05/19/16 – Mark Perry – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, now it's Mark Perry, again, writing for Politico.
I think the last one at Politico Magazine was inside the Pentagon's fight over Russia.
And the new one is the U.S. Army's war over Russia, along the same lines.
Very important work here.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mark?
Oh, it's good to be here.
I'm doing fine, thanks.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So if you could give us a little bit of a refresher course on last time, General McGregor versus General McMaster.
They have different ideas about how America ought to confront Russia in Eastern Europe.
Well, it's really about the structure of the Army.
And these are two very well-known Army officers.
Doug McGregor is retired, and General McMaster is still serving.
And they're really going at it, having a very public debate over what the Army of the future would look like.
General McGregor thinks it's top-heavy, simply not designed to do a good job, is set for more failures, especially in Europe.
McMaster is kind of a traditionalist, which is odd for him.
But he also wants a lighter mobile Army, but he wants it organized around what's called a brigade combat team.
This sounds pretty esoteric, but it really isn't.
I think that what McMaster is advocating would probably include an increase in the Army budget, which McGregor opposes.
And McMaster is a defender of the Army as it is, and McGregor is not.
So it's very public, and it's very bitter.
All right, now, so we're not talking about future plans for how to deal with the Taliban here.
I mean, this is about plans for future wars with major powers, a.k.a.
Russia.
Yeah, that's right.
I think it's a sign that the counterinsurgency kind of mafia that dominated Army thinking during Iraq and Afghanistan has been eclipsed.
Now the military is pivoting to what they see as new threats from China, and particularly for the Army from Russia.
And this new threat includes increased Russian capabilities that the Army needs to respond to.
The question is, how best do you respond?
How big is the threat?
That's the debate now.
Well, and of course, there's, I guess, nobody.
Well, that's an interesting thing, too.
And I know you can't read these guys' minds, but you do talk with them a lot.
Do they all just pretend to, or do they really convince themselves that the American-backed coup of February 2014 in Ukraine never happened, and that history began when the Russians left their base at Sevastopol and seized Crimea, and so therefore, oh, my God, it's a resurgent Russia?
Or they know they're lying, but they know that nobody's calling them out on it?
Or how does that work?
That's a really great question, actually.
Not many people ask that question.
It's a terrific question.
And I found, to my astonishment, that the currently serving military, in particular in the Army, view Russia as the aggressor.
They're the ones who started the trouble in the Ukraine.
They're the ones who want to destabilize Eastern Europe.
They're the ones who are on the right and the far right wing.
They're the ones who are supporting proto-fascists.
The Russians are the ones who are the expansionists.
And the United States and its allies in Ukraine currently are really the victims.
And Putin is out of control, close to a madman, is the aggressor, is running what the Army calls hybrid war.
The political facts here, I found, really don't matter, especially to the currently serving military.
They see Russia as an aggressor, as a revanchist power, as a throwback to the Cold War, and to a real threat to the stability of Europe.
General McMaster calls what we're doing in expanding NATO, forward deterrence.
And it's simply, I don't think it occurs to him that Russia sees this as being veiled aggression.
I mean, we can go around and around and around on this, and it's a very bitter argument.
I mean, when I say, well, there's two sides to the story, they kind of look at me like I'm out of my mind, that I'm unpatriotic.
But there are real voices, including Doug McGregor, that says this threat that we're talking about is way overdone, way exaggerated, and it's very troubling.
So it really is, the two arguments really are kind of intertwined, that McMaster and his faction, I guess, along with the rest of the population of the Pentagon, would all have it that, you know, the buildup must be done, no cuts must ever be made because of the Russian bear.
And McGregor is, maybe because it confirms his own bias, since he's arguing that really we don't need the size of the army that we have now, he's then, you know, more available to look at the truth about, you know, maybe, or at least a little bit more objective point of view about who's done what when in Eastern Europe leading to the current crisis.
Well, I think that's a pretty good outline of the forces around this debate.
But I will say this, there are people in the army who are absolutely convinced and point to their own data that show that the US needs to upgrade its capabilities, regardless of the threat from Russia, regardless of any supposed threat from China, that we need to adopt new weapons, and they're convinced of it.
But there are inside the Pentagon, very important voices of dissent, primarily in the Air Force and the Navy, who say, listen, let's not go out and pick fights that we don't need to pick.
Let's take a clear-eyed view of what the budget looks like and how much can be spent, and let's understand that there's a growing sentiment in the United States against increases in defense spending.
It really comes down to, I was told this by a retired colonel, it really comes down to this.
The American people are going to have to decide, do they want a new F-35 jet that costs whatever, $88 billion, or do they want a high-speed rail system and repair to the infrastructure?
Because you can't have both.
And I think the military is coming to realize that, given the current political environment, that what the American people will opt for is not a defense of Estonia or Ukraine, but a high-speed rail system and a ratcheting down of the kind of threat talk that we keep hearing out of the Pentagon.
Well, or, yeah, and if not high-speed rail, I think Americans can easily imagine what our society might do with a trillion dollars if the government wasn't dumping it into this black hole the way that they do every year, because it really is that much when you throw in the nukes and the VA and everything.
It's an astonishing amount of money, and, you know, we need to remind your listeners, I think, the defense budget for Russia is $88 billion.
The defense budget for our Pentagon is $588 billion.
If that's not enough, and we're being outgunned and outraged, then somebody in our military needs to be fired for wasting money, because it ought to be enough, and it's been enough before.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's amazing, because, I mean, I'm a young man, but just going back to the history of it, it was said back when that, listen, if Russia was just Imperial Russia and they had conquered Eastern Europe, that would be bad, but these are communists, and they are determined to overthrow the whole wide world, and that ideological cherry on top is why we have to occupy Western Europe to keep the Soviets out, no matter what, forever.
Otherwise, it wouldn't really be worth it.
But at this point, we're dealing with the smallest rump of what used to be the Soviet Union in the Russian state with a GDP the size of the Netherlands or something like that.
They gave up, I don't know how many million square miles of territory and brought their military back by, what, thousands of miles from Eastern Germany, a thousand miles from Eastern Germany back into Russia's borders.
And so, and the entire ideological threat of world revolution and all of this is completely off the table here.
And yet, oh, well, none of the old excuses even need to bother applying, they can just go ahead and pretend that the Ukraine coup never happened, you know, the Assad must go never happened, whatever it is never happened.
Everything that they do, like the Palestinians, is always aggression, no matter what our side did first, you know?
Well, I think I do.
I agree with you.
But I think that, you know, we need to look very skeptically at the language we're hearing.
We had a Navy commander in the Pacific talk about Chinese aggression the other day.
Here's a, I mean, here's a country where we're basically at peace with, we're increasing our economic trade with, we're coming to an accommodation with.
The last thing in the world we need to do is pick a fight with China.
Who in their right mind would do that?
The last thing in the world we need to do now is to pick a fight with Russia.
For the first time in generations, you know, we have, we don't have major power confrontations going on in the world, and we don't need them.
It's, you know, we can, we can, we can be competitive with all of these nations economically, which was Eisenhower's vision, without having to go to war.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's what we wanted.
These are free market countries.
Isn't that what we wanted?
Why expend this enormous amount of money on a defense establishment to meet threats that don't exist?
It, it doesn't really make sense.
Yeah.
Well, from a national interest point of view, but then there's Lockheed's point of view and the vested interest point of view.
And for that matter, depending on which theater we're talking about, the different generals and admirals, it's interesting as you're mentioning there, if I heard you right, the Air Force and the Navy, they're not as interested in containing Russia.
They're much more interested in containing China.
The army, they don't really care that much about China because who's going to invade China on the ground?
But you know what?
They sure do like Africa a lot and they like building up in Eastern Europe.
And like you said, they're all just fighting over money.
Andrew Coburn had that great piece in Harper's about how they threw this big party where all the contractors and all their lobbyists, and I don't know if it was in crystal city or wherever it is, one of these suburbs outside Washington where just all the weapons contractors are, you know, breaking out the champagne for the new cold war.
This is the greatest thing that they thought would never happen again in their lifetimes.
Glory.
Hallelujah.
The Russian threat is back.
Meanwhile, the other 300 million of us are sitting here looking at each other going, you know, thinking they must be insane, except, you know, we can see what's going on.
It's all very sane.
It's their, their own financial interests at the expense of the rest of us.
And in the most dangerous way imaginable, bringing about a cold war with the, you know, the one thing that the Soviet, that the Russians still have left over from the Soviet era is their H-bombs.
Well, I think you've touched on a, on the real issue here and it's going to take a generation of hard work to unravel, but if you spend $588 billion buying hammers, when you open your toolkit, when there's a political crisis, you're going to see a hammer and you're going to use the hammer.
And frankly, we ought to be spending money on different things in the toolkit, like more diplomacy, economic aid, you know, economic alliance systems, development, and things like that.
And we're not doing it.
The real problem that we're facing in the world is the lagging, is lagging economies.
And the real problem we're facing in America is that half of our federal budget, half of the federal budget is spent on the military instead of freeing up money to rebuild our infrastructure and to close the gap between the rich and the poor.
And you can see it in this current election.
There's real disturbance over what happened in Iraq, and there's real, there are people who are really upset about what happened in 2008 on Wall Street.
And we have to, we have to address those problems.
And the way to do that is not to increase the defense budget, but to cut it back, to adopt those weapons that we think we need to adopt, and to cut our military budget, and to expend money where it will do the most good.
All right, now let me ask you this, Mark.
The F-35, which you brought up earlier, is such a ridiculous boondoggle.
It's the same thing with the littoral combat ship and all these things, where they're clearly designed as, actually, the designer of the F-15 and F-16 said, the F-35 is designed simply to transfer money from the Treasury to Lockheed.
That's what it's for, and it's accomplishing that purpose.
All the other fancy stuff it was supposed to do is completely beside the point.
And so, in other words, this is like the nth degree of comic book corruption that you probably couldn't come up with, other than that it's true, to have such a turkey as the new fighter jet.
And because it's such a caricature of a boondoggle, it's easy, then, to imagine, for me, that the Russians, even, might have a little bit tighter constraints on their incentives when it comes to designing a new stealth fighter, and they might actually care that their stealth fighter is worth a damn, because there's really not that much money to go around, and they really do need a new jet.
And maybe, is it possible that my darkest imagination is true, that the Russian government, even though they're spending so much less, that they're actually investing their military development dollars well, and that they're really coming up with explosives-proof tanks and stealth fighter jets that are actually stealth and fast and can fly and deliver munitions where they're supposed to, unlike the F-35?
Or no?
Or what?
Well, I think you've touched on some, well, you have, you've touched on some important issues.
Let me take two you've touched on, one at a time.
If you talk to lobbyists in Washington who provide the technology and the weaponry to the Pentagon, if you, you know, you listen to them for 45 minutes about the threat, and then for the next five minutes, they look at you, and they lean across the table, and they say, listen, Mark, this is about jobs.
If we don't build the F-35 fighter, we're going to have no assembly lines, and these people are going to be out of work.
So, you know, you might not like the F-35 fighter.
You might think that we don't need it, and that's a debate.
But the truth of the matter is, if we don't have it, the effect ripples throughout the whole economy, and people go out of work.
That's the problem with the military-industrial complex, is that we've become dependent on it for providing economic relief to people who desperately need it.
It's a jobs program that is huge, the biggest in the world.
That's a problem that we have.
Russia's problem is, they have an $88 billion defense budget, so you're right, you would think that they would be more careful about how they spend it, because of the limited amount of money.
But of the four assistant secretaries, assistant ministers of defense they have, two have been indicted for corruption.
So it's not clear to me that they're even spending $88 billion wisely, or that they're building really high-technical capabilities, and their system is rife with the kind of corruption that, frankly, we have a different kind of a corruption.
Everything in the Pentagon is audited, audited, audited, audited.
People go to jail for stealing money.
But the real corruption here is that we have a military-industrial complex establishment that is there because it keeps people in work.
Whether we need the weapons or not, we've got to keep people in work.
That's a real problem.
A higher level of graft than the contractor himself taking a kickback on the side.
That kind of thing will get you in trouble.
Yeah.
We have establishment graft.
Of course, this is what Hazlitt always said, or I guess it's Bastiat, right?
The seen versus the unseen.
Every one of those F-35 jobs is a complete waste of money, and all that money could be spent on other projects that are actually productive.
But try telling that to the guy who actually works on the F-35.
All he cares about is that the money's going to him.
But for the rest of us, it might as well be a black hole, or like in 1984, like he says, the rockets are just for shooting off the excess wealth of the people in a space where they can't get at it and use it to improve themselves.
Remember, the F-35 has been in development for 30 years, and there's no question in my mind that it will work.
It will be a great fighter.
I don't care what anybody says.
Really?
Yeah, it will be.
Because as Pentagon officials tell me, listen, Mark, if you throw enough money in engineering at something, it's going to work.
Well, that's great if you have a bottomless pit of financing, but we don't have it.
And it seems to me that, you know, given 10 years, we'll have a great fighter.
But so what?
At what cost?
And who's the enemy?
Who are we going to use it against?
Wouldn't it have been better to spend money on upgrading F-16s or F-15s, or a lower cost?
No.
We've got to keep people employed.
We've got pensions that need to be met.
We've got people banging the table about new and increased threats.
So now we're going to have this great fighter.
But do we really need it?
And how do you balance the cost?
Okay, it's a great plane, but so what if we can't, you know, if there's not a threat out there that it needs to meet?
And now, as far as one more thing about the Russians' military tech at this point, you quote Wesley Clark, this ridiculous man, you quote him in here talking about nearly, and this is, I may have sounded foolish, but I was just paraphrasing him, nearly invulnerable new Russian tanks, explosive proof tanks.
And I guess he tried to backpedal from that a little bit.
But do they even have a new generation of tanks at all?
Is there any evidence that they're better at repelling anti-armor shells than the previous at all?
And this is all just made up.
Well, they do have a new tank called the Armata, and it looks pretty good.
And they've put it in their May Day Parade, and they put it on display, and it looks pretty flashy.
But, you know, armor officers in the army who I talk to kind of roll their eyes and say, you know, it guzzles diesel fuel, its armor isn't that good, and it might look great, but it simply can't compete with our own M1A1 Abrams tank.
Now, the Russians have more tanks by twice the number than we do, but our tanks have never been defeated in battle, ever.
And they're just, they're top of the line.
So this, you know, this is another instance of, you know, we're inflating the threat to ratchet up the budget numbers, and I'll give the Congress this.
Well, they talk a pretty good game in public.
They're not about to increase a defense budget past sequestration levels.
There's going to be, you know, they're going to maintain some fiscal austerity here, because that's what they were elected on, even the Republicans.
So they bang the table and they nod their heads when the generals talk, but it really comes down to voting the money.
They're very careful now, because everyone is watching.
All right.
Well, great work again, Mark.
I sure appreciate it.
Listen, thanks a lot, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Come on.
All right.
So that is Mark Perry.
And, hey, he's got a book called Conceived in Liberty, just like Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty, only entirely different.
And he's the author of The U.S. Army's War Over Russia in Politico magazine.
Hey, sorry, everybody, about the lack of interviews this week.
I've been in Windows Hell over here all week long.
So no, it was no vacation or anything.
I'm just behind, but trying to get some interviews done for you today and tomorrow.
Try to catch up and stay in your good graces.
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