School of War - Ep 109: John Noonan on Nuclear Weapons and Policy

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

John Noonan, senior advisor at POLARIS National Security, joins the show to talk about all things nuclear; the life of a missileer, the current U.S. arsenal and its production problems, the strategy of deterrence, and how Congressional oversight helps/hinders good government.  ▪️  Times      •      01:34 Introduction      •      02:04 VMI and the Air Force     •      05:13 Missileers      •      11:25 Targets of significance      •      16:33 Atrophy      •      22:18 Production problems      •      27:46 Congressional oversight      •      34:30 An unfocused military     •      44:17 Not getting it done      •      47:05 “Raw and abject stupidity” Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

What's it like to sit in a nuclear missile silo out in the middle of the continent, the guy with the button, or maybe it's a key, whose job it is to fire the big one when the president says go? Our guest today, John Noonan, served as a U.S. Air Force missileier, and is going to tell us, John's gone on to come to Washington and work in various policy roles in the House, the Senate, presidential campaigns, and beyond, and shares some of what he's learned today on the relationship between nuclear weapons, Congress, and national security policy writ large. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stable. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, John Noonan, senior advisor to Polaris National

Security. He was the National Security Advisor to Tom Cotton. His professional staffer on the House Armed Services Community, or sorry, committee may or may not be community. He worked for the Jeb Bush and Romney campaigns. He's an Air Force officer in his Salad days. John, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for being here. We also grew up. Excuse me. Thanks for having a slow start this moment. We also grew up all but down the street from one another that we didn't meet until until adulthood, but we are both products of Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia's riverine terrain, which at least in me inspired early thoughts of military glory, which then took me to the Marine Corps and the non-glory. And the non-glory

reality of Quantico took you to the Air Force. Why the Air Force, John? Why do we start there? Sure. So I went to the Virginia Military Institute and Aaron, I would love to tell you that there was some, there's some grandiose story of how I was inspired by the airmen of old who conducted bombing campaigns over Nazi Germany. But the simple fact of the matter was that I went to VMI wanting to be a naval officer. Navy ROTC requires that you, take calculus. And I had absolutely no interest in calculus. I walked over to the Air Force table on advice that was given to me by my dad, who was a Navy captain, he said, you know, if you want to join the Army, you want to join the Marine Corps, go dig a hole, fill it with water, live in it for a

month. And if you enjoyed that sort of thing, go join those services. And I decided I didn't want to do calculus and I didn't want to live in a water-filled hole for a month at a time. And I went to the Air Force. And if I may, I do think I have something that's germane to your question here, not to get off on too much of a tangent. But one morning I was in Air Force ROTC and ROTC is mandatory at the Virginia Military Institute, whether you commission or not. It's kind of unique in that way. I decided, okay, I'm going to go sign up for the military. I'm a history major for Christ's sake. I have to do something to be gainfully employed after I graduate.

And I'm signing paperwork the morning of, it was a Tuesday morning in September. You know, you know how it goes. You sign your life away, sign here, read here. And I signed one piece of paper and a major came out of the Air Force RTC detachment and said, hey, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. And we were all confused by how that could happen in an age of modern navigation and GPS guidance. And we were kind of debating that and went back to signing my papers. And right as I signed my second piece of paper, finalizing my intent to commission of the United States, States Air Force, this major came out again and said, kind of white base and said a second plane hit the World Trade Center, were of war. And so by sheer coincidence, again, not by by grandiose virtue or any of those high-minded notions, I think I was probably the first person to sign up for the military after the September 11th attacks. Wow. Cool. That's cool. I, you know, when I was teaching at the Naval Academy, there was this surprising phenomenon. of talented, ambitious midshipmen who were on the fence between competing to be Marines

or competing to join the submarine community. And it was bizarre because, like, it's hard to imagine, I mean, they're both demanding professions for sure, but it is kind of hard to imagine two more different lifestyles within the U.S. Department of Defense. And yet it happened all the time. I would have students in my office telling me they were like they were weighing these as their top two choices. And so I had a version of your, your father's advice, which was. If you're really interested in being a submarine, you should just go stand in a closet for a week and then let me know how you feel. It's well-free. So you go to the Air Force, and then I actually think this is really interesting.

You become a missile ear. Is that the technical name for it? What is the technical name for what you were doing? So, you know, like everything with the military, the formal title is a lot longer, many more words. It's a missile combat crew commander or a missile combat crew deputy commander. Obviously, the deputy is when you're a more junior officer, second or first lieutenant. Missileer is the term that kind of arose of the moment in the 1950s and 1960s when we were first planning those ICBMs in the Midwest and the Midwest. And that's the term that everyone I know in what we call the 13N, 13 November community, which is the Air Force Specialty Code for nuclear missile operations.

That's what we all call it. And what did this involve? My only understanding of it is from the movie War Games, which is a classic. It's Matthew Broderick, right? And I'm trying to remember who else. There's a very attractive young actresses in it whose name escapes me. And they basically run around North America trying to stop a nuclear war that a malevolent supercomputer is going to start. And it opens with this great scene in a missile silo where they're doing an exercise and they think it's real.

And they're told to launch the missiles. and one of the crew members very dramatically refuses to turn his key. That is the only mental image I have of this profession. Was it basically like that in real life? You know, it's both far from reality but also surprisingly accurate, accurate in the sense that it was filmed. I believe in the Whiteman Air Force Base Minuteman 2 training ICBM trainers. So all the setup that you're seeing is essentially what the command console for a Minuteman 2 missile,

which is logged and retired, looks like. they did use to carry sidearms. They carried the sidearms not to point at their crew commander, as you saw in the movie, but there was a very real concern about Soviet paramilitary forces trying to break into an ICBM silo or a command silo and neutralized the crew. And so they armed the crews. That was a Cold War policy that ended. But of course, the ultimate absurdity of that scene is that it takes two people to launch the missile.

So if he was to discharge his firearm and kill his commander, you've essentially killed somebody for no one and for, excuse me, for nothing, because you couldn't get what we call that second launch input, it's not surrendering it pointless. So they got rid of the pistols, I'm afraid. Where were you? And what was the day to day like? What was it like to be a missile?

Sure. I was in the 90th missile operations group, part of the 90th missile thing. I did it. Of course, you always want to do something operational in the Air Force. and my vision was just not good enough to go fly planes. And somebody suggested to me, well, hey, why don't you go into missile operations? It's not the most exciting job. But then it wasn't.

But, but you know, give it a try. At least you won't be sitting behind a desk. A weighty job, though. I mean, I thought I was pretty cool with my platoon or my company's worth of combat power. But there you were prepared to level, you know, industrial zones and cities halfway around the world. Actually, here's a question where did you know your targets? So they don't believe it. At least when I was in, this was, you know, now 12, 13 years ago, they did not tell us specific targets.

We operated off of O plans, military war plans. And all of the inputs that we would put into our command and control system would be numerical. So I'm, you know, to protect the classification of how these works, I'm just making up a number here. You know, we'd get an encrypted message that would say, you execute, you know, execute. Yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yeah, there you go. From the spaceballs reference, execute that. And that would, we would know what country that it was leveled against, but we didn't

know specific targets outside of the usual targeting paradigm for nuclear weapons, which surprisingly enough, even though the power of these are fearsome and unlike anything that we've seen before in human history, still today, after 70, almost 70 years of fielding, the fielding nukes, they do try to prevent civilian collateral damage and and and fractricide in our war plans, which was very surprising to me. When I went in, I thought it was kind of like the, the Samson option where you're just firing everything and you're pushing the walls and the temple down along with you, knowing that you get, you were going to incur a massive retaliation for firing the weapons.

But it's a lot more nuanced than that. And the target here is a United States Strategic Command and the targeting operations squad in there do very good work, very good work. And so I, to answer your question, I got to, I was a little upset and frustrated that I didn't know what we were targeting and I wanted to know. So I actually, like, kind of cracked into some of these war plans and started aligning them with the Google map coordinates from down in the, the missile silo. We did get internet down there when I was, when I was on alert. And I said, oh, okay, we're trying to hit this, this one thing. That makes sense. But day to day, they don't tell you what you're shooting.

Yeah. Well, this is obviously, our plan today is to talk about Congress and the military, but this is, this is actually really interesting. So what is, you know, obviously early on in the Cold War, maybe not obviously, early on in the Cold War, the idea of mutually assured destruction had not yet come about. And nuclear strategy was sort of tactical and operational in many cases. It was going to be part of a broader war plan for wars that we were going to fight and win using conventional forces and with nuclear weapons as a kind of supplement. You know, the way that MacArthur wanted to use nukes in the winter of 50-51, you know, to punish the Chinese for intervening so that we could win on the peninsula.

You know, there was a degree of integration that later in the Cold War sort of disappears. And the idea this exchange will be probably world ending. So it's the fact of the exchange, right, that creates deterrence, et cetera, et cetera, old idea. But from what you're saying, it seems that, you know, in the post-9-11 era in which you served, and you probably have to be careful in how you answer this, but to the extent that you can speak publicly, you know, our nuclear strategy really does still involve targeting military targets and targets of strategic significance. That's correct. And you're right.

And the war, it's funny to think of, as you framed at nuclear weapons and the word tactical. in the same sentence. But as we were staring at this big, bad Soviet army that was looming over Western Europe in the early 1950s and certainly throughout the rest of the Cold War, our war planners took a look at what they saw and they didn't like the balance of forces. They didn't like, they weren't satisfied with our technical advantage. And so nuclear weapons became a centerpiece of stopping the Red Army. Well, if you're talking about using nuclear weapons against armies, that's generally considered tactical battlefield use of the weapons, where you shoot a nuclear artillery ground, for example, and it opens up a one to two

kilometer size hole and enemy lines, then ostensibly your troops that are equipped to operate in a radioactive environment, move through that gap and envelop enemy forces. And that obviously has gone the way of the Cold War, one, because there's no Red Army anymore. We do still have tactical nuclear weapons that are, they're exclusively mounted on aircraft versus the, and soon to be submarines. We got rid of our submarine tactical nuclear weapons called, it was called the Slickham about 10, 15 years ago. I think we're now in the process of reinstituting that. But that, it is largely, it's largely gone. And so I was, when I was on alert 2006 to 2010, it was really the nader of the ICBM business, for lack of better words. They're

Russia was starting to misbehave a little bit. You know, we had the first invasion of Georgia in 2008. We were still on that honeymoon period with China that followed their integration in the World Trade Organization. You know, back then our big concern from a strategic standpoint was, frankly, North Korea, which is not a country that could, not a country that could cause catastrophic and irreversible damage to the United States, but still was crazy, you know, was thought that they were crazy enough and had at least enough, enough rocket.

and guidance and nuclear technology to at least hit Hawaii or some areas of the West Coast if we, you know, if we underestimated their capabilities and they surprised us. Now it's very different. Yeah, I still talk to people who are on alert. A lot of my friends are now squadron commanders and group commanders and wing commanders. And this abject rise really almost an exponential multiplication of Chinese military forces, particularly nuclear forces over the past decade has really opened some eyes and snapped us out of that that that lull that we were in. I wish we could go back to that that those simpler times

when North Korea was was the big worry and I ran to an extent. But the fact of the matter is we are now we're now faced with with treaty limited nuclear weapons that was designed for a bilateral era, U.S. and Russia, and now have a strategic environment where there's a trilateral threat, which is Russia, China, and to a smaller extent, North Korea. So it's, you know, my friends who are still in call it, the fun times are back again. I'm not sure I could frame it so callously as that. But what's concerning Aaron is that we've essentially lost a generation of nuclear thinkers and nuclear strategists and nuclear experts.

And now we've suddenly found that we've suddenly realized what we've lost. and we were kind of scrambling to restore some sort of deterrence framework where we can ensure, I don't want to say mutually sure destruction because it has historical connotations that I don't think would be particularly accurate for the modern era, but I'll just say we're facing a paradigm where not one but two countries can essentially end the United States as we know it. One of those countries is an act of war on the European continent, and the other one is scrambling to reach parity and exceed us in both size and sophistication of the nuclear arsenal. So it's not fun times, as my friends say, it's tough times.

Then we need to get serious. Well, so this moves us in the direction of where I was hoping to go, which is Congress in D.C. and Congress's role specifically in national security policy, but just sticking with this subject, so we now have, in addition to the old bipolar challenge of the Cold War, we have at least a tripolar challenge and actually like a 3.5, 3.1 challenge with North Korea, possibly the Iranians coming into the game soon. The situation, the very dangerous, very fluid situation you just outlined. We also have atrophy in our own system, physical atrophy in the nuclear triad, which for those new to the idea, the fact that we have nukes on planes, nukes on

submarines, and nukes on land. And the three things all sort of support each other. And sort of intellectual atrophy, how do we, well, actually, let me ask it this way. Everything you just outlines obviously a big problem. What are the, what are the first steps towards addressing the problem? You know, what do we need to be doing in terms of physical atrophy? What do we need to be doing in terms of reintroducing some strategic creativity to how we think about our strategic deterrent? Help us, help us conceptualize this a bit. Sure. I mean, it's a great question. And as a listener of School of War, I'm unsurprised to hear you drill down to exactly, essentially what's the core issue, right, is how do we get back to where we were in the 1980s?

I would commend all your listeners to go and read the Congressional Commission on the strategic posture of the United States. This was, it was just released two or three weeks ago, so it's fresh. It's hot off the presses. And it was a bipartisan commission that was announced by Congress where Republicans and Democrats were both going to appoint serious people to look at essentially. our entire nuclear, for lack of better words, enterprise. That's everything from the national labs that build the weapons to the Department of Energy that oversees the labs and the programs that go along with the weapons, to our forces, to the way we're shaped, to whether or not we need to go to, you know, expand beyond a nuclear

triad. We've always been, at least since the 1960s, we've been a nuclear triad country, which is our delivery systems, our land-based intercontinent and a world. ballistic missiles, submarine-based ballistic missiles, and then bomber delivered cruise missiles. And this commission went and they looked at it, and they found some things I think should be caused for at least mild alarm amongst the American public. And I say mild alarm because our nuclear forces are still very good. They're still very capable. We know that with high fidelity that they will launch appropriately. We know with high fidelity that they will probably hit

their target within a very small CEP that's circular error probable. It's a way of saying how close something is to hitting its target. And we know that the people that we have running these systems are pretty sharp officers and enlisted and can do their job and they have the will to do their job. However, what this commission found was that, one, we probably do need to move beyond a triad and add a leg, most likely land-based, some sort of land-based cruise missile akin to what we saw in the Cold War was very controversial program when Reagan instituted it. We had Persian two ballistic missiles, which are medium-range missiles designed for use on the European subcontinent. And then what we call it the Glicum, the ground-launch cruise missile, also designed for use in the European

subcontinent. And we had those in bases in places like England and Germany. The reason we do that is because we don't, it's not because we're trying to start a fight, quite the opposite. It's because we're trying to ensure a targeting strategy on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or anyone who can really level mass strategic level effects against the United States and make it confound that targeting strategy in a way that they just can't assure that they can get enough of our nuclear arsenal neutralized and surprise attack that they they couldn't guarantee prohibiting a U.S. retaliation, right? The Soviets kind of had a had this. figured out, they put, in addition to missiles in a silo, they also put the mobile on large

trucks, and they put the mobile on, put ICDM's mobile on rail. So it was, you know, we dedicated entire satellite and U2 spyplane and SR71 spy plane fleets to try to find these things so we could target appropriately. Even decades later, it's still very hard to do. But that's a problem is we can talk about, well, we should add a new delivery system all day long. We should add a submarine-launch cruise missile, for example, as well, which is another thing that commission recommended. But if our national laboratories, these are essentially residual institutions from the Manhattan Project that expanded and grew during the Cold War and then contracted sharply after the Cold War and are responsible for designing, testing, and building our nuclear weapons,

if those labs can't, for example, produce the plutonium pits that we need to build out these weapons, that having a new delivery system is essentially meaningless because you don't have the, you don't have the payload to put on top of it. I frankly think that before we get, even start getting caught up on what type of delivery systems we need, we've got to fix the labs. And, you know, this is a controversial take, but I think the Department of Energy has frankly done a lousy job of managing the weapons programs. They haven't elevated it in prioritization as much as they should. They haven't gotten with the times. They've allowed a lot of their big science brains to atrophy in the past several decades, where it had a very real brain drain out of those

labs. And I think that we need to either make it independent or roll in under the Defense Department. I think you probably know, just given your background and expertise, is that in the early 1950s, we felt the nuclear weapons were so powerful and so extreme. And we had, as you said, people like MacArthur running around saying, let's drop 50 nuclear weapons on the Chinese mainland to discourage them from continuing their involvement in on the Korean Peninsula. People felt, planners felt that was wise to have a civilian agency controlling the weapons themselves, why the military would control the civilian systems. So I don't want to get too far out on a tangence then, but it was a very different time. Obviously, 2003 is very different than 1952. And I think that the Congress should

move to, along with the president, to make that agency independent. What actually are the problems at the lapse? Can you go into a little bit more detail? Is it just, you know, like we face supply chain troubles across, you know, the defense establishment, you know, virtually everywhere you look. And we just have, you know, choke points and, you know, things that are just preventing us from producing the right amount of radioactive material for these weapons or what, what just help me understand. Help me understand what the problems actually are. Sure. I mean, so let's bifurcate them into things that the labs can control and things that the labs can't control. And by labs, I mean the Department of Energy that owns the National Nuclearer's.

Security Administration, which is the sub-agency that handles our weapons. The things that they can't control is after the Cold War, we appropriately, sharply contracted our nuclear forces. We did not, in the 1990s, we did not need the massive nuclear arsenal that we had in the mid-1980s. We just did. And so we were, yeah, the labs were essentially de-emphasized. Nobody wanted to be in nuclear weapons anymore.

Things like military operations other than war and peacekeeping. and, you know, air wars over the Balkans were, for lack of words, out of the new hotness in the 90s because we weren't going to do big state-on-state conflicts anymore. And what happened was, as always happens as history, is threats reemerged, state-on-state conflict, peer-on-peer conflict, became en vogue again. And the labs, after three decades of de-emphasization of the nuclear mission, we're just caught completely unawares. And it's going to take, it'll take us 10, 15 years to crawl out of this hole outside

a massive influx of funding and hiring authorities. I'm sorry to get kind of silly with this, but I just, this is not a subject matter in which I'm particularly expert. So is it a mining, we're not pulling stuff out of the ground. We're not processing stuff. Yeah, I mean, certainly. Like what is the, to help me understand where the problems actually are. So I'm oversimplifying because this is.

this can get kind of gnarly. For one, we can't make things like tritium triggers anymore, right? And there's a whole complex set of reasons for that. We can make plutonium pits, but we cannot make the... What's a plutonium pit? It's essentially the beating heart of a nuclear weapon, right? It's the fizzile material that ignites and causes the reaction upon a specialized explosion that they do in the warhead.

And of course, it's a lot more complex than I'm making it. But, you know, the infrastructure has atrophied to the point where there's just a limitation on the number of pits that we can produce each year. And it takes, as you imagine, it takes highly specialized technicians and scientists and brainpower and engineers and facilities to do this type of work, all of which has spent three decades atrophying. you know, if you go to some of these NNSA facilities or national labs across the country, you will find, you will find Manhattan-level infrastructure, or excuse me, Manhattan Project-level infrastructure at many of these facilities. I went to, gosh, I hope I'm not conflating the national lab here with, or I hope I'm not conflating the facility, but I went to the Pantex plant in the Panhandle of Texas.

It's right outside Amarillo, Texas. Very important facility for the United States Strategic and Nuclear Forces because they dissemble and salvage and do work on the bomb payloads themselves there. And they had holes in the wall where snakes and rats were getting through. Just not the level of scientific cleanliness and meticulousness that you would expect out of a facility that exclusively handles nuclear weapons. And so there is a funding dynamic. And when I say there's things that they can control and things they can't control,

that is certainly something a presidential administration can control as to the extent to which we fund these labs. What they can't control, Karen, is, I think, a problem that we're seeing bureaucracy-wide just across our civil service rate large, which is civil service entities that are unfocused, that are so bloated that they can't perform their core function, that are distracted with tangential missions, that don't really have anything to do with a bureaucratic entity or a caddicture or what have you's primary focus,

which in this case would be building and constructing nuclear weapons that can support the U.S. military's need and demand. U.S. military is the customer of NNSA. And those are things that they can control. And frankly, the NNSA has done a lousy job of it. I could talk to you for 30 minutes about just this alone. But it's a problem that that's certainly relevant to the State Department that's having trouble doing basic things like non-combatant evacuation operations.

Like truly, like, you know, you're a Marine, you know, like a basic Marine thing would be, I've got a compass and I've got a map and I need to get from this point to this point on the map using my compass, right? the State Department doing a non-combatant evacuation operation or the NNSA building a new nuclear warhead or building enough nuclear warheads to support the demand of the Defense Department is a core function. And failing to do those things is akin to a Marine company commander not being able to use as MAPOMCOM.

So, you know, that's the problem. These are fixable problems. They are solvable problems. But it's just going to take leadership at the top that believes in Stink, Institute. sticking to their knitting and doing their core functions well. Yeah. So you identified a, well, I suppose a congressionally mandated commission when we were speaking a few minutes ago about the nuclear complex.

Was that commission report, something, a function of Congress or did that come from the exact rant? No, it was a function of Congress. And I may be misquoting this, so don't hold me accountable. But I think the, like the chairman of the Armed Services Committee got a certain number of appointments on both House and Senate, ranking member House and Senate Armed Services Committee, the same and then, you know, like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer got appointees. And then I think that the Secretary of Defense had appointees as well. But ultimately, it was a congressional

product that was funded and authorized by the Congress. So you spent quite a few years toiling into the, in the vineyards of the United States Congress, a national security policy, both on the House and the Senate side of things. Talk for us a bit at a high level about what the role of Congress is here, whether it's budget, whether it's oversight, anything else you would identify. And how are we doing? How's the Congress doing? It's a great question. Let me, let me do the bottom line up front to abuse a much abused military term and say, believe it or not, for as dysfunctional as Congress is, they're not doing too bad. I've actually been quite pleased with at least the congressional committees who are responsible for defense. I've been satisfied

with their work, you know, passing on time budgets and avoiding continuing resolutions, which you know as a former congressional legislative director yourself is funding an entity at the prior year's funding because you couldn't reach an agreement on next year's funding, next year's funding. Congress has been pretty lousy. But I do think that it's useful to explain like you're talking to a five-year-old, like just how this works and what Congress's authorities are. Because believe it or not, like even most lieutenant colonels and colonels don't really know where they're, their funding comes from or the process by which it comes from, which is a bit surprising, but, you know, it's, that's not their job. It's Congress's job. So I do understand it. Look, you start with a presidential budget, which is a request, the president requests of Congress

a certain amount for defense every year. And they do that for every other agency, agriculture, labor, state department, what have you. And it's usually built out by the White House's, actually, it's always built out by the White House's offices managed budget with input from each of the bureaus. So, you know, the DoD gives their inputs to OMB. State Department does the same, et cetera, and so forth. But as you know, we're for a constitutional republic and Article 1 of our Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse. So that request that is built out by OMB is exactly what it sounds like. It is a request. It is an ass. It is, this is what we would like. Article 2, of course, gives the president power to deploy forces and nominate military officers

and political appointees, Congress can't do those things, but Congress does have that very important power of the purse. So the budget gets sent to Congress, usually in late winter, early spring, and congressional committees with appropriate jurisdiction for whatever cabinet or bureau or agency you're talking about, we'll do what we call mark up the budget request. And I always, you know, the number one thing I explain to people who don't really know the budgeting cycle or the lawmaking cycle when it comes to defense. The number one thing I have to tell of is there is a vast difference between authorizations and appropriations. The authorizers set the funding levels and say we are going to spend this amount on defense no matter what the president says. And the appropriators,

who are really some of the most powerful people in Congress, go through line by line of the presidential budget and the authorizers, which you know is the House or Senate of Armed Services Committee, are your two authorizing committees, the appropriating committees in the House and Senate go through line by line and decide which program gets how much funding. You know, once you have that, once you have more or less a product in hand, the House and the Senate resolve the differences in the bill, as there always are in a process called conference. And then they send the final product back to the House and Senate, which you'll remember this term well as a privileged piece of legislation, which means you can't amend it, you can't change it. And then you've, you've

vote up or down on it and then you send it to the president for signature. The president almost always signs it. Usually, the president's usually upset with what he gets back from the Congress. That's a bipartisan frustration with executive administrations. But rarely does the president veto what the Congress sends them. And there was one key exception just two years ago. You may remember President Trump vetoed the defense bill. I think it was the fiscal year 22 bill.

And Congress executed its constitutional authority to do the override of that, that veto. So just kind of like a really interesting case study that doesn't happen all that often occurred just two years ago. And it's to me, to go back to your original question, like, look, you know, everything's kind of like working as it's supposed to be working, right? Like, Congress has always designed as a place for dysfunction. But checks and balances hold, even when you have strong, strong feelings on it, as we saw from the Trump administration that really didn't want to sign the checks and balances function as they were supposed to function. And we got a defense bill. The wider frustration, I'll just finish your point. Your question with this

is, you know, we are, we are awfully lousy at passing on-time budgets. You know, the way you should do this is you should get 12 appropriations bills for every segment of government. You know, no later than early fall of the year before that budget is supposed to be enacted. And that just doesn't happen. And we get stuck with these continuing resolutions, which are colossally wasteful, it's the taxpayer and through the military and some of these incredibly complex programs that the military handles and a complete disarray. And there the Congress, I think, has failed and failed in a rather spectacular way. So you earlier, you made reference to sort of bureaucratic bloat and a sort of failure to function

as designed within the Department of Energy. And you've alluded to similar failures in other parts of government. You and I have collaborated on some projects regarding problems, even within the officer core areas where we think that there is call it cultural drift. Congress has a role in all of this, right? It has an oversight role in addition to the power of the purse and it's authorizing and appropriations functions. Over your years in Congress, what were some of the more important exercises in oversight that you were engaged in? And where do you think today there ought to be more oversight where perhaps there's some gaps? Yeah, truly the core of the question,

the core question here, right, is do we have a military that is appropriately funded, focused, trained, and led to meet the challenges of the time? And I don't think it's a controversial thing to say that we face the most concerning national security environment that we've seen probably since the Second World War. You have a large land war transpiring in Europe. You have China that is very blatantly talking about how they intend to cease Taiwan by force and building a military that's capable of delivering a knockout blow to the U.S. military and our allied forces in the region. You have Israel essentially at war with Iran via Iranian proxies in the Middle East. And so it's appropriate to ask, what is, is the military, one, appropriately focused?

I think the answer to that is no. And then two, what's Congress's role in focusing them? The first is why are they unfocused? Look, if you go back to, this is a problem that I think goes all the way back to the Cold War. So I'm not singling out a single administration here. But if you go back to Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin's initial prioritization list, when he took, when he was confirmed by the Senate, nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, he sat down and said, here are the things that the Defense Department values and these are the missions that we're going to be focused on. To their credit, they put China in there. They call China a pacing threat. But right next to China of equal prominence and importance were things that I would argue or not. not necessarily not priorities, but certainly not the military's top priority.

That would be things like climate change. You remember that COVID was still raging. And so COVID response was one of their top priorities. They, we had just come off the January 6th riots or insurrections, whatever term you want to use. And so they, they were of the mindset that the Defense Department was just full of these crazy right-wing extremists. And they did a full military stand-down day to try to, in a whole task force to try to identify these so-called extremists in the ranks. They found less than 100 out of almost 2 million man force.

So, you know, what I think a focused force looks like is your emphasis and your brain power and your manpower and your money and your resources go to things. Go towards enemies that can do things like they can adapt. They can develop tactics. They can develop doctrine. and they can imporize, they can innovate, they can build new technologies, and climate change can't do that. COVID certainly can't do that. This right-wing extremism stuff, you know, certainly, you know, can't do that when you're talking about like your one-off goofballs who are in like a National Guard unit or something like that.

And so when you emphasize those, those challenges that can't do things that like the Chinese military or the Russian military can do, you are essentially seeding ground to China. and Russian militaries who are doing those things full time and they're focusing their whole core and their whole effort on on those challenges with their challenges the United States military. How do we kill them? How do we sink their fleet? How do we shoot their jets down? How do we seize control all their skies and their air? How do we take Guam?

How do we take Hawaii, et cetera? How do we defeat them from a nuclear standpoint? So what Congress can do when you have what I think is I don't think it's necessarily an outlet. political statement to say. I think this this administration is probably a little more focused on the superfluous things that prior administrations have been, although like I said, this is a problem that's gone back decades. The Congress has a constitutional oversight authority, and Congress works in the same way with the military that a board of directors or board of governors or board of visitors works with a corporation or a college or what have you, and that they are obligated and I think you have a duty to

ask tough questions of the military. No one in Congress from your 22-year-old staffer, all the way up to your senator or congressman, answer to anyone in the military, and that is as it should be. And the military should be responsible to Congress. And I think I know the example you're thinking of here is we both work for Senator Cotton. I don't think that's a secret to anyone. In, it was it two years ago, the USS Benomra Shard, maybe it was a couple years ago, the Monomer Shard burned to the ground at Port and San Diego. And this had come off of a series of incidents, I think, starting with a group of U.S. Navy fastboat sailors surrendering to what was essentially Iranian fishing vessels. After going off course in the Persian Gulf, the USS McCain experiencing an avoidable collision and losing sailors, the USS Fitzgerald,

or they experiencing an avoidable collision and losing sailors. And the question was, are these all linked, right? Are these just one-off incidents that are normal with any two million man organization or smaller that in the Navy's case, but large organization? Is it just kind of like the failures that you can expect to happen? Or is there more of a cultural problem, a cultural rod, a lack of focus? And so we decided we didn't come with an answer ahead of time. We went in with the question.

and we interviewed something like 80, you know, former sailors, surface combatants, commanders of ships. We interviewed commanders of ship at sea, much to the Navy's frustration, I would add. And the answer was overwhelming with this, is that there's a cultural rot in the, they found that they were, they believe that there was a cultural rot in the military that tied all of these things together. And we put out the report, Senator Cotton along with three congressmen, all of whom we sat on defense committees or some form of national security committee. All of them were veterans. And the bottom line was, is, look, you guys have to focus, right? Like, times are serious. The Cold War's back, for lack of better term. And if you don't get your act straight, we're going to lose a lot of people

if the flag goes up. Yeah. And so that report was, I think, I think it was leveraged very, it was leveraged in a way, both in congressional testimony, where members of Congress asked about it. It obviously made a very big media splash, so the Navy couldn't ignore it. And I have had sailors privately tell me that that report was sort of a watershed moment for the Navy that made them acknowledge something's not right here, something's rotten in the state of Denmark, and we have to change. And what you saw from Navy Chief of Naval Operations, I know it's a per fullest way of saying it. Chief of Naval Operations, Mike Yilday, about a year later, he came out and said, gave a big speech at the Association of the U.S. Navy.

They have a big event. I can't remember the name of it, but gave a big speech and said, you know, we're not right and we need to fix ourselves. I think I really do believe that was directly derived from congressional oversight. Can I tell our Gilday story? I won't tell it if you think it's inappropriate. He's retired. He's retired, so go ahead.

Okay. So I agree that the project felt consequential while we were working on it. And in its first few days, as we were conceiving of it, as the Bonham Richard was literally still on fire. And we had kind of conceived this idea of doing this project and exercising prerogatives of a Senate office. And we had made a few calls. And so word was kind of getting around that this was going to happen. When you got a call from Admiral Gilday's team, I suppose, is head of congressional relations, saying, you know, would Mr. and Mr. McLean, be free to speak to the CNO here in about 45 minutes, to which our response

was, you know, we'll move some stuff around. I'm sure we can make some better. Consider it. You know, and it working, working for a United States senator and a senator who, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, you can obviously get you access that, you know, is, you get your significant access. But even so, this was, this was a little bit unusual, I would say, to have a CNO, reach out directly to a couple of staffers. And my, my sense in the moment was, This is probably some effort by the Ledge Affairs people to dazzle us with the star power of the chief of naval operations and hopefully talk some sense into us before we go off and do anything that in their perception might be harmful to the Navy. And so we get on the phone with the Admiral and he is, you know, obviously an impressive guy and a lot of experience. And he's just back from San Diego.

And the moment that sticks in my mind that I will never forget. It's one of my favorite moments from my entire service in the Senate. And it was a comment that you made, John. As we're talking to him, he's fresh back from San Diego. he's resistant to, you know, the premise that we want to explore, or the thesis, I should say, that we want to explore in this project that actually all of these bad incidents are connected. He says something to be effective, you know, I've looked at all the, he says basically the opposite of what he says a year later, right?

I've looked at all this stuff and I can't really see the connecting line between these different incidents. And then he's talking about the fire out in San Diego and he says, you know, I got out there and asked you that these federal professional firefighters who are fighting the fire alongside of our sailors and ask them how the sailors are doing. And the firefighters told me, you know, the bravest young men and women we've ever seen. They're doing just a phenomenal job fighting this fire. And you and I are sitting there on the phone.

And without missing a beat, you respond. Well, Admiral, I don't think anyone is questioning the bravery of the sailors. I think the problem is that the ship caught on fun. To this day, to this day, I relished that moment. I relish congressional oversight at work. So well, well done all these years after the facts. You know, and of course, once they did the investigation, they found that there were, there were some very serious shortfalls and firefighting capability.

But the Navy to their credit, I think, went back and went back to school and how they do ship-based firefighting, which is good. Look, I have to give Admiral Gilday. He was a, he was a controversial CNO. I do have to give him some credit in that. It takes, I think it's a beneficial and fundamental characteristic of leadership is when you can, and look at a command that you're responsible for, something like the United States Navy and say,

you know what, guys, like, we're just not doing it. We're not getting it done. We've got to fix ourselves. We have to adjust ourselves. And Admiral Gilday did do that. Yeah. He did not create these problems. They were long festering in the United States military.

He was kind of handed them. And he was the first CNO that I can think of that came in and said, we're not right. And we've got to fix it because we've got a real fight on our hands with the PLA Navy. And if we're not serious, we're going to lose a lot of people. So I will give him credit on that front. And I do understand his impulse to not dump on his own service in front of a bunch of

congressional staffers who work for boss sits on the Seapower Subcommittee, the Senate of Armed Services Committee. Yeah, when everyone says that, you know, we shouldn't be quite so worried about the PLA or the PLA in general because China hasn't fought a war since 1979. My concern, of course, is that the U.S. surface fleet really has not fought a war, properly speaking since 1945, which concerns me. Unlike many other communities of the U.S. military, where, you know, the post-9-11 wars have really exercised them and kind of kept them sharp. So final area of questioning for you, there's a controversy right now in the Senate about,

and this is something I think a lot of people didn't appreciate, maybe a lot of military officers didn't appreciate, but it's the Congress that confirms appointments, confirms federal appointments, and that includes military officers. So if the Senate has a problem with you, you don't get promoted as a military officer. And in general, except for the very most senior roles, like, you know, the members of the Joint Chiefs and staff and things like that, these are, and even then, honestly, these are rarely controversial. Usually the president gets his choices, even in those more senior roles. And once you get down a bit from the list from that, it's just, it really is quite literally pro forma. The list comes up. The list is passed by acclamation or by unanimous consent.

would actually be the technical term, and everything goes on. And that has ceased. That is not happening right now because of a dispute between the Department of Defense on the one hand and Senator Tuberville over a question of abortion policy. So Senator Tuberville is holding up large numbers of senior, well, large numbers of promotions for senior officers across the military. So what is your take on this? What's your analysis of who's in the right, who's in the wrong, the tactics being employed, and how do you think we're going to, you know, one way or the other, resolve this? Sure.

It's a great question. You know, we've never really seen this before. You know, generally the way it works is any senator has the power to object to a military nomination going, going by unanimous consent, which is, as you said, the technical term for being nominated and voted off the Senate floor. Any one senator can say, no, I don't agree to that. And what that means is, you know, you know this better than anyone as a former legislative director is the most precious resource in Washington is Senate floor time. And so if you're

objecting to unanimous consent, essentially what you're telling the Senate is that you have to, you know, you have to vote on cloture, which is starting a debate, and then you have to vote to end cloture and you have to, you know, vote the person off the floor. And if you're Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell for that matter, what you want to be voting on is political nominees, you want to be voting on judges, you want to be voting on, you know, things like the NDA, you don't want to be committing that precious resource of floor time to, you know, your new chief of naval operations or your new vice chairman of the joint chief staff is it it consumes a precious resource that normally didn't have to be consumed. It's unusual to do a blanket

hold like this. We've seen more and more of it out of the Senate in recent years. It is absolutely unheard of to do it to uniformed military officers. And so that's why you're seeing the controversy is something that's never really been done. And it's essentially frozen our national security establishment because people can't go take command or they're supposed to take command. It's everything from the one star level where there are an awful lot of one stars in our two million man military, you know, all the way up to the new chairman of the joint chiefs who required a special floor vote and got it last month. And frankly, like on an individual level, it is to use the scientific term, it's screwing a lot of families and uniform

officers who are guilty of nothing other than serving their country and doing so well. If you look, if you're a two-star and you've got two kids in high school and you're supposed to go from Hawaii to Washington, D.C. to take up a new billet on the joint chiefs. Well, you're in a complete limbo. You can't get your kids in school. You can't transfer them. If you do, you have to pay like two rents because you've got to bill it yourself in Hawaii and built your family in Washington, D.C. I mean, it's hurting people. And it's not a tactic I would use. I would say holds are best used on an individual level where you're trying to extract something that's extractable from the Department of Defense.

I use them all the time. I would say, I'm holding this officer for this reason until I receive this information from this service. Navy, you have to tell me about this program that I'm not convinced on. And then after two weeks, you would release the hold and after they give you the information that you wanted. It's a powerful tool that the minority has or the party that is not in control of the White House, in which cases would be Republicans. So Senator Tupperville is essentially hurting all of his colleagues as well as hurting the U.S. defense establishment because he's denying that tool to senators, Senator Bullen or Senator Wicker, other people sit on the Senate of Rights Services Committee.

However, and this is a big caveat, this was an avoidable fight. And the reason Senator Tupperbill is conducting these holes, a tactic that I don't agree with, is the fact that the Department of Defense, after the Dobbs decision, which was the Supreme Court case, that that reversed Roe v. Wade, decided that they wouldn't announce a policy where taxpayer funds would be used and allowed to be used to conduct leave for military members who need to go to a different state to have abortions. throwing the military in the middle of the one of the most contentious political debates of our time is I can't be nice about this. It's raw and abject stupidity. There's a reason you keep the military out of these fights.

And that's because it's a two-party system and the other party has a vote. And they have tools like holds that they can use. And so essentially what they did is they disrupted this long bipartisan tradition of keeping the military out of a fight. They touched the hot stove, which I mean the Biden administration and the Biden Pentagon, and now they're complaining that they got burned. The obvious thing to do, and you don't see this in the reporting, is that these holds go away the minute the Pentagon reverses its policy, which, by the way, the Senate Armed Services Committee asked them how many service members have actually used this policy that's now been enacted for well over a year,

and the total numbers come to you 12. So essentially the Pentagon is saying, we are not changing a policy that is directly paralyzing our entire flag officer enterprise because 12 people were able to use leave and Air Force or Navy or Marine Corps or what have you, travel money to go have abortions. So my sense on this is just a pox on all these houses.

It is a compass and a map for future administration, for how to stay out of these political fights. And frankly, like, I don't want to be unfair to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who was obviously spent, I think coming up on four decades now in service to his country in uniform as an army leader and now Secretary of Defense, who has sacrificed. I don't know how many Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries because he was in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and deployed on exercises. But frankly, and this, I think, applies to General Mattis as well,

this is a perfect example of why you do not put flag officers in a nakedly political position like Secretary of Defense. They're just a fish out of water. I don't want them understanding politics. It's a nasty business. I want them thinking about the military full-time and having specific political appointees like Bob Robert Gates would be the, I think, the shining example of the Hill, the consummate Secretary of Defense who knew how to keep the military out of these flights. Those are the guys who knew. flag officers should be flag officers and and they should they should turn out when they're they hit their fourth star their final final commands well while we're talking out of school here

I have a recollection of a conversation that I was party to with general future secretary maddish shortly before he was confirmed by the Senate to be secretary defense where he made a comment to the effect of if I detect anyone behaving in a partisan manner in the DOD I'm just going to I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm not gonna allow that I'm not going to allow that in my Pentagon. And I kept my own counsel, which in retrospect, was probably a mistake. But I remember thinking at the time, I don't know if that is going to work. I'm not sure that's going to make a lot of sense, considering that these are all political appointees.

One of the finest combat leaders, certainly in the modern era, but it's leading political appointees in the Defense Department and the Office of Secretary of Defense is just different than leading movements. It just is. Yeah. John Noonan, it has been an absolute pleasure and really informative, talking to you to this. about a pretty unwieldy, but as it turns out, kind of related set of topics. And I am very grateful for your time. And I am grateful to you for all the time that you have spent serving your country. How many years of government service is it overall?

Oh, gosh. I think I'm, I think it's 17 or so. Yeah. But look, you were, you were fighting in places like Marjo while I was sitting in a missile silo with sheets on my bed and a chef. So while I appreciate it, I also have at least the core and basic humility to know that, you Many gave a lot more than I did. Can I tell a source of some pride for me?

I have a few young children. And one of them just a few days ago was playing some game with his brother in which they pretending to have a birthday party. And they were using shoes as the birthday cake. And my three-year-old ate, ate his shoe. He literally ate a piece of his shoe. And there are other elements of his character. I won't go into great detail here.

But it's just nice to know that I've got at least one Marine in the family. He's going to slow to eating crayons as a Marine. Thanks, John. Thank you, Aaron. Thanks for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.