Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And, man, I love them Coburn Brothers.
I guess I don't talk to Alex very often.
We speak with Patrick all the time on the show about all the wars he covers.
And then also from time to time we catch up with Andrew Coburn.
He's also a journalist.
He's the author of a great many books inside the Soviet Military Regime, Dangerous Liaison, The Inside Story of the U.S.
-Israeli Covert Relationship, and One Point Safe, both of those co-written with his wife Leslie Coburn, who also wrote Out of Control, which was the first serious foreign policy book I ever read in high school about Iran-Contra.
And he also wrote Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, co-written with his brother Patrick.
And he's the author of a book which I have begged you to read over and over again on this show, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
He's got a brand new piece in Harper's, the November issue of Harper's, called Search and Destroy, The Pentagon's Losing Battle Against IEDs.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, what an interesting story this is.
The government's well, it's in a few pieces here, but let's start with the modern-day Manhattan Project to defeat homemade landmines.
What was I saying?
Yeah, we're $70 billion in and counting on the fight against IEDs, which, you know, the Pentagon gave basically homemade landmines, this fancy name, IEDs, improvised electronic device.
But people should appreciate just how homemade they are.
We're talking about cooking pots filled with homemade explosive, which is made from fertilizer.
You know, it's mixed up in a few, maybe a 9-volt battery.
Very, very simple.
$10, $20 and up from there.
And that's what we spent this enormous amount of money on.
Well, you read the piece, you tell me what interests you, but I just think it's a phenomenal event of our times that we unleashed a Manhattan Project to defeat bombs made in cooking pots.
Alright, well, I guess the way I would break it down is part of it is maybe the different technological efforts and where they are as far as that goes.
And then the other major part of the story is the narratives of the two soldiers that you follow in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Very compelling stuff there.
And then ultimately, the major point is we're outsourcing all of our decision making and warring to the robots.
We have, not we, but the Pentagon, the people in charge, have this almost religious belief system about the magic of these little electronic gadgets to take care of the problems that they create as they go around occupying the world.
And it doesn't really work.
Yeah, well, let's start with that.
It's been a dream.
Well, certainly going back to Vietnam, where the idea of the automated battlefield, that somehow we can, you know, if we have a deploy surveillance technology picking up infrared to every kind of image, every kind of data, seismic and so forth, and then we suck it all up indiscriminately, automatically, without human intervention, and we put it into, you know, the most advanced computing, data processing technology we have, somehow this will spit out the answer.
And it'll tell us where that Afghan farmer has just buried a bomb.
And, you know, we tried that in Vietnam when they tried to, when I tell the story of how, you know, the electronic fence, they tried to close off the Ho Chi Minh Trail with that, and that never worked.
And really it's what they've been trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You know, what's funny about that, Andrew, is to hear Robert McNamara tell it, his big mistake was getting so buried in numbers and quantifications that he lost track of what he was doing in the world, whether it was World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.
Well, that's kind of his, you know, yes, he does say that, and that's what he sort of said in that Errol Morris film.
I was going to say, this is his lesson, was that, you know, it's not a matter of quantity, it's a matter of quality over there.
Well, right, and it's, I mean, it's a separate discussion.
I really react badly to anything Robert McNamara says, and I thought that film was really Robert McNamara's attempt once again to sort of slither out of what should be his indictment for war crimes.
Sure, yeah, I'll buy that.
But the, you know, in a way, though, you could say, from the point of view of the real interests at work here, it's not so dumb, because while, you know, that huge project to block off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was basically an IBM contract, or what's been going on since in our current wars, they don't have much to do with, you know, stopping the enemy.
They do have a lot to do with corporate profits.
So from the point of view of, you know, what we used to say, you know, the old-fashioned term, military-industrial complex, this all works very well.
You know, IBM made billions of dollars in Vietnam.
Now we have firms like, you know, Honeywell, General Atomics, ITT, you know, the list is as long as your arm, including a lot of now very rich corporations that no one's ever heard of that have made, you know, tens of billions of dollars out of the IED.
But the point is, it hasn't slowed the IEDs down, the Taliban, or before them the Iraqis done, by one minute.
But it's certainly made people a lot of money.
Well, and there are stories in this piece, again, it's Search and Destroy in the November Harper's, that illustrate exactly what's going on here so well, where you say this guy Rivolo in Iraq, the astrophysicist, he came up with a plan, he said that, you know, these and those tactics aren't working, let's go back and, you know, examine our results and maybe come up with something better, and he said, well, what if we flew light aircraft around just to keep track of who's actually doing the placing, and we try to follow those guys home and blow them up, and maybe make it, you know, decrease the incentive for people to be willing to go out and place a bomb for $15 by the side of the road, and risk when they're actually risking their life much more, and they just and he says, I guess, to you in this piece, that they rejected it out of hand because it wasn't expensive enough.
Exactly.
They would rather use satellites or something.
They did, they exactly wanted to use satellites.
Oh, really?
That's not even in the piece, I was just making that up for sarcasm's sake.
I thought they wouldn't believe it, but we actually do have satellites looking for Afghan farmers digging holes in the road, you know, it's, and beyond that we have layer upon layer of blimps of, you know, very four-engine aircraft, smaller aircraft, I mean, all the way, I'm not sure anyone can see, you know, get any daylight down to Afghanistan, there's so much stuff up above, but that's what happened to, yeah, Rex Revello, I mean, he, you know, he really, he went and did the numbers in a good way, I mean, he just figured out cause and effect, you know, we we, you know, we deploy all this surveillance technology, what has been the effect?
And he found, you know, really looking at, you know, this kind of system and that kind of system and how many bombs were in the area, you know, did the number of bombs that went off go up or down or, you know, nothing up, and he found time after, you know, in fact, pretty much every case, well, not every case, but every high-tech case, that these things had absolutely no effect.
And that's, you know, and, you know, because he, you know, he was in a well-placed in the command, I mean, to know what was going on, they were rejected because, as you just said, they weren't, they were too cheap.
Alright, hold it right there, Andrew, hold it right there, we gotta go out and take this break.
It's Andrew Coburn, author of the new piece in Harper's Magazine, the November issue, Search and Destroy the Pentagon's Losing Battle Against IEDs.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Andrew Coburn, author of Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, about his new article, Search and Destroy the Pentagon's Losing Battle Against IEDs.
And, you know, it really is a matter, you have quotes in here of some commander or another, Andrew bragging about how, oh yeah, with all of our drones and all of our integrated software and computer screens, we can see everything.
And yet, it's simply just, again, back to McNamara, it's just a matter of confusing quantity for quality.
Exactly.
And data for knowledge.
Yeah, or, you know, put another way, the object is quantities of dollars rather than quality of what the job they're actually meant to be doing.
But the problem with that is that means that when they appropriate all these billions of dollars, they're all just basically wasted, and our guys are still getting blown up by these things, same as they always were.
Exactly, I mean, that's, you know, I had a conversation, I quote in there from the guy who, until last year, the general who, actually earlier this year, General Oates, who ran the Pentagon's main, sort of, anti-IED task force, it's called JIDO, they, I mean, he said, you know, basically the numbers of, you know, bombs that, the percentages of enemy bombs that go off and, you know, hurt one of our soldiers really hasn't changed since 2004.
I mean, his phrase was that number stayed pretty stubborn.
And what that means is, you know, as we've, you know, we've spent, you know, all these billions of dollars, we've developed new armored vehicles and jamming devices and surveillance planes and armor and all those things, but, you know, the other side has simply committed to them, so the overall equation hasn't changed.
Which is, you know, which is pretty interesting and kind of sad, as you say.
Well, and you also illustrate, especially in telling the story of this guy Chavez in Afghanistan, who's sort of the real-life Hurt Locker guy, that it's really the plain old and time-tested methods that are the most effective.
What you really need is somebody with balls of steel who's willing to go out there and clip those wires.
Well, that's right.
I mean, he's a very remarkable guy.
This is, um, I should explain, this is a Marine Master Sergeant, Thanos Chavez, who was the acronym, he was called an EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal.
He was, and his job was to go out and disarm these bombs when people found them.
And he was, and the story I tell is, he was posted with a Marine unit to the town of Sangind in the Helmand province in Afghanistan, this was in 2008, which was completely, when they got there, it was completely carpeted with these bombs.
I mean, the whole, the previous units had been, basically, had never been able to go out of their base.
And Chavez turned out, he was incredibly good, I mean, brilliant, in fact, in disarming the bombs, but in, just, uh, you know, in figuring out where they'd be.
Um, and he didn't, you know, use high-tech equipment, or he told me, he said the most useful piece of equipment he had was a long piece of, uh, parachute, a length of parachute cord wrapped around a stick, which he'd used to pull bombs apart.
Basically, he used smarts and a pair of wire clippers and a few other things, but all very simple.
And the story I tell is how he was being so successful, but the Taliban decided that he was a major threat.
Um, you know, this is known because they were chatting about it on the radio, and they, um, so they deployed, they pulled in a sort of star bomb-maker on their side to make a bomb that would be booby-trapped, sort of, rigged so that when Chavez tried to disarm it, it would blow up and kill him.
And he figured it out.
I mean, he, in a brilliant flash of intuition, he realized what this was and disarmed it.
And then the next week, there was another one with a, with an extra wrinkle.
So, uh, and he defeated that.
And this went on all summer.
And the whole town, both the Marines and the Afghans, knew what was going on, that they were trying to get Chavez.
Every day he went out, and, you know, people wondered if they were going to get him today.
Um, and you have to read the, people have to read the article, but it ends up in an interesting way.
But he, you know, he was a real hero, um, but he's an absolute, sort of, contrast to these, you know, gajillion dollar systems, which, you know, are, as I say, of great profit to the, uh, defense corporations here, but don't have much to do with anything on the ground.
Mm-hmm.
Well, now, when you talk about the numbers haven't changed much since 2004, uh, if I got my timeline straight, 2004, they were putting these guys out there in aluminum Humvees, but now they got these big MRAP vehicles with the angular bottoms and reinforced steel and this and that.
Right?
Doesn't that make a difference?
It, well, it did make a difference, yes, but the trouble is that, um, you know, then the trouble is with being in an MRAP, I mean, you're reasonably safe, and not totally safe, but you're safe, certainly a lot safer in one of those from being blown up as you drive along, but unfortunately, all you can do is drive along.
They, uh, uh, you can't actually affect anything.
I mean, you might as well stay at home and drive around the parade ground.
Mm-hmm.
Um, so that, especially in Afghanistan, where the roads are, you know, really terrible, in Iraq, they were, you know, rather better.
Um, so, you know, so they've had to try and develop more maneuverable, um, you know, lighter MRAP so they can actually go somewhere off the one paved road, you know, the main paved road in Afghanistan.
So the overall effect is that people still have to, you know, to do anything, whatever they're meant to be doing, they have to get out.
So you now have more people walking around in, um, you know, Marines in Afghanistan, so that makes them more vulnerable to stepping on a bomb.
Um, and that's why you're getting particularly horrendous injuries these days, but, um, so, you know, yes, of course, we've come a long way from having guys ride around in sort of aluminum, uh, aluminum humvees, or in fact in those days, I mean, soldiers in Iraq were actually trying to make their own armor.
You know, they were scouring garbage dumps to find, uh, scrap dumps to find, you know, it was called hillbilly armor, find bits of metal that they could stick on the sides of their humvees.
Uh, and they were completely vulnerable to radio-controlled bombs, so yes, you know, we built the MRAPs and we built, you know, jammers, um, but then the enemy, you know, waits for you to get out, or they figured out that you can actually, you can't, it's hard to penetrate an MRAP, but you can make it roll over, which, you know, ultimately has the same effect, but it's out of action.
Um, you know, it's been, you know, back and forth, but overall, the actual proportion hasn't changed.
I mean, you know, our defenses have gone up, the number of IEDs on the other, that the other side makes has gone up.
You know, you know, it goes up and down a bit, but overall, the trend line stays fairly constant.
You know, one of the guys in the chat room was pointing out that, uh, compared to the, uh, NVA or the VC, the Taliban is, uh, much less well-equipped and financed than them.
They had, you know, the Chinese and the Russians were at least financing them and helping them.
Uh, in this case, these guys have nobody really on their side, and of course, decades have gone by, and, and, uh, we've had nothing but, uh, technical revolution after revolution in the American way of waging war, and yet, the balance is just about the same as in Vietnam.
We keep, we can keep on fighting, and they can't really drive us out, but we can't defeat them either.
Well, this is absolutely true, but it's an interesting thing about the Taliban.
I mean, Thomas Chavez, uh, the Marine I was talking about, I mean, he'd also done several tours in Iraq, and I asked him, you know, to compare, I'll talk about this in the article, you know, how are the Iraqi IEDs compared, or how are the Afghan IEDs compared to Iraq?
And he said, well, actually, he said the main difference was he said pride of workmanship.
He said the Afghans, they had much, as you say, much less to work with.
I mean, it's a much, much poorer very, very poor, but he said that they really, you know, Afghan IEDs were much better made, more carefully made than the IED, than the Iraqi ones where they just crank them out, just rely on numbers, and maybe you know, large proportion wouldn't work.
Um, he, he was in a way, he was very admiring of the Afghan workmanship.
He said they really went after quality, and he thought they were, and you know, what's very interesting about this story is that he, he got to know the guy who was trying to kill him basically through his handiwork.
I mean, he, you know, he had real insights into the sort of personality, you know, into the sort of the, this very clever mind that was at work on the other side trying to, um, you know, rigging this, making this device with very simple parts, you know.
Yeah, lots of mutual respect there between these two guys, both of whom, as you were saying, Chavez is using wire clippers and a stick, and a little bit of C4 here and there, and these guys are working pretty much on the same level there, eye to eye across a little bit of time.
You got it.
I'm sorry, we got to leave it there, but that is a good place to leave it.
The story of this guy, Chavez, that you write in this article is worth the whole article.
It's great.
So, thanks very much for your time on the show, Andrew.
Really appreciate it.
Hey, Scott, good to be with you.
Take care.
