gives him Goldstein's book on how it really works and all that.
And he says, yeah, the purpose for the floating fortress and all the rocket ships is just to take all your money, all your excess productivity and sink it into the ocean or blast it off into space where you can't get ahold of it.
That you might use that money bettering yourself somehow.
And that's not in the interest of the party.
And so that's why that was the purpose of the floating fortress was to keep people impoverished and desperate and in a state of emergency where they're more easy to manipulate and a kind of shades of 2015 right now, if you ask me.
But then of course there's the giant checks for those who manufacture the floating fortresses.
So that's something too.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, there's a lot of truth to that.
The the fact is this, this is this machine, this defense machine, I hate to call it defense.
I mean, it's not even defense anymore, is it?
I mean, it's, it's it's something else.
It's the empire.
It's like a, yeah, but it's kind of a welfare state for the, uh, for the imperial procurators.
Uh, the thing is these, uh, these aircraft carriers, uh, the Navy has conducted test after test demonstrating that they're highly vulnerable to cheap missiles, which, uh, which everybody in the world has.
Uh, these things are basically a Leviathan that, uh, that are quite sinkable and yet we keep producing them.
I can understand having a couple of them on hand if you want to get, you know, planes to some crisis point in the world or something like that and have a base for them to fly off of.
But do we need 15 of them?
And, and, uh, so, but that's one example.
Certainly the other one is of course the, the air force with the F 35, which is a, is going to cost a trillion dollars by the time it's all over.
And the thing apparently doesn't work.
Right.
And you know, they're saying in the chat room too, isn't it funny, all this money spent on all these pensions and all this healthcare for the soldiers, uh, breaking the bank for the entire country, uh, and they're still treated like crap.
They kill themselves at a rate of 22 a day.
And if they need an appointment, they oftentimes can't get one.
And then the VA, a lie about who even asked for an appointment or whether they got one or not, rather than find a way to get them an appointment with somebody, here's a voucher, go get an appointment with somebody since we can't help you.
No, they just bury them and pretend they never happened kind of thing.
And, uh, and as, as one guy in the chat room was saying, well, once you're a veteran, you're no longer of any use to them anyway.
So they already, you know, it's like driving a new car off the lot.
It lost half its value right there.
And uh, and then probably if they really did mean well, it's kind of a socialist, uh, government bureaucracy type of enterprise, which by definition kind of can't succeed just because of the economics of the thing, uh, where they try to ration services out and they always fail because they have to fail.
Right.
Right.
It's designed to fail.
And they've created a, you know, government monster that, that doesn't work very well.
And uh, and it doesn't really answer the questions.
The, uh, the problem is a lot of the, uh, the, one of the studies I cited in my article is from a Harvard Kennedy school says there are, as of 2013, there were 860,000 veterans of the Afghan and Iraq conflict who either were wounded or they were injured or they suffered from the burn pits, from the PTSD.
These are people that are going to need either intensively or intermittently medical care for the rest of their lives at a cost of $2 million per person if this care is given.
And you know, it's like, uh, who was thinking when they, when they did all these things, when they got involved in these wars and who is, is there anyone thinking in Washington right now when they're talking about going to war over Ukraine?
Uh, you know, it's just like, there's a disconnect and I'm convinced with the, the big problem is that the people who make these decisions are totally immune from the consequences of their decisions.
They don't have kids in the military service.
They, they, they don't suffer when Obamacare comes in.
They don't ever have any pain from the bad decisions that they make.
So they just go right on and keep making the same decisions.
Yeah.
It's like, who's the biggest man in the think tank hallway who can come up with the toughest thing to say about what someone else should do?
Well, the biggest man is clearly Robert Cady.
Yeah.
Him and his brother, fat neck, Fred.
Two toughest guys in town.
Fred is bigger.
Yeah.
Fred might be bigger.
Boy.
And, uh, to, uh, to plagiarize George Carlin.
Did you see his wife?
Where'd he find her?
At a Halloween party or something?
Over there for the Institute of study of the study of war and, and how we might get into it.
And by the way, I want to ask you about this.
I got another Ukraine interview.
We could certainly talk about that, but I got one of those coming up, but I want to ask you about Iraq and Syria as long as we're talking about wasting money, doing everything wrong and horrible around here.
I have a quote here from the Kagan's from the Institute for the study of war that they put out last summer about what's got to be done in, uh, in, uh, Iraq and Syria now.
And of course there's staking out the Hawkers, the Hawkers position.
You remember this is the one where they called for 25,000 troops there.
We may have even talked about at the time that, uh, in the summary of their report, right at the beginning of their report, the Kagan's themselves say it is impossible to articulate a clear path to the desired end state.
In other words, we had no reason to believe that what we are proposing here will quote unquote work for getting what it is we think we might want, but do it anyway.
25,000 troops, no less.
I'd be afraid to know what they mean by end state.
Yeah, exactly.
The desired end state.
I don't think I want to know.
Well, maybe I do.
Incredible.
Well, so now, uh, so what do you think of this?
Uh, how much, obviously somebody, no matter how much, uh, you know, concrete for brains these people have up there, they've seen the folly of sending in the third infantry division, the way Bush Jr.built up in Kuwait and did this massive invasion.
Um, but then again, there are leaks all the time where they say it's going to take American soldiers to take Mosul.
Do you think that's right?
Do you think they're going to go that far this year or at all or what?
Well, I, my, my feelings are that, um, essentially that Obama is not willing to go down that road.
I think he, he, he constantly keeps saying it's an option, but I, I think the fact that he said it's an option means he's, he's not interested in doing that.
So I give him full points for that.
Uh, but then nevertheless, there's going to be heavy pressure coming from Congress where McCain is, you know, now head of the Senate armed services committee and so on and so forth.
This is going to be incessant.
There's going to be incessant pressure for us boots on the ground in, in the middle East.
And I think you're going to see more pressure for a U S presence of some kind as, uh, you know, trainers, new, uh, people providing legal weapons to the Ukrainians.
And I think these, uh, both of these developments are extremely dangerous.
Uh, the Russian development is particularly dangerous and, uh, I don't really understand how these people can go to sleep at night when they're pushing this kind of stuff, which is only going to be catastrophic for the American people and catastrophic for everybody else that we come in contact with.
Yeah.
Uh, on piles and piles of money, you think, uh, army pensions for enlisted men are good.
What do you think these guys make when they got their, uh, their, uh, you know, uh, center for a new American security salary coming in?
In fact, I bet, you know, the answer to that.
Yeah, they, they have salaries usually in the two to $300,000 range.
Uh, and of course then they have perks on top of that in terms of, uh, traveling first class and staying at expensive hotels and hobnobbing with, uh, with the Kagan's and things like that.
Well, and you know, actually that does raise the question though, I guess a lot of them are at least a part-time professors or something.
They got to get their pensions from somewhere.
Do the think tanks give them pensions like AEI and the council on foreign relations?
Sure.
They have 401ks that they contribute to and they're very generous.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
They did.
They always, they're always thinking of their bottom line.
No question about it.
Yeah.
You know, I really am lucky that, uh, I had a high school history teacher that explained that.
Yeah.
Ever since world war two, it's a wartime economy.
Basically.
They never did ramp that down and change it back into just normal times and never even mind, you know, her socialist ideal or whatever, but just, you gotta understand that for the, the way the system is now, they gotta keep making bombs and dropping them on people under some excuse or another, and be prepared to see that the rest of your life.
And that's where we are right now.
They gotta do something, huh?
Yeah, there's some truth to that.
And it's, and it's gotten worse since obviously your, your, your time in high school, the, uh, because the fact is that the defense contractors have been clever enough to, uh, to put their plants, you know, all over the place.
Uh, they, they're in every constituency in the United States.
So it's always, it always comes down to an issue, an alleged issue for congressmen to say, Oh, well, we have jobs in our district.
Yeah.
Uh, sure does look now.
Like it's going to keep rolling on like this until the nukes go off or the dollar breaks, or I guess if the first happens, the second will too, but it may be a vice versa, but otherwise, I don't know, but keep up the good fight and keep writing your great stuff, Phil.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's a great Phil.
You're all he's at owns.com in the American conservative magazine.
We'll be right back.
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