Angry Planet - The security threats both candidates are ignoring

Episode Date: November 1, 2016

With Russia a wildcard, Islamic State on the run, budgets out of control and several Forever Wars, the next U.S. president will have their plate full.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. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. I really think he thinks that he can operate as an imperial president. I take him at his word that he intends to try to fire generals, and I think he will be the utter salvation of both ISIS and Al Qaeda.

This week we tried something a little bit different. Malcolm Nance, Andrew Bacevich, and Mandy Smithberger joined Matthew Galt to talk about the security implications of either a Clinton or Trump presidency. While many in the cognoscenti have voiced reservations about Donald Trump, the War College panel sees trouble ahead for Hillary Clinton, too. So, can either candidate offer any solutions? You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, listeners, and welcome to War College's 2016 election special.

Whoever wins the 2016 election will inherit a 15-year-old war in Afghanistan, a conflict with the Islamic State, a military budget rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, and a relationship with Russia that has some nostalgic for the Cold War. We're here today to cut through the noise and talk policy. It's been a strange election and a lot of important issues have fallen through the cracks. So we're going to discuss the challenges the next president faces and remind the voters what's really at stake in this election. With me to help do that is retired U.S. Army Colonel and current Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University, Andrew Bacevic. Bacevic is the author of many fine books, including his most recent, America's War for the Greater Middle East, a military history. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be with you. Also with us is

former U.S. Navy officer and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance. Nance is an expert in security and has served as an intelligence and security contractor in Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Air of Emirates, and North Africa. His most recent book is The Plot to Hack America, how Putin's cyber spies and WikiLeaks tried to steal the 2016 election. Mr. Nance, thank you so much for being here. Well, I'm just glad that you could hold this on the Navy's 241st anniversary. Thank you. Perfect. To round out the panel and keep us honest and hopefully on budget is Mandy Smithberger from the Project on Government Oversight. She's a former National Security Policy Advisor to U.S. Representative Jackie Speer of California and the current director of Pogo's Strauss Military Reform

Project. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to start with Afghanistan. On October 7th, the war turned 15 years old. The Taliban is making inroads, neither candidate, to my knowledge, and please correct me if I'm wrong, has spoken at length about the war. It didn't come up during any of the debates. Mr. Basevich, what's the situation there in what's America's mission? Well, that's a good question. My sense is that the conditions in Afghanistan are gradually deteriorating. It is difficult for me to see that there are any efforts underway that point to any sort of a definitively favorable outcome. On the contrary, what seems most likely is that this longest war in our history will simply

become longer still. That said, I think you actually have put your finger on the most important issue here, and that is the extent to which the American people have agreed to allow the two major candidates to simply ignore this war's existence. I made a point a couple weeks back of reading the convention speeches that each gave, and neither Secretary Clinton nor Mr. Trump even mentioned the word Afghanistan. So this seems to me is indicative of the extent to which war has now become normalized, accepted as a permanent part of our political landscape. and indicative of the lack of accountability by members of our political establishment in ignoring this longest of American wars. I want to point out the party platforms.

The Republican Party platform only mentions Afghanistan in terms of immigration from the area. The Democratic Party platform says they will, quote, continue to push for an Afghan-led peace process and that they generally support President Obama's decision to maintain a limited troop presence through 2017. Malcolm, does America have a moral obligation to Afghanistan, and how do we end this war? Well, I think we do have a security obligation to Afghanistan. I'm not sure if we have a continued moral obligation since we killed the man that was responsible for September 11th, who dragged us into Afghanistan. You know, I really feel that right now, I mean, having been there in 2002, you know,

and that was the first time that I went there, that we are sort of like in the period when England had its first Anglo-Afghan War in the 1840s and then came back and had the second Afghan Anglo War in the 1880s and essentially had to annex the entire place, establish their own leadership, you know, and unlike today, there are no emirs that you're going to be able to establish there that will have any stability. We are fighting a counterinsurgency war against people that live there and that war has been a day-to-day effect of their lives, Since the 1979 with the Russian, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it's just been a, it's just a component of their lives. And with God's will, as they say, they will just persevere through that. And if we withdraw, it will go back to the way it was before. And if we stay, then we're going to have to have a security commitment that is, you know, on par with, you know, British India, where you have to literally create yourself a security state. and try to professionalize the Afghan forces for another 20 years.

Mandy, do we have any idea how much the war in Afghanistan has cost us? So the war in Afghanistan has cost about $800 billion. Reconstruction has cost about $115 billion. And we're going to be spending probably in the next year about another billion dollars a year for reconstruction and $4 billion a year for Afghan national security forces. Something that we've been concerned about, though, attempts to classify the assessments as to the readiness of those forces and the inadequate

accountability for that spending. Who's been trying to push through classification? So those have been our own military officials. And to some degree, it's obviously understandable that we don't want to expose huge vulnerabilities, but we need to make sure that there's some democratic accountability when we're spending that much money to train these forces when they're concerns about ghost soldiers. Right.

problems with the Afghan military, right? Afghan commanders are overreporting their troop levels, and the Pentagon is paying for soldiers who may not even exist, correct? That's correct. I'll turn this next question over to the group. Why hasn't this come up? If we stay in Afghanistan, it seems as if we'll be locked in for 10 or 20 years. We're wasting billions of dollars to stay with no clear idea that it's helping. Why hasn't this come up during the election? What's going on? It seems to me that the absence of accountability with regard to Afghanistan, the unwillingness of leading politicians even to discuss the matter is part and parcel of a somewhat larger phenomenon, and that is the refusal to evaluate what our military involvement in the greater Middle East has produced

over the past several decades. So it's not simply an absence. of attention to Afghanistan. I believe it's an absence of attention to Iraq, to Libya, to Yemen, to Somalia, you know, you name it. And one of the reasons I think that there is this absence of attention is that both parties are implicated in this failed military enterprise. There is no anti-military party. There's no party that is in general skeptical of armed interventionism. there comes to be almost a conspiracy of silence. And disturbingly, the American people are willing to indulge that, rather than insisting that the conduct of these wars to include Afghanistan,

rather than insisting that they ought to be at the very center of debate and discussion during the presidential election year. So when you say that, it makes me feel as if the American public is the problem. We're not holding their feet to the fire. Is that accurate? Well, that is indeed my judgment. or to put it another way, if there is going to ever be a change of policy, a basic policy, if there's ever going to be a move toward greater prudence and pragmatism with regard to the use of our military, it's only going to happen if enough of the American people stand up and say, hey, wait a second,

this is stupid. This is not working. This is utterly unsatisfactory. That critique is not going to come from the top down. it's going to have to come from the bottom up. And sad to say, there's, as far as I can tell, precious little indication of popular mobilization around these matters. You know, the American people still have the capacity to get mad about stuff, whether it's the evidence by the Occupy movement, evidenced by Black Lives Matter, evidence by outrage over, you know, sexual assault. But the American people seem to have lost their capacity to get outraged by foolish foreign

policies and needless and badly managed wars. That they tolerate. Yeah, if I could just step in there. He's absolutely right. I mean, the American population has this capacity to get outraged for about an hour. And this was not the way it was. Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, you know, real politic, you know, and the place of the United States in the world. and setting strategic doctrine was standard. There is no strategy being done here. Osama bin Laden attacked the United States quite clearly, in his own words, in order to draw us into Afghanistan to do to us what he believed he did to the Soviet Union

and that that would bring about a clash of civilizations and it would break us economically and financially. And it almost did do it, you know, in a roundabout way. But he had a strategy. And he had a strategy that was built over what he believed would be a hundred years of spreading his ideology and dealing with the West. We are reactive. And George W. Bush, when he went into Afghanistan properly, did it quickly.

But then, you know, within two to three, within three months, I believe, he had already done his shift to invading Iraq. And I know, I mean, I was on the ground when people were telling me in January 2002, stop thinking about Afghanistan. Let's get ready for the next big shift in Iraq. And I was like, what? What are we talking about, Iraq? So, you know, the American public is going to have to be reeducated

that there are strategic policies out there that need to be confronted over a very long period of time and not, you know, quick wars where they think that they can get in a victory. Afghanistan is going to have to go into a stewardship of sorts, a combat stewardship. ship where we'll have trainers, we'll have special forces to bring pressure on what remains of al-Qaeda and the now dwindling ISIS over there because the Taliban is turning ISIS into us. And then at some point, I'm not sure who's going to do it, but someone is going to have to make some form of rapprochement with the Taliban and, you know, and wean them off of warfare as a way of life. And whether that happens in my lifetime or my children's lifetime is the big question.

The one thing I would add is that the American people have a lot that's going on. Where we get really concerned is where Congress isn't doing its job and conducting oversight and holding these military leaders accountable. All right, let's talk Russia. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recently gave an interview where he worried over the future and said that U.S. and Russia need to start talking again. Reuters just interviewed someone they described a close Putin ally who said that Americans must vote for Trump or risk nuclear war. What's going on? Okay.

You're talking about Vladimir Geronovsky, you know, who is a component of the Kremlin's propaganda ministry. I think what's going on, and it's very interesting because I just finished a book on this, where it is less about Donald Trump and it is more about Vladimir Putin and his KGB background and how he turned the FSB. back into the new KGB, I mean, based on all old-school Soviet operations and how he saw this opportunity to reposition Russia from third place in the world, as far as in economic and superpower goes, to first place or second place in the world, by certainly creating enough mischief in this election

to allow the processes that Mandy spoke about earlier, the inactivity of Congress, the inability of certainly the Republican side of Congress to not give the president anything, not one dime if he requested, including funds to combat ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and Russia sees that stagnation as an opportunity. Now, Russia's a nation right now that has some of the lowest income in the world, almost on par per capita income, on par with India right now. It's that bad over there. And with oil prices being as low as they are, he has to find strength somewhere else. And in 2012, the Russian reset wasn't the American relationship with Russia going astray.

It was Russia deciding they would become a more, well, propagandistically stronger nation and would start becoming more adventurousome, aggressive, asserting itself, creating its own markets, taking away markets from the United States, and allowing American. America's inability to solve its own problems, be its doom. And that would move Russia from third place to second place, you know, to second place in the United States down the third place behind China. And I certainly see all of the hallmarks of that. You know, even though I'm a Middle East guy, I started out in Russian intelligence world.

My three children are adopted from Moscow, if that gives you anything to play with. I have my own KGB cell in my house. So I know how they act. But in this case, I think that Russia is trying to position itself as a new, aggressive Cold War posture for its own public consumption as much as rattling Americans' nerves in order to create more instability. Mr. Basevic, what are your thoughts on this? And let me ask you a specific question. During the second debate, Hillary Clinton floated the idea of establishing a no-fly zone in Syria. How do you think that would go over? go over in the sense of what results? Yeah, what would the results be and how would Russia react to something like that? Well, first of all, I wouldn't support the idea because, again, the presumption is that

bearing down militarily, us bearing down military, militarily is going to somehow yield positive outcomes in Syria. And there's simply no evidence of that occurring. we have plenty of examples of the United States intervening militarily in the region with expectations of making things better and it simply doesn't happen. In many respects, we make things worse. So I'm not for a deeper U.S. military involvement in Syria. But to get to the larger question about Russia, I don't think I, if I, I think I understood everything Malcolm was saying, I don't think I agree. I don't agree in the sense that it seems to me it's very important for us not to indulge.

Putin's expectations that he somehow, or ambitions that he's somehow going to restore Russian greatness. To Malcolm's point that this is, in many respects, a poor country. I was looking at some figures the other day that the total size of the Russian economy is equal to the total size of the Italian economy. Russia is a country that until quite recently, I believe, the population's been shrinking. And it's shrinking, at least as I understand it, because Russian males are killing. themselves through the alcohol and drug abuse, not signed to a healthy society.

So my sense is that Putin is actually playing a very, very weak hand. He's got his nose out of joint, perhaps many Russians have their noses out of joint because of the way that Russia has been treated since the Cold War ended. We have treated the West. We have treated Russia with considerable contempt in absorbing former Soviet republics into NATO in expanding the EU up to the very borders of Russia. You know, it's always useful to sort of try to look at the situation from the other guy's point of view, that kind of behavior on the part of Russia vis-a-vis Europe or of China, let's say, vis-a-vis the Western Hemisphere, we would certainly view it as hostile.

So they have some reason for their behavior. That doesn't justify it. But I think one should not indulge the notion that Russian behavior is indicative of a resumption of the Cold War and anything like the bipolar competition that was at the center of the Cold War. Malcolm, do you want to respond to that? No, I take great pride in having Andrew Bessovich come out and challenge my assertions. I think he is correct in the sense that this isn't a new Cold War. Certainly not, like you said, the bipolar challenge between the two nations, which we were, you know, nuclear missiles were being built at an enormous rate and militaries were being expanded just on the belief that our opponents could get a strategic advantage over us. That's not what's happening.

What we're seeing is I think Putin is playing a propaganda war and he is stretching out what he believes to be these muscles, you know, of flying backfire bomber missions from Russia. to drop a bomb in Syria. But when you look at that, that backfire bombers dropping like 20 unguided bombs, the way a German bomber would have flown over Stalingrad in World War II and dropped them. Whereas we have B-2 bomber missions that will fly from Missouri to Iraq or Afghanistan drop off precision bombs and fly to Diego Garcia and then back to Missouri. I think they're jealous of that to a certain extent. And all of these new machinations, the new deployments of battle fleets and aircraft carriers and intelligence

collectorships and more aggressive flights along Finland and the North Sea are just sort of a shadow of what they thought was their greatness. But the only way that we really know most of these things are occurring outside of the military is that they're putting them up on Sputnik and Russia today almost nonstop. So his target audience is less of the West than his own people. I agree with that, by the way, emphatically. But can I pose a question for Malcolm? Because I think it's important not to overreact to the kind of provocations that you just mentioned using a conventional arsenal. But the part that does trouble me, and I'm only going here by press reports, is the hacking. These intrusions into crucial networks mucking around with our political,

process. Now, the extent to which this is a result of Russian policy as opposed to mischief makers, I'm not quite sure, but if we posit that it reflects a real policy, then I'm troubled. And frankly, I don't know exactly what we can do to persuade Putin, if indeed he's behind this mischief making, to persuade him that it is not in Russia's interest to continue down that path. In other words, to move to a bit of a bit of a mischief making, to persuade him. And in other words, to move to a bit of a cyber ceasefire, if you want to call it that. Do you have any ideas on that? Sure. You know, Brian Williams called me one of the coolest heads in counterterrorism that he's ever met. But this is the one area that I am hair on fire at full alert. I do what is happening right now,

based on my analysis, I just put out a 200-some-a-page book on it. This is not mischief making. This is a full-scale FSB. directed operation that was ordered by Vladimir Putin to swing the results of this election. And by doing it by hacking every component of the Democratic Party's machine, literally Watergate 2.0, only this time nobody got caught. They were successful. They hacked the DNC, the D-Triple C, the DSCC, the Hillary Clinton campaign and their donors, and all of the opponents to Russia and the Ukraine policy, including John McCain. and Lindsey Graham. Those are the only two Republicans and Colin Powell because they thought his emails would be

embarrassing. Those are the only Republicans who were hacked, really hacked by, we have tracked that back to GRU and FSB's branch, you know, the Special Communications Security Service, which is their version of NSA. We've also matched them to the hackings of Ukraine a year ago when they shut down three power plants and left 80,000 people out of power, the hacking of the German parliament, the hacking of French television, the hacking of the government of Estonia, and the hacking of the government of Georgia. So what can we do to get them to cease and desist? Well, we are, you know, the president has made it very clear. He has high confidence that

this is the Russian intelligence. And we are technically in the first steps of having shots, having to shoot cyber shots across Russia's bow. We don't want this to escalate to where we start dropping other countries' infrastructures, which can happen. I mean, they have the capacity, we have the capacity. But something is going to have to be done. And I suspect that the president will order cyber command in NSA to launch a cyber. I refer to them as cyber weapon systems because they are essentially electronic cruise missiles

at their proxies, which is the criminal bear. as we call them. These are their hackers that the subcontract for the FSB and the GRU. And we'll take their money. These are the guys who steal credit cards and do add fraud and earn billions through illicit internet activities. So that's where I would go because it doesn't directly affect the Russian government. And it takes a big chunk of change out of the people that rely on the Russian government's permission to operate in cyberspace. But, I mean, so retaliate. We have to.

But the response to retaliation could be to bring Russian authorities to their senses. Right. The response could be further escalation. You know, Richard Clark himself warned years ago about a cyber Pearl Harbor. And right now what we have is we have a slow roll placing of a 50 pound weight. on the scale of the U.S. election. And now that they've been called out, you know, the only thing left to see is,

do they directly attack us on election day by, you know, messing with, not the voter rolls, but the statewide tallies. And if that's the case, then there's your Pearl Harbor. I mean, the U.S. election process has been screwy, but it's been relatively solid for 240 years. And Russia is the first actor to truly decide to mess with that process.

and elect a person that's amenable to them. I don't know what should happen. It's going to be in the hands of the next president or possibly the current president, but we are entering a new dimension of and a new battle space that we have not been operating before, you know, is more like the Cold War and espionage. Now we're talking about cyber battle groups, having to launch cyber weapons systems and disable or hijacked systems. This is a new game.

The only caveat I might add to what you just said, though, is that I think the cyber Pearl Harbor already happened, and it happened when we and the Israelis attacked the Iranian nuclear research facilities. Oh, yeah, but, you know, it's always awesome when it's our Pearl Harbor. We're the Japanese, right? But the question is, you know, when it's their turn and we suddenly wake up and the eastern sea border of the United States is offline. and it's not the Iranians or it's a proxy group that's been given that capability using FSB software or they give it to some ISIS hacker group, which is something I tracked in another book that I have next year. Then, you know, this thing will quickly escalate it to cruise missiles. If I may, and this is, I think, an excellent example of what we should be hearing presidential candidates talk about. To my mind, and I believe me, I am not, have little expertise in these matters, but that possibility of the

eastern seaboard going dark seems to me to be of far greater importance than, than frankly, most of what's going on in the Middle East. I mean, what's happening in the Middle East is a vast, human tragedy. But in terms of whether or not events there affect the well-being of the United States of America, I would say that the growing cyber threat is vastly more important and yet doesn't get talked about. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, I'll make this short, the president made his announcement. Precisely as I predicted in my book, the president would have to make the announcement that the United States was technically under attack by a hostile intelligence agency. and that the United States needs to go on guard.

Unfortunately, he made that announcement on the same day that we found the video from Donald Trump talking about grabbing women, and therefore it was completely lost, and we may suffer for that. I want to talk about the Islamic State. Andrew, do you think it's possible to defeat the Islamic State without dragging out America's war in the Greater Middle East?

And should we? Well, I think defeating the Islamic State is an imperative. at least my reading of events in the battlefield that perhaps slower than any of us would want, things are actually moving in the right direction. How this long-awaited offensive to liberate Mosul unfolds will tell us a lot, I think, about where things are headed. But my argument is this, that however necessary the defeat of ISIS is, when that day arrives, It's not as if that then enables us to declare final victory, go home and say, well, good, everything is fixed now.

ISIS is a manifestation of forces that will persist even in the absence of ISIS. And really the larger strategic question is how can we restore some semblance of stability to that part of the world? my conviction is that it is not within the capability of the United States to do that unless we want to occupy the entire Persian Gulf with, you know, three-fourths of a million American soldiers from now until the cows come home. We're not willing to do that. We can't afford that. There's no political will to do that.

And so the solution, that is to say, the path to restoring stability, to my mind, has to come by mobilizing the powers in the region, who may differ with one another on any number of important matters, but who in fact share a common interest in restoring some semblance of stability, in maintaining the state system that, for the most part, the Brits created in the wake of World War I. So our task is not a military one. Our task is a diplomatic one, and that is to persuade Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, you name it, to set aside, at least for the moment, their differences, and to make common cause in addressing

what really is a transcendent and for them existential threat. They need to collaborate to restore stability. We can't do it for them. Malcolm? Yeah, he's absolutely right. Isis, as my reading from the battlefield goes and I watch it on a daily basis, ISIS is most likely, unless there's a massive setback in Mosul's operations. It won't exist next year as a caliphate within Iraq and Syria. They're surrounded on four sides right now. And the mission is a meat grinder. And that's what the intent is, is to grind them down. And I think they're soon going to be coming to their Okinawa moment where, you know, the families will be throwing themselves off of cliffs and, and the fighters will be throwing each and every one of them at their enemies with suicide attacks. There won't be any survivors on the,

you know, out of the military age males, unless they're captured. The real question is, what are you going to do with all those families that are there? We had a study where we discussed the return of female members who were European, American, sub-Saharan African. What are they going to do? Are they going to stay in refugee camps for the rest of their lives without passports? But the rest of the organization is going to devolve into what I call a ghost caliphate, where it will center itself on the Internet and the ideology,

because we haven't even tried to kill it, is going to continue to persist and may manifest itself elsewhere, like, you know, back in Somalia or in the North African South. Do we think either candidate will conduct the war against Islamic State differently? You said they soon won't exist as a caliphate, but will Trump or Clinton do anything materially different? Andy? Let Mandy weigh in here. Yeah, Mandy. It seems under Secretary Clinton that we're going to be looking at something fairly similar to what we've been seeing under Obama and not seeing much of a change.

The challenging thing with observing Mr. Trump is difficult to predict how that would look, at least from our standpoint. So as with so much in this election, it seems as if Clinton will be a continuation of Obama's policies and Trump is a big question mark. That's what I think is true. I mean, you know, it's very difficult to try to take Trump's off-the-cuff remarks and then say, oh, okay, that'll translate into the following four-point plan. He says he's got a secret plan to defeat ISIS. But if the secret plan, and I don't know what his secret plan is, but if the secret plan, for example, would imagine a serious escalation in the number of U.S. forces actually on the ground to expand. the U.S. on the ground involvement to include a fairly large-scale combat involvement, you know, not advising, but fighting, he, I think, would run into very serious resistance,

among other people, from the senior American military leadership, which I suspect is not in the mood to have a replay of the Iraq War of 2003-2011. So we have to remember, I think, to some degree that when we're in this election moment, we sometimes talk as if the person we elect is going to be the emperor, or in this case the empress. And the truth is that any president operates within some fairly narrow limits as to what range of options is possible. So, my, that's a very long-winded way of saying that I basically agree that what we're going to see, regardless of who wins, is more or less more of the same. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

I think with Hillary Clinton, we're going to get that meat grinder, right? It's going to be the millstone grinding ISIS up until the caliphates no more and then dealing with it as brush fires, you know, in the places where we now have operations. We've had success with that. ISIS was defeated in Libya, technically, two days ago when they made the announcement that SERT had been cleansed and they had been driven to a three-block area. If they've moved down into the tribal areas or back into the Sahara, that's technically it for ISIS and Libya.

Supporting ISIS, you know, Egyptian operations and taking them on in Afghanistan. Yemen's the only place that we don't have a real handle on them, even though there are Saudi and Gulf State forces there. But for the most part, that's called real politic. And Hillary Clinton will certainly be able to manage that in the way that, you know, knowing the limitations of the presidency. Donald Trump, on the other hand, I really think he thinks that he can operate as an imperial president. I take him at his word that he intends to try to fire generals. And I think he will be the utter salvation of both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

It will be a new day. There will be a new future organization, which will bring about whatever remaining and surviving members of it are, because he will so antagonize the Muslim world that 1.5 billion people who are firmly against this, maybe a percentage of them will think, well, maybe this is what it takes to stop being discriminated against or treated like second-class citizens in their own countries. You know, rhetoric is not just words, okay? Rhetoric is the potential for action by presenting your mental view of how you see the world. And I think it is a very, very, very dangerous world out there. And as an intelligence operative or operator, my job is to predict the future. And all I see is bad in a future world if there was a Trump presidency. And, you know, it's incumbent upon the American people to decide if they want to see the world burn

or if they would just like to see the world attempt to assemble some measure of stability. On that cheerful note, I'm going to bring us to the last topic, which is, I think, one of the great taboos in American political life, the Pentagon's budget. Oh, thank God. Thank God, Mandy, we got to yourself. Mandy, what does America spend on its military? So by conservative estimates, we have a $600 billion budget. When you really look at all of the costs of our national security, it's closer to a trillion dollars a year.

One person that is talking about military spending is Trump. He says America's military is in shambles, that it never wins anymore, and he wants to build it back up. Mandy, do you feel any of that is true? Is America's military in shambles? I don't think that's true. I think our military is quite strong. we are concerned about some of our future plans and how our current management of our budget could weaken the military in the future. But most of all, we don't think that increasing spending is going to strengthen the military.

What we've seen is that when you have these kinds of huge increases in spending, and it's important to keep in mind that the Obama administration is spending more now than at the peak of the Reagan buildup. but what you're seeing is that we're not making choices and that we end up mismanaging systems. What are your concerns? What are we mismanaging? So the F-35 is the poster child. And what really is concerning about rhetoric, like Mr. Trump's, and the emphasis on how we need to get weapon systems very quickly delivered, is that we found time and time again that that results in us delivering weapon systems

that are less effective and that even though we think that we're going to be speedy, about it, that they take longer to develop because we discover problems that then have to be fixed at great cost. And then ultimately, it means that we can have fewer planes, fewer ships, and our military service members have a harder time maintaining the systems that we have. I'd like to jump in very shortly. You know, we just had a situation where two U.S. Navy warships, one, the USS Mason, was engaged off the coast of Yemen by a very advanced Chinese-made any ship missile that was smuggled in by the Iranians to the Houthi rebels. It and its sister ship, the USS Knights, managed to go back and retaliate by destroying

the surface search radars. But not before they had to engage or engage and avoid four C-802 anti-ship missiles. In my 20-year career, and I was considered quite the bullet magnet in terms of naval warfare, even though as a land warfare specialist, I was taken under attack by three anti-ship missile systems in 20 years. We just had four launched in eight hours at us. We are spending money within our, within the Navy, for example, to process systems to fight the, you know, perhaps not think about the wars that we really need to be fighting, you know, the future wars. You know, one of the ships that was that was destroyed off of Yemen recently was a swift ship,

catamaran ship that had been contracted by the U.S. Special Operations Command for some time. A week ago, it was hit by one of those Chinese anti-shipping missiles and burned from end to end. It was a contract ship. It wasn't one that we constructed, but some of the warships like the literal combat ship just don't have the capacity to fight a multidimensional war the way an unlimited brawl is going to be in a future war. You don't know whether you're going to be fighting the Iranian Navy like I did in 1988 or you don't know whether you're going to have to go through minefields or fight against some rebel group that's got, you know, 200 anti-ship missiles. And we set ourselves up for failure when we don't think through what is the actual end state

battle going to be, the way that we're doing with land warfare systems, you know, which are also all oriented to insurgency now and not quite capable of taking on a North Korean full-scale invasion or even a battle in Central Europe. So I think a lot of money is being wasted on, you know, just piling on to the post-war counterterrorism world, which I was involved in. I mean, the day before 9-11, I had the only counterterrorism consultancy in Washington, D.C.

And the day after, I was literally being handed cards by Lockheed Martin, saying they were the world's experts in terrorism. So, you know, I think that's where quite a bit, if not 30, 40 percent of the waste fraud and abuse is going. in weapon systems that just aren't oriented to the current and future wars. Mandy, do we have any idea how much of the Pentagon's budget is gobbled up by waste, fraud, and abuse? You know, it's billions, but in some of that is, you know, spending nearly a billion to $2 billion, spending too much money for spare parts and not paying, like, fair and reasonable prices or overstocking.

In some cases, it's having cost overruns for systems and paying for the costs of concurrency. which is when we are producing systems before they are even close to being fully tested, but it's easily billions. I think it's interesting that this is one of those topics like Afghanistan that we don't talk about. Why do you think that is? Yet again, I think this is another time where we have to look to our elected representatives and how they aren't really doing their jobs for us in the Congress, that there's very little accountability for these weapons systems that a lot of the Pentagon

budget is not treated as how do we have the most effective defense for our country, but how do we have the most prolific jobs programs? So now we look at these weapons systems as job creators, job programs. Absolutely. And that's led to the ballooning budgets. Ballooning budgets and no one wanting to criticize someone else's bad system lest they invite criticism of a system that's being built in their district. Mr. Nance, Mr. Basevic, do you have anything to add? One thing is that, you know, you began this section by ticking off Trump's critique. And one item was the American military doesn't win. I think actually that's what that charge sticks and deserves examination.

When I say win, of course, I'm not referring to win firefighters, win tactically, but win in the sense of conclusively achieving our stated political purposes. That's why you go to war to achieve policy objectives. And that's where our military has fallen short. And again, that's where there really ought to be a very lively discussion. Why don't we win? What's the problem? Is the problem political decision-making?

Is it senior military leadership? Is it the way our forces are designed, equipped, trained, the way our officers are educated, all of the above? but it is politically a lot easier. I think it's particularly true within the Congress, simply to say, we've got the world's greatest military, I support the troops,

and let it go at that. So when you talk about waste, fraud, and abuse, I don't know how much money, I mean, Mandy says billions, I'm sure that's true in terms of too many spare parts or of weapon systems that cost too much, but the real waste that ends up being into the trillions

when we stack up the expected ultimate cost of our wars in the greater Middle East, it's a waste of wars that are arguably unnecessary in some cases and certainly ill-managed in almost every case. And those shortcomings, it seems to me, really deserve to be scrutinized far more closely than they have been. That was an excellent point. And, you know, if I could just add one last thing, there are some. components of the U.S. armed forces that really can be done away with. And I'm talking about

two of the three arms of the nuclear triad. Land-based ballistic missiles for all of their precision, for all of their throw weight, only have one mission, which is deterrence. And that deterrence can be equally done with the submarine ballistic missile force that we have. Land-based bombers are now being used at bomb trucks. You know, we launch a B-52 out of Guam or, or, you know, we launch a B-52 out of Guam, or out of Diego Garcia, it's going up and it's running eight, 16-hour missions with 84 precision, you know, J-dams. That's what they're being used for now. They're not part of, you know, the alert system to penetrate Russian airspace anymore, nor should they be. You know, and I'm sure there's a, that's possibly a good $50, $100 billion a year right there.

So, you know, for systems that could be brought down to one leg of the triad that is invulnerable and certainly will, provide the deterrence that we need. Mandy, Malcolm, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us and taking us through the issues that we don't talk about enough. Thanks for having me. Yes. Our pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's show.

Let us know if you like the format. And if you do, we may try it again. If you have that or anything else to say to us, you can let us know via Twitter. We are at war underscore college. We love it when you leave us comments on iTunes too. War College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Heddock. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show, or some weeks he just plain hosts it. It's produced by Bethel Hoppe.