Angry Planet - Prestige Weapons Systems are Busting the Pentagon’s Budget

Episode Date: January 16, 2018

The Pentagon always wants more money and it usually gets its way. Between sequestration and the War on Terror, America’s military often feels like it’s stretched thin. The Navy says it needs more sailors to prevent disaster, U.S. nukes need upkeep to stay safe, and the Special Operations Forces need more and more support to do their job.Yet the American military outspends every other major military power on the planet and watch dogs constantly complain of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon. What’s going on? Here to help us sort it out is one of the watchdogs, former Marine Corps officer and current Project on Government Oversight employee Dan Grazier.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. In the popular mind, we think that the big Reagan buildup in the 1980s was the pinnacle of Pentagon spending with the exclusion of the World War II years. But in reality, in the last 15 years, that's when we've really reached our peak. With the peak being in 2011, when just Pentagon spending peaked at approximately $711 billion that year. You're listening to War College. a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, War College listeners. I am your host, Matthew Gull.

Jason Fields is here in spirit, if not in the digital flesh. Last week, we spoke to David Dutoula, Dean of Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Power Studies and retired Air Force Lieutenant General. He walked us through the purpose and power of the B-21. During that conversation, we had a long aside about the Pentagon budget. It was a good talk and a point of view you don't normally hear on this show, but we didn't want it to stand alone and we didn't want it to go unchallenged.

So today's show is a bit of an odd mix. We're going to open with Deptula's thoughts on the Pentagon's budget and dovetail that into a conversation with former Marine Corps captain and current government watchdog Dan Grazier. But first, here's Deptula talking about the budget. Can you explain briefly what you mean by constrained research, because all we're hearing about, and by the way, I'm not taking any sort of stance whatsoever, we keep hearing about this desire to increase the defense budget by something like $65 billion.

And I know there's a lot of talk about how the figures are sliding all over the place, and it may already be money that had been supposed to go to defense. But I think there's a perception that the government is looking to spend more on defense. Well, let me answer your question this way. If you look at our national security strategies over the last 25, 30 years, there are two consistent underlying themes that have been evidenced in them, regardless of administration, Democrat, or Republican in place. And essentially, those two are this.

One, during peacetime, the United States military will engage. around the world in an attempt to work with partners and allies and friends and influence potential adversaries to promote peace, assure stability, and avoid situations that might erupt in conflict. In order to be able to do that, we need to have sufficient rotational-based structures and force structure to be able to be able to execute those operations around the world. Okay, that's one. Number two is, if in fact we do get involved in conflict, we need to be able to succeed in a minimum of more than one, read two, major regional contingencies simultaneously. The reason that's so important is if you only have a strategy that's designed to fight and win one major contingency, our adversaries know that. And there are others that will take advantage of that opportunity to cause mischief in other

parts of the world. So if you go back and you take a look at those two key tenants and speaking at a macro level, look at the spectrum of conflict that I mentioned earlier, each one of the services need to be able to provide the resources to handle that rotational base during peacetime so we don't drive our people into the ground. And number two, be able to succeed against real, modern threats in two locations. So that sets sort of the foresizing methodology for what we need. Now, I go back to kind of what's occurred over the last 25 years. We've been operating on the left side or the low-end conflict side of the security spectrum.

Remember what happened after the Berlin Wall came down? Actually, you guys are probably too young to remember that. I'm not, actually. All right. You know, what happened? The decade of the 90s was an attempt to seek the peace dividend. Okay, the Russians were going to be our friends. They were going to be our partners.

We didn't have to worry about nukes anymore. We didn't have to worry about Russian threats anymore. The Chinese were still well behind the United States. They were going to be our partners as late as the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s. Secretary Gates talked about the Chinese being our partners, and he didn't want to hear anything about preparing to be challenged by the Chinese. Well, guess what? Here we are in 2017.

very much different Russia that we're facing. Some refer to it as a resurgent Russia, at least in terms of their nuclear capabilities, as well as reinvigorating their conventional capabilities, what they've done in Ukraine, what they've done in Syria, the threats against the Baltics, and you have a China that is now on track to exceed the United States economic prowess

in the not too distant future. They have dramatically accelerated their economic, as well as military prowess. So without talking about a specific number, we've allowed our military capabilities to meet these national security requirements against advanced threats to atrophy. So, you know, we are operating, in the case of the Air Force,

a geriatric Air Force. You know, the B-52s that we're operating today the youngest one is 52 years old. We have trainers that are over 40 years old. We have fighters that are over 30 years old. And so, you know, if we want to maintain the ability to have accomplished the national security requirements in the modern era, we've got to recapitalize our force. We forwent that recapitalization in the decade of the 90s.

In the 2000s, the Air Force was essentially a bill payer for the increase in the size of the Army to conduct counterinsurgency operations. And then introduced in 2011 was the Budget Control Act, which was an attempt to at least slow the acceleration rate of the national debt, which by the way, taxed the military at a rate, proportionate to its makeup of the federal budget. And then the whole notion of sequestration was introduced. People tend to forget this to be a budget control measure so onerous and ridiculously ineffective that it would force the Congress to avoid it by introducing a budget. but they didn't do that. So we have lived with constraints that have neutered our military. I mean, the Congress of the United States did more damage to the U.S. Air Force than our most

determined adversary could only hope to accomplish by introducing the Budget Control Act of 2011 in sequestration. I mean, if you recall what happened in 2013 when sequestration came into play, I mean, we literally shut down 30% of our squadrons. We didn't conduct any red flags. We didn't do any test or training. And that had an enormous impact on reducing readiness. And so we need to recover from, if we want to maintain these national security strategy objectives, we need to recover to be able to do that. So you have two choices. Number one, you can either resource the Department in defense to meet the needs of the national security strategy, or you can change the national

security strategy, which takes us into the realm of walking back from this notion of being a global superpower or a force for good to more of a regional threat, or I'm sorry, a regional actor. And I don't think the United States of America want to do that, because quite frankly, that would result in a more problematic world than we currently exist in. I'm sorry for the long answer, but it's a complicated set of elements that play into the rationale for why the Department of Defense needs to increase the resources. Either increase the resources or you reduce the strategic objectives. It's one of the great things about podcasts is that we can allow for long, complicated answers.

So thank you for that. That was last week's guest, retired Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, talking about the budget. Here, to give us some context and a rebuttal to those statements, is former Marine Corps captain, Dan Grazier. He served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now works for the Strauss Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan think tank that studies issues such as the Pentagon's budget.

Dan, thank you so much for being here. All right, let's zoom out a little bit. Let's kind of put some of this in context for the audience. His kind of opinions, I think, represents one side of the argument. And there's another side of the argument, which I think is more of the project and government oversight side of the argument. Can you kind of elaborate on that for us? Sure. You know, the way we tend to look at military spending is the you can have these wide, you can have this spigot wide open.

and you can have these, you know, these unlimited budgets. And what happens is the people in the Pentagon in the defense industry, they essentially stop thinking. And they start making really bad decisions because if there are no constraints on, you know, no real constraints on the budget, then you get to kind of have your big, massive wish list fulfilled. And instead of making hard decisions about do we really need to buy a, you know, $1,000, $20 million per copy aircraft, or could we design something simpler and less expensive?

And if you, and by constraining budgets, you kind of instill that kind of discipline where you make people make the hard choices and make the necessary tradeoffs, and you come up with simpler systems, which at the end of the day, simpler systems are almost always a better option for military hardware. because in combat, combat is a very chaotic situation. And in that situation, you don't want your troops facing inward, focusing on maintaining and tinkering with their extremely complicated gear. You want that gear to kind of fade in the background so they can focus outward on the enemy

and actually accomplish the mission. It feels like we've been living in a fantasy world, I think, in terms of Pentagon budget for. a while now. Do you think that's that's true? Like they've the tap, the spigot's been open for a long time. Oh, absolutely. The, you know, if you, if you, if you go back and you look at historical spending levels, uh, even adjusted for inflation, the spending levels over the last, you know, wow, I mean, pretty much ever since September 11th, the, the, the spending levels increased. And, and in the popular mind, we think that the big Reagan buildup in the 1980s was, was the pinnacle of, of

Pentagon spending with the exclusion of the World War II years. But in reality, in the last 15 years, that's when we've really reached our peak. But the peak being in 2011, when just Pentagon spending peaked at approximately $711 billion that year. And I heard it in the Marine Corps for about the last five years or so that I was in about how, oh, resources are constrained. You know, I didn't see it too much. There was a lot of talk about it, but even when spending was, you know, under sequestration and under the budget caps, I mean, we're still talking, you know, well over $500 billion a year. So, and you haven't seen any of those real hard choices being made. You know, you still see us pursuing these massively expensive systems like the F-35, like the B-21, like the, like the,

Ford, like the Ford program, the only possible real exceptions are perhaps the Zoom Walt although that's still kind of going on in the littoral combat ship, because that program is still a bit of a zombie program that just won't go away completely. So there is kind of a disconnect between the rhetoric of, you know, real constrained budgets and what is actually taking place. That's really interesting because I do hear that constantly. especially from upper level military officials, that they're constrained, that sequestration hurt them, that they don't have the resources to get anything done.

And you look at things like the issues that have affected the 7th Fleet this past year, especially, right? And the Navy and the Navy personnel issues. They're saying they don't have enough sailors. It feels like these big weapons programs are what's gobbling up the budget. Like they're the real problem. you think that's accurate? Oh, definitely. They take up a massive chunk of the budget. And again, and it all comes from indiscipline. I mean, you go back and you look at the F-35 program. The F-35 program, the award, you know, the milestone B moment for the F-35 happened in October of 2001.

So that's right at the height, like right, you know, just weeks after the September 11th attacks. I mean, the World's Trade Center site was still smoking at that point. And so, of course, that Congress was extremely generous with, you know, with, with, with money at that point. And so the, you know, the Pentagon just went crazy with this program and they decided to add everything they possibly could. So there was literally no discipline involved in that, in that process. And so there were some very poor decisions that were made because there wasn't the, the budget or there wasn't the discipline imposed by, you know, more constrained budgets. All right. Could you explain to the audience what the MDAP?

is what it stands for and why the Pentagon wants to avoid it. This is something you just wrote about, right? I did. I published a piece just today about this. So an MDAP is a major defense acquisitions program. Those are all the, well, what they should be is they should be every single major, major weapons program that we have. But what I've noticed is that the services are getting creative in avoiding that process. Now, the the the mdap process the acquisitions process is a it is a behemoth and it is it's very big it's very unwieldy there are a lot of steps involved in in bringing about a major weapon system by the book by the through the MDAP process and I would be the first to tell anybody that if you really look at it

and you look at the whole process there are plenty of places that that it can be streamlined and there needs to be a concerted effort to streamline it to reduce some of the burdens that it imposes, but we need to keep the necessary oversight so the system does not run amok. Now, that being said, programs like the F-35 are being run as major defense acquisitions programs, and so the system will, you know, can produce over-budget and over-priced weapons systems. But that all being said, that does not mean that the services should be able to make up the rules as they go by, well, a little bit of verbal jujitsu. So a good example. And this is the one that really kind of prompted me to write the piece today, or that we published today, was the Army's tank upgrade program. The Army is upgrading the, is coming out with a third generation, M1A2, the M1A2 set version 3. And they're running it as a, they're calling it an engineering change.

proposal. And when if you if you add up all the costs involved with the entire program, it, it, it vastly surpasses the threshold to be considered a major defense, a category one major defense acquisitions program. And something that's really interesting is the army is currently running the, the upgrade program for the Hercules, the Mike 88 Hercules tank recovery vehicle as an MDAP, but they're running the, the new tank program as as an engineering change proposal. So the recovery, the tank recovery vehicle is going to receive more scrutiny than the tank that it's supposed to recover. When did MDAP come into being? And can you kind of give us an overview of how it works to make us understand why they want to avoid it? That's a good question.

The program, I don't know the exact dates, you know, when it really, when it really began. it's a it's a process that that has really kind of evolved and over the over the years into into what it has you know it's a it's a really great example of of kind of bureaucratic creep you know the the the way more and more regulations are added and and fewer ever taken away but the the overview of it it's it's a multi-step process it really kind of begins when the the services I identify a capability gap. And that could be a whole bunch of different things, but we'll just take a, you know, take a fighter plane, for example.

The services decide that, hey, you know, the aircraft that we have aren't exactly meeting, meeting our needs, and they definitely aren't going to meet our needs, you know, out into, as we, as we, you know, view out into the future. So let's take a look and see what capabilities that we really need. So that kind of begins a process where they go through studies. And one of the first things that they do is they actually try to identify, you know, whether or not the capability can be met by non-material means, by, let's say, changing tactics or something like that.

But, you know, pretty generally, they do say that, oh, it does require a new material need. And so we're going to pursue a new system. And so then they develop, you know, the requirements, like what is the new system going to, you know, what are we going to need it to do? And so they come up with a requirements list. And then these are eventually farmed out to defense contractors in an ideal world. You'll have multiple contractors that will build essentially production representative prototypes. Those prototypes will compete in kind of a head-to-head competition. And then the best one, the best system will win that process.

And at milestone C, or a correction at milestone B, that's when the winning contractor is announced. And then they begin the engineering and manufacturing development phase where, and this is where the F-35 program is right now, where they fully developed the system. And it goes through all the testing, the developmental testing. And then once that's done, then it goes through the initial operational test and evaluation period. And after that, when it gets a clean bill of health, again, an ideal situation, it gets a clean bill of health after IOT&E. Then you get the milestone C, and then it becomes a full production model and is farmed out to the fleet. So, again, this is a very long process. the Department of Defense actually created a defense acquisition university here in the in the D.C. area

to put its people through, to go through all of these processes, because it is very cumbersome. Something I didn't include in our piece, but we found it the other day. There's this big poster-sized printout that shows it's like the PowerPoint slide from hell that shows all the different nodes and all the different processes that have to go through that they have to go through in order to complete the process the right way. Okay, well, that sounds like a long, involved heavily bureaucratic process. I think David's argument, I think he kind of makes it in the audio, in the clip we heard, is that it's those kinds of processes that are actually creating the budget overruns, that are making the budget so expensive. Oh, I would wholeheartedly disagree with that. you know, the source of the, the source of the budget overruns are generally very poor decisions that were made very early on.

You know, in order to, and we call it in our little world of military reform, we call it the frontloading of projects. And that's where the defense contractors and the program offices in the Pentagon, they make these wild claims about all the wonderful things that this program is going to do. do and about how inexpensively it's going to it's going to be in order in order to do that. So they save those kind of things in order to to get the process rolling. And then later on, once they realize that they've that they've overpromised the capabilities and they grossly overstated the, or they greatly understated, I should say, the expected cost of the system. That's the real source of the budget overruns.

It's not the process. The process contributes to that in only very minor ways. It's the way that they overpromise the capabilities and they undersell or they definitely overpromise on the savings. All right, War College listeners, thank you so much for joining us. We are on with Dan Grazier talking about the Pentagon budget. We back right after this. Thank you so much War College listeners. that was a word from our sponsors. You are back.

We are talking to Dan Grazier about the Pentagon's budget. Do you think there's ever going to be a reckoning? Is a lot of this feels to me, and this just occurred to me now, so tell me if I'm completely off base. This feels like almost like an economic bubble. And that it's going to swell and that it will burst one day. And hopefully the bursting is not some sort of major conflict where we find out these weapons are all not what we've been told.

were. Well, that's, that's definitely our biggest fear. And, and that's the, and that's the real motivation that, that I have when I go to work every day is we want to make sure that, that we don't, that, that these things don't fail and, and this whole system doesn't explode in our face, uh, in, in that kind of a situation where we're, we're in a war and all of a sudden, all these weapons that we've devoted, uh, decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to, uh, end up not performing well. That's the biggest fear. But then the other fear is that, and again, this is another term of art, is that, you know, we're going to face this massive bow wave in defense acquisitions where, you know, we, you know, because the services have front-loaded

all these programs, and, you know, we might very quickly end up in this position. If you think about things like the F-35 program, if, you know, in the next couple years, when it does finally, you know, if and when it does finally pass the milestone C, and it goes into full rate production, and we start spending, you know, tens of billions of dollars every year trying to buy those, and the B-21 program reaches the same point in a couple years, and we're spending tens of billions of dollars to, you know, to buy all those, and at the same time, we're trying to do the same thing with the Ford aircraft carrier program and all these other different systems, that all of these things are going to come to do at the same time, and we're just not going to be

able to afford it. That's the bow wave for defense acquisitions. And that could, that could be a big, a big problem that ends up busing the budget because we've made, because we made poor decisions years ago, and we didn't anticipate these kind of things moving forward. Basically, because we bought a bunch of things on credit. Exactly. Exactly. Because we make these decisions and, you know, like the, again, to beat up on the F-35 program a little bit. You know, I mean, that program has its origins in the mid to late 1980s. And it really kind of took off in the early 1990s around 1993 when I was a freshman in high school. I'm 40 years old now. And the contract was awarded in 2001, but here we are in 2018 now. And the program is only just a

about to start the initial operational test and evaluation period. So, I mean, these decisions were made were made decades ago by people who knew when they were making these decisions that, and I'm willing to bet that some of them knew that those decisions were probably not the best ones, but they knew that they weren't going to be around when there was going to be that reckoning. Do you think that what, okay, if we're spending money on these big weapons systems, other things aren't being, let me think of how to rephrase this, sorry. What parts of the pit of the military budget actually deserve more cash?

Well, definitely the operations and maintenance side of it. And, you know, making sure that the education process or, you know, the schools, the training and education commands get the resources that they need and definitely maintaining the systems that we that we already have. And, you know, there's there's a lot of people who like to go around and make claims about older aircraft and how older aircraft are a bad thing. Well, not necessarily. There's nothing inherently wrong with an older aircraft and with really any older system. You know, if something is designed well from the very beginning and you maintain it properly, it can be used. for you know for decades I mean you know I mean some the A10 is the really classic

example of that right right you know again if if the if the A10 is maintained properly it is still an extremely useful aircraft and but the the Air Force doesn't like it and they've been trying to start with the resources for years and years good example is they let the contract lapse for the rewinging effort and now they're they're they're because they were they're shing aimed into starting that program up, they're kind of slow rolling it saying that we have to rebid this whole process and that's going to take a couple years and then it's going to take a while to create the tools because when they cancel the rewinging process, they actually had Boeing,

who had that contract, break all the dyes for it. So they have to, you know, basically trying to force the hand of Congress and saying, hey, we have to cancel this because the wings have timed out on it. But I mean, you can look at all. a whole lot of programs in... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They broke the dyes? Yes, yes. They don't have the tools anymore,

all the necessary tools to continue the rewinging process of the A-10. I had not heard that. That is, wow, okay. It just shows the animosity that the United States Air Force has, not just for the A-10, but for the whole mission of close air support.

Somebody going out and saying, just because something is old, it doesn't, like doesn't necessarily hold water. If a system, and this applies to a whole bunch of things, if a system is designed well from the very beginning and is maintained properly,

it can be useful for decades, if not longer. You know, look at something, I mean, you can look at something, you know, very simple.

Look at the, you know, the Colt 9-11. Like, that thing was designed so well that it hasn't been changed at all in more. in more than 100 years and people are still fighting to get them. And many in the military wish they would go back to them. But you know, you can look at, you know, the B-52.

The B-52 is still a relevant aircraft. And even though the, even though the youngest one of them is more than 50 years old, it is still a relevant aircraft because it was designed right from the very beginning and it has been maintained and upgrade properly over the years. they're pulling those out of the bone yard now aren't they yeah exactly and because they can and you know to go back to the 810 a little bit of a tangent on this one uh the the the air force was caught chopping up relevant uh useful a 10 uh frames in the bone yard and again it this is just to force the hand uh of of congress and saying that hey we have to push forward with the f35 program because it's going to be the only one that can do this uh that can perform this mission because it's a wait a second, we don't have any 8-10s anymore because they all, because they were chopped up. Good Lord. Okay.

Why doesn't? And it's not just the Air Force that does that. No, I know. It does that too. The Navy has scrapped a lot of, a lot of ships that were retired early, basically to force Congress's hand because they don't have a, and to use the popular phrase, a ghost fleet. So to force Congress's hand so they would have to buy. new ships rather than having the option of refurbishing older ones that are in the in the mothball fleet why does it seem like walks like you and me are the only ones that care about this

that's a good question i think a lot of times it's uh you know most people are uh are obviously focused on on a whole bunch of other things it takes a lot of effort to you know to really kind go through a lot of these issues and really read them and become familiar with all of them. There are plenty of people that are concerned with this. I hear from a lot of people all the time, but there are very few people who actually go out and speak publicly about this. I mean, one of the, and there's a lot of people who make a lot of money by trying to hide this kind of information as well.

So there's a whole cottage industry out there of think tanks that are wholly bought subsidiaries of the Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummans of the world who pay people a lot of money to go out and paint a very rosy picture of the, well, paint a rosy picture of the performance of new systems and then paint a very bad picture of the world to try to justify the purchase of a whole lot of these new systems. How do you think we make normal people care? do you think it's not going to happen until we have, I mean, with the F-35, they're catching on fire and there's a hypoxia problems. It seems like people should pay attention. How do we, is it going to take something grander than that? Well, I really fear that that that is the case. And again, I go to work every day to try to raise awareness of these issues. So that's not a problem.

You know, one of my biggest fears is that something like the F-35 is going to, is going to, is to fail in a way that it, that, that Americans get killed. And there are examples of this in the past. You know, you look at what happened with, and, and I take no pleasure in this as a, as, you know, as someone who wore the Marine uniform, I take no pleasure in bringing this up. But the, the Osprey program, that was a bit of a poorly conceived program in its day. That was, that was, you know, rushed along. And, and in the process, there were a lot of Marines that were killed in accidents with that program. And those are the kind of things that I work very hard to try to raise awareness of these issues to make sure that that kind of stuff does not happen.

You know, if you look at the CH 53, the Marine Heavy Lift helicopter, the new version of it, the CH 53 kilo, is coming in at approximately $131 million per copy. That's actually more expensive than the average cost of an F-35. for a helicopter. And that's a little ridiculous because it creates this situation, and I can tell you from personal experience that this does happen, that we spend so much money on these things that they become too expensive to lose, which means that they're too expensive to use.

And it questioned, you know, and that begs the question of, well, why do we spend any of this money on it in the first place if we're not willing to use it? And again, the personal experience from this is, I was in Afghanistan in 2013, and we were running hell-born missions in in our area of operations in the in the Southwest, uh, uh, a O of, of Afghanistan that year and that were being run with, uh, C.H. 53's, uh, by, you know, marine piloted C.H. 53s. And I can tell you that we weren't sending those into like, we knew where the bad guys were. And we knew where, um, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we where a lot of enemy activity was, but we weren't sending the CH53s into those areas. We were sending them into other areas that weren't all that bad. And when you asked the question about it, well, you know, we don't want to risk the helicopters by sending them into those areas.

And those were not the $131 million versions of these helicopters. They were the older, less expensive versions of him. So, you know, again, by having this permissive budget, environment that creates this in discipline where we spend, you know, $131 million on a helicopter, we kind of create this situation where we have this very expensive, very delicate military system that we're not really willing to use in all situations. So you really have to ask, like what was the point in this program in the first place? It's like a toy collector that buys all the things you wanted as a child and then doesn't open the box. Yeah, exactly. That's

exactly what it is. And it's, it really, uh, kind of boggles the mind when you, when you look at it and you really consider it from that perspective. Uh, you know, we, we build this military for, um, you know, that's, that's oriented for the extreme edge of the, the spectrum of conflict. And, uh, and, unfortunately, that edge of the spectrum is, is a very unlikely situation. Uh, but the much more relevant situation that somewhere, you know, in the middle of the lower end, you have this military force that is really not, you know, not, not, not geared for that. It's definitely not equipped for it. And, and a lot of times it's not really trained for it either. And, and so, and sometimes it's actually, it's actually counterproductive.

You know, we kind of lose right from the very outset on the moral dimension of warfare, which is the strongest dimension, uh, by sending a, you know, $120 million, fighter aircraft to drop a, you know, a $100,000 munition on a tent. And, you know, we really kind of create the situation where you create a David and Goliath situation where we're Goliath. And quite frankly, very few people have rooted for Goliath over the last 2,500 years of that story's been told. That's all for this week, War College listeners.

As always, Jason and I appreciate you. The show would not exist without your love and support. If you like the show, please follow us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. Be sure to like and subscribe via iTunes Stitcher or Android Play. We get a lot of notes and reviews from listeners, and we appreciate all of them. Here's one from Dwight CDD. The host of War College use penetrating questioning to shed light on some broadly uncovered topics. This is convergence journalism at its best.

Thanks, Dwight, and I agree with you about the gobbled you cook. Next week, we'll have a great conversation about DARPA and Disney World, and after that, we'll be checking in with China. And yes, we are still working on that episode about the Praetorian Guard. See you next week.