09/07/10 – Winslow T. Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Winslow T. Wheeler, he is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.
He worked on national security issues for 31 years for members of the U.S. Senate and for the U.S. General Accounting Office, my favorite government agency of all.
And he's the author of the book, The Waste Rules of Defense, How Congress Sabotages U.S.
Security.
He's written for every newspaper and important magazine on earth.
Welcome to the show, sir, how are you?
Very good, thanks for having me on, appreciate it.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I was going to cite as one of my footnotes the Independent Institute study, I believe, led by Dr. Higgs, but as far as I know, you helped him do it.
Now, I realize that you're also there at independent.org is the website, the Independent Institute, and it's Bob Higgs' estimate that the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year on war, and I wanted to add a couple of footnotes to that before I let you comment, and that was that Mother Jones came up with the same estimate, didn't cite Higgs at all, did all of their own research, and came up with a trillion dollars a year.
And of course, Ron Paul, I believe, mostly referring to Higgs, and the Independent Institute uses the term, or uses that figure, a trillion dollars a year, quite often, and they went over at factcheck.org, and they decided to dig into it and see if Ron Paul was telling the truth, and they said, yeah, he is a trillion dollars a year, that's about right.
Is that what you say?
Right.
Yeah, we've all done this independently.
If you add up the various elements to our complete national security policy, it gets you easily toward trillion dollars.
It's not just the Pentagon, this year at $710 billion, but can include also Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, nuclear weapons, the national security programs of the State Department, including arms aid, Veterans Affairs, then there's various dogs and cats, which actually adds a substantial amount, and also a share of the interest in the national debt that we can impute to the Defense Department.
You can disagree about what that percentage is, the number I picked was about 20%, which is the share of federal spending that is the Pentagon, and you add all those things up together and you get to a trillion dollars pretty quickly.
Dogs and cats, does that mean mercs?
That means about $20 billion in the Treasury Department that's paid for military retirement in addition to the money for military retirement that's in the Pentagon budget, and also some TRICARE costs that are tabulated in the Treasury Department, not in the Defense Department.
There's also other things like the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, all kinds of little bits and pieces that are spread all over the government.
All right, well, I like doing these brain teaser type things.
I often complain about how, even in my own mind, the other places on Earth a lot of times are just a shape on the map, and a lot of times not even an accurate one.
Instead of picturing what downtown Tehran looks like, I don't have any idea.
I've never seen any pictures.
They never show me what Iran looks like, so I just picture the shape on the map.
It's the same sort of thing with the number of people killed in a terrible explosion in Iraq today.
Five soldiers were killed, but it doesn't, the number, the digit five, that old Arabic numeral or whatever, that doesn't impute the meaning of what really happened there.
The pain, the smell, the grief is left out.
It's the same thing with the word trillion.
How much is a trillion?
A thousand billion, but what does that mean?
How much is that, really?
Well, it's a hell of a lot.
I guess there's all kinds of ways you can get a sense of what a trillion dollars is.
It's a poor question to ask me.
I'm not a mathematician, and I don't have in the front of my head one of those cute little aphorisms like the number of times that people have respirated since Jesus was born or whatever, and it comes to a trillion.
I'm not a good source for that.
Yeah, but well, I mean, that's kind of a point in and of itself there.
You know, here you're the expert's expert, Winslow, I'm not knocking you at all, and yet it's hard even for you to really wrap your head around what a trillion really is other than a bunch of digits on a page, a bunch of zeros on a page.
How many dollars is that?
How many hot meals does that represent?
How many private educations could that have afforded, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
We have no way to compare, really.
Right.
Yep.
It's amazing.
Well, we're sure it's a lot, though, and you know, I'm glad you brought up the interest on the debt there, because it seems like right now the interest payments on the debt are as minimal as they could be, because the interest rate is set so artificially low by the central bank, but already we're paying nearly half a trillion a year just in interest on the debt.
What are we going to do when the interest rate goes up to 6%?
Well, that's right, and in a few years, if we keep on the ruinous path we're on, the interest on the debt will be larger than the defense budget.
It gives you a sense of how totally out of control both the Republicans and Democrats have been in Washington for a long time now.
When Clinton left Washington, his most important constructive legacy was a government surplus projected into the future, and Republicans led by George Bush and Democrats led by all sorts of people squandered every penny of that surplus and a lot more away.
Although, you know, I'm thinking that was pretty much based on inflated dot-com bubble numbers of revenue coming in, although I'm sure the tax cuts and the wars haven't helped or anything like that, but I don't know if I really believe that if they had stayed the course it would have kept on like that.
I was at the budget committee at the end of the Clinton administration, and everybody seemed to agree that the existence of the surplus was real.
But they disagreed about the size of it, and they strenuously disagreed about what to do with or about it.
But its existence was pretty much agreed to by everybody.
And now here we are.
That was a different age.
And now we have, what was the national debt then?
It was almost ten then, right?
I mean, Clinton was spending three trillion dollars a year by the end, or no, no, no, two.
It was Bush had the first three trillion dollar budget.
But I think Clinton had the first trillion dollar budget and then the first two trillion dollar budget in his second term, right?
I don't remember.
Can't tell you.
Okay.
Well, I think I remember complaining about it at the time, that's all.
So I'm looking at this thing at the CDI, the Center for Defense Information at cdi.org, and this report is dated August 30th, 2010.
What did Rumsfeld Gates do with a trillion bucks?
Is there a trillion missing or unaccounted for?
And then what did they do with it?
Well, they squandered it.
In addition to the trillion dollars Congress appropriated for the wars after 9-11, Congress also appropriated an additional trillion dollars for the so-called base budget of the Pentagon, the non-war parts of it, a trillion dollars in 10 years.
And after that trillion has been spent, we've got a Navy and Air Force that is smaller than it was 10 years ago.
And the Army is marginally larger by about three combat brigade teams at gigantic cost, more than $80 billion.
And its equipment is also older than it was 10 years ago.
In other words, with an additional trillion dollars, the people running the Pentagon, including Rumsfeld and Gates, made our military forces smaller and older.
It's really phenomenal.
You know, I wonder how much they spent total on aluminum Humvees to send our soldiers out on IED lottery missions.
Has anybody ever broken that number down separate from the rest?
I'm sure that number exists, but I don't know it.
I'll have to find it.
I have a note here from my friend Malcolm Garris.
Being science-minded, I'm reminded the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, or 6,000 years if you're a fundamentalist.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air and online.
This is the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.
FM.
Yeah, I love that.
How much is a trillion?
Well, just think, the universe is only 6,000 years old.
13.7 billion, that's still a tiny little bitty number compared to the annual defense budget.
Dollars for years, anyway.
Interesting stuff.
All right, so I'm talking with Winslow T. Wheeler.
He's at the Independent Institute, and I'm looking at his paper at the Center for Defense Information.
What did the Rumsfeld Gates Pentagon do with a trillion bucks?
It's about our reduced military force at a vastly increased cost, and Winslow, I'm reminded of, I think it's a fact that it was September 10th, 2001, that Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech and said, I guess over the last 10 years or so, the Pentagon couldn't account for approximately three trillion dollars that went to who knows what.
This was, I think, a shot across the bow of the generals from the Rumsfeld thing about the, there were, I guess, you I'm sure know much more about this than me, but there were three or four major choices before them about which way to transform the military, and Rumsfeld had picked his lighter, faster, in and out, and then subcontract the rest sort of method of doing things, and I think he leaked this or gave a speech about this missing three trillion in order to strike a blow against the generals the day before everything fell apart there, and I was just wondering if you can shed any light on that incident and then get back to, as you're talking about in your paper here, explain to us the shape of the U.S. military force such as it is for this, you know, less than it was for the increased cost here.
Right.
Rumsfeld did give that speech on September 10, excuse me, 2001.
The conventional wisdom is that he was on his way out as a pretty abject failure as Secretary of Defense to get any of those things under control, and...
Already after only nine months, they were already talking about getting rid of him?
Yes.
The word was that he was on the way out, and that was sort of his, you know, his hostile swan song.
But a lot of things he said were very correct, that the bureaucracy in the Pentagon was huge and bloated and out of control in the sense of growing.
It was very much in control in the sense of running the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld didn't run it as they had done under the Clintons.
The bureaucracy and the Joint Chiefs got pretty much everything they wanted out of both the Clinton presidency and out of Congress.
When 9-11 hit, Rumsfeld was rejuvenated and stuck around for, you know, another five years, and the defense budget became the favorite of a lot of money spenders.
As I said, not just the trillion dollars spent for the war, but in addition to that, a second trillion dollars added to the non-war parts of the Pentagon budget that made our armed forces smaller and older, if you can believe it.
Sounds counterintuitive, but when the cost of military equipment per unit rises faster than the budget is growing, as a matter of fact, it grew much faster than the budget was growing.
In other words, you can't replace the inventory you've got as it ages, and so you're buying fewer and fewer items, and the inventory becomes, on average, older and older.
And at the same time, it gets smaller and smaller.
Those are trends that have been around for a long time, well before Rumsfeld, and sad to say that Mr. Gates is doing nothing that will reverse that course.
Tell me about the Navy.
How many carrier battle groups are there?
There's 11 carriers.
There was a debate last year about whether to reduce that to eight.
The Navy...
There's only seven seas.
Well, they're not all deployed at the same time.
They rotate in and out of port, and they rotate in and out of overhaul and maintenance.
You need a base of about 11 or 12 to have about...
I guess it's four or five deployed at any one time.
And so that's the same thing with, for instance, submarines, not all 50 are at sea at any one time.
When they have a new generation of submarines that cost, what, 20 billion or 10 billion apiece or something?
Three billion.
The Virginia-class submarine, on average, is a little bit less than three billion, about two and a half, I believe.
It's a huge submarine, it's about 10,000 tons, I believe, and they came up with a typically port-driven way of constructing them.
One half of them are...
For each submarine, one end is built in Norfolk, Virginia, and the other end is built in Connecticut, and they literally join them together.
They couldn't bring themselves to actually competing the yards for producing these submarines.
Rather than competition, they simply split the baby in half, and that way, each yard is at liberty to run up the costs without the danger of losing the contract to another source.
Amazing.
Well, I can't imagine that Congress is going to hold some hearings and get to the bottom of that or anything, right?
No, they're totally disinterested in getting to the bottom of things like that, because they know that they're the primary reason why that asinine approach to building submarines is being followed.
Amazing.
Well, that's why Eisenhower wanted to call it the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, but then I guess he thought, well, that would sound like he was biased in favor of the presidency against the Congress, so he didn't want to make it sound like that, but certainly that's the form of the thing.
Not that the presidency is any less guilty.
Now, I'm sorry, because I'm sure this is redundant from previous interviews, Winslow, but I'd like to get your answer to something that I learned from an Air Force guy I know, and I put to him, hey, isn't it the case from what I saw on the Discovery Channel that America's F-15 Eagles, never even mine, the rest of them, could, nuclear weapons aside, dominate the airspace of any country on Earth in an afternoon, and that they can kill all of China's MiGs from 300 miles away, and that there's just no need whatsoever for a F-35 or a F-22.
That's what he told me.
We could dominate the world with F-15 Eagles from now on, the ones we already have.
Well, I think it's a mistake to focus on the technology.
The F-22 Raptor and the F-35 so-called Lightning are real failures in terms of design, but it's not the physical hardware that, in the history of air-to-air warfare, has decided who wins and who loses.
It's the pilot and the competence of the pilot, how well he's trained, and whether he's got that touch that the successful pilots have.
Far more important than commanding who wins and who loses is the quality of the pilot, especially if he can find tactics to surprise the other side.
And I'd be much more comfortable saying that if we trained our pilots better than anybody else, we'd have nothing to worry about.
Sad truth is that we train our pilots far less than we used to, and far less than we should.
A F-22 pilot gets only a very measly 10 hours per month in the air in actual air combat training in the air in a real airplane.
In the 70s, we used to train our pilots, give our pilots about 25, 30 hours per month.
And one of the sad consequences of this hyper-expensive hardware we've been buying is that it raids its money from all kinds of places, and one of those places is training.
But to the point that, and I guess I wasn't specific enough, what I saw on the Discovery Channel, which my Air Force friend confirmed to me, was that over the years, the F-15 has evolved in major ways, and that the nose cone of that thing is crammed with so many instruments, they can kill you by looking at you from over 15 horizons away, or whatever it is.
The point is that, I mean, you're emphasizing pilot training, but I'm saying the planes we got are good enough that with that pilot training, we're not in danger of any other Air Force.
That's the point, right?
Well, there's no Air Force that's a threat to us.
There's no reason to rush into...
We're not even threatened by another Air Force over their countries, are we?
Pardon me?
We're not even threatened by another Air Force over their airspace.
Correct, yep.
Yeah, wow.
That's world hegemony.
I don't know how benevolent it is, but right on.
Well, thank you so much for your time and your insight.
Everybody, please go look at what did the Rumsfeld Gates Pentagon do with a trillion bucks.
It's at cdi.org.
Thank you very much for your time, Winslow.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, it's also at independent.org and at counterpunch.org.