06/16/16 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
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All right, introducing our good friend, Andrew Coburn, and writing for Tom Dispatch this time.
Andrew Coburn is an editor of Harper's Magazine, and his latest book is Kill Chain, The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins.
As I say, this one is at tomdispatch.com, which means we'll be running it tomorrow on antiwar.com.
It's called The Pentagon's Real Strategy.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you, sir?
Hey, Scott.
I'm good.
Good to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
I like the way you start this.
You quote John McCain, Anthony Kordzman, and even our friend Andrew Bacevich, saying there is no strategy for what to do in the Middle East.
If you'll suffer through this for me here for just a moment, Andrew, I have my favorite quote from the Kagan clan.
After the fall of Mosul and the declaration of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014, the Institute for the Study of War put out a thing written, I think, primarily by Fred and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, where right there in the very introduction, where they call for the introduction of 25,000 combat troops to Iraq, they say, quote, it is impossible to articulate a clear path to the desired end state, meaning they have absolutely no idea what to do or even how to come up with a line of BS that they think they could sell to Washington, D.C., for crying out loud.
But you know what?
Let's put 25,000 troops anyway in there and see what happens.
How about that?
But now you, in this article, you are saying, no, that is just wrong.
These people have no idea what they're talking about.
No surprise there about fat neck, Fred, but it is just wrong to say they have no strategy.
They sure do.
What is it, Andrew?
The strategy is to keep the money flowing.
I mean, maybe Kimberly and Fred are the useful idiots in this, but the general, you know, the military-industrial complex, or military-industrial-congressional complex, as we should properly call it, have always had a very clear and extremely successful strategy, with a few blips, very few blips, which is to keep the money pouring through.
And, you know, you can see that, you know, this manifests itself in various ways.
Primarily, I always think, because they don't seem to be very interested in war, in finding effective ways of fighting.
I mean, I cite in the piece, for example, the Air Force is busting a gut trying to get rid of the only really effective weapon they have for, you know, for these wars in the Middle East, which is, you know, the plane called the A-10, which is a close support, you know, ground support plane, which actually sort of works quite well, very well indeed.
So the Air Force wants to get rid of it, because they want to pour all the money into this new long-range bomber they're about to build, which is going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, and this present disaster, which is the F-35.
I mean, you can find examples up and down the military, but, you know, it's clear.
That makes the strategy very clear, you know, get the money, spend the money, and, you know, hey, if you want to go and kill some people, that's kind of an afterthought.
Yeah, you know, it really is something else, just how upside down the whole system is.
I mean, I learned about the term permanent war economy, and sort of a cynical take on the Cold War and how unnecessary it was in its origins, and all that kind of thing, pretty young.
But to get to the degree that you're talking about, where, you know, they don't even really consider it, where the F-35, if we ever got in a real war with, you know, any actually equipped Air Force, our guys would be wiped out flying these turkeys.
But they don't even really care about that.
Yeah, they don't.
Actually, the only thing that might save lives is if the plane, it's very hard to get it in the air.
I heard recently that the, you know, the Marines have a few now that they've declared operational, and only 14% are able to fly, have been able to fly at any one time.
So you know, that shows how bad it is, just to bear out your point there.
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing.
And then, yeah, I mean, you talk about the minesweepers, and really the A-10 is the best example.
I mean, really, Andrew, you know what it is?
You're asking the audience, or you know, their innocent mom who never considered how corrupt it could all be, to imagine a system of corruption that's beyond their imagination and in their own country.
I mean, you're basically saying that the guys, the generals that run the Air Force, they don't care if US Army infantry and Marines on the ground get shot to death.
They would rather throw the A-10 on the scrap pile, replace it with a plane that cannot do the same work whatsoever for their own financial interests.
I mean, it sounds like you're talking about the level of cynicism and corruption that one would expect from some third world kleptocratic hellhole, not a limited constitutional republic where they do all this fighting to keep us free.
That's right.
I mean, it's pretty, you know, the implications are pretty staggering.
I mean, we've got this now, this huge corrupt system, which, you know, gets worse.
And think about it, this, you know, you see various figures for the defense budget, but if you throw everything in, I mean, Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information did this calculation.
We basically spend a trillion dollars a year on the military establishment one way or another, including, you know, the nuclear weapons, which belongs to the Department of Energy and everything else, veterans benefits.
It's a trillion dollars a year, and we really don't get much defense out of it.
You know, you think at least if you have a huge defense establishment, it'd be nice to get some defense out of it, but we don't, you know, they don't really do a very good job at that because they don't really care.
Well, it's a monopoly, lousy service, high prices.
That's how they go.
Exactly.
It's exactly so.
Exactly so.
Well, now, let me ask you this.
You know, the Russians have what the economy, an economy the size of Manhattan Island, not even New York State, right?
They cut their budget and in an apparent signal that they don't want to play this brinksmanship game with us right now because they know they can't compete with us, you know, on the spending levels and that kind of thing.
The old days are long gone, and as you have shown us, even the old days were never what they were cracked up to be in terms of Soviet military capacity.
But I got a thing in my imagination where I think, wait a minute, maybe there are people in charge of the Russian military who have an incentive structure that's quite different than ours that possibly, I mean, they got a monopoly too.
Maybe I'm an idiot here, Andrew, but maybe they have an incentive structure that could emphasize performance on the question of something like their new generation fighter jet.
We are not going to tolerate F-35 level nonsense here.
We actually want a stealthy jet that's fast and can climb and can turn and can shoot and fly in the rain and do all the things the F-35 cannot do.
And I just wonder, is there any, like, real good head-to-head estimate of their newest fighter jets versus ours and whether they actually mean business in the usual sense of that term, as opposed to business the way you're writing about it here?
Well, I wouldn't get too overexcited about that.
You know, my feeling is they would be building an F-35 if they could afford it.
You know, the Russian, I don't think the left, you know, in the old days of the Soviet Union, I mean, the Russian defense, Soviet defense complex was kind of a mirror image of ours in a more sort of even more tattered state.
You know, and then that basically fell apart.
So they basically rebuilt the Russian military, and it's better than it was, there's no doubt about that.
But, you know, their newest fighters, they're not that great.
They really, you know, it's, I'd see no sign of them, you know, if they really, if they were building, I don't want to sound like a cracked record here about the A-10, but if they were building an A-10, if they had built an A-10, I'd think, oh, they're serious.
But, you know, that they, I don't see them heading down a radically different path from ours.
You know, it's just, as you said, they've got an economy the size of Manhattan.
So there's not that much they can do compared with the old days.
Yeah.
Well, and although I wonder, you know, pound for pound, dollar for dollar, their newest jets have got to compare, you know, better than the F-35 on that, although that may be meaningless at the end of the day.
It seems to me.
Let me just say, one advantage they have is they don't have that much money.
Right.
Yeah.
That's kind of what I was trying to get at here was like, this is all we got and we really need a jet that works.
And so instead of just padding a bunch of corporate executives, bank accounts, maybe we could focus on trying to develop an airplane.
I think we talked before about that video interview of the designer of the F-16 and saying that he and his buddies at Lockheed secretly designed the F-16 without letting the bosses know because they wanted to develop a jet that would actually be worth a damn.
And the bosses wanted to blow up, waste a bunch of money on the F-15, which was the F-35 of its day.
Right.
That's that's I mean, not nearly as bad as the F-35, but the that's basically what happened and there was a thing.
There was a group called, in its day, the Fighter Mafia, who basically more or less in secret sort of maneuvered through the F-16, which was quite an effective plane.
But, you know, that ran.
But that that's an exception.
The other one was the A-10, as a matter of interest.
But, you know, that's the exception only only rarely does groups like that come along.
And that's getting harder and harder and more and more rare all the time.
You know, I don't know if you saw this headline a couple of weeks ago where one of these generals told Congress that, yeah, well, you know, you guys are right.
The F-35 is never going to be able to provide close ground support.
So now what we want to do is design an entirely new plane to replace the A-10.
But damn it, we're throwing those A-10s in the garbage.
We swear to God.
Yeah.
Although don't get too much into that, because what they really want to do is head off someone making them do that.
They say that.
But there's been no sign of actually being serious about it.
All right.
Now, I guess, can you tell us real quick about just the scam of the bow wave here and how they they build in the modernization programs and all that?
Sure.
I mean, it usually happens.
I say in this article, usually what happens is when you have a war, you know, something like the so-called war on terror before that, you know, going back to Vietnam, the budget climbs to huge, you know, huge heights because, hey, we're fighting a war.
Then the war comes to an end and this tapers off and there's a crisis, a budget crisis for the military.
So they while they accept very grudgingly, very, very small cuts and they get smaller all the time, every time this happens, they meanwhile lay down a bunch of programs, you know, research and development programs, which don't look that expensive at the moment, but lock in huge budget bills later down the road.
That's what's happening now.
They call it the bow wave and, you know, we're ensuring that in about 10 years time or maybe even sooner, you know, suddenly the defense against the military is going to turn around and say, oh, my God, we're underfunded.
We need we're in the middle of building this, that and the other thing, and we're going to have to cancel them unless you, the Congress, the taxpayer, give us a pot more money.
So it's a very common, you can really see it's like a sort of wave, but it's the bow wave.
That's what they call it.
Yeah.
Well, it was a 50, 50 shot of whether I was going to pronounce that right.
I should have gone with the voting term there.
All right.
I'll let you go.
Thanks so much for your time, Andrew.
Really appreciate it as always.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
So that is the great Andrew Coburn.
He's the author of a hell of a lot of very important books about American foreign policy, et cetera.
Going back quite a few years, he is Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
And of course he's the brother of Patrick Coburn, our good friend, the war reporter.
His latest book is Kill Chain, the Rise of the High Tech Assassins.
And you can find this article, The Pentagon's Real Strategy, Keep the Money Flowing, at TomDispatch.com and we'll run it tomorrow at AntiWar.com.
Scott Horton Show, 4,000 interview archives there at ScottHorton.org, sign up for the podcast feed there, iTunes, Stitcher and all of that.
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