08/15/12 – Dina Rasor – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is my website.
And our first guest on the show today is Dina Razor.
She is an investigator, a journalist, and an author.
She founded POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, back in 1981.
She's the author of, I guess, more than one book, but the latest is Betraying Our Troops, the Destructive Results of Privatizing War.
And now she's writing for Truthout.
And I'm sorry, I know, Dina, you have some kind of official title at Truthout that I'm sorry I don't have in front of me here, but it's...
That's all right.
But it's here at Truthout, the latest piece is, Congress as Enabler, the Pentagon Can't Kill the M1 Tank, Only an IED Can.
So welcome back.
And I'm sorry, tell us again what you are over there at Truthout.
I write a column, besides being a reporter, called Solutions Making Government Work.
Kind of a tilting at windmills column, but, you know, we're trying.
We're trying.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, the M1 Abrams tank, I'm sorry, I should have done my homework and double-checked on all this, but I do remember something about Donald Rumsfeld back in the Ford years, pushing this thing through for political reasons, it beat out a better tank.
I read that in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
Right.
Do you know about that?
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
One of my first investigations when I was...
This is why it's so disgusting to say someone tried to kill his tank off.
It was when I was 24 years old, and I'm 56 now.
But anyway, what happened is they had two different kind of engines on the tank, and this Chrysler Corporation had this weird sort of gas turbine engine they tried to develop for the commercial market in cars, and it failed.
Usually tanks are diesel engines.
And General Motors had a diesel engine, and the Army had picked the diesel engine because they didn't want to mess around with this complicated gas turbine engine which had numbers, one proven engine.
Rumsfeld turned it over because that was the time Chrysler was getting a federal bailout, and they wanted the tank to go to Chrysler.
And so we got stuck with a tank that had the engine, just the engine alone was two-thirds of its maintenance.
And so that was the first sort of boondoggle with this tank, and the engine failed.
There weren't the usual whistleblowers inside the Army who tried to stop it.
Their careers were destroyed.
Right.
That's how it works.
Right.
Yeah, you know, Will Grigg and I were joking one time about that movie.
I forget which one it is now, but it's one of those Tom Clancy movies with Harrison Ford as the Boy Scout CIA guy.
And one of these, the movie ends with him walking up the hill with a pile of papers in his hands, and then the credits roll, and that just means, well, there's going to be accountability now.
I'm telling Congress on you, and you don't even need to see that part.
You know it's going to be all taken care of now.
And just how laughable that is now.
Back in the 80s when you were going through this with the Abrams, at least people still believed that that kind of thing could be possible.
But now, ha, what a joke.
Go tell Congress.
What are they going to do?
Nothing.
Yeah, well, it's the idea that we've been following them since that time, and it is very bad against IEDs because it has a flat bottom, and all the armor is put in the front.
The reason the armor is put in the front is it was supposed to go across Europe and fight Soviet tanks.
Two tanks pull up, boom, boom, and hit the front.
And so they took all the armor out of the back and underneath.
And that is exactly, when they were rolling them through the streets in Baghdad, they'd hit these IEDs.
And something that some guy can go down and put together probably for $20 could take out, by the time the M1 got to Afghanistan and Iraq, $8 million apiece.
And so very quickly they learned how to disable the M1.
So they stopped rolling the M1s around the streets and then just sort of put them there like mini forts.
Very expensive mini forts to show force.
Right, yeah, we would interview reporters back then.
I can't remember who it was.
It may have even been Michael Hastings way back then telling us about guys who would go and park their tank when they were supposed to be out on patrol all day.
They would just park their tank in a field somewhere with all their guns facing out and just pretend to go patrol because we're not just going to go play the IED lottery in this thing for no reason.
Well, it was almost as if these tanks were not offering much more than even the Humvees.
Because they weren't built for that.
They weren't built to do that.
But that's supposed to make us macho, show us force.
And pretty soon the insurgents figured this out.
This is like Vietnam where they figured out our complicated weapons.
And the IEDs just kind of crippled the whole effort on that.
So the Army actually was trying to do the right thing.
And that was they said, well, they own the plant.
The government owns the plant in which these tanks are made.
And General Dynamics made the plant.
They bought the Chrysler tank division.
And they said, look, we want to stop the plant for two years.
Redo this entire tank and stop building them.
We don't need any more.
It's shocking.
We have like 2,800 of them scattered around in various places around the world.
But we have 3,000 of them sitting in the desert unused.
And so they wanted to just suspend it for a couple of years while they retooled it and make the tank or, you know, whatever thing they were going to make to fit with this new kind of warfare.
And the Congress, of course, and the lobbyists and everybody else would not allow them to do it because of, you know, the jobs and everything else.
But so Congress keeps putting in, you know, here's the Army actually trying to do the right thing.
And here's the Congress keeps putting in money to keep funding these tanks to keep the plant open.
The plant's not going to go away.
I mean, it's a government-owned plant.
But, you know, they needed to suspend making these things.
So, you know, unfortunately, every time that happens, they're going to pop out another one of these Cold War tanks, which will probably, you know, take one out of service, put the new one in, and take the perfectly good one out of service and put it in the desert sitting there.
And that $8 million piece, it adds up.
The soldiers are better off, right, with the tanks just sitting in the desert, in an American desert doing nothing than having to drive them around, you know.
Yeah, well, in my column I actually embedded a video that was taken by the insurgency.
It has all the, you know, Arab music in the background and the guys chanting, God is great, all is great, you know, in the background.
And here comes an M1 and it hits an IED.
Now, M1 is 70 tons, okay?
And here comes the M1 and IED hits it.
And it launches it.
It launches it.
And it blows the turret half off and, you know, probably killed the guys in it.
And I'm just sitting there going, it's amazing that, you know, a bunch of guys can go around and pick, you know, most IEDs, a lot of IEDs are made out of old artillery shells that they found left over, you know.
And there they are launching this $8 million tank, probably killing a soldier.
It was not built for this kind of thing.
And so when the Army, even, you know, as much as we, you know, complain about the Pentagon and the Army and their decisions and everything, here they were actually trying to do the right thing.
And the Congress wouldn't let them.
And it's very, very interesting because it's kind of the same kind of thing.
We have, you know, made Rumsfeld take, you know, born this tank out of pork for Chrysler with the wrong kind of engine.
And here we are, you know, I think years, 30, 35 years later, we're trying to fix the thing again so that it's not, you know, we don't keep building these things.
And now the Congress is interfering with it.
Right.
And, of course, these are the congressmen who always demagogue and pretend that their policy is all about how much they love the individual soldiers over there.
Meanwhile, if it's in their political interest, they'll send those soldiers over there to ride around in a death trap.
No worse than that.
These are the same guys who say they don't want to run up the debt.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's Deena Razor.
She's whooping the Pentagon's ass like always here.
Truthout.org.
We'll be right back.
Well, and the Congress is too, yeah.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Keep all my interview archives there.
Now more than 2,500 interviews.
Going back to 2003.
We're talking with Deena Razor.
She founded the Project on Government Oversight back in the early 80s.
She's now writing for Truthout.org.
And this one is called Congress as Enabler.
The Pentagon can't kill the M1 tank.
Only an IED can.
About this time, it was the Army said, please stop making these death trap tanks, and Congress said, no way, and just keeps appropriating more and more money.
In this case, as you write here, it was even the Desert Ox, Ray Odierno, who said these are 280 tanks that we simply do not need.
And certainly our privates and specialists and whoever else manned those things would be better off if we just dumped them in the Gulf of Mexico to make an artificial coral reef out of them, right?
Yes, and the other part about it is that this tank, because it has this gas turbine engine, it sucks gas like you wouldn't believe, and so it can't go very far without gas.
So it has to have a series of nanny trucks following it, getting it parked and everything.
It's so badly made maintenance-wise, high maintenance.
And so you have to have guys driving fuel tanks on the battlefield not very far away from it.
And I always feel like saying that these guys that want to keep building these tanks, okay, let's have your son go drive the fuel tank in the battlefield.
In fact, I actually embedded a video in my column there showing a soldier who went through and videoed all the fuel tanks, deliveries, trucks, everything that had been blown up by IEDs.
So it's madness.
It's madness, and they try to say it's a job, but it's probably the most inefficient way to make jobs.
You might as well have somebody dig a hole and fill it up because that's a lot less dangerous for everybody.
Right.
Those are exactly the economics that the Republicans and the Democrats all agree on, is military Keynesianism.
Yeah, so it's madness, and I just have been working on trying to get this tank killed, remodeled, reorganized, and when the Army finally said, well, we're going to stop for two years and try to make something that's for the kind of warfare we do now, somebody thought, oh, thank God.
And, you know, the Army finally tries to do the right thing, and they can't.
You know, they can't.
And it's because of Congress.
So the Congress enables this thing to keep going, sometimes even more than the military.
It's the politicization and the very frustrating thing is I have had many debates with generals and the public and stuff, and they always say, we want the best for our boys.
But they really don't, because they acquiesce and cave into this pressure.
I am surprised that this time they're actually saying, no, we don't want to do this, and they're saying it publicly over and over again, and I think it's because they know they are, whether they admit it or not, the sequestration has them spooked.
They really can't believe they're going to do it, and Panetta got up and said, oh, no, we're not going to let this happen, we're not going to really cut, which really disappointed me, because he was a cutter when he was in OMB.
And Obama said, if you don't cut the Pentagon as much as you cut everything else in the sequestration, I won't veto it.
And I was really surprised.
I didn't think that, I thought that he'd cave too, but this time he did not.
So it's a good sign.
Yeah, but we're talking only about little, you know, slight reductions in the rate of growth of spending and that kind of thing, right?
Right.
Nothing serious.
Well, what it is is they act like this is the end of the free world as we know it.
Yeah.
Our military is going to go back to the size of the budget of 2007 when George Bush was in charge.
And when they had that budget, they didn't talk about hollow OMB and, you know, we're starving defense and stuff, but the fact that Obama went back to that rate has made it so they act like, you know, well, it's this man who's never served and communist, you know, he wants to try to ruin the military.
And so it's just crazy.
I mean, it's...
Well, it is crazy.
We're talking about a tank that was designed to keep the Soviets from pouring through the folder gap into West Germany, right?
Right.
And we have a defense budget that's the same as it was when Ronald Reagan was running his brinksmanship and, you know, restarting up the Cold War in the 1980s facing down the Soviet Union, which did actually exist and controlled a third of the world, and we're doing all this to fight a terror war against a band of pirates on the run?
Maybe we're the evil empire now, and that's the explanation we're looking for.
Yeah, well, that's really true.
It has nothing to do with what its mission is.
It's become an entity...
It's like when the South, they brought in Kudzu from Japan to stabilize the hills, and then it became a life force of its own and, you know, killed everything and taken over the South.
But the Pentagon has just been like that.
And believe it or not, the defense budget has doubled since 9-11.
Doubled.
Amazing.
We are at the same constant dollar footing of the highest amount of defense spending ever.
Well, and then the thing is, we don't make anything except weapons anymore, so then people get all confused and think, instead of realizing that the reason why not is because we blew all our capital making weapons, they just look at it like, man, we've got to at least keep making weapons because if we're not cranking out F-16s and we're all completely flat-busted now, it's the only industry we have, people think.
Yeah, well, the other part of that is when the Pentagon has their overrun, they get in trouble for it.
They desperately then try to sell the weapon overseas so they can justify keep building the weapons.
And so, you know, we are exporting our mistakes overseas, you know, our weapons that are just crazy.
I mean, it was made to stop the Soviet tanks.
The Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore.
And even at that time, if the Soviets were going to have a tank line all over Europe, we would have used nuclear weapons on them.
That was the tactical nuclear weapon, which would have rendered all of us useless.
So it's like a fairytale, like a bad, grim fairytale that never stops.
And everybody buys into it, and you cannot go after the Pentagon as Pentagon bureaucrats, which are usually generals, like you go after HHS bureaucrats, because they're military guys, and they use that.
And they, you know, they come in, and, you know, it's just not cool to be beating up a general.
You know, they're happy that HHS, you know, top guy comes in, he's made some mistakes, that members of Congress will beat him around the head, so he stands growing.
But when the generals come, you know, I've tried to brief them, you know, get him, get him, get him, you know.
It's not cool to beat up on a general.
So we have, you know, the troops, I'm glad we're honoring the troops, because I saw in Vietnam what happened when they came home and all that.
And, you know, and I don't get into the foreign policy thing, I have my own opinions on that.
But the bottom line is, is that do not let your soft spot for the troops roll into the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the generals.
The generals are just bureaucrats with funny-looking uniforms.
Yeah, well, and it'll be at the expense of the troops if we just let them have their way, as we've seen.
Absolutely, because they go for the gee whiz.
And, you know, here's another example.
They have spent billions and billions and billions trying to detect IEDs, billions.
And so they finally found one thing that works 80% of the time.
All the other, I mean, they're just the most, you know, Goldberg, weird stuff.
And you know what works 80% of the time?
Dogs.
Dogs, trained dogs.
And so they had this program, but it's too cheap, too effective, you know, and you're not going to make a whole lot of work on that.
So they admitted that, and they're still trying to find other, you know, find other gee whiz.
So DARPA, which is the research arm of the Pentagon, decided to try to reverse engineer a dog's nose so they could make a machine that could sniff out like a dog.
Well, they haven't been able to do it.
But the point is, why would you try to reverse engineer a dog's nose Now we're like living in a Terry Gilliam flick at this point.
I mean, this is ridiculous.when you have, you know, thousands of dogs in shelters.
Now, you know, I'm really sorry if the dog ends up getting blown up.
That doesn't happen very often.
But those dogs are going to be euthanized anyway.
A dog's nose is a dog's nose.
You know, certain dogs do better, and certain dogs have better personality, but you can go through shelters, which they've done, and gotten dogs and trained them, and got 80%, which is higher than anything else.
Or you could just quit propping up Hamid Karzai in the first place.
Well, they really say they should be people first, you know.
I wrote a column a couple years ago that said people and dogs first.
You know, come on.
Use dogs, not a robot dog.
All right, that's Dina Razor, Truthout.org.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Good talking to you again.