10/08/09 – Winslow T. Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Winslow T. Wheeler.
He is director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.
He's also the editor of the anthology, America's Defense Meltdown, Military Reform for President Obama and the New Congress.
You can often find what he writes at counterpunch.org.
Welcome back to the show, Winslow.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate it.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, and I'm going to go ahead and throw a headline at you.
You do what you want with it.
Senate passes $636 billion.
That's $1,000,636,000,000 in a military bill.
It includes $128.2 billion for Iraq and Afghan wars.
That's from news.antiwar.com.
What do you say?
Right.
I've been spending some time paying attention to this bill.
One of its more delightful aspects is all the earmarks it adds.
It has about $6 billion in earmarks.
The committee report pretends it's only about $2.6 billion, but it's more like $6.0 billion.
And what's worst about it is how they pay for it.
They don't add money to the top line of the bill.
They raid other accounts.
What account do they raid?
They raid a huge but obscure account called Operation and Maintenance.
That sounds like a good place to keep a slush fund, huh?
Well, yeah.
It pays for the kinds of things like training and spare parts and weapons maintenance and gas and food and uniforms and spare parts.
All the kinds of things that you need more of, not less of.
And the Senate Appropriations Committee, led by Danny Inouye from Hawaii and Thad Cochran from Mississippi, raided this account to a fairly well to pay for the report.
That's their version of supporting the troops.
Yeah, well, you go to war with the army you have.
And after the senators have finished looting, then you go to the war with that army.
Right.
And those are cuts in an O&M, Operation and Maintenance, budget that is already too small, not too large.
Our combat pilots in the Navy and Air Force get about half the in-air training they had, for example, at the end of the Vietnam War.
Army tank drivers get significantly less training in tanks than they did during the low readiness Clinton years.
The Navy's had to train in personnel costs in order to hunt for money to pay for ship maintenance.
It's all over the place.
That account, the O&M account, is huge, but it should be even larger.
And these people are running around raiding it to pay for their pork.
Well, and of course, this means that anybody who opposes financing the wars are stabbing our guys in the back.
Don't you know how strained our resources are at this point?
You just want to pay our soldiers minimum wage and have them get no health care.
It's all your fault if you're opposed to the wars, not the fault of the people who have these infinitely expansive missions and then refuse to even take care of their own basic troop support.
Well, that's an interesting point.
These guys are posturing as supporting the troops, both Republicans and Democrats, and meanwhile they're running around doing these raids to help them in press releases back home to show the folks back home what a great job they're doing.
All right.
Now, how much is $636 billion?
Because, you know, you get too far above and beyond what you deal with.
I mean, in my mind, I mean, I know it's, what, more than half a trillion, but how much is that even?
I mean, is there a way that you can compare that to, I don't know, how many freeways you could have built across the state or how many private businesses, small businesses, medium-sized businesses could have been invested in?
Is there any way to measure how much money that really is going through in just one year worth of appropriations here?
Well, first we need to get the numbers right.
You are correct that this bill is $636 billion.
However, that's not all of the Pentagon budget.
It doesn't include a significant piece of military construction, base relocation and closing, remediation at bases of environmental problems, and so on.
The full Pentagon budget is about $680 billion, but that's not all we pay for national security.
Add to that nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy for another $20 billion.
Add to that an obscure account in the Treasury Department for military pensions.
That's about another $18 billion.
You could add, if you want, homeland security costs.
That's about $40 billion.
Add, if you want, Veterans Affairs Administration costs.
That's another $80 or so billion.
You might want to add international aid to countries, to the U.N., arms sales, et cetera.
That's another $30-something billion.
Give a share of the interest and the debt that's attributable to the Defense Department and national security spending.
That's another $50 billion.
You start adding all these things up together, you get real close to a trillion dollars.
Right.
That's what Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute and what the good folks over at Mother Jones Magazine both came to that exact conclusion independently, too.
Right.
Yep.
Wow.
So tell me the story of the C-17.
What's a C-17?
The C-17 is an unhappy compromise.
Back in the 80s, the C-17 was initially designed and funded.
It is a wide-body airlifter, and it is supposedly able to land on, quote, unprepared runways.
But actually, it's neither of those things.
It compares very poorly to a cargo version of a 747.
And to enable it to land on a, quote, unprepared runway, it actually takes weeks to prepare the runway.
Ha-ha.
And it's not a cheap airplane, either.
It's about $275 million a copy.
You can get a 747 SP cargo version for about 10% less than that.
It carries a much larger load for a substantially longer range.
What I'm trying to say is that the C-17 is not the optimal thing you want.
Well, now, how are these decisions made?
Because you would think that if you have a general, who we all know generals are real no-nonsense, all-business sort of guys, if they have a certain budget and they need to get the best equipment that they can get, why would they settle for an inferior plane for a higher cost?
Well, you're asking a cosmological question.
How do any of these things get started?
The basic in the organization becomes if you don't support this program, you're not part of the team.
If you're in uniform, if you're not supporting the program, you need to worry about your next promotion.
If you're civilian, you need to worry about your next, you know, pay upgrade.
If you don't help the program, you're part of the problem, not part of the team.
If you work on Capitol Hill, you just may have some subcontracting involved.
When I worked for Senator Javits from New York, it took a major contract, not just a subcontract, to get our help and assistance.
But these days, all you need is a minor, teeny-weeny little subcontract, and you're virtually guaranteed a senator or congressman's support.
There's a whole community of different interests, political, material, career, etc., that builds up behind these things.
And they become, as we well know from the C-17, unstoppable, even if the Secretary of Defense says he doesn't want any more.
Now, it seems like even if you're talking about a giant, bureaucratic, multinational corporation, somewhere along the line, somebody whose responsibility is the purse strings would put a stop to something like that and go ahead and buy 747s, right?
It seems to me like the one thing that you didn't mention as part of the equation is what the actual cost is.
It doesn't seem to matter to the people doing the purchasing at the Pentagon, I guess is what I'm getting at.
Well, they don't have a sense of there being a limit to the amount of money they can spend.
We have the world's largest defense budget.
As a matter of fact, we're about equal to what the rest of the world combined spends.
We're now at a post-World War II high in terms of U.S. spending for the defense budget and inflation-adjusted dollars.
They don't have a sense in the Pentagon or in Congress of where the spending should stop increasing.
And by the way, for this huge amount of money, we now have the smallest army we've ever had since the end of World War II, the smallest Air Force and the smallest Navy, and their major categories of equipment is on average older than it's ever been in that period also.
It's an amazing situation of repaying a huge amount to get a smaller, older, shrinking military establishment.
Well, it's funny.
There's a competing narrative, I guess, that comes from both sides, and they're both wrong.
The liberal side, they kind of try to trumpet the stopping, question mark in parentheses there, I guess, of the F-22 project, as Barack Obama standing up against the Pentagon and wasteful spending.
And then, of course, Sean Hannity likes to say Barack Obama and his horrific cuts to our defense and that kind of thing.
So it's in the interest of both sides to play that narrative.
But really, they've done nothing but increase the budget, right?
In fact, Stephen Colbert had a little line graph and said, how dare Barack Obama slash the budget by this much?
And then, of course, the line goes up.
That's correct.
The current plan is to increase defense spending two or three percent per year until the year 2017, as a matter of fact.
If you compare Obama's first four years, or even the first eight years of his plan, he will significantly outspend Ronald Reagan, again, in inflation-adjusted dollars, for defense spending.
But the military infrastructure that he gets for that increased amount of spending is significantly smaller than the one Ronald Reagan had.
That's funny, because, you know, I don't know, maybe it's just your tone of voice, but it seems like that ought to be the most shocking thing, that Barack Obama is outspending Ronald Reagan, when Ronald Reagan was standing up to the giant Soviet bear.
Right.
What's the excuse for this, other than paying massive welfare payments to people who are already millionaires?
It's the same kind of question of, you know, why does all of Washington, D.C. rally around a bad idea of a cargo lifter like a C-17, and build 15 to 25 more than the Air Force and Secretary of Defense say they need?
You know, there's lots of ways to attempt to answer that question, but we've got an entire system in Washington that addresses these things that's quite broken.
And we're seeing just how broken it is in watching closely how they deal with bills like this new DOD appropriations bill that, in a way, Ann Cochran just slithered through the Senate.
It's a continuing story of increasing the spending and getting less for it.
And what is the real story about the F-22, anyway?
I guess my most cynical view so far was something like, well, they killed it, but Gates made it clear that it was only because he was, I guess, part of a faction fight, and had chosen his side in a faction fight inside the Pentagon about whether we need to be focused more on preparing for some kind of future war against China, who actually have the ability to field fighter jets into the sky, or whether the future is simply bombing helpless peasant civilians in their own countries that we occupy from here on out.
And that was the advantage of the F-35, is you can kill civilians with them easier.
But then, I guess, that didn't even really happen.
They're going to go ahead and keep the thing in production anyway, or what's going on with this?
Well, I think Gates deserves credit for getting a stake through the heart of the F-22.
I mean, he said, let's stop building this thing.
He had to have a gigantic fight on Capitol Hill last July to get the Senate to vote to stop production.
But he and Obama deserve a lot of credit for going to the mat and fighting the fight hard and long to put that system out of production.
My problem is that he had a large, long list of programs that he wanted to stop.
C-17 was one of them.
And he and Obama have not put up the kind of fight they put up against the F-22 to stop more superfluous production of the C-17.
I cannot tell you what's going on in their heads to fight the good fight on one thing but not on another.
But the simple answer is that they didn't.
And they won on some of their decisions, but they lost on a lot of them.
And I cannot jump into Robert Gates' head and tell you why they didn't put up the same kind of fight on the C-17.
There was a story in, I guess, the late summer of 2001 about missing trillions of dollars of Pentagon money.
And I wonder, I don't know, some major part of my brain thinks, well, that can't possibly be true.
I mean, I know they spent trillions of dollars and we have multiple trillion dollar budgets every year in this country.
But how do you really get away with losing trillions?
Is that really right?
Do you know about that story and maybe what happened to that money, how much it really was?
The trillion count is of transactions.
In other words, a single dollar, when it gets to the Pentagon, goes through numerous transactions before it is actually spent.
And it was about $2.3 trillion of transactions, if I recall correctly.
The explanation is that the Pentagon is financially incompetent.
It's not that the Pentagon would flunk an audit if one were done.
It's that the Pentagon can't be audited.
There's a significant difference.
You flunk an audit when you track the money and you find that it was not spent as intended.
You can't be audited when you can't figure out how the money was spent.
Just for example, about once or twice a year we see articles about some major manufacturer telling the Pentagon that the Pentagon paid them too much money and here it is back.
We're in the atrocious situation where we're reliant on the defense manufacturers to tell us when we've paid them too much money.
Yeah, well, I'm sure that'll work out fine.
And this is not a new problem.
This has been around for decades.
The Clinton administration did absolutely nothing about it.
The Bush administration did nothing about it.
The new controller, the CFO of the department, is a former Clinton official, Robert Hale, who spent his time trying to fire a major whistleblower named Ernie Fitzgerald back in the Clinton years.
And now he's giving excuses to those few on Capitol Hill who are interested about why there's not important progress in fixing these problems.
There was a hearing a couple of weeks ago about the Defense Management Contract Audit Agency and a GAO review of it that found that it simply wasn't doing its job.
And all Mr. Hale could say was that we should not worry and he'll get everything fixed and would we please go away.
There's a few on Capitol Hill who are interested in this subject, but it's not a sexy subject matter.
And so it takes a real conscientious member of Congress to seriously get involved in an issue like this.
Well, you know, I guess in a way it's almost like a giant secret or something.
It's pretty easy to understand on one hand that giant corporations whose biggest customers are the military have a major interest in lobbying and electing friendly Congress members and stuff.
I mean, people used to joke back in the 70s, right, that Scoop Jackson was the senator from Boeing and things like that.
The military industrial congressional complex, as Eisenhower wanted to call it, we can all kind of see this.
And yet at the same time, it sort of seems like the truth doesn't quite get through to the American people that what we have here is this massive government dependent sector of our so-called capitalist economy.
That is dragging everything else down.
It seems like a Chinese finger trap or something.
We can't seem to get out.
There's no way to vote them out.
There's no way to outlobby them.
And our Congress is controlled by representatives of the war industries, basically, to a great degree.
Isn't that basically right?
Well, even though Congress, for example, is doing a horrible job on the Defense Appropriations Bill, which they just passed Tuesday this week, there were a couple, three senators who moved some amendments that amounted to something.
I don't always agree with them on social issues, but Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, for example, was one of the very few in the Senate that I find to be serious about some of these issues.
He had two amendments.
He should be complimented for finding that kind of thing out and doing something about it.
It's one thing to give a speech.
It's another thing to take action in the Senate.
He moved his amendment.
Of course, he lost badly.
He barely got about 25 votes.
Most senators want to hear no such thing and don't want to impede the earmarking process.
Senator Coburn impressed me very much that he wants to do something about it.
About the care of the soldiers, this is the kind of thing that seems really untouchable in terms of the only position that anyone ever takes on care for American veterans is that there's not enough of it, it's not good enough, there needs to be more of it and it needs to be better.
I wonder about the adverse consequences of having what amounts to a massive welfare state for American soldiers, veterans and their families.
That argument again about this money spent, the seen and the unseen, it goes to subsidize a massive proportion of millions of people, their families, their educations and all these things.
It seems like it becomes the actual justification for the Army itself.
This is how someone who's not born rich can go to college one day or something like that.
You think about all the guys who went to war after 9-11.
Probably two-thirds of those guys didn't think they were going to go to war.
They joined the Army so they could go to school.
Stuff like that.
It doesn't seem like maybe a silver lining of the neglect of the troops is that people might learn the lesson that joining the military and signing up to be dependent on the national government for the rest of your life is not the way to secure your safety and happiness.
I think we need to take care of these people.
The VA budget is about $80-90 billion a year.
That's a small fraction of what we spend in the Pentagon.
The nation asks these people to sign up and commit to fighting these wars.
I don't support these wars, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make sure we take care of these people who have come back injured one way or another.
The VA may not be very efficient, but it's the mechanism we have to try to take care of these people.
I'm not at all shy about saying we should do what it takes to do that.
I probably phrased my question too broad, too.
I've been plenty critical on this show and we've done lots of coverage with various journalists about the neglect of soldiers who are injured, come back with brain injuries and are told they have a personality disorder.
This is absolutely scandalous to me, the way the government treats the soldiers.
I'm just saying, isn't there kind of a lesson in there?
Don't people in this society have this false idea that just joining the military is some kind of rite of passage?
It's a way to go to school.
It's a way to guarantee that even if you die, your wife will be able to go to the hospital.
It's like this giant embedded part of the welfare-ism in our society.
The welfare-warfare state, as the Rothbardians call it.
Joining the military is an honorable profession.
I don't have any problem with that.
I don't have any problem with promising somebody a college education if they enlist for four or six or eight years or whatever it is.
I'm okay with that.
The alternative, if you want to do away with that kind of thing, is you're not going to attract people to volunteer and at some point we're going to start talking about a draft.
Or maybe we could talk about not having so many commitments around the world.
It seems to me the reason that someone would join the army, all things being equal in a free society, would be to go fight a war.
Not so that they can go to school.
Not so that they can sign up their family for health care benefits at the expense of the rest of the society.
Armies are for fighting wars.
Not for, you know, this is what I've got to do in order to guarantee these benefits that I want to get.
Am I crazy or what?
Armies should be for defending yourself when you have to.
The problem we have today is we're involved in two wars that we shouldn't be involved in.
But, again, it's an honorable profession.
I don't have any problem with giving people incentives to sign up.
I have a problem with the people in Washington, D.C. who send them on missions that we shouldn't be sending them on.
And I especially have a problem with people in Washington, D.C. who stand by and twiddle their thumbs when others force us on the country and don't stand in the way of doing these kinds of missions that we shouldn't be doing.
Well, you know, I've got friends in the military.
I'm not trying to be against the soldiers themselves.
It's the system of, you know, it's the same kind of economic analysis I'm trying to do in looking at Lockheed and their motivation in saying, well, look, we can try to compete in the free market and investing billions of dollars in projects that may or may not make money or we can just sell weapons to the Pentagon all day and guarantee our profits.
And that's just part of it.
And I'm trying to analyze it from an economic sort of point of view there rather than I don't want to come across like I'm just ranting against soldiers, most of whom join up when they're 17 or 18 years old and don't know anything.
Well, you know, with an entity like Lockheed, what we should be doing and that we're not is insisting they build a good airplane at an affordable cost.
We let them get away with not doing that.
The problem isn't as much with Lockheed, although they're certainly partially at fault, as it is with people back here in Washington who give them a license to go spend money and we don't seem to care much about what we get in return.
Indeed.
Indeed.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Winslow.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Everybody, that's Winslow T. Wheeler.
He's the director of the Straus Military Reform Program at the Center for Defense Information.
He's the editor of the anthology America's Defense Meltdown Military Reform for President Obama and the new Congress.
You can also find him quite often at counterpunch.org, where my interview from yesterday is website of the day.
We'll be right back.