Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:62 - Special Guest: Bill Buppert, on Iran

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

In this episode we speak with Bill Bupert of the Libertarian Institute about Saudi Arabia’s military limits and why wealthy states can still struggle to build effective conventional forces. We discuss oil wealth, imported labor, hierarchical structures, maintenance problems, and the difficulty of reporting bad news in military systems. We also talk about how modern war challenges large institutions, especially with drones, precision weapons, and missile warfare. A major part of the conversation focuses on the limits of U.S. missile defense, the vulnerability of expensive systems, and the risks faced by carrier strike groups and other large surface fleets in contested waters. We further examine Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and broader U.S. intervention patterns. We close with a discussion of logistics, corruption, readiness, and Bill’s work on irregular warfare and military reform. Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 0:03:50 Why Arab Armies Struggle 0:20:25 The Future of Big Militaries 0:34:13 Missile Defense Reality Check 0:51:15 Can We Stop a Nuclear Strike? 1:01:24 Are Carriers Obsolete? 1:16:00 Logistics, Waste, and War 1:22:40 Bill’s Final Plug (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Sponsors: Expat Money: Secure your international Plan B: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://expatmoney.com/provoked⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Agorist Tax Advice: Pick up a free copy of the brilliant Matthew Sercely's Agorist Tax Toolkit at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://AgoristTaxAdvice.com/provoked⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott Horton Blend Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://moondoesartisancoffee.com/products/scott-horton-supreme-breakfast-blend⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Provoked show site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://provoked.show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Darryl's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@martyrmade⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://subscribe.martyrmade.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@scotthortonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthortonacademy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://antiwar.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org/books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.scotthortonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is Provoked. All right, you guys. Welcome to the show. It is Provoked. I am Scott Horton. He is Darrell Cooper, and he is our special guest. Bill Bupert, my good friend. He is the Smedley-D. Butler Fellow for Conflict Studies at our Libertarian Institute. And he is also one of our guest professors at the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and

Freedom at Scotthorton.com. And this is our show Provoked, brought to you by expatmoney.com slash provoked. And I'm really happy to have Bill here. This is going to be a great conversation, mostly between these two guys, I can already foresee. But I must bring your attention to the most important thing that Bill ever wrote, which is his review of Fool's Errant. It says, if I could give six stars, I would. If you read one book about the Afghanistan debacle, this is it. I spent nearly two years there, and everything Scott writes about is true.

I've come to the conclusion that the purpose of all of America's wars since 1871 is to expand government power and provide a sophisticated money laundering operation for the military industrial congressional complex. His reading of primary and secondary sources is deep, wide, and insightful. He takes the time to follow narrative events to their conclusion and explore what caused them in the first place. Daryl, I can hear you, but I can't. Legendary.

Oh. Just one to hear. Scott, hang on. Can you hear me? Yeah. Bill says he can't hear you, but he can hear me. I can hear you. I can hear Daryl, but not you.

Well, you can hear me, right, Daryl? Yeah. Don't tell me I'm muted again. No, no, I hear you. Phil lost me. Oh. Well, that's not good. But I hear Daryl.

He can hear D. Look, okay. Scott, you talk and I'll sign while you talk. You guys go ahead here. Phil, he can hear me. Daryl, tell him that everybody else can hear me. Yeah, I think everybody else can hear him. So he wants us to just go ahead and pick it up.

I'm just going to finish introducing him and then turn it over to you, okay? Okay. Bill, as you can see, he was in Afghanistan. He was an Army officer. He is our fellow, a Smellady-D Butler Fellow at the Institute. Here is his great new piece on our blog, failure to launch. This we won't defend, which you guys are about discussing here. And then here is his two great podcasts that we feature at the Institute,

The Chasing Ghosts podcast, which is focusing on refuting counterinsurgency strategy doctrine and how there ain't no such thing and don't even. even try it stupid and so good. Oh man, it's so good. And then also, uh, broader takes on more things, war notes, a conflict podcast. And this is just top of the line stuff for all you military guys in the audience. This is your guy. You're going to love his podcast. It's so good. It's all at Libertarian Institute.org. And with that, I'll just turn it over to you, coop. Cool. So, um, I can hear him loud and clear. Yeah, Scott, I was going to say, I don't know if we would lose the stream or not, but if you can, just bounce out of here for a second and come back and

we'll try it again, but I'll take over from here. There's a bunch of stuff talked to you about tonight, Bill. You and I should have gotten together a long time before this, but I'm going to try to fit everything into a reasonable time frame. The first thing I want to talk about is maybe a bit of a diversion from what we'll spend most of the episode on, but I wanted to get your thoughts about, you know, last week we were talking about the Houthi advance and the Saudi Arabian military, and I kind of made some offhand comments about Saudi Arabia's military limitations, their inability to kind of field

an effective force and made some kind of, you know, kind of rather low resolution, you know, silly, goarly thought out comments about Saudi society in general, you know, that were sort of the reasons I was giving for that. But the underlying, the underlying. The underlying point, you know, the inability of so many of Arab countries in general, but, you know, the monarchies in particular, to field effective military forces is a well-known thing. People have written and spoken about it for a long time. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that. Like, you know, what are the main limitations that a country like Saudi Arabia, which has the money, has the population that theoretically could field an effective

military force, but they just, they just can't seem to do it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. So, Saudi Arabia, the House of Saudud, imagine having the House of Bush as, as Conis, you know, in America, created at the end of World War I as a result of T.E. Lawrence, going to the British authorities afterwards, the Sykes-PICO agreement, all that kind of torpedoing that goes on. I was very fond of a comment you made in one episode where you said, hey, I'm the guy who will go back just like Putin did, and I'll go back to the 12th century and move forward. So I really think that we have to look at that when it comes to Saudi Arabia, because the problem with Saudi Arabia is Kenneth Pollock did a book called, did a book called Armies of Sand. In Armies of Sand, he talks about the fact that

Arab armies cannot do conventional warfare for a variety of reasons. And when you look at it, look at Saudi Arabia, they have become so wealthy with oil that when you go, I think you've been to Saudi Arabia and so have I. When you go to Jeddah or Riyadh and you enter that airport and you come in, what's going to happen is you're going to see cues for diplomats. You're going to see cues for Saudis, but you will see dedicated cues, dozens of them for Filipinos and for Pakistanis and others, and they do all the work there. Kenneth Pollack makes a really interesting point, too, in armies of sand, where he says, if preventative maintenance is how near-peer and peer armies fight and do it effectively, you've got to do that organically. The Saudi Arabians, as all

Middle Eastern countries, do not do that organically. They are absolutely incapable, culturally of doing preventative maintenance. And when you're using exquisite platforms like jets, tanks, I have Vs, all of those things, and you don't maintain them in what is a rather harsh environment, try flying a helicopter. I think you've been in Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. I spent two years in Afghanistan.

Someone on the talcum powder sand, it causes a lot of grief for mechanical devices like helicopters, tanks, things like that. So if we fast forward now, the way I look at Saudi Arabia is I look at it with a real, a real skeptical and cynical I, because I have something called, I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, I don't speak Arabic, Mahabith, or maybe Mabahith, but I think it's Mahabith, which is their security service, sort of like the former Iranian Savak and things like that. Really brutal. I mean, the CIA had organizations where they would do black sites and what

is now Myanmar, what used to be Burma, and they had black sites for rendition in Saudi Arabia. It is alleged and did evil things to evil people using the Saudi means to do torture because they've been doing it for the longest time. The other thing I think we have to recognize is that when you look at Sunni projection and financial support of terrorist organizations, Wahhabism is ground zero in Saudi Arabia. That's where that, that evil form of jihadist poison has emanated from for most of the world throughout the Sunni centers of gravity and things like that. What we're seeing in Syria and other places is the Shia crescent.

And the Shia and Iran have had a relationship. The Shia and Iran and Syria have had a relationship for going on 110 years. They're very tight with each other. The West, to me, seems to wage war on Shia more so than Sunni, even though we saw them going against the Sunni in Afghanistan, for instance. But if you look at Iraq, what you had was you had this tiny minority, maybe it wasn't tiny, Daryl, but it was probably a single digit percentage, or maybe 15% of Shia, of Sunni ruling over Shia. That's why one would go to Kabul in Afghanistan, and so many folks in Kabul spoke Farsi, spoke Iranian, because they were either Persian influencers or they were Persian,

or they had a very vital relationship with them. I don't think the Saudis can handle what Yemen's throwing at them. I think tactically, operationally, and strategically, they're absolutely incapable of fighting on their own. They need U.S. assistance, they need U.S. mentorship, they need U.S. machinery, they need Western machine. They need all those Filipinos and folks who come in there that they import into the country to make the connective tissue Saudi Arabia operate. And I know this is going to sound uncharitable.

I have never met but one intelligence Saudi military official. Is that just because, you know, it tends to be where they warehouse the second and third and fourth sons of important families and things like that? Or, you know, I know in some of the, like, in some of the Arab countries like Iraq and Syria, where you did have this minority ruling over, you know, a different sectarian majority. You would have a lot of the, I guess, high value branches of the military. your pilots, you know, a lot of your special operations forces, things like that would be drawn from the other minority groups. You'd have Christians as a lot of pilots like in Iraq, things like that. Lebanon, for instance. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Saudi, I mean, the very fact, you sort of alluded to this at the beginning, the very fact that, I mean, I'm pretty

sure it's the only, yeah, it's the only country in the world that's named after its ruling family, right? I mean, that by itself is, it kind of tells you that, you know, this is still right, you know, you get right beneath the surface, you know, and you go past the photographs taken at fancy conferences in Riyadh. And this is still a deeply tribal society. And you have a lot of people who, you know, well, have written about how in societies like this, you know, there's, it's not always easy to get people to, uh, military forces, combat forces, to trust one another enough to think that they're going to have my back if things go bad. And so, you know, there's also, you know, in a society like that, just something that, you know, we've got maybe is becoming kind of endemic in the United States, but we're, I guess we're falling from a, from a greater height. So, you know, it still looks better here. But just this inability, like a system constructed where there's absolutely no incentive at all to report. bad news up to chain of command. And every incentive to

just put it off, bury it, don't be the one who takes the heat for it, et cetera, until things just pile up and we think we've got an effective Afghan National Army and it turns out we don't. And we find that out in 30 days. Right, right.

All that time. Yeah. What do you think that, I mean, I've seen some people who are commentators on the region, I mean, they're speculating that if like, if this goes on, this could be a legitimate threat to the Saudi regime stability in general. I mean, you think it could go that far?

I absolutely think that. And the only thing that keeps the Saudis aloft is oil money. The same thing with the UAE. The only thing that provides a lubricity for being advanced civilization is that very thing. And you were asking me earlier where you said, where there's a low IQ, and again, this may make some of your audience uncomfortable by stating this. but if you look at the country of Africa and you look at aggregate, median IQs,

they aren't high. When you combine that with Islamic regimes that tolerate first and second cousin marriage, that doesn't end well generationally as they advance down the line and they have children. That's why you see a disproportionate number of birth defects, learning disabilities,

and one could say mental retardation in societies in which that cousin marriage takes place. And because of the royalist monarchist prince orientation of the Saudi house where you have hundreds of members of them, there is encouragement within them that you cannot spoil the bloodline

by marrying outside the bloodline. I mean, the British have suffered the same. I think that even when you look at some European bloodlines, it could be the case. I remember reading one book about World War II where the Germans were doing an analysis of the royal family in England. And they said that, yes, the king has the brain of a chicken and has to be reminded to remove his clothing before stepping into the bathtub.

So I do think that it can have cognitive effects. But again, to Kevin Pollack's point about Arab armies, and I'm very poignant about this, I was talking about conventional warfare because Islamists excel at guerrilla warfare. at a regular warfare. And there are a lot of components to why that is. They are in oral culture in the places that we have fought, an oral culture that maybe develops those parts of their brains, more so than us in the West, who tend to be a literate population, where we use reading

for a lot of things. But I remember being in Afghanistan and being agog at some of the bloodlines that either my interpreters or A&A folks when I talk to them, they could talk about not only their grandfathers, but their great-grandfathers. They could talk 200 years down the line. And what they could tell me all about was blood obligations, clan obligations, honored obligations, and all of those kind of things.

So I want to emphasize that bifurcation, Daryl, that when it comes to conventional warfare, Arab armies are just god awful. All right. Hold on a second. I got to make some money here. Expatmoney.com slash provoked. What you do is just do that.

expatmoney.com slash provoked. And it will take you to this great website where you can register for the expat money summit, which is a free event. They do this every year. It's at the very beginning of October. And it's a bunch of seminars about how you can protect your neck

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I did. Hey, all right. Scott, make sure Scott joins us. Why is Scott joining us? Yeah, I don't know. What's up with that? Were you at, Scott?

Come on, Scott. I was out. If the guests can't hear me, then I can't ask the get to get. Now, we got you. We got you. Excellent. Well, then hell, as long as you can hear me, let me tell you about Matt Sersely. It'll help you if you're rich and you have money, but the government is trying to take it from you.

This lawyer will help you protect your neck and dot your eyes in just all the right places to make sure that you don't pay them one any more than you absolutely have to. That is aggristaxadvice.com. Matt Sersely at aggristaxadvice.com. Anyway, you guys were talking about what now? You know, I'm looking here at the chat while you were chatting. Arab armies, they're no good, you were saying. I knew that. I'm saying they're no good from a conventional perspective.

And that's been proven out for the longest time. And when it comes to the unconventional perspective, and when it comes to guerrilla warfare, they excel. Beating the U.S. Army, all right? Yes, they've done that repeatedly. But, of course, the U.S. Army hasn't won a conflict since the end of World War II. Yeah, well, I think we're all probably better off if I butt out of this conversation, turn it back over to Mr. Cooper here.

Go ahead. I mean, go ahead, Darrell. You know, the, you sort of notice this cycle throughout history, right, where there are periods where technology, material technology, social technology, they tend to favor large institutions, consolidated, you know, large organizations that, you know, because it takes a lot of resources to feel the Bronze Age chariot or something or to fit out a heavy horse cavalry in the Middle Ages.

Only certain, you know, very few people can do that. They need a lot of other people to support them just so that they can do that. And that sort of tends to lead to a very, top-heavy kind of aristocratic society where all the war-making power is gathered up into these large institutions that can defend their boundaries, you know, against interlopers pretty well. And when you got up to the late 19th, early 20th century, you know, you look at like the first and second world wars. I mean, you have just these examples of the institution of the nation-state sort of reaching their absolute apex in terms of, you know, if you just think of it in terms of

state capacity, their ability to marshal men and resources over sustained periods of time. It was just incredibly efficient, you know, relative to anything that that has been seen in history and arguably is around today. And in the 20th century, the century that, you know, America and the second half of it didn't win a lot of wars, but we were still sort of militarily dominant in some sense. I think most people would, you know, would think of it that way. You know, that was the era of bomber fleets and aircraft carriers

and just these massive systems that it, you know, really the only institution on the planet that could feel the apex weapon systems were not just nation states, but only the most powerful nation states could do it. They're the only ones with the wherewithal And if you didn't have that, then you were relegated to being a member of NATO, you know, a member of the Warsaw Pact, maybe, you know, a third part of the third world, but you weren't going to be a major player. And today it really seems like we're kind of moving into, I know you read a lot about this, that the 21st century, that that pendulum is really swinging back in the other direction, where now, you know, these gigantic institutions that you had to have. if you were going to field the weapon systems of the 20th century

that allowed you to compete on a global level, you had to create these gigantic, hyper-complex lumbering systems that now that technologies and some other changes have come along that have put a tremendous amount of destructive power in the hands of individuals and small groups, you know, a lot of these nation states are in a very bad position. And, you know, it seems like, I guess, like, you know, I sort of, when I'm getting emotional about the failures of the American

military's procurement system, you know, I always think it's just that, you know, people don't want to reform it, but I'm not so sure that these gigantic institutions, you know, the 20th century, really can reform themselves in that direction. And it makes them incredibly predictable. It makes them very easy to provoke and bait, you know, into making mistakes. And, you know, it seems like we're we're all kind of i mean getting a very early lesson uh in this in iran right now um and you know some people like uh somebody somebody somebody asked me the other day uh you know that you want us to win the war in iran right i mean yeah you don't think we should be there or whatever and should never have happened and all that but you're an american where you want us to win right

And I had to pause for a second because I was like, you know, I mean, I don't want American servicemen getting hurt. I want this war to be over with as quickly as possible and in all that. But I would rather learn the limits of our power, the easy way in Iran right now, than the hard way further down the line, you know? And what are the lessons that, like the most important lessons that you think we are getting right now from what's going on? Well, we spend a trillion dollars a year when you put in the DOE cutouts for nuclear weapons research and things like that. And of course, the current Department of War says they want to spend $1.5 trillion. They're spending it on exquisite platforms. By spending it on exquisite platforms,

what that means is that we're going to concentrate this wealth in these platforms that can be destroyed in the Salvo competition by very small objects, whether that's UAS, FBVs. What we discovered from the SMO in 2022 is that here we have the Russians invading the Ukraine, and then after they're in the Ukraine, three years later, four years later, we discovered that 80% of all combat casualties

are from UAVs and FPVs. As a matter of fact, we're finding that with tow systems, because they can be spoofed as a result of being non-wire guided and wireless, they're going back to wire-guided. That's why when this war ends, if it ever does, there are going to be these mountains of this fiber optic wire that's going to be festooning, all the trees and everything in eastern Ukraine.

And before we depart Saudi Arabia, I wanted to say one thing, and that's this. The Obama administration, and I'm not a member of either. their party, I call them the Unip Party, as I think you agree with. But the Democrats, under Obama, between 2008 and 2016, not only maintained forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they also started the war in Syria, assisted the war in Syria, advanced that war in Syria. Scott will tell you that that war in Syria started well before 2010, 2011, before the head shopper got into the presidency. Same thing with Yemen. What Obama, told the Saudis is that what we're going to do is we're going to help you out in Yemen,

and you can go there. If you look at a map of Yemen, I urge all the audience, if you get a chance, Google this, and look at a map of Yemen, and you will find the Houthi occupy the western third of that country, which is very mountainous. And I know this sounds hubristic when I say this, but Bupert's law of military topography is that a culture of riflemen who know what they're about, cannot be militarily defeated in mountain terrain. Even with UAVs, FBVs, we find that.

We did not defeat the Afghans. The Russians did not defeat the Chechens. We will never defeat the Yemenis. And the Houthi are very enthusiastic young men when it comes to fighting. They're very talented at the conventional edge, but they're very talented at the dispersed guerrilla edge. I mean, this is a country that has no Navy, that has no missiles to speak of

except what it can get from the BRICS countries who has chased aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea chased aircraft carriers out of the region because they're scared to death. I'm hoping, Daryl, that because of your background in missiles and such and mine, we can discuss this really hard problem of IAMD and missile capacity and salvo competition

and magazine larders being empty in the West because despite what that 60 Minutes Dufus said, the flaget who came on there, our kinetic magazines are winnowed. There was a CSBA report two years ago, since we gave all of these enthusiastically, of course, gave all these stingers to the Ukraine. Of course, you know that those stingers

found their way outside of the Ukraine into market bazaars that they could trace by serial number because the Ukrainians, it being the money laundering complex, of the West, probably the central locusts, we're selling those and using them against Russians. But the CSBA said that in order for us to restock and replenish those magazines of those stingers,

it would take us 18 years minimum to do so. Now, that's also assuming a 24-7, 365 factory capacity, we do not have a carrying capacity in this country for creating stingers. We don't have a carrying capacity for shipbuilding. for every one ship, and we're lucky if we can build a dozen in America. When it comes to nuclear vessels, you're looking at six to ten years. The Chinese are apparently doing that 350 to one for every one ship we can build.

They can build 350. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot there. It's like, you know, the incentives that are built into the system to favor these large, complex systems. it's really hard having spent a couple of years actually standing up the procurement department of the installation I used to work at you know I really got a firsthand look at just how I mean I'm sure there's corruption at political levels and things like that you know things that we would call corrupt but that wasn't even what I encountered what I encountered was that I didn't I stood up our department on the base right I was talking to people at the at the

distributed command level, people at the Pentagon, you know, dealing with the procurement stuff. I never spoke with a single person that I came away feeling like they understood 10% of the U.S. military procurement system

and what was going on. Like nobody seemed to have any clue what was actually going on. It's like when you talk to somebody, you know, like runs a hedge fund or something like that, you expect that they just understand the global economy and the finance.

No, not really. Not really. They find like little areas to arbitraves and stuff, but not really. Nobody understands it. It's a head scratcher with our acquisition system. And what I sometimes think is that in 1960s, the Soviets said, there's no way we could beat U.S. industrialization and production, even though we were midgets compared to what we did during World War II before 1945. That was something to be seen.

But I often thought that, well, wait, what if the Soviets brought over their sclerotic and central planning mechanism and stupidity, and somehow took defense acquisition university, translated from Russian into English, we adopted that because, and you and I, I think for hours, we can go into the nuts and bolts of just how sclerotic, arthritic, and Sovietized the American acquisition system is, like with aircraft carriers. I don't know if you're familiar with Ivorob, bone of my teeth about aircraft carriers. We can retire every one of them. Tomorrow, I would urge us to do so. It's such a tremendous waste of money, but we have something called the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition. I am not on their Christmas card list. I suspect that Scott is not. I suspect that

you are not. And we keep building these things that when you examine them in detail for their military ethics, they have no military efficacy today whatsoever. And the reason for this is because the totality of the U.S. military establishment right now has created a premier 20th century peer fighting force that is absolutely not fit for purpose in this century for peer warfare. Now, I'm not using the word near peer because I think that's an anachronistic term now, because the Yemenis have proven, the Houthis specifically, that they are peers to America, whether we like that or not. Um, you know, the thing about even, even in the 20th century, like I have a lot of questions about how, um, our systems, especially in the, you know, the, say, latter third of the 20th century, how they really would have held up in a peer conflict. And, you know, like, the thing I think about a lot is, um, you think about some of the pictures of these old World War II ships from, you know, they'd just gotten out of battle. And I mean, there's the carriers are just, they got.

craters on the deck. They're just, they've been shot up. It just, and then I think about the USS Stark when that missile, that Iraqi missile hit it back in 83, and it went in, you know, near the front of the ship, and the warhead did not even explode, but the fuel on the missile started a fire, and that thing was disabled, just from that. And it's, you know, you have these systems that we build in redundancy to the systems and all that kind of stuff as best we can, but everybody knows, they all have a lot of single points of failure. And when you're talking about, you know, catastrophic damage on like the platform level, some, like set one or more of those single points of failure is going to get triggered. And then very quickly you end up with this super complex

system that just doesn't work because there's a fiber optic cable that's not hooking up right somewhere. And when you, when you think about something like our layered air defense systems, where, you know, you take out an early warning system and now the ballistic missile defense systems behind it have a lot of trouble acquiring targets in time to, you know, strike them at the ideal moment. I mean, the whole thing kind of breaks down very quickly, you know. Americans have no idea that they are defenseless

against incoming IRBM and ICBM threats. Right now we have something called a mid-course interceptor. And what it does is it does this. magical thing, and this is going to riff with you, Darrell, because you understand it, is that when an ICBM or an IRBM reaches apogee, reaches the top of its parabola,

it's going to tip, and from that tip, one weapon or multiple independent reentry vehicles, Mervs, are going to emerge from there. This mid-course interceptor is named that because it can only hit it in that magic moment when it tips, because ICBMs

have been hypersonic since the 1950s. And if a hypersonic is coming in, it's not terminally maneuvering, that's a hard target to hit. If it is terminally maneuvering, it is impossible to hit. And folks don't understand, and again, I know you're going to grok this. If I'm trying to intercept incoming munitions, I must send in two to four minimum missiles against it to get a probability of kill above 91%. So if I only have 48 of these mid-course interceptors, then I'm sending two to four up.

call it two. And they send in more than 24. And by the way, I'm assuming that every one of those hits and they won't, you're out of luck because it's going to penetrate this dome, much as you saw in the George Powell film War of the World's 1953 with that dome around the tripods, is we don't have the means to do this. And again, and Daryl, I'll stop after this because you got me on a tear. Here's what galls me about it. And fortunately, they call it Department of War now. The Department of Defense, the Missile Defense Agency, and you probably know the answer,

what percentage of the total defense budget does the Missile Defense Agency get? Wait, I jump in here now because I want to hear that, but also just want to reframe the whole thing too. Because this is really your speciality, Daryl, in the DoD and then also as a private employee, you know, a contractor form. But I know it's a very special interest

of bills as well. So my question for you, Cooper, is, is he right? All the terrible accusatory stuff that he just said about how well it doesn't work, all this missile defense stuff? And I know that you can't get in trouble and say classified things,

but I know that you can say unclassified things. So say all those. Yeah, you've heard me say similar things since the Iran war started for sure, and I've been talking about it long before that. I mean, it's, I mean, look, our system, the new ages system, for example, the one that just rolled out on DDG-25, brand-new system. With the spy six. Amazing system.

It's like technologically, it's absolutely amazing. I was actually, I was working out at the test site at the missile range in Kauai for six or seven months on the development team with that for that system before it got rolled out to the fleet. It was in like the later stages of its development. And it's an amazing system. as somebody who had worked with, you know, earlier iterations of the Aegis weapon system, this one is, it's decades ahead of even Delta Victor, the Baseline 7 system that we used for.

It's amazing. And yet, even that, all of those things that you just said still apply. It's still just incredibly difficult to shoot down an incoming ballistic missile once it tips over. It's just hard. It's hard, not even from a, you know, you can acquire, and track it, there are physical limitations to our interceptor missiles that makes it very difficult. There's just a lot of things going on.

And people, I think, well, you've seen it. We started this war with this, you know, and I think this is true. Even within the military and the decision-making levels of the Department of Defense, even they had this totally unjustified overconfidence in how these systems were going to perform. You know, I don't, and I say that because, you know, we were talking about like Arab military cultures earlier, and I brought this up and said that we have sort of our own version of it, you know, back when I was still, I was still in the game, like, I would be the guy, I spent a lot of time just out in the field. You know, I'd be gone eight, nine, ten months a year, some, a lot of it overseas, a lot of it deployed with U.S. or Allied navies,

working with allies that we sold weapon systems to, things like that. A lot of time on bases, on ships, just interacting with, you know, service members on all these things, training them, helping them, you know, learn their systems, fix their systems. So I got a lot of like broad experience. You come out of like you do 10 years in the Navy active duty like I did. And, you know, I spent the entire time on one ship. You know, my tour on that ship was five years. And besides that, I was basically in school and on short.

duty. And you get an idea of what the Navy's like, but you've only been on one ship. I've been on all the ships. I've been on dozens of bases, worked with, and we have this problem where, you know, I would come back from being overseas for seven or eight months. I've been on during that period of time, maybe 15, 20 deployed ships. You know, I spent time working with the guys at Bahrain. I spent time working with just all over the place, seven, eight months. And I come back and they're going to have a sort of a town hall, right, where the commanding officer and the technical director sit up front. And they want everybody's, you know, concerns or opinions, like what's going on out in the fleet?

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And I would always be the guy who'd raise my hand. And as soon as I did, all of my like immediate supervisors and like one level up were just like, oh, God. Like they were like, here we go again. and I would start telling them what I was seeing out there and telling them the absolute truth and everybody in the room who had any experience out in the field

knew I was telling the truth and the technical director and the commanding officer to their credit, they always wanted to hear it. But it got to the point where, or at least they, in the meeting, they wanted to hear it. But it got to the point where like literally my command would find other things for me to do to send me off to go do so that I would not be at these town halls.

and, you know, just that process of sort of passing negative information up the chain of command, being the bearer of bad news, it really, you want an extreme example? This is an extreme example, but I was assigned to a strike group back in, I think, 2013, 2014. You know, there's, I think there are three destroyers, a cruiser, and then the carrier, and then some support ships and stuff. I'm out there mainly to work with the four air defense platforms, the destroyers and the cruiser. And, you know, I would spend a little time on this ship because they've got to groom their system and get all their alignments done and do a lot of advanced maintenance or repairs that, you know, the crews having trouble with and I need to train them.

So I'll be there for a while. And sometimes I would go to another ship once they were all kind of, you know, wired up. So I get out there and I'm assigned to, I think it was, I think it was on, I was on DDG-90. I think. And I get out there and I'm reading, I'm going through, or before I got out there, I was on the carrier. And I was assigned for a couple weeks to the destroyer squadron, you know, on the carrier. And all I heard was about how this DDG 96, man, they are just terrible. Man, what a nightmare.

They're just every day. It's something with them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, all right, well, that's where I got to go then. So I go out there, absolutely amazing crew as far as their air defense people. Awesome. One of the best ones I've ever worked with. And I go out there and, yeah, the ship had problems, like, or the system had problems. But they would report the problems up the chain of command.

It would make the way all the way over to the carrier. And then they would go through the process of ordering the parts they needed, fixing the problems, et cetera, et cetera. And they would go through that. And so just, you know how it is? I mean, you know, just like you're out in the desert, you're bouncing around on the ocean, these complex electronic systems break. You know, you're talking about putting megawatts of power through them in a dynamic moving environment like that.

Things break. While I had been on the carrier with the Destroyer Squadron, the whole time I'm hearing all this terrible stuff about this ship, I'm hearing just amazing things about one of the other ships, which I won't name in fairness to the people who were there at the time. Best ship, they're getting all these Bravo Zulus from the Destroyer Squadron, from the admiral, you know, everybody, just this, they're just on point, everything. Man, we never even have to worry about them.

Well, they need help with a one day. I get called over from 96 to this other ship because their air defense system, we're off, we're in the Gulf. Their air defense system just does not work anymore. Like it just one day goes from being perfect to it doesn't work. And so I go over there and the work center dealing with the air defense system, I mean, they had absolutely no idea what their system did. They did none of their maintenance.

They had no idea what was going on with their system. They just signed their signatures to all the maintenance cards and said they did it. They never did any of it. And of course, like this is a, you know, this is a super advanced, like, complex system that your division officer, you know, he's a lieutenant who used to be a damage control officer, and now he's gotten assigned to be the fire control officer, or whatever you can tell him whatever you want.

He doesn't know, right, most of the time. The good ones over time start to learn, but most of them, you know, if you're a decent bullshitter, you know, a tech can put an officer off the scent because it just doesn't know what he's looking at. You know, he sits in combat and he sees the big screen,

the big tactical screen in front of him, and, you know, it's got your native ages tracks, but it's got Link 16 tracks, it's got CEC tracks, and all he knows is he sees a great big screen full of tracks. and the fact that we're supposed to be acquiring that, that, you know, airliner, commercial airliner at 195 miles or whatever, but we're only acquiring it at 60 miles. He is not, there's, there's 100 tracks on the screen.

He's not paying attention to that, you know? And so it's, it just goes on and on. And I get there. And the reason their system had fallen apart was not some gigantic catastrophic failure. It was that there were 20 failed components in this, in this thing that they had absolutely, no idea about because they didn't do any of their maintenance. They did none of their actual work. Couldn't have done it if you put a gun to their head. And finally, one more little thing broke, and it was the straw broke Camels back, and now all the tracks on your screen disappear. And it's a big,

you know, wow, they're having their first problem in this whole deployment. Can you believe it? And it's like that ship was getting praised up and down. They were getting awards from the Destroyer Squadron, all this kind of stuff. And the ship that was doing it was doing it. And the ship that was doing what they were supposed to do, it was when they had a problem, they reported it. You know, people didn't want to hear that you had a problem, but you reported it, you fixed it when you got the part. They were like the dirtbag ship in the Destroyer Squadron.

That is like an encapsulation of a much, much wider problem in the system. Because that mentality, you know, that's, it's an extreme version and a small-scale version of it, but that exists like, I mean, in my opinion, uh, maybe Scott has some different ideas on this. Maybe you do, but like, that's probably what happened in Afghanistan. You know, I believe that they're probably like the, you know, you get like a few levels up from the major down on the ground who's responsible for actually overseeing the training of, you know, the Afghan security forces. You go a few levels up the chain. They probably did think everything was fine. Just because it gets, that gets lost in translation, there's people who are like,

well, I'm not going to lie to my boss, but I'll just, I'll soften it a little bit. And then he softens it a little bit for the general. And then he softens a little bit for the... You know what I mean? Like all the way up until people are just shocked that this didn't work the way we thought it was going to work. Let me interject you if I might and then, you know, I'll turn it back over to you guys.

But what we're talking about here is ultimately, never mind Iran, we're talking about how to defend the United States from a nuclear attack by North Korea. Probably not even Russia or China because in that case would be such a volume because, you know, they'd be pouring it on to make sure. And so our defenses would basically be overwhelmed

at that point anyway. They even say these are just designed for North Korea, basically, but they've got a few dozen if they wanted to really start launching nukes at us. And so my understanding is, and I'm an amateur on the missile defense here, guys, but that what's so unique about the new Russian hypersonics

is that these are lower altitude and coming in at shallower angles at hypersonic speeds around, I guess, Mach 9 or whatever that make it impossible to defend from them. But if you're talking about a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile coming off a Russian submarine or coming out of Siberia and going over the pole, then that thing is coming in at Mach 18. And so I don't know which all exactly different systems are designed really to protect from those

or if not or what. And I want to hear what y'all have to say about this, But what I have to say about it is that my old friend Gordon Prey, the rest in peace, was the former chief scientist of the Army and used to work at Sandia National Laboratory testing H bombs. And, well, at least A bombs, I don't know. Yeah, he tested H bombs out in the Pacific too. And so anyways, what he says to me is that the only legitimate missile defense

against intercontinental ballistic missiles, I guess even from North Korea coming in, would be what we call neutron bombs, which the reputation of a neutron bomb is this evil weapon which is meant to irradiate and kill everyone with cancer or whatever, but then leave all the factories intact so the evil capitalist running dogs can take them over, whatever. But that's not what they're for.

What they're for is knocking out avionics in space. So you have like a real thin shell on the H-bomb so that more of its energy is released as radiation instead of heat. And then so that way you can take out incoming Russian ICBMs. That's the only missile shield. There's incoming H-bombs. You hit them with H-bombs.

Otherwise, forget it, dude. You're going to miss. They're going Mach 18. And so, and they're cold in space. And so all your heat-seeking, everything is useless. And so I want to hear what you guys say about that. Because, oh, to finish that is, well, they're politically impossible to make. and you saw that with the new charm bomb.

They started making a few of them, and then everybody was like, no, this is an evil weapon of genocide, and so you can't make them, even though what they were really for was a defensive purpose. But anyway, now I'll be quiet and let you guys... I mean, that may be completely off base

compared to new technology or what. So there's a list of things I need to get to because Daryl a few minutes ago... Yeah, and I just added. So go ahead. So it's three-tenths of 1% that the missile defense agency of the entire defense budget

that they spend on the missile defense agency. And that simply tells you what their priorities are. Their priorities are not protecting the homeland, protecting the civilian population, or any of that.

It is all about the graft, the grift, the money laundering complex for these exquisite platforms and these large weapons. What Daryl was alluding to with DDT was the Arly Burke. The Arly Burke was commissioned,

I think the last hole left in 1991. It is a fact. effectively, the only U.S. naval vessel that we've ever had that is effective. And Darrell, I spent time as an enlisted guy in the Navy. I got my commission in the Army to avoid sea duty. So I've got some experience with exactly what you're talking about. Nobody told you at the recruiting office that you were going to be around the water. Well, they did. But you know what happens in the surface warfare community as far as becoming an officer. Even if you're an LDO, they eat their own. They eat their own. They each. you alive. They grind you up as a human being. And the number one, I think you're going to back me up on this, my number one ascination of why the Navy has so many problems is sleep deprivation. And they haven't tackled that properly at all, especially when you were your haze grain underway. When they had a couple of collisions outside the Strait of Hormuz of Fus, a few of Dr.

McCain and another one, they tried to prosecute that young female officer who was, the officer of the deck at the time, and she got acquitted because she got up there and she said, look, here's my schedule from the previous, like, you know, 72 or 96 hours. And it was completely insane. And I've been on, and, you know, that's not,

like, as you know, I mean, that's not a, that's just how it is. It's like one of those weird things where it's like almost a, you know, if you, if you take any breaks as a, you know, as an aspiring department head or something like that. Like, I mean, he's poor guys like I used to I used to room for about four months I was on a destroyer and I roomed up with the operations officer in his stateroom and he had this ridiculous alarm clock that made the most insane loud like rabbit being eaten by a coyote sound until he solved a couple complex differential equations on the thing that it would allow it to stop it like forced him to wake up because he had to do that and this guy I mean I don't think in four months I ever

saw him sleep for more than 90 minutes, 120 minutes at a time. And I mean, I saw him go days without sleep on the regular. And it's like, you can't really, I mean, you're talking about putting somebody in charge of like the Combat Information Center or the bridge of a $2 billion war ship in a hostile area on an hour and a half asleep in the last 72. It's insane. There's two captain's cabins on board, the carriers and the battleships World War II. I was just at the USS Alabama. Museum and Mobile, Alabama. Well, the captain has a very large state room below decks, but right next to the bridge is a smaller state room for him.

If a captain... This is boring. Okay, okay. Let me finish this. If a captain isn't near the bridge, he's not in the action. If they sound general quarters, he's going to be awake. I guarantee you, Daryl knows this. If I'm the captain vessel, leaving a DDG.

And it's peacetime, they're going to wake me up. twice a night with something. The OOD's going to wake me up for something. Now, when it comes to what you're talking about with defending ourselves against nuclear weapons, I want to talk about the Ereschnik very quickly. The Ereschnik would be the conventionally tipped hypersonic missile that the Russians have created and successfully used. By the way, America spent tens of billions of dollars on three separate hypersonic missile programs, the Dark Eagle being one, of them, they were all signal failures. We haven't gotten any of it right. Now, this is for offensive weapons. When it comes, if I took every patriot, every thad, every anti-air modality that we

currently have available to us in the U.S. Army, and we were alerted that a Chinese fleet was on its way to hit the West Coast. The only parameter that I could secure is San Diego County. Now, if you go to the A2AD complex in China along their entire eastern coast where they're behind the second and third island chains going out to Japan, the Philippines and such, they have that locked up tight. They have it locked up tight and width depth

and they have lots of very effective munitions called anti-ship missiles. Are they DF sterile? DF21s? 22s. Yeah, they're great missiles. And those red missiles.

radii keep going out. Those radii, Scott, are going out to such an extent that pretty soon the carrier, and I hope they do this anyhow, won't have to leave San Diego or elsewhere on the West Coast because they'll be within range of all of these Chinese missiles. At one point I want to bring up Scott and you and I have discussed this. We are a global hegemon. Because we're a global hegemon, we're very poor at defensive operations. You will Well, find, curiously enough, Daryl knows this from historic inquiries, if you're a regional hegemon and you are contiguous to neighbors who don't hold you in the highest esteem and may in fact invade you, you spend a lot of intellectual martial capital on defense. You will note that America, because of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for one thing, but also because of our hubris, we spend no time on defense. And again, Daryl alluded to this. Our logistical chain to supply everything is very perilous.

It's one that you can take out lengths in this chain. What's that? It's dependent on China. I mean, for the navigation systems, you know, these rare earths and all that, I know you're always covering that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So wait, now what about what Gordon says that all a Daryl's missiles can't shoot down a real Mach 18 ICBM coming in from outer space? And so the only real way to defend against that is with another H-bomb sent up to intercept it. I mean, look, I'll just say real quick. I'll let you take over, Bill. Go ahead. They're physically capable of doing it. We do tests where, you know, I've described this on here before.

I mean, we make sure the conditions are absolutely ideal, you know, to intercept the target when we're testing. From the weather to the atmospherics to the fact that we do a count. the intercepting, you know, platform, they're in on the countdown, you know, of the launcher saying 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, and they launch. We know where it's being launched from, what the trajectory is, what the exact moment that it's going to, everything is coordinated and choreograph.

So if that's the case, we could shoot down a missile. I mean, it's possible. We could very well also miss. I mean, there's a lot of things that could make it difficult, but it's possible. It's physically possible to do. But when you factor in losing the first six or seven minutes

is like you wake up the president and tell them what's going on and get everybody on station and figure out if this is really a problem and all that kind. I mean, at that point, like now you're reacting very quickly and it's very, very difficult. And especially since, I mean, you're not going to be 100% sure, you know, A, you're going to be surprised by it. B, you're not going to necessarily know

exactly where that thing's headed. There's just a lot, all of those things that we try to control when we set up a test aren't going to be present, you know? And so in that case, it's extremely difficult. Wait, I want to say, hold on, I want to address what you were saying, Scott. I want to address what I just want to drop up.

There's a thing back in late Bush years or maybe early Obama in the Washington Post. It was either the times of the Post, but I think it was the Post. And they published it on a Saturday, It was a first person thing by a guy from the military industrial complex explaining how, man, this whole thing is just to boondogle to screw you. And we are still in so much money in the name of this missile defense,

and it does not work. And it was like true confessions of a missile guy. But it was very explicit. I'm pretty sure it was in the Washington Post. I probably find it. Go ahead. I'm sorry. So what I'm saying is this is there's something called natural space.

And what natural space means is that once you get past the atmospheric level, For all your electronics on board a sophisticated modality that goes into low Earth orbit, there are a lot of things that have to be done to shield it and things like that. But I want to offer this other thing. If we're talking about taking them out at a Lagrangian point or a low Earth orbit place around the globe, have you guys seen, and the audience, have you guys seen how crowded it is up there? Have you heard of something called the Kessler Effect? Now, the Kessler effect is this.

If I lobbed a one-ton bag of sand, thanks Elon Musk, if you'll afford me the opportunity, and I do an omnirectial blast in low Earth orbit, I think Daryl is between 3 and 500 kilometers. I'll park it in a nice sweet spot there. And I explode that, Scott. Think of what this does as a pinball by cascading effects going throughout

where all of a sudden I hit a satellite, satellite shatters. Parts of said satellite, they start to maintain velocity. Something that is in space, if it's traveling at 16,000 miles per hour, it doesn't slow down after it's been hit. Most likely it will act as an accelerant.

Now, what will that do to this vast panoply of satellites that are out there to include the Don Musk's 11,000, satellites that he's put up there for Starlink, it will be an absolute catastrophe. And I think that's one thing that the space farce and these other organizations, look, it could be the Chinese, it could be the Russians.

If you detonate something up there to stop a nuclear weapon, you could very well take out literally tens of thousands of orbiting platforms. And what it could possibly do is two things. Number one, it would blind us from non- from using non-air breathing technology, which is what satellites are. Number two, how could we penetrate that

to go out into space again after that happens? I mean, when do things that are accelerating around and assume a gradient, when do they stop? So, and I want to offer this too, USS Air and Ward, May, 1945, picket ships, 5,500 sailors at the Battle of Okinawa die, 36 ships were sunk 350 ships were damaged

by Japanese kamikazis what's really interesting about the kamikazis but Bill that's 1945 what the hell does that have to do with today here's what has to do with when you look at group three and four UASs the large ones like the scan eagles

the larger modalities like that they can terminally maneuver well kamikazes can terminally maneuver even if at the time they were dead at the stick that plane is probably maneuvering. The amount of lead that they would put up into the air at the time on those picket ships to down these kamikazis was absolutely incredible. As a matter of fact, at the Battle of

Laita Gulf, there was there were battleships in train. And the battleship commander talked to the other battleship commander and he said, is that ship on fire? Because they were using their anti-aircraft weapons. And they were so festooned with them at the time that this wall of lead was going out there, but the kamikazis would still penetrate. That's the point with all of this, is that Saabot competition is if I have more missiles than you do, then in the end, I'm going to win if I can send them aloft. When we look at Iran, not this year, but last year, we all recall when Iran was lobbying all of those munitions against Israel. I think, Scott, you and I discussed this. when they did that, my conjecture is that the Iranians went to all of their ammunition supply points,

and he said, I want your oldest slot numbers. I want your oldest missiles. What your most ineffective missiles? Because what they did is they conducted a reconnaissance by fire on the Israelis to determine what their defensive dome was for integrated air and missile defense there. They tried to determine what are their clock times, what's their human in a loop, what are their reactions, how many do they send aloft to intercept me, and do all these things. And that's one thing I want, before I give it over to you, Daryl, that's one thing I want to leave people with,

please don't assume that the Iranians, the Persians, are a stupid people. And by the way, I don't want you to think that I think. The Arabs are stupid people. I do not. They excel at certain things militarily. When it comes to the Iranians, they are not a stupid people,

and they play chess. They don't play checkers. I would suggest that the Israelis play chess. There's no doubt in my mind. I have no doubt that the awful office, plays checkers. Well, before we do get out of here, I've got a, I guess I just want to see the smoke come out of your ears, but I'd love to hear your opinion on these new Trump class nuclear battleships that he wants

built. I am so glad you asked that question. Number one, they're not battleships. Would you look at them from a whole perspective? They are large cruisers. All our Taekonda rogas, 26 and 27, is when they're going to return. tire all the cruisers. You had mentioned Daryl that apparently you were in a flotilla where they probably had Ticonderobus. And at a time, we had nuclear-powered ones.

I'm going to make a very bold statement here, and that's this. The days of the aircraft carrier and all surface naval vessels and blue water combat are over. There's no sense in it at all. So if I'm saying blue water combat, what I mean is these great Godzilla battles we had from 1941 to 1945 with the redoubtable Japanese, that stuff's not going to happen anymore, which means this. Our Navy will be deployed against littoral conflicts. They will be near the beach. If they're near the beach and that antagonist doesn't happen to own a single ship, I think with the Houthis in Yemen, They deployed 1974 or older vintage Soviet patrol boats that probably were not in good working order. But they managed to shoot our UAVs out of the air, I think, to the number of 26. They were able to send carriers scrambling. The carrier apologists and flaggots will always say that, oh, no, they were redeployed to go to a different place.

No, they weren't because there's no carrier safe in littoral waters in which, there is a sophisticated missile system because I don't have to sink a carrier to turn it into a future fish apartment. All I have to do for a carrier is I take one shaft down, I reduce its velocity forward for it to get the

sufficient speed to launch aircraft. Or I put a five degree list on the aircraft carrier. It cannot launch. There's a reason that when you look at aircraft carriers from above, there's a five degree can't support of the aerial takeoff

corridor. for the aircraft off the deck. Why is that? Darrell knows why. That way you don't run over the ship. If when he's at full military power and that cat, especially a non-steam cat, like the e-mull system, God help us,

you're going to run over the ship. That's why it's designed so that when you're a full military power, which means that throttle is all the way to the stops, in addition to the catapult impulse and impetus that's launching you off. It's a combination in physics of both of them to get it off. you don't run over the ship.

By the way, I was going to interrupt you, but I have to say, I saw a whole documentary about this, and it was the British who invented the cock-eyed landing strip, and the Americans refused to adopt it because they didn't want to, even though the Brits proved that, no, it works, and what had happened,

what kept happening was they kept crashing into all the planes parked down at the end of the runway, and killing themselves, and guys were just dying over and over and over, and then they said, look, you could just put the runway crooked, and the Americans were like, no, no, you can't either. And they kept it that way. It was, I think, during Korea, and they kept it that way because they didn't want to adapt, which is kind of, you know, apocryphal to your whole kind of talking about.

I'm here to tell you, Daryl, you and I have lots to talk about, and I know that we're running out of time. We need to talk about Alftrag Stactic. We need to talk about mission command. We need to talk about why our land forces aren't up to par. We need to talk about why the U.K. would say, silly shit, like, well, then we'll send a battalion or a regiment over to Greenland to help them out. Here's the thing you don't know. Again, Darrell, we could take hours talking about this. How many British Army regulars are there? 75,000. A tooth-to-tail ratio is my trigger pullers versus my logistics tail. It's traditionally 1 to 10, 11, or 12. What this means in grunt math for the UK is if you took the Royal Marines

and you took their para regiment and you took all their trigger pullers in every one of their horse cavalry, the Queens cavalry, whatever the case may be, and they're not riding horses. That's just their name. If you took them all together,

you'd be lucky to come up with 8,000 fighters. And there's a one-third rule here, which means that I can send one-third of those guys out, but one-third are in training and one-third are doing an administrative refit. They're doing a fit to, go forward to do something else or they're in training or maybe they're on leave, whatever the case may be. We have the 82nd Airborne Division, and they're on standby. We have an entire division that we can parachute

in air land. B.S. We cannot. And we should not. We should only have pathfinders and lurps on parachute duty because they can air land the rest of them. We don't have the C-17 strength to deploy. We do so much blow hard stuff when it comes to the U.S. military where they say stuff about our capabilities and we have no checks to cash to fulfill those. It's one reason why. Thank you, Scott. I was able to do that nine-hour course

on a Trail of Tears, American stalemate and defeat at the Scott Horton Academy, by the way. Please frequent the Scott Horton Academy. I wanted to add a course at the out. One more thought about the carriers is that, you know, another thing about them is there really

strategic liabilities in the sense that it's very, very difficult to use a carrier against an enemy that that sort of merits a carrier's attention

unless you're prepared to get into a real deal like land invasion type war. Like if Iran sank one of our carriers, this administration's in a real pickle. I mean, it's like, you know, are we going to

just did, admit, oh, that was a huge mistake and run away? Probably not. I mean, so it's like it's a tripwire asset that if you're going to put it in danger and it actually gets hit, man, like you're almost, your hand is almost forced into a major, major escalation. And so if that's not what you're going in trying to do, then that's just another way that the carriers are a liability on a political and strategic. Oh, absolutely. So, Scott, can I do some quick napkin, Matt? If you don't mind, I think the audience is going to be, they're going to be amused by this when it comes to carriers. Let's do some math here.

And Darrell, you can help me out with this. We have, we have debited carrier air groups from approximately 85 aircraft to 65. The majority of those are strike aircraft. And some of those are aircraft that blow corridors in suppression of enemy air defense so that they can go through and take out those missiles that happen to be on land so they can make a corridor for the strike package to go. let's do our math then with one carrier. Here's what we have. And remember the one third rule, I probably got 22 birds available.

Now, in order for me to do this effectively, I have a combat air patrol of five aircraft that must be a loft that protect the carrier. Then I have something called a B-Cap, which is a barrier combat air patrol, which protects the remainder of the flotilla that is supporting that carrier. So that means I have eight to 10 strike aircraft

to send a loft to deliver their munitions, as it were. Well, not only are they all not going to have munitions because you're going to have those ones that are going to intercept and do the seed mission, that suppression of enemy air defense, we'll call it six to seven birds. By the way, if they're F-35 Bravo's or Charlies, they're going to have a combat radius of 700 nautical miles, which means cut that in half. Let's call it 300, 350 nautical miles for a strike projection. That carrier has to get that close to the A2 AD defenses off China, for instance,

during a Taiwan offensive, why would you have nearly 10,000 souls in the flotilla, in the carrier, to send six aircraft to conduct a strike mission with the munitions on their wings or inside their nacelles? How does that make sense in any universe? It doesn't. Because from 1941 to 1945, aircraft carriers won that bloody war.

Japanese gave it their best, but they lost. We built 110 carriers during that war. We couldn't get close to that now. But after 1945, the carrier, per what Darrell was saying, has no military utility whatsoever, and it's a vanity project. Rant off. Yeah, well, look, I mean, I've known a lot of real experts who have said that very same thing for decades.

You know what I mean? There are even like studies from the war colleges and whatever. Since 1945? Well, no, but certainly, you know, with the advent of precision aiming for conventional ballistic missiles, you know, at range, where we have, you know, they had machine guns, gatling guns for sea skimming cruise. cruise missiles. Like, say, for example, when the Israelis gave our blueprints to the Chinese for a little bit of money, we had these gadolin guns for that, which good luck. But there's no good defense for a ballistic missile coming straight down onto the deck. There's not. There's not.

That was it. And that was a lot. I don't have to hit the carrier. If you're able to do that 50 meters of that carrier, its whole will be compromised. I mean, literally, I've told you this before, Scott. People, I think, sometimes don't even believe me because it sounds kind of ridiculous. but as far as anti-ship ballistic missiles, our best defense is to run away and hope that the thing can't be guided in terminal, you know, in its terminal stage. I mean, because it does take a little bit of time to get there,

and if it's not terminally guided, then are terminally maneuverable, then you can, you know, sort of predict its trajectory and just run away and hopefully get far enough away by the time it gets to wherever it's going. At 35 knots. Yeah. I mean, so like that, but that's literally our,

that's literally our best defense against. I mean, in the past, when we were, when we were, you know, really kind of not, we were worried about, like, say in the early 2000s, when that quote you gave earlier, or the article you mentioned earlier, Scott, about the whole thing being a boondoggle, you know, the entire Pentagon, the entire U.S. security structure was completely oriented

toward the war on terror, had kind of forgotten that there would ever be peer competitors again in the history of the world. and, you know, in that kind of an environment, I mean, you still just insane to put a carrier like in the Gulf or near these places, but, you know, most of the people, the Taliban, they didn't have, you know, badass Chinese-made, you know, anti-ship cruise missiles they were going to shoot at us or anything like that. And our, you know, the aircraft on a carrier just running pickets, 180 nautical miles out from the strike group, like that was really our primary defense was just don't. let anybody that we think might have weapons get close. And because, you know, like an anti-ship missile, you're talking about missiles usually with, you know, maybe cruise missiles with ranges of 100 nautical miles, maybe 200 would be like a really, you know, really long one unless you, and for that even, you'd have to have

like surveillance aircraft in the air, all that kind of stuff to like help with the targeting. And so like, really it was like if you could keep them more than 100, 150 nautical miles away from the strike group, like that was. our sort of primary defense. And we all kind of knew. And this is even back, I mean, when I was in the game, like, in the late 2000s, early 2010s, everybody kind of just knew that,

you know, if one, like when Hezbollah fired that, what was it, a Charlie 802, like, derived missile or something that Israeli frigate in 06, that if something like that happened. And, you know, the fire controlman who was in charge of, you know, paying attention to the ages sectors wasn't off over

in the corner flirting with the sonar technician instead of manning his console, which I give like a 50-50 chance that that's not the case in any given moment. You know, assuming everything's fine, that one missile sort of leaks through and like we got a cruise missile to shoot

down, okay, great. But if we're talking about like a real exchange, nobody had any illusions except for the fact that you know, they were going to, they were going to go down with the ship. I mean, that's just, it's how everybody felt about it. Everybody just kind of knew that. And, you know,

it just, it makes sense when you think about it, right? Because in those cases, I mean, the attacker has all of the initiative. They have a basic idea of how many, like, of what your intercept capacity is in terms of, you know, the track load of your radar

to, you know, how many, engagements your system can handle at any given moment because it's not that many, you know, to how many missiles you have that can defend against various incoming on a platform. Like, they know all these things or they have some basic idea of it. And it just gives them all the advantages. And so we have these hyper, hyper, complex, expensive systems that really, you know, in a way look like they're built for like 20th century peer-to-peer combat,

when really what they're built for is to roll into somebody who can't shoot back at all. And occasionally, if like they happen to get a, you know, a 1975, you know, cruise missile on the black market. And they load it up into a, you know, a shipping container on a boat and fired at us that maybe we could take that. That's really what the, what the systems are practically designed for. So I think, too, go ahead, Daryl. No, I just saying, that's a, that's a, it's a sad state of affairs, but it really. really is true. So I want to posit a thought experiment here for how asymmetrically, which is what I deal with a lot in chasing ghosts, my irregular warfare podcast. What if we did this? In order for

America to conduct expeditionary warfare, which means we always have to leave Conis to go fight elsewhere, what would happen if the threat, and this could very well be within the Houthi's toolbox, all they targeted Daryl was power, portable power. They killed gensets and they killed gen set mechanics. And they kept doing that. They didn't hit a tent. They didn't hit a ship. They didn't hit a tank.

They didn't hit any of that. All they would do is target our portable power. It would cripple our ability to conduct war overseas. If they did something as simple as that. What would happen, for instance, if somehow they managed to spike our water or spike our logistical chain or poison our logistical chain? I was always aghast. I spent two years in Afghanistan the amount of money they would spend on bringing bottled water in.

They didn't give us, they didn't give every soldier like Daryl and I, give us a $350-kated-in expeditionary water filter, good for 15,000 gallons. Give that to me. And I could even go into an Afghan chow-hall. I urge you not to go to one. I could even go in there and drink something, and as long as I filtered out, I would be safe. Scott, do you know how much it costs what the estimated cost was for a gallon of diesel once it made it into the Humvee

at the plot and went out to do the various things that we did in Afghanistan? It's in the book. I actually read this the other day because I was read Fools Aaron for purposes, but I don't remember anymore. With 400-something bucks a gallon? If I recall 115, but I'm going to give you the floor.

I'm sorry. If you know it's four, I have no doubt, I have no doubt. If you say it's 400 a gallon, I have no doubt that's the case. I remember being in Colleen at my first tour. I was in Coblo in my first tour over there and two days into a 30-day cycle of giving the Afghan National Army their fuel billets for that time. They got 30-day billets of how much fuel they would have. And all of a sudden, two days later, they're coming back to us and they're saying, hey, we need more. and then we'd go out.

I did some audits, as it were. And what would happen, Scott, is within 48 hours. They had sold 90% of the fuel that would have given them to their friends and family. And this happened to cross Afghanistan. And this would go on and on and on. I mean, it's a microcosm of everything we did there. I mean, the U.S. State Department was in Afghanistan. And they, I'm a cruiser hit.

I love land cruisers. Well, they had a level seven up armored. Lankruiser, half million dollars. And so the State Department will go out, oh, if they got a flat tire, they open the sunroof and put a thermite in to destroy it so nobody could use it. And then the State Department spends $1 million on an armored tow truck that never leaves a lot. And they continue to put thermites through the sunroof if they get a flat tire or have a radiator leak.

So, I mean, look, what I'm saying, I know you guys have seen, Daryl, I know you've seen this personally, the amount of weight. that occurs in our expeditions overseas is unfathomable. Yeah, I've told Scott, I've spent entire six-month deployments on Arleigh-Birk class, top-of-the-line state-of-the-art air defense ships, spent an entire six-month deployment chasing Dow's off the horn of Africa, you know, who are smuggling small amounts of hashish and Yemen or something. It's just an insane misallocation.

resources. I mean, it's one of those things as we look back on it years from now, we're going to be like, oh yeah, obviously that was not sustainable. Why did people think that that was sustainable? And Daryl, every year, every year that general officer would come to Kabul to take over, Afghanistan, and he'd stand there with his hands on his hips

and say, I've got this. And the only thing he's got is his dick in his hand and he's going to slam into the cash register at the end of the year. let's leave everybody with that image i gotta go uh feed my chickens and do some harvesting before it gets dark okay i don't i don't have the per searle we have a lot we have a lot to talk about i i'm sorry guys i do have the americans um using the taliban as security for their convoy so they can transport the gasoline across afghanistan to get it to their bases and then the Taliban take that money and use it to buy guns from the Afghan army who got them from us and then use those guns to fight our guys.

So that was a big part of how that was. Dude, that's straight out of like catch 22 or something right there. Goodness gracious. Over there that has the price per gallon for you. I'm sorry, Bill, we'll have to get that right next time. I know Daryl's got to feed chickens, but did you want to take care of some of the shack? Oops. I hit the wrong one.

Scott Horton flavored coffee is very important to drink in the morning. It's so much better than Dunkin Donuts for more. Walgreens, man. Once you start drinking this stuff, you'll never stop drinking it. Scott Wharton.org slash coffee. And then also the Scott Wharton Academy. If you want to listen to this guy, Bill Bupor, talk about how America lost every war since 1945 in great and grave detail, then you're going to want to sign up to the Scott Horton Academy. That's Scott Wharton Academy.com. And then also, martyr made, he swears to Jesus that he is going to put out a new episode of his podcast, Enemy, the Germans War, sometime very soon.

And that is a firm deadline, and he's going to keep it. He swears. So that is at subscribe. Martyrmaid.com. And as long as you're over at Substack, also sign up for Scott Horton Show.com. Hey, look, I interviewed Eric Margulies again, Scott Horton Show.com, and you can get the audio book of Provoked, which is almost all done up there. And then also I have to announce that I have an event with Joe Kent and the great Dan McKnight as well. Next Wednesday here in Austin, hosted by Responsible StateCraft. Kelly Vallejos is hosting the thing.

And another guy, Adam Weinstein, from Responsible StateCraft, will be there too. And I'm on Tim Poole's show next Tuesday, Monday. Yeah, Monday. I'm on Tim Poole's show. And that's all I got. Oh, Liberty Stickers.com. If you hate government and you want to tell everybody in traffic,

how much you hate government, then you go to LibertyStickers.com. I have so much. I have some administer of you very quickly, if I may. I recognize your Kufut 101 t-shirt, Manir. So I know all about that. We'll have to talk about that sometime. Also, revolution.

Yeah, but Kufut's more interesting. I'll let the audience check out what those extraordinary lads did in South Africa. So what I want to say is chasing ghosts in a regular warfare podcast, War Notes, a conflict podcast in War Notes. I did a series called Fight Club, Fixing Fight Club, in which I talk about everything from how to take care of the Navy, how to fix the Army, and why we should deep-sex the Marine Corps, and why we have a strategic deficit disorder.

And I'm also at the Libertarian Institute as the Smedley-D Butler Fellow for Conflict Studies, as he mentioned, the Scott Horton Academy. And I also want to say, for what it's worth, I'm a huge fan of Daryl's work at Martyr Made and anti-humans seared my soul. Over. Yeah, definitely check out Bill's stuff. If, you know, there's a lot of podcasts and shows out there

that a lot of them that I like, but that if you listen to every single episode, it sort of becomes this, you know, this repetitive, this war is dumb and what is Trump thinking? and just sort of this more of a polemical thing. If you really want to get down to brass tacks, like a lot of technical stuff like inside dish on, you know, how things are run and how they might be reformed,

you've got to check out Bill's stuff. Yep. And look, both podcasts are featured at the Institute, chasing ghosts and Wernotes. So you guys will love all that. And by the way, look, it's our 10th anniversary this month. It was September 2016. We found a thing.

It's 10 years of the Libertarian Institute. It's me and Bill and I don't know, 20 or 25 of the greatest writers and podcasters in America's Liberty Movement. And we don't do fun drives very often, but we're doing one right now and we need your support. So go to Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And okay, that's it.

The chip is off your shoulder until next Thursday. Thanks, Scott. This has been provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe. to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on Ex and YouTube. And tune in next time for more, Provoked.